#178: Website Teardown | Breaking Down the Best Website Experiences in 2024 with Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth at Navattic

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One, two, three, four.

Exit. Exit. Natalie, everybody's here. Fantastic. Great response. This one. We had over 900 people register and I'm excited to chat with you. You've always done a great job on these in the past. So good to have you in here. I'm going to turn it over to you. Why don't you do a quick intro, set the stage for what we're going to talk about. Just so you know, Natalie's got about like 10ish minutes of slides that she's going to flip through. Then we have some actual websites that have been submitted from Exit 5 members. We're going to talk through those and then we'll have a nice big chunk of time for Q and A at the end. All right, Natalie, you got the mic.

Hey everyone, I'm Natalie Marchulio, head of growth at a company called Novatic. We're an interactive demo platform, but I promise we won't talk about that too much on this live session. I'm calling in, I think from space or from somewhere with just a beautiful view. I did just move apartments, so my background was like very bare. So I decided to go with a virtual background, which I'm not usually a virtual background person, but better than the white wall behind me.

Well, that's. That makes one of us because I'm actually on this boat right now, so.

It'S actually nighttime here. I'm calling from, I don't know, the Arctic.

You have great service, so shout out to wherever you are.

But I'm really excited to talk about this topic. Like Dave said, we got so many good website submissions, it was really hard to choose five. And I, I did look at every single one. We looked at ones decide which one to go through, try to base it off of our B2B Buyer Best Practices which we'll talk in a bit. So websites that fill that criteria. But first just wanted to give the community a shout out because like y' all have awesome websites. I had a lot of fun just like looking through a bunch of websites this week.

Oh, one thing. One housekeeping. I forgot producers in my ear telling me we're going to take questions during this session. So I love doing these because all of the people that are in marketing are also in the chat. And so two things. Number one, give your feedback. We're going to ask you to rate these websites also that we talk through, but also chime in, throw your comments in there, add your color to this. This is marketers learning from marketers and so share your stories and lessons in the chat as well. But if you have questions and you want us to get to them, go to the Q and A, put your question in the Q and A and then I will go through those when we get to the Q and A session at the end and I can sort them all by. I think you'll have the ability to upvote them and I'll be able to pick the highest upvoted questions. We'll get through a bunch of those but use the chat. It's one of the reasons that makes these live sessions great.

Cool. Ready to dive into some of the content here. So as we talked about, most of today will be a tear down or a build up? A little bit of both. But wanted to explain why we decided to do these website teardowns and explain the context that it's not just going to be regular. Do we like this website? Yes, no, but we are partially basing it off of criteria of buyer first best practices. So essentially we did a report two years in a row. We just launched the second year of it called the B2B buyer best practices. Looking at the top 100 SaaS companies and seeing how buyer first they are. And by that we have three criteria. One, how accessible is the website? So how easy is it to like book time with a sales team or to get started with a free trial? I think we've all as B2B buyers booked time and then just been ghosted, which is a really weird experience when you're like, I want to buy your software and you are ghosting me and not letting me. So that was our first criteria. How accessible is it? Second was usable. So how easy was it to play around with the product or experience it in some way before I jump onto that live demo or into a free trial? And that's not like is there little gifs or images like can I play with some version of the actual product? And then the third was visible. Probably the most divisive and fun one of do you show public pricing or not? I feel like this is such a hot button topic of B2B SaaS. But ultimately for buyer first, if you're putting the buyer before your own sales experience, generally buyers like to know what the price is. So this is last year again, we did this report two years in a row and last year we booked demos with the top 100 SaaS companies, 100 by size, so just the largest. And it wasn't great. It didn't make me feel great about the state of B2B buying. Last year, 35% of companies never got back in touch with us. And I will caveat, we did this report with Chili Piper and used a Chili Piper email. So it wasn't like we were some weird sketchy Gmail and that's why people didn't respond to us. Maybe we were being disqualified, but they still never even told us we were. So 35% didn't respond. Average two day response time, which again is kind of wild. I'm saying, hey, I want to buy your software and you're taking two days to respond. Only 7% had an interactive demo. So a way to play around with their product before you jump onto a live demo. 57% have public pricing. That was probably the most positive statistics. But of that 57%, 21% didn't actually show the price. So I cannot do live math. But less than 57% actually showed their pricing. So again this is last year and let's dive into this year. So it got better. Yay. I thought this was pretty cool. I think so often when you see these reports come out about state of it just is highlighting a lot of things that are bad with the state of whatever it is. It's usually like this is what's broken. So it's really cool to see. This year things did improve. My theory and Dave, I don't know if you have any theories on this too, is with the market getting more competitive, people are seeing the buying experience now as like a differentiator. You have to create a good buying experience to stay ahead.

I think this is misunderstood. As a marketer, I think oftentimes we feel like the whole pressure to deliver is on the actual act of marketing. But I think to me, a bunch of the things that you put in there are not just things that marketing owns. Like marketing might own the delivery of the website, but the fact about how the sales org is structured and whether they're going to respond to certain types of inbound requests in some time period. Marketing doesn't necessarily own that there's a pricing strategy and like, are we going to put pricing on the website? That's a company level decision. And so I think overall I see the B2B buying process as not just marketing's responsibility, but it has to do with the whole company. And so when I see someone that does this, well, it's not because the marketing team is great, the marketing team might be great, but it's mainly because the company is aligned strategically on how they want to go to market and what type of website experience they want to have. And for most companies today, the website is the digital storefront. You know, even if you sell enterprise, even if you sell really big deals, like this is the storefront for your business, for your product. And I think it's a huge factor in whether people are going to buy from you regardless of, whether, you know, marketing is involved there or not.

