Jaleh Rezaei - CEO at Mutiny - How To Optimize Your SaaS Website for Conversion, Growth & Sales

It's our jobs to tell better stories. And always remember, it's the risk takers that are rewarded. People are sick and tired of being marketed to, and they're sick and tired of being sold. The single biggest story today in sales and marketing is how our customers are buying differently.

Hey everyone, it's your host Edward Ford, and welcome to the Growth Hub Podcast, brought to you by Growth Marketing Agency Advanced B2B. Advanced B2B helps B2B SaaS companies generate sustainable revenue growth through marketing. So if you are looking for an agency partner who can help you get measurable results from your marketing, then check out advancedb2b.com for more info. Now joining us today on the show is Jaleh Rezaei, who is founder and CEO at Mutiny. Today we are exploring a topic that is critical to every single SaaS business, and that's how to optimize your SaaS website for conversion, growth, and sales. So prior to founding Mutiny, Jaleh spent 6 years at VMware in product marketing before joining Gusto to lead their marketing team. She then founded Mutiny, which is YC-backed, which helps you personalize your website and turn it into your number one growth channel. Now, there are a ton of practical takeaways in this episode as Jaleh discusses the components of a highly effective website. The people and processes needed for rapid and effective website experimentation, how to improve the conversion rate of your website, the numbers that you need to track, and a variety of strategies, tactics, and case studies from real life that have helped various companies create effective SaaS websites.

So here we go.

It's episode 46 of the Growth Hub podcast with Jaleh Rezaei, founder and CEO at Mutiny.

Welcome to another episode of the Growth Hub Podcast, and it's my pleasure to welcome Jaleh Rezaei to the show, who is CEO and co-founder at Mutiny. So, Jaleh, thank you so much for joining us today here on the Growth Hub Podcast.

Of course, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm super excited about this episode because today we're going to be discussing a super important topic in B2B SaaS, and that's how to optimize your SaaS website for conversion, growth, and sales, and a few other things. So to kick things off, could you tell us What is the actual role of your website in B2B SaaS?

You know, I think the role of the website is conversion, but I do think it's a, it's a good topic to think about. Do you want your website to be there to convert visitors to either a lead or a trial, or do you want the website to be there as a resource to people that are further along in their evaluation process? In which case engagement and time on site is really what you're going for. Most SaaS companies tend to have either a trial or have an introductory demo. And so for most people, I think conversion is the primary goal. But a lot of B2B companies that that have really long deal sales processes and really large order sizes, they sometimes shift the way they think about their website and have it be primarily responsible for a place where people can find additional information about their product.

Yeah, definitely. And we'll most certainly come on to conversion in more detail later on. But I think following from this, then, you know, there's a lot of different things your website needs to achieve and it serves many purposes. So then following from this first question, what are the components of a highly effective B2B SaaS website?

