Conversion Optimization: How to get it right - with Khalid Saleh

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Hello and welcome to another brand new episode of the ABM Conversations Podcast. And this is me, your host, yag. In today's episode we are going to discuss conversion optimization and we have with us someone whom I consider to be the master of it, the amazing Khalid Saleh. In fact, he wrote the book on conversion optimization in 2010. Khalid is the CEO and co founder of Invesp, a leading provider of conversion optimization services and software. He is also the co founder of figpi, a one stop platform for everything related to CRO such as AB testing, heatmaps, session replays, online polling, what have you. He's a recognized expert in marketing strategy and has presented at major conferences around the globe. He has also been a frequent guest on key media outlets like cnn, BBC, sky, npr, New York Times, you name it, and he's been there. So, without any further ado, Khalid, welcome to the show. This is your prime time and I'm super excited to have you here.

Very excited to be talking to yag.

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So let's get started. You've been in the business of conversion optimization for a long time now. Probably you started at a time where it wasn't even called conversion rate optimization. And if I remember it right, there was a time where you were entirely focused on E commerce and then you opened up for others as well. And now again, it looks like you're skewed more towards the E comm world. So let's first put a finger on what conversion optimization is not. And maybe if you can also talk us through a little bit on why conversion optimization is prioritized way more in E commerce than in, say, B2B SaaS companies.

That's a really good question and an interesting one. I think any entity, any type of business, whether it's E commerce SaaS, even if you're a services company, ultimately you deal with different marketing challenges. If you think about the marketing funnel, you want people initially to be aware of you that hey, we exist. And then if you're online, you want them to come and visit your website. So that is whether it's the organic traffic that you're driving to your website or the paid traffic through the different channels. And then, okay, well now we have the eyeballs. People are coming how do we actually convert them? So any business deals with those problems? Somehow I think naturally E Commerce is a bit more focused on the revenue aspect. SaaS and the evolution of SaaS, if you think about it, really, the explosion of SaaS happened in the last 10 years. E Commerce has been online a lot longer than that. Thus the most VPs of marketing, most executives and the E commerce space are really kind of understanding. Okay, we need to. Need to understand how we can solve the conversion problem. And this is interesting because we've been doing this game now for what, 15, 16 years. Back in 2006, I can tell you, we talked to a VP of E Commerce or VP of Marketing at an E commerce company and we tell them, listen, you need to focus on conversion rates rate optimization. And there's always this puzzled look. I was like, search engine optimization. I'm like, no, no, conversion rate optimization. That was exactly the conversation 15, 16 years ago. Fast forward to nowadays. You have actually teams dedicated to conversion rate optimization. Now, I think SaaS, some SaaS companies are very focused on that. The problem, by the way, SAS brings a whole set of slew of new problems that you want to focus on because it's not only about single conversion, but it's about the lifetime value, the activation, the retention. So I think conversion optimization for SaaS is even more complex, more fascinating. Yeah.

In fact, there's a reason why I asked you, let's put a finger on what it is. Not because a lot of people think that changing the color of a CTA button means CRO.

Oh, you cannot imagine how often I see that. So we're in the process right now of interviewing because we want to hire a few CROs and we're always looking for people who have done it before because we still have to teach them our process. We have to go through the education to kind of focus on how we do conversion optimization. So I get to talk to a lot of candidates. And it's interesting to me because you're talking about sometimes people have been, have been doing CRO for two, three, sometimes five years. And I'm like, okay, well give me the most complex a B test that you've done. That's a question. Because that will get. Help me gauge the complexity and how, how deep they've analyzed or a website to come up with, with a testing idea.

Yeah.