Yeah, it's so funny you say that because every marketer who I talk to about this topic generally is like, yes, I want pricing on my website, I want a demo, I want easy calendar booking. Usually it's the internal politicking that makes this harder. So hopefully by seeing some best practices today. And that's part of the reason we put out this report to show like, hey, these are the standards. Now you have something to go share with your boss to be like, oh, you know, if 70% of the top B2B SaaS companies are putting pricing on their website, maybe we should be as well. And I think that's also part of the reason why we saw these stats get better this year. As it becomes more popular, suddenly it just becomes, you're almost like forced into it. If all of your competitors have public pricing, suddenly you might feel like, okay, to keep up, we need to have pricing. Or if all your competitors have an interactive demo and people can easily get like see what the product does beforehand, it kind of just like pulls the direction altogether. So I think it's just hopefully in a good way, but almost like forced peer pressure that we are seeing more and more companies adopting these buyer first best practices.

Well, I think it also comes back to like, I think you have to realize that in B2B most people are, they're more shopping than they are buying. And so even if I'm going to buy, let's say like we're using ZTLE for this webinar, right? Oh, damn it. I said webinar. Live session. We're using ZTLE for this live session. Even if I really like this product, I'm going to do my due diligence and I'm just going to go check out two or three other competitors. Like when we moved our community over to Circle, I went with Circle. But I also kind of simultaneously did some just quick cross referencing and research with two or three other platforms because you're spending a lot more money. You're not buying a $14t shirt. You want to see what other features people have. You want to see how it's priced. I actually have a perfect example of this. I needed to get cap table software for Exit 5 because we're building a real company. I want to have equity and have our team have some skin in the game in case there's like a, an exit or something down the road and have everybody share in that success. And I was torn between Carta was the software that I've used at all my other previous companies. But I just wanted to try something else and see something different. And so I evaluated Carta and I was ready to buy Carta. And then a founder friend of mine told me about this company, Pulley. So I go to Pulley, I check out their website, I had some questions specific to Carta. They answered me in like two minutes. I got my answers, I booked a demo and I end up going with them. Like that has nothing to do with their marketing and their creative and their campaigns. It has everything to do with the buying process. And that is what led me to.

Buy from that company, yeah, kind of what I was saying before, it's a real differentiator now if you can be first. Also, just because people are so busy now, like unfortunately there are still layoffs, there are less team members than before. Like we just don't have as much time as we used to to sit around and evaluate a lot of software. And if you're taking two plus days to respond to a demo request, someone might have bought software by then. But luckily it is getting better. As we see on these stats this year, it was an average of same day response time, a lot more automating used in the email sequences and on the websites to make it faster. Almost 70% had pricing pages. This was really cool. To me it was still about 20% that didn't show the full pricing. But just the fact that this many more had pricing pages and then almost doubled the number of interactive demos, obviously that was the stat that got me most excited.

Do you know, I feel like the pricing page thing, I think that oftentimes, at least the companies that I've been at before activity on the pricing page was considered some like high intent activity. And so we like to gate that. Right. I see you kind of like nodding along and so like I've had the sales, sales wants to like if someone wants pricing, they must certainly be ready to buy When I get that there's a lot of nuance in pricing. But me as a consumer, I roughly want to know, I get that there might be like a custom this and that. But as a consumer I roughly want to know, is this 10 grand a month? Is it 20 grand? Is it 100? Is it 29.99? I need some ballpark and then I'm going to give you the time because I think the thing that's changed in the last 10 years because of the Internet and social media and G2 and communities like Exit 5 where people are sharing, like if you're not posting your pricing transparent on their website, I'm going to tell you right now people are in Exit 5 and they're asking it. And someone like Tim Davidson, we had somebody ask about pricing from two ABM vendors who did not have their pricing on the website. And Tim had screenshotted it from like a previous conversation. And so that person got the pricing inside of the community. Like people are going to find that out. I just, I feel like you'd want to at least give some people a rough range. And there's this kind of shift of like sales and marketing. Like we used to have to squeeze Everything and control everything because buyers didn't have any of the power because information was not for free. But now that all this information is out there anywhere, you kind of have to adjust your marketing and adjust your website strategy to match.

And the way I think of it now too is buyers didn't used to know how to buy. I was never trained on how to buy software. So it used to be nice that it was a very like gated, controlled process because I was like, yeah, walk me through it, I don't want to know what to do next. Now everyone's probably bought and across the org it's not just decision makers anymore. Everyone's probably bought like 10 pieces of software a year. So I think we just kind of get the game and we get how to play the game and get around it if you're not going to give us the information we want. But I was smiling before because you mentioned intent on pricing pages predicted the next slide. Why did it get so much better? That's one of my theories. So these are all my theories. I will say I read every single follow up email we got from booking those demos and looked at all 100 websites. So these are the theories I have from doing that research. But for pricing, I think we're seeing so much more pricing pages not just because we're being more buyer first but because there are now so many more ways to get intent signals from it. And even if you don't gate it, you can use Clearbit, you can use so many of these companies to see the accounts and now the contact level who is viewing that pricing page. And the reason I thought this was like the higher intent, I saw a lot more pricing pages on the main nav bar. 66% of websites that had pricing had on the main nav bar. So clearly they're trying to like drive their prospects towards that page. And then two other takeaways of why I think it got better from last year for demo follow up. A lot more automation this year, which seems pretty straightforward but this year it was the same day response time because a lot of companies just had that first touch automated email. I think we've learned letting a prospect slip through the cracks by not having any sort of automation just isn't feasible these days. And you can just easily have an email that's like hey, this is an automated email. Someone will reach out. And then a lot more calendar schedule used in the automated emails versus still some on the websites, but a lot more in the email follow up cadence and then interactive demos. My main Hypothesis is just a more mature market. And as markets become more mature, enterprises will start using it more. Also shown by the demos, it was really cool. It wasn't just on the product page anymore, kind of like hidden. A lot of times it was front and center as a secondary CTA or I saw a lot more demo centers, which is why we saw like four demos on average versus one. So basically like 10 different demos on a page covering different features. That was becoming a lot more popular this year versus last. So these are my theories. Would be curious if anyone else has theories of why B2B buying has gotten better this year versus last year.