I think the very first thing is clear messaging. You'd be surprised how many B2B websites you would go to and spend, you know, 3, 4 minutes clicking through to different parts of the website and not understand what the company does or not get a sense for how it fits into the ecosystem. I spend a lot of time on websites and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of all of the different B2B products that you could buy. And it's still, for most companies, it takes me a while to understand just what their core value proposition is. And so I think that's a really common problem in B2B. And one rule of thumb that I have around that, that I observed from YC is 80% accurate, 100% clear. So typically B2B companies do, their products do a lot of different things and people try to convey all of those value propositions for every single audience into one headline. And so if you are willing to just sort of narrow that down a little bit and just focus on, you know, what is the most important component and communicate that in as much clarity as you can, the site ends up performing a lot better than if you try to pack everything into your homepage, for instance. The second component is, I think that's really important, is a high-converting signup form. So sometimes, you know, people assume that a high-converting signup form has to be really short. And it's true that shorter forms tend to convert better, but you can also have longer forms as long as they are— as long as the form is designed well. So for example, at Mutiny, we have a signup form that asks up to 4 questions. Which is a lot, I think. But we don't ask anything that we can get from publicly available data. So the form starts with an email, and then based on whether we can enrich that email and what information we can enrich, then the user will see a next question. And it sort of keeps building the profile and scoring that user. And so at most, a visitor will see 4 questions, and we have almost no drop-off, I think it's about 11% drop-off that we see from, from start to finish. And most, most forms tend to have about a 50% drop-off, at least most traditional B2B forms. So I think that's something that you wanna think about, that if someone has taken that step to say, I'm interested in learning more about your product, what can you do to not bog them down and to help them either get inside your product trial or have the conversation with your sales or success team. The next part that tends to be really important for conversion that's tied a bit to the signup form is the, is the CTA. So we find that the right call to action can have a huge impact, like probably after your headline, it's the most important lever for conversion. And typically different CTAs work with different— work for different audiences. So you can, you know, some folks want to be a bit more hands-on and some folks want to speak to somebody in more detail. And also as a company, you might have limitations from a unit economic standpoint, what you can support. And so it's really helpful to be able to kind of tailor your CTA to the different audiences. I think even like the exact words that you put on the CTA, whether you call it a free trial or get started or request an invite or explore demo, they can have huge swings in conversion, sometimes as high as like 30-40%. So you really want to think about what are the CTAs on your site and make sure that you test the copy really effectively. And then I think to just kind of run through a few other things related to B2B websites. Every B2B company has different audiences. And so, you know, you're gonna have different buyers that need to be part of the conversation at some point or another. There's different verticals that tend to be using the product for different reasons. I like the Clay Christensen Jobs to Be Done framework. So there, different companies are gonna hire your product to do different jobs. And often it's really difficult, if not impossible, to try to communicate effectively with all of those audiences in one go. And so having more audience-specific content is really valuable. The more traditional kind of old-school way of doing this is to have the solutions pages and things like that. So that people can go deeper on their own if they're motivated. And then of course, if you've engineered your own personalization or using something like Mutiny, then you can also automatically adapt your homepage to the right messaging for that audience. But that tends to give people quite a bit of lift between like 50 to 90% when you adapt to the audience. And then finally, I would say chat is quite helpful for conversion, something that you wanna test out and see whether the fully automated versus a human-assisted version is gonna work better for you. But that tends to have pretty good ROI. I think mobile is something that for some reason we tend to not really think about mobile in B2B. We build the website, it's a big, beautiful canvas and we put all sorts of lovely things in it. But the reality is that for most companies, about half their visitors come through mobile. And it's such an afterthought and a lot of people don't even go to their own website from a mobile device. And, you know, and like the moment that you go and you put yourself in the mindset of a mobile user, you start to realize, you know, wow, this is— I have all these pop-ups while my signup form is bigger than the size of the screen. It's hard to see my navigation tab. And so, you know, I think just thinking about what is a what does a mobile user want and holding yourself kind of accountable to, you know, the mobile experience must be good and it often requires decent amount of tweaks for the mobile experience to be good relative to the desktop version, especially around CTAs and signup forms. So having things like click-to-call and, you know, letting people email themselves if they want additional information, things like that, I think is really helpful on mobile. And then finally analytics so that you can understand how to continue to optimize the website. I love Amplitude and FullStory. Amplitude helps us kind of understand for, you know, every event, the impact that it has on conversion, what different groups and audiences are doing and what their experience is like. And then FullStory is great for when we want to dive a little bit deeper and look at how users are actually navigating the site, and it can be a really good source of inspiration for ideas for optimization.

Yeah, this is awesome. I think there's so much to unpack here. So just to recap those 7 things. So it's messaging, a high-converting signup form, the right CTA, content for different audiences, chat, mobile optimization, and analytics. And I think the first point you mentioned on messaging is so, so true. The amount of websites I've been to where I don't understand what the product is after going through several pages is crazy. So I love the advice, 80% accurate, 100% clear. And I think following from here, I think in order to build and actually maintain a website, you of course need people, and a website typically needs people beyond your marketing and growth teams. So how should you structure a team around website development? Who are those people who actually need to be involved?