And I'm amazed because sometimes I hear things and I'm like, okay, I don't even know how to gently put it to the person I'm interviewing that this is too simple. Because I hear is. They're like, well, our most complex test was, you know, testing different images on the website. And I'm like, okay, well, I mean, yeah, it's a test, but I don't know if I would call it even. It doesn't even qualify for a simple test, in all honesty. I hear like, you know, I. I hear like. And it's like, oh, well, you know, we've analyzed, like, you know, we've changed the. The text on a button or the color. Definitely hear that consistently. And, you know, I. I was talking to a gentleman. It was last. Last Friday. And I'm like, okay, so what kind of this? He's like, oh, you know, we definitely tested different CTAs. I'm like, okay, I mean, that's fine. You can test different buttons, but what else? He's like, no, that was it. And he's like, but it helped us increase conversions by about 35%. And I'm sitting there, and I'm like, okay, so let's think that you're an ordinary person, because. Okay, remove all. Peel the onion.

Yeah.

Imagine you're an ordinary person. You land on a page, and because they use a different color, red versus green, you are 30% there. There's 30% more chance of actually getting you to fill out the form or place an order. That's the case. And he's like, no, most likely not. I'm like, so why do you think that. That. He's like, but the data. I'm like, okay, that's fine. Let's talk about the data. How many conversions did you record? He said, well, I was like, well, like, you know, our original design had, I think, about 10, 10 conversions. And our, like, a new design, like, you know, where they were testing, had about 14 conversions. And I'm like, do you think scientifically you're able to make a decision based on 10 conversions versus 14? He's like, well, it is statistically significant. And I'm like, yeah, I know, but don't you think it's, like, very little? It's just like flipping a coin. It's a 50. 50% chance. Heads or tails? Correct. Now, if you flip it 10 times, heads might appear seven or eight times, you know, and then tails appear three times. That doesn't mean that, well, heads had a higher chance. It's just we. You did not flip it enough times. So it's always an interesting conversation because there's a lot of. A lot of interest in conversion optimization, improving website conversion rates, and understandably so. But at the same time you hear certain things. And after doing this for so many years, I'm like, oh, why? Why are people doing this? It's not conversion optimization. It's actually more like silly things. And then they're hoping that their website conversion rate will increase.

You know, I'm absolutely loving this conversation and I so relate to this because I've been doing a lot of interviews for product marketing over the last one month or so. And it's pretty much the same story but just with different use cases. But you know, CRO is not, as you said, you know, it's not necessarily just an E commerce concept. But let's also talk about it a little bit from a revenue standpoint or an impact standpoint. You know what to expect from a CRO. So in a typical B2B SaaS kind of environment, what do companies get from CRO? Like, how do you explain to a CFO or a CEO that this is what you can expect at the end of me optimizing your website for conversion?