I think there's just more competition now. There's more competition in any industry too. And so if you're, if you're a brand new product in a brand new industry, then you can maybe be a little bit more controlled. But I think we talked about earlier, everybody's, everybody's shopping and evaluating multiple platforms. And so the more content and information you can have up on the site, the better.

Yeah. And now we get to the fun part of seeing what websites are doing that, which ones are making it very clear, very easy for their buyers. So let's get to the teardowns.

Well, actually before we do that, I have a question for you. Do you agree with what I was saying earlier? We're like, this is a company strategy thing. And I think for the marketers here, like you, this isn't just a design thing, it's a go to market thing. It's a how does we talk a lot about, like how marketing needs to influence change across the organization. Who owns this? If somebody's watching this session right now, it's not just like, oh, let's go back and change the layout of our website. There's some like fundamental strategy questions that need to come up. Right.

I have never heard an org that knows who owns pricing, like pricing is always owned by everyone. I don't know any company who has a definitive owner. If you do, great for you, I'd say I can talk about our experience getting public pricing on our website. I was the one initially leading the charge, but I needed buy in from sales. And that's fair. It affects them the most. It affects sales a lot more than affects me as a marketer. Of course I need their buy in and their support or else they're just gonna, if we do it without it, they're just gonna let alone. And that's gonna hurt that sales marketing relationship. What I did, and this is what I recommend, anyone trying to do these buyer first best practices was nudged in that direction until people got more comfortable. So for example, we started sharing pricing. If someone reached out for a demo and they mentioned they want to see pricing, we started sharing with them in that first email. And then I'd every now and then have prospects actually reach out to me over LinkedIn and be like, hey, can you please share your pricing with me? And then I looked at those deals that we showed pricing earlier and found that they had higher close rates and were much faster deals. And then I presented that data to the team and the sales team and showed okay. When we've been showing pricing earlier, we have seen how it accelerates the sales cycle as validation for why we should put it up publicly. So while I was the one leading it, I did need to get sales buy in and I had to use a little bit of data and like qualitative research. I couldn't have just been like, let's do pricing for the sake of it. It definitely took a little bit of having to get used to.

I love this comment in the chat from Brian. I'm going to shut up and we can tear these websites down. Brian said, I think people are truly realizing that the more transparent you are, the more, the more they can trust you. And I think as people and as buyers, we can all nod our heads to that and agree. Where that breaks down though is then inside of the company when you're like behind on your growth goals, when you want to gate all the information on your website, when you want to drive more qualified conversations with buyers. How do we measure this? That's where a lot of this starts to break down. I used to work at this company Drift for a CEO named David Cancel and he was really big into like doing business and doing marketing that people actually want and using empathy and being like, wait a second, just because we can't measure this or just because like this isn't perfectly going to be trackable, or just because this break our lead scoring model doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Like is this a company problem or a customer problem? The customer problem is I just want to go to your website and I want to see how much this thing costs and I want to know if you integrate with this. The company problem is. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. If we give away our pricing, we're not going to be able to have a qualified conversation with a buyer. And that's where I think a lot of this breaks down inside of a company.

And that's why I think you Kind of have to prove it a little bit. If the sales team thinks that this is going to hurt their qualified leads, it's going to be really hard to convince them otherwise until they see it. I think if you can do small steps to move to it and prove to them. The biggest thing I always hear about pricing is beyond just what if my competitors see it? Or what about qualified buyers? What if my customers see it and then demand discounts because we overcharge that one customer? And every time I've heard that and then released pricing on a website there's like two customers where that happens. Your customers aren't often stalking your pricing page. And I think also B2B buyers get it right. Like maybe you got custom packages or add ons. It's not always black and white for everyone, but it took us releasing pricing and then waiting a month to see that customers weren't up in arms for everyone to feel comfortable with it. So I feel like you just got to get people comfortable because just arguing theory isn't going to work as well. And then you're just arguing like am I smarter than you or do I know this better than you?

All right, let's flip over to the teardowns. Quick psa. Danielle on our team just put the link to Natalie's report in the chat. So if you want to grab this, I think this is a, I think going to a session like this, the opportunity is like to learn, get the information, take notes and then like use this as a jumping off point to maybe present a strategy or go back to your boss, your team and suggest some changes based on this study. So.

All right, and last little thing, I'll plug about the report at the bottom. We do have a scorecard. So at the end of this, if you want to score your own website against these buyer first best practices, you can do that and then maybe show like hey guys, we scored low or celebrate if you scored really high. But now let's score these websites. Cool. So this first one probably shouldn't be surprising if you're in B2B software. You've probably heard of Comstore before and I wasn't really surprised when I was judging all these websites against our buyer first best practices that they followed it because a lot of what their whole company is about is helping you do buying in like a more human way. Basically helping you find connections when you're going to buy software. So you can say like okay, I know this person, maybe they can give me an intro and it could be a lot more of that human relationship than all digital. So again, they kind of practice what they preach as far as being buyer first. A few things I wanted to call out. So first thing I've pulled up here is their book a demo page. So go to ComSource BookAdeMO. And I've never seen this before and thought it was so brilliant and was like, why don't more of us do this instead of just saying book a generic demo. Whether you are really interested in our software or you have barely heard of us and just want to learn a little more, tell me where you're at in the cycle. If you're ready to start buying and you don't want to know, do a discovery call and just jump right in. If you're looking for a full demo or you just want to start learning. I think that alleviates that awkward first demo where it's so often it's like, hey, I really want to buy. I'm really qualified. And then they make you do like a discovery call with a BDR and you're like, no, no, I'm telling you, I know. I did my research and I just want to buy it. Or vice versa. When you're just, you know, in discovery phase. And then the sales rep gets annoyed because they hear those words like, oh, I'm just browsing right now.