Yeah, you know, the, um, I think for most companies, they'll build a website and they will do a big website project once a year or maybe once every 15 to 18 months, and then no one really does much with the website in between. And so I think like the first step of thinking about what's the website team is it doesn't have to be a big large team, you could just have a metric on the website that is part of someone's OKRs and somebody is actually logging in and looking at Amplitude, looking at FullStory and is thinking about the optimization of the website. So I think that's the very first step that would probably be a win for most, most B2B companies. And then after that, if you wanted to put a lightweight team behind it, I think that pairing a technical/analytical person with a content person, usually a product marketing individual, is a really good first start for starting to make optimizations to the website. And you know, it doesn't— I think, you know, you don't have to necessarily find someone who's a conversion rate optimization expert. You can find someone who's curious, who's technical, analytical, and is good at research and learning about best practices and structuring tests. And you can have this be part of their overall job or position. Often this person will sit on the acquisition team. And then the piece that I find is usually missing is pairing them with a content person. So a lot of times what I've seen is, especially as companies and marketing teams get bigger, you start to have this division of talent between the technical analytical side and then the folks that are really good at understanding the customer and tailoring the messaging and the value proposition to those people. And often when you bring them together, magical things happen because you— turns out you need both of those things to to do marketing well. And so, you know, you would— I think you would get a lot more out of the team if you even dedicate like 25% of someone who's really good at content to the website so that they can continually optimize it and run experiments. Obviously they wouldn't be able to make major shifts, but there is a lot of technology out there that can give you the ability to make changes and optimize the website without necessarily usually needing engineering, and so that's a great place to start. And then if you wanted to dig deeper and make much more significant changes to the structure of your website, then you can add an engineer and an interaction designer to really round out the team. And so I think kind of those 4 core skills would allow you to take really wide swings on the website. And I'd say the final thing about the web team and optimization is the biggest failure mode that I've seen is not necessarily even the skills of the team, but it's rather this space to fail. Especially as companies get bigger, this concept of on-brand develops, and it can be really stifling in experimentation because the team that's trying to optimize the website is not given the space to think about what are all the things that we can try to make changes. They always have to be critiquing for, okay, but is this on brand? Can we do this or not? And more importantly, most things can be— if you find out that it works, you can then optimize it and build the glossy professional version of it. For your website eventually. And so it's, it's really good to give people a little bit of space to come up with this faster version just to test the concept. And keep in mind that a test that's running on a small percentage of your audience for a 1 to 2 month period is not gonna change the way people think about your brand. It's just gonna help you figure out as quickly as possible whether a new direction is going to be worthwhile additional investment for your company. And so just giving those people some space to fail and not be on brand would be a huge help.

Yeah, definitely.

So it's really about bringing all those disciplines together and letting people go out, experiment, fail, and just improve the overall website. And like you mentioned, a lot of companies do that big website redesign project every few years. I'm sure people listening have experienced that themselves. But let's talk a bit more about the processes that people should use. So what are those experimentation frameworks that these teams should then employ to ensure that their website is not just published and left for 2, 3 years, say, but is actively worked on on an ongoing basis?

Yeah, so I think, you know, in terms of the experimentation framework, the The best thing to do for the optimization of any existing asset, especially a website, is to pick a north star metric that the company or the team is trying to improve. And then think about, OK, what are all of the experiments that we could run that could help us move this metric. And so, typically, if you have a diverse team with different skills, the ideation around experimentation gets a lot better. And the way we did this at Gusto with our growth team is we would pick the metric and then we would have all of the folks that were either part of that project or folks that were invited to to participate temporarily in the ideation process. We would have them come up with ideas and, you know, we would show them like what a good hypothesis looks like. And they would come up with their ideas and then we would put all of those ideas into, you know, you can use Google Sheets, you can use Airtable, Jira, whatever, whatever What tool is easiest for your team? And then we would do a voting system on that to prioritize the ideas that were better. And typically the voting system included a bit of, you know, how much effort is this versus what is the perceived ROI or that we think we can get from it. And then we would vote on the ideas. And so we always kind of had a backlog of things that we were working on. And we would choose from the best ideas. And every week we had a reflection meeting where we would think through, okay, so these are the tasks that, you know, we ran. These are the new tasks, here's why. The tasks that wrapped up, here's what we learned from them. And that— those insights would inform everyone for subsequent weeks. So we would close out the week with insights and then we would kick off the week with prioritization of new experiments. And I think that feedback loop is really important because the best ideas for optimization tend to not necessarily come in the very beginning, but they come on the back of another learning. So you try something, you take a big swing and, and either the results you get, like amazingly positive or amazingly negative results, both are equally valuable for experimentation. And when you see that, you're like, wow, okay, obviously I've hit a nerve point here. What does this mean? And what assumptions had we made before that were incorrect? And you sort of build on that and you build your next test. And then the next set of tests that you build on the back of that learning tend to be the most valuable optimizations for the company.