Very good. So the conversation is always interesting. So a company comes to us, potential clients, and one of the very first questions I asked them during kind of our initial let's explore whether this makes sense or not is kind of the questions where I'm like, okay, if I ask the right questions and if they have the right answer, the the project has a better chance of actually producing results and the client is happy. So one of the questions I asked them was like, hey, so what's your current conversion rate? Lots of SaaS, they'll come to us anywhere between 2 to 4 to 6% conversion rate. I'll tell them, okay, we work together six months, we deliver results, you're happy, what's your conversion rate at? And I listen very carefully. So talking to another company, they were at 4% conversion rate. And he said, well, in six months I would expect to at least hit eight, eight and a half. That to me is a huge red flag. So you're expecting you're doing about four or five million dollars in revenue and within six months you're expecting to double your revenue. It's a great idea. You know, anybody would love to do that is just unrealistic. And regardless whether it's conversion optimization, whether it's paid, any type of marketing, correct, wrong expectations, you're not going to be happy at the end. And I always, look, I'm very clear with them. I tell them, hey, there might be companies that can do something like that. It's not us. Now we know conversion optimization really well. And we're really good at it. But doubling the website conversion rate within six months, not, not, not possible. Usually what we aim for is to deliver anywhere between 10 to 20% average about 15% every quarter. That's our goal. We need to make sure, like, kind of that we have probably internal goals that are a bit higher. But that's kind of how we set the expectation to say, okay, the conversion rate now is at 4%. We want to get to about four and a half, you know, 4.5 within a quarter. The first quarter is always challenging because you're doing lots of analysis and you're just kind of, you're walking to a dark room and you don't know what things are there. So there's lots of stumbling blocks. And it's almost like, you know, you're lighting a small candle and like, you know, then like, as you do more testing, you're lighting another candle nine months into the project, you know, exactly. You have a really clear. And you're delivering very consistent results. Now I'll mention something else that I think, you know, I find very, very interesting and fascinating. Lots of times companies hire us, you know, and then they have a very clear goal, help us improve conversion rates. And I tell them, you know what, we will do that, but we will deliver other results. And they're always like, huh, okay, what kind of other results? So with a SaaS company, we'll say, you know what, it's not a one time conversion. If you want a one time conversion, I can help with. You offer your service for free and everybody's going to convert. Nothing magical about this. What matters is revenue. So how do we deliver consistent increases in revenue? Money in the bank. So for us, that's about. Okay, well, people are people signing up because that's a conversion rate. Correct. But if they're, if you're on a freemium model and they're signing up but never upgrading. Okay, well, we have a problem there. If they're signing up and not activating, which we have another problem there. If we have a high churn rate, then we have another problem there. So those are all different areas that we help because again, it's money in the bank. Even more fascinating is when you start talking to customers, customers who actually signed up and paid and are using the product. Lots of times you discover additional revenue opportunities that you haven't thought about. It's like, hey guys, we've talked to your customers and they're pointing to a specific problem that they're using your solution for or something. That you're missing. Why don't you consider that? Because lots of your user base is asking for it. So that's what we call additional revenue opportunities. It's not even about conversion optimization. Correct. At that point, it's not about fixing the website, but it's about thinking about the business model, which is very fascinating. I'll give an example from, from an E commerce company yesterday. So basically they sell an organizer system for trucks. So if you have a truck and you buy a whole bunch of equipment and you're putting the equipment and how you organize that. And yesterday we're talking to one of, one of their customers and he's like, oh, this is really fascinating. He's like, I bought it everybody. And he's a contractor, so he works for a company and he's like, you know what? Like, you know, all the supervisors loved it and we're like, oh, so do you think the supervisors would be interested in buying like, you know, something like that? They're like, yeah. And of course they would figure out the budgets. And after we finished the call, we're like, okay, so this person came into the website and placed an order. That's fine. We can figure out how do we make that experience a lot more seamless and remove all the friction from it. But a lot more interesting is to figure out all these different contractor companies, you know, services companies, and reach out to them because they have a much larger budget. Correct. They're not going to be buying a single organizer system. They can buy three or four of them. And it's an interesting business idea. You can throw one resource at it for a quarter. And do you know whether it's called outreach or figure out a way to outreach to those and see if there's a business model there that's a whole just from a single customer conversation. We're like, oh, this can be like, you know, a multimillion dollar investment. That is just very interesting that our clients did not think about it before.

Absolutely, absolutely. It makes a lot of sense and it's totally, you know. Yeah, as you said, it's not even getting into the conversion optimization or any, any tactical adjustments. It's just a conversation that reveals so much. Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's what's fascinating about doing conversion optimization because you really. Yes. You touch the website, you improve usability, you improve persuasiveness. But at the same time you start thinking about the business model and the business process, which can be very fascinating. It's interesting. Some of it is. Some of whenever you're doing conversion optimization. Some of it is very tactical and some of, some of it is very strategic. And both are fun. Correct. Tactical is really quick strategic. Sometimes those are interesting conversations that you have with, you know, with business owners sometimes. I remember we worked with a company and they offer skincare for men. It's a SaaS E Commerce, which is always a fascinating business model.

Yeah.

And we came to them, we said, hey, like, you know, everybody's saying they would love to buy like you know, acne medicine. And oh my God, the CEO was so annoyed, he's like, I hired you guys to do conversion optimization on the website and you're coming to me with an idea of a new product line. We don't do that. That's not us. That's fine. You know, it's like we tried a couple of times. I mean ultimately the client decides, yeah. Six months later they launched the ACME product. It represents as of now. So it's been launched since 2018, about 55% of their of their revenue. That's, that's what he has said. Oh, horrible idea. Why are you doing this? And I'm like, hey, can we at least take a little bit of credits? Not going to take a whole lot of credit for it, but at least we suggested it. We said actually we didn't even suggest it, your customers suggested it. And we just merely were the vessels to kind of like, you know, relay the message that hey, there's lots of.