Damn, I'm so mad about this idea because I wish I. Yeah, I wish I knew it. One of the biggest things that I struggle with was. And you see this on a lot of B2B websites. It's like the call to action is either like there's usually two. It's like super top of the funnel, like join our email list. Or it's like, talk to sales. And it's like, ah, marketing. Like, how do we get credit for all the stuff that happens in the middle? And this is a fantastic way to do that. And we talked about empathy before. This is like meeting the website visitor in the where they're at. So like, maybe you don't want to talk to sales today, but you had a couple questions. Okay, cool. Here's another path. And I'm sure that Comsore has a way to like track that engagement and you can measure, measure the behavior accordingly. This is great. Have you seen this? Have you seen anybody else do this before?

I haven't and I can say too. So we actually use Comsore. And like when I went through the sales process this aligned, they were very meeting me where we're at, it was very conversational. Like if they didn't have this and then push me to immediately, like buy or opposite it. Very much like met me and it was conversational, so can vouch also, they follow up on this. Let's meet the prospect where they're at. Cool. Okay. A few other things. So you mentioned if you're not ready for a live demo yet, what I also love that compsor does, first of all, just go into their main page. It's just very straightforward and the language they use is very conversational. It's something I've been trying to push myself a lot as a marketer and sometimes still get in the habit of writing jargon. But everything they're saying is just very simple language. Like, turn your advisor's network into a revenue channel. I think even down here is where it gets like, very conversational. It's just like, get warm intros, connect prospects with customers, build a referral program. It's not accelerate pipeline 10x. It's not overstating it. It literally is saying what you do, which I found really refreshing because a lot of B2B websites don't just state what they do. And then one more thing to point out. So then when I go into these pages, to your point before, Dave, of like, okay, what if they're not ready for a lot a demo yet or like a live demo on each of their three product pages, they do have an interactive demo. And so if I want to quickly, like in two minutes, learn a little more about comsor, I can do that. I also even went to this interactive demo the other day when I was using the product to see if, oh, is there something I'm missing or more I could be doing. So also just an added benefit, which was cool. And then again, very plainly, they tell you the benefits. I also like how clean the pages. There's not much else distracting. It's mostly just the text. It's very simple. And then we also get into some more product imagery so I can learn a little more about the product. But, like, very clean landing page, not too much going on. And if I want to dive into the product more, I can go through the interactive demo.

Very nice. Okay, here's what we're going to do. Oh, you got more. I was going to give us our.

We got to move on.

Yeah, yeah, no, we're good. We still got time. Go ahead.

I'll just show the pricing page. This was the other cool thing I wanted to cover because to give them credit, they show all pricing, which you also don't see that much in B2B SaaS nice.

Yeah, this is great. Okay, Natalie, well, save your rating, folks, on this webinar right now. Damn it. Three times. That's three miles and 300 burpees. Well, I'm going to have a busy afternoon. Go in the chat right now. I want to get your rating. Give us this website rating based on B2B buying. The scale is from 1 to 10. Feel free to add Y. But right on the count of three, you're going to put your number in chat. Natalie, you're going to think of yours. And then while they're coming in, I'm going to ask you to give your rating. Okay? Ready? 3, 2, 1. Put your rating. Put your rating in the chat. 1 through 10.

This is so hard because I. I've looked at these websites for a while, but I'm going to try to. Okay.

9. 9.9. 8.7. 8. 7.5. 9. 8.5. 8. 7. 8.5. 9. 7. 10. Nothing below 7. Very high. Quite high. 7. Brody hates the design. Dave Winter. No interactive demo. 7. 7 is pretty good. The lowest score is 7. This is really good. Look at all. By the way, are there people on this live session or what? This is amazing. Meijo says three hates it. So sorry about that. Really good. So I don't know if we send this, the commsore team on here, like getting them some love. Natalie, what's your score? Go ahead. You got the mic and we're gonna go.

Yeah. An 8.

9.

Yeah. 8.5, I guess.

All right, 8.5. Seems like the bar has been set. Let's see what else we got. Let's keep going.

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Cool.

Okay, so I didn't want to just do all B2B SaaS. So I did want to choose an agency because we have a lot of agencies on the calls too. But what I thought was really cool about this agency website was it reminded me of a really good B2B SaaS website in a way. So first way I'll talk about that is like so often I go to agency websites and it's again a lot of jargon and I'm like, but what does that really mean? I don't understand the outcome I'm going to get. So I thought it was cool. First of all, the three things they do are their nav bar, like onboarding, training, coaching, very straightforward. And then they have this view watch a demo, which I've never seen on an agency page. The ability to watch a demo of the outcome that you'll get. It's usually all like customer Testimonials but they actually have a demo of what the onboarding HubSpot onboarding process would be like. Have you seen this Dave?

No. So just a video of somebody on the team explaining it?

Yeah, yeah. Which seems really simple right?

But we, we go to the most complex like gotta hire a $50,000 retainer website agency to do this first. Like this person knows this product really well. Like let's get her on camera and let's film a quick video in house. Like I think this stuff works especially there's this weird line between like we want stuff on the website to feel really like professional and polished versus like sometimes a screen recorded video. It's like your head in the bottom. And going through their product can work really well. So I like it, I dig it.