Right. So it's almost like a framework growth teams would use, but applying it specifically to your website. So we have now the team in place. We've spoken about that. You have your experimentation process and framework. So next, let's get a little more granular. So how can you break a hypothesis down into core components and then create the leanest possible website tests and how fast should you expect to see results from these tests?

That's a really good question and sort of a— I think this is a topic that a lot of people tend to struggle with. So, you know, every big idea can be broken down into smaller components. Typically, the way we operate is we come up with a big idea, we get really excited about it, right? And I'm guilty of this too. And we then go and start executing a program to see whether the idea works or not. And the challenge with that is that typically big ideas are full of assumptions, right? It's a big compounded list of hypotheses, assumptions that you're making. And so when you have to build a program to test whether that works, you kind of are simultaneously testing out all these different ideas, which means that the program tends to take a lot longer. And once you get the results, you still have to figure out, okay, well, if it didn't work that well, why didn't it work that well? So a much better model is to spend some time upfront to break down the hypothesis into smaller, into smaller sections. So one process that I found to be helpful that I learned from a really great growth PM is, you know, first you kind of fast forward into the future. And so you think about, okay, 2 years from now, this— we've implemented this, it's been a huge success. Let's describe that world. And that gets you to kind of define, well, what is success? And I really encourage people to think about what is a single metric that you would be able to see? And that forces you to really think about what are we trying to get out of this program or this big idea if it is successful, and it forces discussion amongst the team if they have differing opinions, right? Like, is this a top of funnel thing or is this about conversion for people that are down funnel, etc.? And so that's kind of the first step of defining what does the future look like and what— how do we define success? And then the next step is to kind of fast forward to that same point in the future, but now assume it didn't work and ask yourself what went wrong. Why didn't this amazing idea that we were all so excited about 2 years ago or 6 months ago or whatever didn't work? And everyone kind of participates in— of course you can do this by yourself too on a whiteboard, but it's more fun with a few more people. And so then you start to ideate like, oh, well, it didn't work because of X or Y, and you come up with this list of things that could go wrong. And it's helpful because all of a sudden everyone, even though they really believed in the idea, they now start to understand on a more fundamental level all of the assumptions that are actually packed into this big idea. And so, and then you kind of take a minute, you organize, you de-duplicate, and and you try to come up with kind of like the MECE, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive list of assumptions that builds into that bigger idea. And typically there's a dependency. So, you know, you can order them with— start with the one that's the most important. You know, like if A doesn't work, there's no point in trying B type of thing. And so you can organize it. And then, and then you can design a test, I would say, less than 1 week. If the hypothesis is not compounded and the idea has been simplified, no matter what, you should be able to get early directional results in a week. And for most ideas, you can do it in 1 day. And so I would say, you know, try to hold yourself accountable to really short timelines. And to kind of like give you an idea, you know, you might be thinking about some big program like, should we offer, you know, the ability to sign up for small group dinners and events on our website? You know, so you're trying to kind of test whether as part of your sales process, you should have events be included. So, you know, the first step is like clarifying, like why are we even trying to run this program? Is it a conversion tactic? Is it something that we're doing because we think more people will engage with us and then we'll have a better, more in-depth opportunity to sell them? Is it something that we think is gonna help us engage, you know, executives, audiences that we can't align with today? So you kind of, you know, go through and you're like, well, actually this is about engaging executive audiences and building a relationship with them, and we're gonna measure that in terms of percentage of target accounts with whom we have executive relationships with. And then, you know, from there you can kind of break it down. Okay, if the program doesn't work, what are all the reasons, right? You know, timing of the event might not work, the topics that you're covering at the event might not be interested, positioning it on the website might not be a great place to get people into those conversations. Maybe this is something that needs to happen via, you know, more of a direct invite or things like that. Or, you know, and then one of those will be, you know, it might be hard to scale. But as you can see, like, once you break it down, you're like, well, there's so many other things that could not work before we even worry about scaling it. And so then you can say, okay, well, If we were to just prove out whether the web would be a good place to do this or not, whether website is even the right medium for the invitation, let's— why don't we just like put something up and see who signs up and then let's call all those people and ask them why they signed up or what they expect for the event. And so within 3 days you will be able to know a lot more about this big idea and where you should go next than you did, you know, a few days before when it was just one big vision that probably would have been dropped because you thought it would be too hard to scale.