Interesting, I can imagine the look of I told you so.

Oh yes. Every once in a while. But you don't do that a lot with customers because in all honesty, it's just fun when, when you work with companies for so long, you get to know them so well. One of our oldest clients been with us since 2010, so we're, we're going on now 11 years working together.

Amazing.

When they first started a two man operation, you know, and that's it. And I've seen them go from half a million dollar in revenue over the years. They grew to about $22 million. Then they made some silly mistakes which was also fascinating because like you get to know a person. Correct. You work together.

Yeah.

For so long and from like, you know, 22 million dropped to about 3 million which if they were only two two man operation that would have been just easy. But they had hired so much staff and now they're back, they're not at the 22 million but they're hitting about like, you know, 7, 8 million because like, you know, they've cut, trimmed Lots of the fat that they've had. So it's always fascinating when, when you get to know people. I also tell people, I'm like, oh, I don't want to use the cliche. We'll get to know you better than you know yourself. Or we're part of the team. Not really. Like, you'll know yourself if you're honest more than anybody else. Yeah, but. But we will know how you like to take your coffee. That's what I tell customers. Oh, we'll get to know you to that level and you will know how we take our coffee. Or the fact that I drink lots of carbonated waters, water bottles in a day.

Amazing. Amazing. And talking of, you know, the tactical side of things, so if you can just give us an overview of what typically entails, say, conversion optimization plan. Like, what are the different things that you typically account for when you start?

The first month, I think is the hardest month working on a project because you really, what you need to do is go through the website experience and figure out, okay, here are things that are broke on the website. And then when I say broke on the website, it could be silly as a bug. By the way, sometimes you work with smaller companies, you understand, okay, there's a bug. Okay, the developer did not get to it or they pushed the wrong code. And okay, there's something's broke. But I mean, sometimes we see it, even with larger companies was like, hey, did anybody actually go take a casual stroll through the website, check out to see how it works? Because sometimes it's just not working anymore. Or like, you know, I was working with a SaaS company and I love their service and I'm like, you know what, we're going to be using it for our site because it's an SEO SaaS. It helps you with. I'll mention them if you don't mind, in links. It helps with kind of building kind of the entities around the website. Very fascinating. And you know, initially I'm like, okay, well, let me just try them out. Because I want to. We want to optimize the website and at the same time, I want to see how the upgrade processor were on a plan that's $50 a month. And I'm like, oh, actually we need to add more pages. So I need to upgrade to the $195. And I try and go through the process. Now I am ready. I have my credit card. I want to just pay them the money. You know, it's like, here's the money. And I just could not do that, um, so I, I called the, the, the co founder and I'm like, dixon, it's just, I, I want to give you money every month, you know, and it's just not working. He's like, really? I'm like, yeah. So you go through that process of analyzing the website, looking at the bugs, looking at usability issues, looking at conversion issues, and I like to distinguish between those and then to identify all these issues. There's several exercises that you, that you go through. So typically one of the first exercises is we'll bring in all the CROs in the company. They sit together, they're locked up for a day, sometimes two days, depends on the complexity of the website. And they go all these. Through all these.

When you say CRO, are you talking about the revenue officer?