And I just think for an agency so often I have no idea what the actual outcome is. Like I'll get to see case studies of other people and who've had success but I don't actually see the outcome. So I thought it was cool that they were actually showing me what HubSpot onboarding would be like. A few other things to call out. They also make it for accessible, super easy to get in touch. I feel like so often with agencies they're like really long forms and I have to describe exactly what I want out of the meeting and sometimes I don't even know yet I'm going to you because I don't understand what I need help with. So I like that they just had a very simple work with us and it shoots you down to accountantly and I love that they explain what will be on that call. Very similar to the comsore example. I think one thing we don't do well enough in just B2B in general is explain what are you going to get out of that call. Like we always just assume, yeah someone wants to book a demo because our software is great or our agency is great but here we actually get to learn like okay, this is exactly what we will talk about. This is what I should come prepared with and if we agree we'll plan the next steps. I love that too. Making it more of a two way street rather than just, I don't know. So often we forget that B2B buying is both ways. You might not be a great fit customer and that's okay. And we can just have a normal conversation about that.

Well I also think, I also think setting expectations like hey, here's what this call is going to be about. This is a sales call by the way. It's just the other one, the. Com source site. Like the only thing I didn't like was it just like talk to our sales team. There were three CTAs which kind of made up for that. But like, I don't really want to do that. I hate being sold to. Usually when I talk to a salesperson it's. I feel like I'm being interrogated and then they're going to spend like 15 minutes without letting me talk and talking about their product and solution. I love the idea of setting expectations for like, here's what this call is going to be like before you book it.

Then you can decide exactly, like just upfront, let them know. I feel like in the past the B2B buying was so much. We have to keep so much hidden because the demo is like that secret prize that you'll come and talk to us for. Like we have to have a way to entice you and if we tell you what the demo is going to be, you're not going to want to show up. So I love that we're realizing, let's just let people know and they can decide like we can trust the buyer can figure out for themselves whether or not it makes sense. I also really like these FAQ session questions. I feel like especially for agencies, it's really helpful to understand or even like, I don't know where to start. I kind of love that question. So often with agencies I know I have a problem, I don't even know how to begin solving it. So telling me, kind of predicting what I'm going to have trouble with, what I need help with, I think they just, it shows a really clear understander of their buyer in this example.

Can you go back to the top for a second?

Yeah.

One thing I really liked, and I think the homepage headline is an area where a lot of people get stuck. There's a good little copywriting trick that they're using here which is basically, how do you, how do you target an audience with your content? Well, I know instantly I'm not a HubSpot super admin, so I know right away this is not for me. But Dan Kennedy, who's like a old school sales copywriter called this like planting the flag in the headline. And so it's like new moms blank, right? Runners blank. This one is HubSpot Super Admins. And so like, is it a sexy headline? No. Is it super catchy? No. But within one second of landing on this website, I now am going to keep scrolling and learn more. At least I am a HubSpot super admin. Okay, now I'm going to keep going. I think it's a really good way to think about a website headline.

Agreed. Okay, I think it's time we vote now.

All right, let's put your votes in. What's this one? Now keep in mind high scores from the last one. So it's got to be relative. It's got to be relative. But put your scores in 3, 2, 1. Put them in the chat. Natalie's got her pencil and calculator out over there in her new apartment doing my calculations.

Oh my.

Came on 6, 6, 5, 6, 7, 7, 6, 695687, 77865, 9, 7, 5, 7. Yada, yada, yada. Okay, I get the tone. Natalie, what's yours?

So I feel like I'm copping out with everyone else's answers. But I was going to do a 7 partially because they do have pricing but it's very hidden. I wish they had it on the nav bar. And then while I really like that watch a demo video. I do wish there was a little more like imagery or something that shows me what I will get out of their services.

I'm gonna give it an 8. I think people are being tricked because it's not like a mind blown design, it's not like animations and crazy stuff. But I think, you know, it's an amazing website with terrible design. Amazon, you know, it's an amazing website with terrible design. Craigslist, I get it, you can have a bar for amazing design. But I also think your website can. I think this is a good example of a website that has more function than like sizzle. And for me it's working. It works for me.

And I think remember they're selling just HubSpot admins who maybe want things a little more like straightforward, logical than all the fluff and design. Okay, next one. So similar that it is a little less fluff and design audience. We're going through directus which is headless cms. So probably maybe developers, website designers. What I really liked about this website is they have so many options to learn more or play around with the product that isn't just booking a demo, which isn't too surprising. I think dev tooling does this really well because dev developers do not want to get in a sales call. So I think oftentimes when we think about the best buying experience, DevTools are some of the best ones to look at. First of all, they do have a homegrown interactive demo. This they made themselves and I have it pulled up here just so you don't have to. Oh, I'm going to have to sign in. First of all, this is the sign in to their interactive demo which I just thought this little video is kind of fun. Like someone pointing at me to do something. I maybe could use the space to explain what I'm gonna see. That's the only thing is when I was going through this experience I didn't really understand what I was signing up for. But I did it because the man was pointing at it.

So I guess so it's kind of like it is a way. It's a waste. It's a waste. It's funny, it's cute. But like it's over here. It's. Unless you're a moron, go over here.

Yeah, I'm torn about that one. I want to hear what the chat says. But what's cool is this is like I said, so they homegrown built this. It is a full replica of their product. So I can go in and get an idea of what it does. I will say sometimes I'm a little torn about these experiences when there's no guidance at all because I have to figure out what I'm clicking around for. I'm just kind of clicking around a. Basically a state of their product that has full data in it which that part's really cool that I can see everything but part of me was clicking through this before and being like okay, this is cool, I can see it but what does this mean? So maybe a little bit of pop ups or guidance giving a little more explanation since it is pretty top of funnel. Okay, now I'm going back to the main website. I thought what was also cool is if that was the interactive demo we just went through their main cta. If you're like hey, I'm ready to get going, you can start self hosting right away. And they have a bunch of videos and documentation on how to do that. Again clearly very tailored for the developer audience. If one of the first CTA's is like docs and how to get started. Also like they had some nice product imagery here. If you don't want to do the full interactive demo you can get this quick little gif to get a quick overview of what they do and then again clearly stating who are they built for. So developers content hub and then this part I thought was a little typical. Just the product screenshots and the CTAs but thought the rest more above the fold was what was exciting to Me also, we'll call out. They have pricing, and again, mostly full pricing. They don't show enterprise, which is pretty standard. But I also like that they then have a pretty big breakdown, especially again for maybe more that developer audience of, like, infrastructure really wanting to know exactly what is included or not included.