Yeah, this is really cool. So to recap, it's about defining future success, then assuming it didn't work and asking why, then testing it out over a very short timeframe and then gathering results and conclusions from there. So yeah, super cool. Framework. And like you mentioned at the start, a major objective for any SaaS website is conversion, and we just spoke about conversion there in the example, and I think everyone is super interested in this topic. So how should you design a website and build a website that is optimized for conversion?

Yeah, you know, I think for most websites, you are not trying to complete the whole sales cycle in one go, right? And so it's good to think about like what is the primary goal of the website, or at least like if you're getting started, what is the primary audience that you want to optimize your website for? In most cases, you're trying to get the person interested enough in taking the next step, right? Whether that next step is a trial or a demo. So you can think of it as like, what are the things that they need to see to kind of come to this opinion that, oh, I better check this out. And oftentimes you don't need a ton of content to get somebody to that point. You just need to create enough urgency to get them interested and excited. And so, for example, social proof can be incredibly impactful for conversion. Seeing— and it really does depend for different companies and for different audiences within the company. We do a lot of personalization of this social proof and the call to action. But, you know, If someone sees case studies and logos from other people in their industry that they trust and respect, that tends to be really compelling for them. They want to find out, you know, why other folks in their industry are doing this. Like for instance, Amplitude personalizes their logos based on the industry, and they do this on the homepage as well as pricing and other subsequent pages. And that increases leads by 54% because people are just interested in that social proof because it really moves them. Other types would be bringing in reviews. If you feel like you're in a highly competitive market where you have a better product and customers love what you're doing, bringing third-party reviews into your site experience and de-risking the decision for the buyer that like, hey, here's all the other people that trust this product and this experience. And so there must be something really interesting here that they can dive into. I find like press and those types of social proof is not really that effective. It's more around like other customers and their experience and their usage that tends to like really, really pique people's interest. And you know, the second thing I would say for conversion, less is more in my opinion. You know, I think sometimes for B2B marketers, we assume that to have a good website, we need to have a lot of stuff on the website. And the reality is the more stuff you have on the website, the more the customer has to read through it and connect the dots. And no one is more motivated than you, right? Every customer, regardless of what channel they're coming in from, a referral or a paid ad, they are going to be less motivated than you to figure out why this product is great for them. And so do the work on behalf of the customer and try to like really think about, you know, what would be the most compelling information that I could put in front of these different audiences. And cut out any of the clutter or old pieces of content or things that people don't really look at anymore from the website. You know, most people don't need more than a short single page to decide whether they want to start a trial or take a conversation with sales about a product. Like that's just the reality of it. Like people aren't necessarily reading hundreds of pages and blog articles to take that first step. So just make sure that you are doing the work of that curation. And keep in mind that you can also do things with your brand. So if you want to show that you're different or typically I would say for most customers when they come to a website, They want to understand what the product does and they want to gain a little bit of understanding on, on like why this is better than the competition, or at least have some hunch that this could be better than the competition. And so, you know, that's something that you can also achieve with your brand. If you are modernizing an old-school industry, then, you know, the design of your website, the visuals, the, the feel of it, if it conveys that, you know, you are— this is not your grandma's website, you know, and that this is a really different approach and this seems more modern, like that in and of itself can be a selling point that follows more of a show, don't tell approach.

Yeah, this is super good advice and it sounds like it all comes back to Cialdini's Six Principles of Influence when we're talking about conversions. I think conversions, they're not the only goal, of course, when it comes to your website. So how should you actually measure the performance of your website? What are the other key metrics people need to be looking at?