No, we're talking about our conversion optimization guys, you know, the specialist on our team. And basically they're saying, you know what? Okay, so some people come through ads. Let's go through that process on a mobile device, on desktop, and let's see how the process looks like. Some people are coming from email. Some people. So you're looking at all these different experiences, and as you're going through this process, we're jotting down, it's like, oh, gosh, I clicked on an ad that promises me a subscription plan of 1995. But when I land the plan that you're showing is the 1399, it's like, what happened? Imagine if the visitors going through that. It's like, oh, yeah, I can do the 19. Oh no, what happened? The price just changed. So we jot down all the issues that we see now when we're evaluating, we're evaluating really based on best practices. And we've done 23,000 A B tests. So we've done ton of AB tests. Some failed, some succeeded. And that helps us to say, you know what, we've done this before. This will be interesting. Now, we don't know for sure whether what we're suggesting is going to work for this particular website, but at least we note it. Something else that we do is we'll tell every client who signs up, give us some people who subscribe to your website. If you're SaaS or bought from you for the first time in the last 30 days, let's have conversations with them. Our conversations are about 45 minutes to an hour. And those, those are lengthy conversations. Not everybody's ready to go through them. And we started the conversation by going backwards. So we'll tell them, hey, so you just subscribed to XYZ.com like, yeah, so when was the first time you thought about that? You need to solve, you need to subscribe and what's the problem that you're trying to solve? And we go backwards as opposed to, oh, how was your experience with the XYZ website? We're actually going backwards. This is very powerful because this gives us amazing copy that we can use on the website. Yeah, we spend a lot of time looking at analytics, heat maps, session recording to say, you know, okay, what are people doing? What's the data telling us? We look at competitors. What are they doing? Now we're not copying competitors because competitors goals are different than us. Success for competitors is different than success for us. But it can intrigue us enough to say, you know what, okay, this is, this might be an interesting feature to test out, but we need to develop it some more. All of these activities that we go through gives us a humongous list of items. Sometimes 100 items, sometimes 150 items. All these are possibilities of testing where we say, you know what, okay, so we have a potential problem over here, now let's come up with a potential solution. Solution for it.

Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. And I personally believe that, you know, we can take a very small scientific approach when it comes to conversion rate optimization, which you're pretty much talking about. But I mean it can be a step by step process that can set up the entire flywheel in motion. And I know you have a very similar point of view towards it and you have created this conversion framework. So this means one should be able to produce a process where they have a time tested system. So if you can take us through this entire framework, and I think you have about seven or eight principles on which it works, right?

Definitely, definitely. So the question that we've had when we first started the company, me and my partner working there, and we evaluate websites and then I can tell you back in 2006, we've made some very silly mistakes. And then eventually you start saying like, okay, well this was not a very smart idea to do. Okay, we've learned from it. But then you expand the team and the question was, okay, so great, we know this really well. We've done so much AB testing, it's in the back of our heads. But as you add more team members, you want to have something consistent. You want to make sure that if John is evaluating a website that he's looking at the same result that Maria is generating. You don't want them to just produce completely different sets. So we said, okay, we need to bring structure to this process. And that's when we start thinking, okay, if I look at a particular page, landing page, a homepage of a website, how do I evaluate it? And that's when we thought about, okay, that's how the conversion framework was. Was born. And in it we say there are certain things that you can control as a website owner, as a marketer, and there are certain things that you do not control. It really is very dependent on the, on the visitor. So if I think about things that I control as a website owner, the very first one is trust. Because guess what? If somebody does not trust you, does not trust the business, they're not going to buy from you. They're not going to give you their credit card information. I recall one time we had this one company, really nice CEO, she called us, she's like, hey, I want to jump in. It's actually, it was a referral from our longtime client, which is always good. And we jump on a call and she's like, oh, I have a conversion problem. So I naturally, I Google the business name just to see. I kid you not. Except for the first result, which showed the website, all the rest of the, like, you know, the Google search results page where complaints about the business, wow, don't do business with them. Rating 1 out of 5. I mean, and, and I was talking to her and I'm like, I don't think you have, I mean, yes, you have a conversion problem, but I think you need to solve the trust problem. And that's not something that we do. Because if somebody's going to Google your name and they see all these reviews and other customers complaining, I'm like, you definitely need to fix it in your business. And then you fix. You need to clean up the results in the search and Google, you know, the Google SERPs.

Yeah.

Because then that's something that we can do now. The minute you fix that, then we'll see what your conversion looks like.

So that's fundamental. Absolutely.

Definitely. I mean, imagine like, you know how often. I mean, I don't buy anything without reading reviews. Now here's something interesting that I've noticed about myself. So I. We decided to buy a toaster, like a kind of an indoor grill. That's what they call them. And it's fascinating because our George Foreman, trusted. George Foreman gave up after 10 years. I think we bought it for $39. So I'm thinking I'm just going to go ahead and place another for like another George Foreman and my wife is sitting there, she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, buying another one. She's like, no, no, no. My friend had bought this other one and you should look at it. And I'm like, I look at it and it's like 2.99. And I'm like, are you kidding me? We just use the toast. It's like, you know, and she's like.