I always get overwhelmed with the feature checklists, and I feel like you can just write whatever you want.

Okay. So I am always a little torn on those because we've had this conversation about our own sales.

People love them, but I'm like, I guess we could just make. We all just make it up. It's just marketing.

Well, yeah, they're all just terms, so oftentimes they don't actually know what that means. And then a sales person can be like, oh, no, that term meant this. Like, that's actually not included. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like it's more also just like, check the boxy. Because when I've bought software in the past, I've been given, like a criteria list, just like a sheet of all the features it needs to have. And sometimes I feel like those pricing breakdowns are just like, okay, it checks the box here, it checks the box there. But I don't even understand what that feature is. I just know that it's a criteria and that I can check it off and don't have to do more research.

All right, we got to keep it moving. So let's do our ratings for this one. Three, two, one, go. I'm not a developer, so this is tough. Tough for me to say. My only feedback on this one is, I think it looks. I think it's great. I like the funnel. I get it. I'm not a developer, but I think they speak to developers. I just. This falls in the bucket of my friend Eli at no Boring Design. He would. He would call this, like the stripification of B2B website. It looks like your classic B2B software company. Nothing wrong with that. I like an opportunity to stand out, do something different. But I think it seems like a good, functional site. What do you got, Pro? What's your rating?

Yeah, that's why I was thinking kind of closer to a six. I know. I'm just going eight, seven, six now, so I'll try to switch it up.

Rob, maybe you put your. Maybe subconscious. You organize your examples from favorite to least favorite. We'll see if you got more.

I might have done that. But I think the top I was really impressed by. I do think again. I wish the interactive demo had a little More guidance. But I was a little disappointed below the fold. It just. It wasn't bad. And look, our website probably looks kind of similar, but it just felt like that pretty generic. Image copy. Image copy.

All right.

Yeah.

Do we have one more?

We have two more.

All right, we got to rip through them real quickly.

Okay. I'm just going to highlight the things that I really like about the websites in each of these that are a little different. So I won't go whole thing.

Wait, did you just accept or decline cookies right there? That's just a big question.

I think. I just honestly don't know. I just hit the button. I honestly don't look most of the times, which is so bad. I just kind of hit the closest button I can. Maybe I'm learning about cookies. Just make it the most obvious. Click if you want them to say yes. Cool. Okay, so first base. I'm going to highlight the best parts of it. 1. Of course I'm going to love a take a product or a secondary cta. Super simple upfront, I can see the product and start playing around with it. It is gated. I will give a little knock, a little half point for that. Generally I prefer ungated, but I love the fact that it's secondary cta. Makes it super easy to find it, play around with it. And then I did want to highlight. So I'm curious to get the audience's reaction to this and it's a little buried. I wish they had this higher up. I really liked this section because so often we're asked just for some like generic stats, some really quick, easy to understand stats of why should I go with your product? How will I save money? And I feel like this just laid it all out there really quickly. Why should I go with them? And then after seeing these high level stats, I can use them to then calculate my own savings. An ROI calculator is nothing new, but I haven't seen it as prevalent as much on the website like that along with right below stats. I just thought it was also a really nice looking ROI calculator. I feel like so often ROI calculators are kind of gross and not the most appealing. I really like the sliding motion so I could see the range too. Like I kind of get an idea maybe of like, oh, if I'm on the really small range, maybe this isn't for me. Or if I'm on the top range, maybe this makes more sense. And then again, not surprising it's gated. But I just thought this was like a really clean way to understand ROI and like what I should be looking at when evaluating the software.

Interesting. I like tools like this. My friend John Short runs this agency, Compound Growth Marketing and he's. He has a lot of strong opinions about like mid funnel. And I think something that we talked about earlier is a lot of the B2B websites, it's typically like either contact sales or go do something else. I like the idea of building tools like Optimizely used to have this. I don't know if they do now. I haven't used it in forever. But they used to have like you could preview their tool on your website. At Drift, we built a way that you could put your URL in and build like a test version of the chatbot on your website. This is a ROI calculator. I think you can bridge the gaps in the funnel by creating tools like this that help people buy. I think this is a great idea.

Yeah. And I, I've seen a lot of ROI calculators, but usually it's during the sales cycle. I like how upfront this one is on their website and actually that would be my feedback is I wish this was more apparent. Like it took a little bit of digging to find it. Cool. Are we good to rate this one?

Yeah, let's rate it. Put your rating in. Mid funnel experts put your rating in. By the way, they have a competitor called second base.

That would be amazing.

Yeah, you never know. Firstbase.com average rating. Dave bought calculating in my head like 7.6 average rating. Natalie, what's your rating?

I was gonna do a seven.

All right.

Again, going with the crowd. I really like the ROI calculator. I feel like it was really easy to justify why I should buy the software, which is very buyer friendly. I love obviously the product tour. I wish a few more things were ungated and then I did have to knock them because I didn't see pricing on it.

They could use Novotic in the future. Okay, go. Last one. We got one more. Then we got lots of Q and A we got to rip through.

Okay, last one really quick. So I think this is one of the ones, Dave, that maybe falls under your functional but maybe not the prettiest of websites.

Well, I'll be the judge of that. You just keep presenting.