So I am in kind of the camp that you should at least have a primary metric and be able to kind of measure that metric for different audiences. And so, you know, my preference is usually conversion. For the website. But I have seen companies for whom, you know, their sales process really does not start on their website. And, you know, it starts with industry connections and Rolodexes and things like that. So for them, it really is about engagement. Like most of the people that come to their website are already kind of an active opportunity. And so for those folks, I would say then, you know, they can set the goal of engagement. And engagement can be things like, you know, how deep they go on the site, time on site, what assets they're reading on the site. That can be really valuable. I think looking at bounce rates on the site is really important, especially if you are a newer site or you've just done a major redesign on the site, bounce rate can be a really good metric to look at. I typically like to have a North Star metric and then have a bunch of submetrics and things that we look at underneath to understand what is working and what is not working on the site. So most of the deeper analysis is almost like to get inspiration to make the site better for the number one north star metric. So for example, looking at what are the most visited parts of the website? What do people seem to look at? A lot of times, like the most visited— there's a set of most visited assets, pages, paths that you've made really easy on the site and therefore people visit them a lot. And then there are other things that you discover that people seem to really engage with, like especially for conversion paths. So most folks that see a particular asset tend to end up converting. And both of those can be a huge source of inspiration for what the audience is looking for and you can think about how to either further optimize pages on the site or how to bring the content that might be buried more into your homepage. Because the ideal scenario is that you don't want the user to look at more than like 2 or 3 pages to kind of take the action that you want. So you're constantly trying to learn like what's working and bubble that to the top. And then similarly, things that are not visited at all, you want to think about like, why does this belong on my website then, right? If no one's looking at it, just because I created it, it doesn't mean it has to exist. I had this English teacher who would always give this really great editing advice, which she would say, you know, Jaleh, you got to be willing to kill your darlings. Which sounds kind of extreme, but I think what she meant by that is like, as you start to create content, you end up creating things that you're excited about, but it doesn't serve the purpose of the whole. And it actually makes— it just creates these like silos and little rabbit holes that your listener or your visitor can go into, but doesn't really add that much value and you kind of have to be a writer but also an editor of all of these experiences. And so you have to be willing to get rid of things that even though it took you months to create it or you thought it would be really valuable because it's better for your visitors to have less clutter in the way.

Yeah, exactly. So I think it's really a case of not getting too attached to your work. And I think that's especially hard for content creators, content marketers and people who've been building a website and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it. But I think another thing that is super popular and very much in the focus in marketing these days is ABM, especially in B2B, but ABM at scale is probably one of the next frontiers for marketing teams to conquer, and that comes down to personalization, which is something you spoke about earlier. So kind of two parts about this topic. What role does personalization play in your website and how can people actually go about dynamically personalizing their website for different visitors.