Oh, it's so great.

So I'm like, okay, first thing, I start reading the reviews. So it's fascinating to me how I start noticing myself because this thing had 600 reviews. So absolutely amazing. Lots of trust there. Yeah, I don't read the five star reviews. I mean, I might skim one or two. I skim one or two of the one star reviews because sometimes, you know, you might have gotten a bad unit and that's the reason you're not happy. I read the three star reviews because I'm like, okay, those guys are objective, you know, they somehow somewhat like it. I'm like, oh, I wonder when I started doing that. Start looking at this three star reviews versus, like, you know, the one star.

This is a hack I've never thought of. Very interesting.

Yeah. And I'm like, okay, so I mean, we bought it. Is it worth the 299? I'm not sure. It's funny because again, like doing conversion optimization and then buying stuff, you analyze your behavior. I'm like, okay. I'm like, is it six times better than the $50, you know, grill? No, it's not. But I also understand diminishing returns. And at some point. But anyways, you know, when you buy something for $30, your expectations at a certain level. Buy the same item at 300, $400, you expect a much better experience. Correct. A much better product because I paid 300, $400 for it, you know, and it's funny because you can stay at a hotel. Oh yeah, I stayed and I paid like my $50 a night. I'm like, okay, I know exactly what I'm walking into at $50 a night. I pay $500 a night. You know, I am expecting them to give me a massage and like the whole, like, you know, the whole deal. So a much, much higher level of expectations. But I digress. So trust is the very first factor that, that we evaluate. FUDs, fears, uncertainties, and doubts. Because we all come to our website and we always have fuds. Correct. It's like, is this the right products? Is this the right service? What if I don't like it. What's like, you know, data security, lots of questions that we have around fud. So you need to address those. Then we have incentives. And by incentives I mean incentivizing those visitors to act right away. Now lots of times the minute I say incentives, people minds always go to discounts. I'm like okay, discounts are fine, but there's one way but scarcity urgency, that's, that's a lot more interesting.

I'll give you the Booking.com style where there's a clock hanging on your head.

Booking.com went to such an extreme correct of scarcity that I'm like, you know what? And people figured it out then where it's like, it's useless. But I'll give an example from our software from figpy. So one thing that we did is we have now a new program where we use machine learning to give marketers actual recommendations of things that they can make changes that they can make on their website. We actually analyze these sessions that visitors are coming and we say, oh, here's the change that you should make. You know, you should move this element. You should use better image. You should use. So this is fascinating. And we're like, we don't know whether people are going to like it or not. And I'm like, instead of just throwing the feature out there, let's just do a limited release. Because also it's very expensive to do the analysis on the website every time you have to run an ML like in a model. So we're like, okay, we're just going to open it to like, you know, 10 companies to start with and literally like, you know, within an hour it closed down. Now what's fascinating is like, you know, we got the 10 companies, signed them up and the fact that we've closed down the program. We're like, we're just testing it out. You cannot imagine how people email me, they're like, hey, when can I get in? Like is there a wait list? I'm like, oh, this is fascinating versus if I had just opened it and just left it there where people feel, oh, I can come in and sign up tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, that's another thing. And then there is engagements where you try and figure out how do you actually engage your visitors. And this is very hard. It's kind of the last thing that you can do as a business owner. But it sounds very easy because everybody wants to engage. But how do you actually create something fascinating where people say, oh, this is really, really cool. Some companies do it really well. Some companies fail, fail at it. So those are the factors that you control. Those are what we call the website centric factors. And then you have a visitor centric factors, things that you're aware of, they impact your conversion rate, but you have very little control over. So, for example, my Persona is going to impact how I navigate around your website, how I view, how I read content. Sometimes I'm very impulsive. There are other times where I am very meticulous. It depends on the purchase, correct? Yes. You know, my wife tends to read every piece of copy and do lots of research, unless she loves the item, where she just goes and places the order. And I'm like, I'm like, did you even check the price? No, but I like the item. I'm like, really? I'm like, for me, price is a first filter. If something, I'm like, I expect to pay a certain price for a certain item. You know, and if an item is twice that, price is like, okay, it's out of the competition. I'm not. I'm not going to even look at it. So our Personas and how we actually interact with the website, you know, that's a visitor centric Persona. There is the buying stage. Not everybody who comes to the website is ready to buy. Going back to that organizer system that we just talked about. Yeah, the person that we just interviewed, he just bought it a month ago. The first time he saw it was five years ago. It took him five years to place an order for this item. And he's been thinking about it for five years.