I'll decide if someone from Terra Leap is on here not to dock it. I think it's still a really cool website, but I think this website does such a sneaky way of showing their product in a lot of different places. So they're like a testimonial platform. I think it's really cool that basically they have just like little testimonials everywhere. So like, obviously, again, very much showing the value you're going to get from this. But also they're using their own product. They're out like testimonial, testimonial, testimonial, video version of testimonial. A bunch of different ways to showcase what their product does. And then they even have this little chat guy, which is another. I did not realize he was going to speak. And then he even has this little guy that you can then get more testimonial or can it kind of similar to like the. Com soar of what do you want? You can then show. Okay, I have specific questions. Or like, this is what I'm looking for. I just thought this was a very good example of again, like, let me show my product as much as possible. I also thought the CTA was very interesting. I'm a little torn on it. I like that they call it this no pressure call. But then it's like, you better own up to that. Like it better not be the cta. And then you get on and you're actually being hounded by a sales rep.

Yeah, that can happen. Or if you disguise it as it's an assessment, it's a coaching call. And then it's actually just sales. There's a lot happening. There's a lot of videos, a lot of moving parts happening on the site right now.

That's why I said I'm not going to do this one for the design as much, but the function and actually showing what the product does. I got a very clear understanding just from the homepage of what the product does because they use it so much in the homepage.

I like that. Yeah, I think it's kind of weird. It's. This is the weird part of marketing to me. It's like, are we judging the design? Are we judging the function? It's tough to know. If you really want video testimonials, this might work for you. Find out how. Book a no pressure call now. That implies that all the other calls are pressure. Yeah, I like when the call is oriented around helping as opposed to selling.

It did feel a little infomercially for me at times. That would probably what I dock it as, like book a no pressure call now. Remind me those 3am commercials where it's like, call now to get this CTA felt like it was screaming at me a little bit.

A little bit. Okay, what's your rating, folks? Let's Move on. We got to get to the Lance. Five out of ten. Craig says five. Four. Danielle. Oh, my gosh. Danielle. Four. Danielle with the hard four.

Carl.

Seven. Jake with the four. Six, seven, five. This is a lower one. On the lower side, I'm gonna give it a six. No problem. Works. It's like there's half a turkey saying like, you really want a good lunch, but you don't have time. There's half a turkey sandwich left in the fridge. You're just going to slam that real quick before your next meeting. It's going to work. It's going to be fine.

But sometimes as a buyer, you just want to know it's going to work. Sometimes the design and everything is great. But I've seen websites that are so well designed that I'm almost like, but what do you do? Like, I'm distracted by all the design.

Yeah, there's a lot.

Yeah.

Did you give your rating?

Yeah, I said six. Agreed with you.

That's not a real rating. You need to be like 6.3 or.

Something in my head beforehand. Okay, I'll give it a 6.3.

Okay. All right, let's answer some of these questions first. Most important question. This question is from Craig. Dave, why did you schedule this live event during the Open golf tournament? Craig, obviously the golf has been on TV since 1:30 in the morning, so I figured I would give Natalie an hour of my day. No big deal. Yeah, you're welcome for that. Let's do this one. By the way, do these show up? Can you see these when I click on them? All right, there's another note. We're making a list. We have a list, a laundry list of things. This one's from Brody. What's your opinion? Just we're going to rip through these rapid fire. Okay, so what's your opinion, Natalie? Do you feel like pricing should always be on the website or not?

Yes, but I think when your company's ready for it, when you feel like you have solid pricing and differentiation, then it should be on the website. If you're still experimenting, maybe wait till you have it figured out.

All right, let's see this one. I've struggled to find good examples of service based B2B companies where an engineering firm, no products to feature. Can you speak to structuring your site around services as opposed to products?

I think that's the animal. I think is how you call it the second example. That was a really good one. I'll put in the chat. I'll put these all in the chat. If you guys want to play around, yeah, do it.

I'm hosting. You do that, you put in the chat. I don't understand. To me, no change, right. The thing that you're selling is just a service and so you are going to lead with the value and the benefit of the service that you provide. In that andimal example it was HubSpot super admins. Like we got this, we got this thing for you. All right, let's do this one. How do I balance best web journey practices in targeting enterprise icp? For example, pricing page is a difficult topic for us because it's all custom.

I think you show what you can show for the non enterprise packages and then enterprise you can just say custom. I don't think enterprises really look as pricing as much but really pricing is just to show to other startup companies that maybe you're not for them. It's more give them a range so you don't waste time on both ends with a startup booking time and then being like, oh my God, this is way too expensive.

Yeah, I think the website journey is all about if you're targeting the enterprise icp, I think it's all about this is why copy and like what you show really matters a lot. It's, it's how you. It's actually like that animal example where we said right away because they said HubSpot super admins and so like what language can you use to show people? And then if the pricing is difficult because it's all custom, I would actually lean into that and try to explain that as opposed to just being like contact us for pricing. Just being like pricing. I wish we could show you the price here but there's actually a lot of work we have to do behind the scenes to come up with a custom quote for you. I think you earn some trust if you can like lean into that a little bit as it just opposed to being like contact sales to get pricing. What do you think about having public pricing for the first two to three packages and not showing it for the most expensive package? This works fine. We just saw this, right? It was in the second to last example you showed. I think that's fine. I would just probably also add some of the language that we just talked about. Here we go. This one's from Anthony. Dave said the more information the better. How should websites structure their content to provide comprehensive info while assuring it remains quick and easy to digest? For users that don't have a lot.

And prefer to skim, I would say give them a little and Then give them the option to keep going. So, like, the way I think about this for how we advise customers with interactive demos is the first few steps should only be like five to eight steps. Give them very high level and then give them the option of what they want to explore more into. So I think start basic but then have more information if they choose to go down that path.