I get really excited about ABM because it has so much room for you to understand your customers and give them better, higher-quality experiences. When I went from Gusto to Mutiny, Gusto has a very high-velocity funnel You can kind of think of it as net fishing versus the ABM model where you're more spearfishing. And so you're not to refer to our customers as fishes, obviously. But, but it, you know, there's just less data and it's a lot harder to understand users when you have such a high volume of people coming in. It makes personalization more challenging. I mean, it makes it really important, but it makes it a little bit more challenging to get the right data on your users. Whereas in an ABM model, you know exactly who you are trying to go after. You know the accounts, you can get the contacts, you can get all sorts of data, and that data can be highly leveraged data. So you can You know, if you have, let's say, like 5,000 target accounts or 10,000 target accounts, there's ways to, in a scalable way, get data that costs you probably no more than like a dollar or two per lead. Or you can do much more custom research on each and get more in-depth data that can cost you maybe like $5 to $10 where you're going per lead, where you're going through all of their specific company information. Either way, I really think that marketing can take the onus of getting this data for sales and have it all be available relatively easily in a centralized repository. Even if the lists are dynamic, meaning they're being populated through ongoing scoring and engagement algorithms. And so it's, you know, once you know who you're talking to, I think every single touchpoint in ABM needs to be personalized. And so to give you a couple of examples of how some of our customers do it, you know, Segment does a lot of personalization and they have both an inbound funnel, they also have an ABM funnel. And so they can, they do both inbound and outbound personalization for their target accounts. So when somebody who's in one of their target verticals, you know, they'll see an ad that Segment will show them through their ABM ad platform. And then when that person clicks through the ad and comes into the landing page, the page is personalized for their vertical. So if it's an e-commerce company or a B2B company, they'll see something different. They'll see different messaging a little bit. So the messaging is slightly tweaked. They'll see social proof that's tailored to the customer. And they'll even see— because Segment does a lot of integration— so they'll see a tech stack that's tailored to the visitor's company's tech stack. And they will see kind of the Calendly link and the rep that owns that account. And so they'll start to kind of build that relationship. Some of our customers will also personalize the chatbot that's on the page to line up with the rep that owns that account. So that's just like a really great way that once somebody does take the effort to click through your ad, that they'll be really impressed with like what a great fit you genuinely are. For their vertical and it helps with conversion, but it also helps you build a better relationship with them because it shows when we're coming after you, it's because we can help people like you and here's clear articulation of how and why. And so that's kind of like for the inbound use case. A lot of ABM folks, even though they might initially find out about you through one channel, they'll eventually come back to your website. So they'll Google your company name and they'll come back to the website or they'll send other stakeholders from the website to that landing page. And so we have customers that then do additional personalization on their homepage for that account. A lot of times the personalization is done at the vertical or company size level, but there is also one of the things that, you know, functionality that we enabled that now a lot of people are looking at is personalizing based on the stage of the funnel. So, you know, once somebody comes to the site, you can know, okay, here's the company and they are an active opportunity versus we haven't, you know, started speaking to them, they're just in the database. And so you can change the content that you bubble up to the top to align with the stage that they're in. So having things that are more around like competitor comparison and ROI analysis, things that people care about when they really— when they get down to the wire when making a decision. Those are things that you can do kind of later on and then you can stay more focused on on value and case studies and things like that when they're earlier in the funnel and you're trying to pique their interest to engage with you. And then in the outbound case, you know, most target accounts, you have a team of SDRs and sales reps that are supporting and are trying to actively gain conversations with those accounts. And so what, you know, we've seen work is obviously personalized outreach. So whether it's a LinkedIn touchpoint or emails, you know, you've got to show that you've spent time thinking about this account. And then one capability that we have is we can generate one-on-one personalized pages for each customer, and that page not only has content that's fully tailored to that role, that specific individual or that company, but it also has a custom URL that includes the company's name in it. And so the SCR can just grab that link and reach out to the customer and say, hey, you know, we think you're a really good fit and here's a page that our team created for you that explains exactly why we would be able to help you. And all of the data that they have in their CRM or in their Salesforce can be dynamically pulled into that page. And you can get as granular as like you have this many employees, which means you have this cost associated with XYZ. One of our customers is— in their outbound pages, they help companies with website website uptime. And so what they're doing is they're showing the cost per minute on that company's website. And basically they have a formula to do this, but when they reach out, they can say, hey, we've calculated based on a set of standards, like, what is the cost of downtime on your website? You know, that really is going to get someone's attention and make them be like, wow, like, this is "Wow, this is incredible." Maybe they didn't even know that, right? And now they're hooked and they're reading about, "Okay, well, let me see how these guys can help me with uptime." And that leads to that value and personalization that leads to a further conversation with the account. And so, yeah, in the outbound cases, we see about a 200%, so a 3x increase in engagement, reply rates. Signups, etc., when, when they— the outreach and the pages involved are fully personalized to that company.

Yeah, I think there's so much potential here. And like you said, even if you're not employing an ABM strategy, personalization is so important for SaaS companies, for example, if you're a low-touch, self-serve business. So if you can crack it, then you'll see pretty good results. And finally, before we move on to the closing questions, let's talk about some cases. So what tactics have worked for you and other well-known companies when it comes to creating an effective SaaS website?

