B2B Website Teardown

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. 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, like, 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 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, it shows a really clear understander of their buyer in this example.

Here we go. Okay. Brody says, love these webinars. You always host great content. Thank you. We haven't even started yet and we already got the positive vibes in here. I'm doing this live session from my boat somewhere in the. I don't know what part of the world this is, but it's great. And we, we do these Exit 5 live sessions. Don't you dare call them a webinar. Don't you call them webinar? We do them once or twice a month, depending on what's going on. We bring in a subject matter expert from the world of B2B marketing, and we do a little deep dive into a topic. We've done topics on abm, SEO, how to manage up and be a cmo. And today we have a great little bit of a presentation. Plus tear down with Natalie, who heads up Growth at Novatic. They just did a really interesting study about B2B buying and the five live sessions. In the past, there is a rule that if you ask if the session is going to be recorded, you have to run one mile and do 100 burpees and that and you have to send us a video of that after in order to get welcome back into the next live session. So there's already been someone who's asked that I won't hold that rule to you because you may not have known. This may have been your first one, but that, that's the rule. So before we bring in Natalie, I want you to go in the chat right now and tell me who you are and where you're writing in from, and then also drop a note about, like, why did you take the time out of your day to come to this session? So I'm gonna. I'm gonna do that real quick. Dave, Burlington, vt, Here, because I'm hosting. So let me know where. Where you're writing in from and we'll go from there. Okay. I'm just sending a note to the team real quick. And let's. Let's bring in. Let's bring in Natalie real quick while. While we do that. So, man one, one thing. This font is hard to read. We got to make that change for next time. This is our first time on this new webinar platform, which is zttle. We used our green brand colors, but it's hard for me to read. So Craig's in Omaha. Liz is in North Carolina. Liz is in New York City. Dave's in Burlington. Sakshi is in India. Megan's. We got people from all around the world. We got Don from Costa Mesa, Toronto, Canada, in the house. David in Montreal. So anyway, 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. Jason, 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.

Cool. 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 I'm actually.

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

Great reception. 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 looked, 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 filled 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 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. Let's do it. So as we talked about, most of today will be a teardown 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 like as B2B buyers book 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? Oh, sorry. And that's not like, is there, you know, 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% had public pricing. That was probably the most positive stat. But of that 57%, 21% didn't actually show the price. I cannot do live math, but less than 57% actually showed their pricing. Again, this is last year. Let's dive into this year. 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. Like as a marketer, I think oftentimes we feel like the whole pressure to deliver is on the actual act of marketing. But I think you can't. To me, a bunch of the things that you put in there are not just things that marketing owns. 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 type of 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 also 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, 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. Like 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 almost, you know, 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 gonna buy, let's say like we're using Zuttle for this webinar, right? Oh, damn it. I said webinar live session. We're using Zettle for this, this live session, this webinar. 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 move 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, you know, $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 ex it 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 like 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, 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.