Yeah. Also if I could clarify what I've meant there, I actually don't think that. I don't think the goal should be to overwhelm them with information. I don't think. I don't necessarily mean like the most. More. More is always better. I think there's a max. And I actually think something that you have to realize with the website is to me, the goal of the website is not to just blast out a ton of information. The website is a vehicle to hopefully get someone to hang out with you and spend time and talk to you about your business. And so at some point you have to kind of say, yeah, this is all we're going to put on the website. Like we can't. We don't need a page for everything. We want to make it easy for people to find the content that we need. But the goal is not to explain every little thing, thing that your product can do on the website. Oh, this is like a, this is a layup for you.

I did see this one.

How effective are interactive demos? How effective would you say are interactive demos? Lady who runs growth at Interactive Demo company.

It's hard for me not to say. Very right now. I will try to sum it up with some stats and then maybe go to our website if you want to learn more. I will say we have about a 40 to 60% engagement rate. So anyone who goes to your website, about 40 to 60% will engage with the demo and about usually 10 to 30% conversion rate. So of those people who go through the demo, about 8 to 30% will convert to another CTA. I could go on a lot more about interactive demos. We got a lot of questions, but also happy to talk after if you want to learn more about interactive demos.

Very effective. Short answer, how do you frame a website as your product expands to more solutions? Let me take this one. Let me. Dave from Burlington, let me take this one. This is a question that's come up a bunch in exit 5. So I've had an opinion on it recently. I think the goal here would be to have like a homepage that generally explains who you are and what you do. But then you have. I don't know if you call it product pages or solution pages, but let me pull this. If you go to webflow, and I know this only because I did a podcast recently with Shane, their CMO, but if you go to webflow.com is a good example where like they explain your site should do more than look good. And okay, clearly this is a website building tool. But if you go to solutions, they now have webflow for freelancers, Webflow for startups, Webflow for enterprise, webflow for agencies, and now like each one of those you can say, okay, I'm an agency, so here's how webflow works for me. I would do something like that. Do you have anything to add to that?

I was about to say same thing. I actually did a presentation on this last week and I think solution or like use case specific pages are really effective for that.

Okay, we gotta do one more. Do you see one you want?

I think this is interesting. How do you balance difference between creating value of the people who work in the company versus just giving data? Trying to say like how much should you give versus how much should you gate?

What's your opinion on gating content? No, this one. How do you balance the difference between creating value of the people who work in the company versus just giving data? I don't know if this is about like the knowledge workers. I don't know. We're gonna have to skip this one. I don't think I could give a good answer.

I originally took it as like, how do you balance more value based messaging versus data? But I think I misinterpreted that one. That's good.

Okay. Oh, good one. Who should be responsible for end to end website experience? Natalie, what do you say?

I think it has to be a team effort. I think you need to have a leader who I would vote should be marketing. But as I pointed out before, you need to get buy in from sales and product. You're probably going to have to compromise somewhere a little bit to make sure that the website matches what product wants and it shows off the most important product features. You're not just creating experience that's great for the prospect but hurt sales down the line. So you need one owner, but I do think you need to get everyone involved in an alignment and you can't just kind of like topple. I know there have been times that I just want to do what I want to do for my website, but it ends up being better when I bring in everyone and we all agree.

I think there does need to be an owner. I Think product marketing typically owns the story and the content and the positioning and the messaging. But I think there's gotta be some type of digital team. Sometimes it's called digital. There's gotta be some true owner of the actual technical function of the website given that it's your like storefront. And I think that's typically in companies today. It's like a digital team or if it's demand gen of some kind. I think you kind of have those two teams working, working in tandem. Let's, let's end on this one, which is an interesting one. What's your opinion on gating content and form fills in general? When is that appropriate? When does it make users more likely to bounce? Maybe just talk about you're running marketing at a high growth startup right now. You've probably thought about this. Where do you see this fitting into your world and how would you use forms?

I think the best way to use skating is when it logically makes sense that you would want someone to email you. Which sounds very basic but like for example, sometimes the interactive demos we've seen people frame it as instead of just hey, give us your email to access the demo, say at the end of the demo. Do you want this email to you for later or do you want this to review this later? We'll email it to you. Share your email. I think in cases where it benefits the person if you're going to follow up with relevant information or if you're going to send it to their email so they can access later, I think then gating makes sense. Where I don't think gating makes sense is the very first thing you see. I don't love when the first thing you see in an ebook is a gate or the first thing you see in a demo is a gate. We actually see a lot more success if you put it like five steps in because then they've gotten a little value and they know what they're signing up for. Versus if the first thing you see is a gate, you've gotten no value yet or nothing really convinced you why you should put in your email to me?

It's about intent here there's a restaurant that we order from locally, pizza place, old, old website, horrific form to fill out to order the pizza. But my conversion rate on that form is 100% every time because I am there because I want to order the pizza. I got to go through all the information. Information. I don't think the form is actually the issue. It's about the intent. And so if you're asking for lots of information in a low intent scenario, then the conversion rate is going to be low. If it's higher intent, you can ask for more information. And I do think that whether it's an email, whether it's a chat thing on your website, you do often need that. I think where this conversation has shifted though, you can actually get a lot of the data and information in B2B today without asking someone to fill it out. And so what's the, what's the minimum that you need? I think goes back to this discussion about B2B buying. Anyway, okay, I asked for your ratings. Now you can tear us down. Leave your ratings for this webinar. We're going to X out of this so we won't even see them. So don't worry about what people actually say. But Natalie, awesome. You did great. Super interesting topic. There's obviously a lot we could go on here for a long time and thanks. The chat was really good today. Everybody's really helpful for each other. My MVP of the chat was Anthony who said for those that came late, they're reading questions that are submitted in the Q and A, which was super kind to play host to that. So Natalie, great job. Check out Natalie on LinkedIn. Go find Novotic and you can just check out all the stuff that we're doing@exit5.com Natalie, good to see you. Enjoy the rest of your day. Good luck in your new apartment and I hope everything's good.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bye. Bye. Exit.

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