Yeah, so maybe I'll just give a couple of additional examples, and we publish a lot of these on our site too, so people can take a look at that. But one example that I really like is around CTA testing. Like I mentioned earlier, the name of the CTA or the specific CTA is really important for conversion. And so one of our customers, Brax, they did some CTA testing as they were going from startups to the e-commerce segment. Their CTA used to be "Get Started," and so they started trying a more accessible CTA, which was "See if you qualify." And that had a huge impact for them. I think it increased their conversion by 30% and much higher than that even in certain segments of— in certain audience segments for them. Similarly, another customer of ours, Amplitude, they did some CTA testing where they moved to an email-only CTA that was enriched. But they also changed the text to— they went through a few iterations and the one that had a huge impact for them was "Explore live demo." And that also increased their conversion rate by 30%, as much as 100%, especially in the startup audiences. And so, you know, those types of CTA testings can be really impactful. And, you know, a lot of times, like, we have customers who for their larger enterprise accounts, they'll remove their pricing pages and they'll remove their free trial and only kind of like offer that demo. And that has increased their— both their signups, but also their average deal sizes because their reps can have a more custom contract-based conversation. For the accounts that are more enterprise, and they can still have this self-service, you know, trial for companies that are much smaller and are just trying to get their hands on something to try. Another, I'd say, example here would be, you know, at Gusto, one of the things that worked really well for us from a conversion standpoint was conveying ease of use in a holistic way. So, you know, we were always the product that was incredibly easy to use and had really great support. And that was our big differentiation from everything that's in the business. And so we, you know, the best way for us to convey that ended up being through weaving in a lot of product UI so that people could see how easy it is. Simplifying language. So things as simple as like no Oxford comma, right? Or making sure that sentences are short and uncomplicated, you know, are really— were really good. And like our writers were kind of amazing at being able to write in that way. I actually write, my writing would never make it onto the Gusto website without some serious editing. But, you know, but there are folks that are just really good at simplifying language. You know, we would have accessible photography and illustration. And so it just became a lot easier for us over time to make the user feel what ease of use and like a delightful experience what that experience is like because they had that on the website. And so they could kind of naturally think about, okay, what would something like that be in product? And that is something that certainly helped our conversion over time.

Yeah, amazing. And for me personally, I'm also a huge fan of the Oxford comma. So I think I will have to get over that and stop using it, which is terribly sad for me. But this was super good and there were a phenomenal amount of takeaways. Throughout this discussion. So I hope everybody was taking notes, but we could now move on to the closing questions and our Fast Five Challenge. So all I will do to finish things up is ask 5 questions, and all you need to do is answer as quickly as possible. So are you ready?

Yes.

Okay, let's do it. First question: what is the one book you would recommend others to read?

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Yes, a classic.

Second question: a SaaS company you love and why?

This is kind of an obvious answer, but Slack for me, because I just trust them. I think they really take care of their customers.

Yeah, definitely. Third question: favorite place to read about marketing online?

I don't really have a favorite place to read about marketing online. I think most of what I find valuable happens offline.

Okay, cool.

Fourth Question: most important growth metric?

I mean, I would say aside from revenue or pipeline, it should probably change each quarter to focus on different problematic areas within the funnel.

I love it. No one has ever actually answered with that. So that— I like that. Yeah. And then fifth and final question: best piece of advice for fellow marketers?

I would say take risks. You know, most of the The best tactics, the highest ROI projects tend to be things that other people aren't doing. When the tactic isn't saturated. And I would say one particular tactic that is kind of like a personal frustration of mine is crappy content. I think we are graduating from the era of blasts and clickbait, and we all just really need to raise our standard in the content that we create and really think about it from the perspective of building meaningful connections with our audience.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, this was super good.

So, Jaleh, I just wanted to thank you so much again for coming on the Growth Lab Podcast today.

Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.

That was Jaleh Rezaei on how to optimize your SaaS websites for conversion, growth, and sales. You can find Jaleh on Twitter @jalehr. And as ever, if you have any thoughts or feedback, then you're always welcome to reach out to me on Twitter @nordicedward or connect on LinkedIn. So thank you so much for listening to the Growth Hub podcast, brought to you by growth marketing agency Advanced Advanced B2B. This is your host Edward Ford signing off, and make sure you check out advancedb2b.com for more content and resources on everything B2B SaaS growth.

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