It's an attribution nightmare.

Oh, my God. Nothing is going to work at that point. Five years. You are one patient man. I mean, for me, usually I think the maximum I wait for an item. Of course it depends on the price, but I might have waited for a year, you know, or like, oh, it's too expensive. I need to plan it out and whatnot. Five years is a very long time. And then finally is the complexity of the sale. You know, buying like, you know, buying a T shirt is a lot different than buying a laptop, than buying a piece of jewelry. And sometimes even if you think about, if you're a SaaS, lots of times people say, well, this is very simple. We use Trello for our project management. It's okay, you know, I mean, that's what we use. We have a client that does project management software. Absolutely love the system. Absolutely love it. But we're still using Trello. And I was analyzing our behavior. I'm like, here's our Clients, we'll get the software even for free. But guess what? I have to remove about 20 projects. And some of them have been there for years. Correct. I have to migrate them. And. And the thought of, like, you know, 30 person, like, you know, like, bugging me constantly because this doesn't work and this workflow doesn't work, just the thought of that is just scary. So it's not always about how good your system is. It's about, well, you know, what are the hassles that a visitor needs to think about?

You know, I cannot agree more because a few years back, I was in one of the companies where we were working on chat tools, and. And I did one small campaign test where I said, I'll reach out to the users of one of our competitors and give them my product for free for one year. And trust me, the migration level was way too low than what I'd be proud to say. So you're bang on. Even if it's given for free for a year, the transition is not as easy as it sounds.

I mean, it's fascinating. So we were on Dropbox for a long time and then trying to cut costs, and I'm like, okay, I'm like, oh, we're paying them too much. Let's switch to Google. And then we can also move from Outlook. We can, like, you know, go to Gmail. And I did my research for about a couple months, and then over a weekend, I decided to go ahead and do the migration without telling anybody. I paid a very expensive price for that. Over a month, people were complaining Two, three years later, you know, it's fine, every. Everybody got used to it. But here's something fascinating. That experience of going from Dropbox to G Suites, or the Google Apps, as they like to call them, left such a bad taste in my mouth that every time I think of a migration from a completely different app to another, I'm like, no, no, no, I can't do that. Project management software. I still remember the migration from Dropbox to G Suite unrelated. And it's fascinating because when I was talking to the client, I'm like, it has nothing to do with you. It's all about G Suite. Things like G Suite. He's like, we don't even compete with them. I'm like, oh, but that experience is still there in the back of my head, and I'm still weary of it. And he's like, how do we solve that? I'm like, it's a tough one because that's, you know, you need to think about that. Customers are not coming to you in a vacuum. Customers are considering other options. The status quo is, is your biggest competitor and you need to solve that problem.

Yeah, it's a universal breakup line. You know, it's not you, it's us.

Exactly, I like that. Actually, I think that's probably a better line to use as opposed to it's the G suite problem. Okay, it's not you, it's us.

You know, about one thing that you said, I got pretty excited. You were talking about the user flows and the way it is optimized for buyers in different stages. So typically, if you look at a good 80% of the websites, they typically tend to have one universal flow and it is not optimized for different buyers or even different buyers at the different buying stages per se. So if a SaaS company had to optimize their website for the different stages of their buying cycle, be it someone who is coming back after a few visits or somebody who is an existing customer who is trying to expand or whatever, so how should they look at optimizing their website for these different kinds of users?

I think the best answer to that is to actually imagine somebody who is coming at that stage and they're going through the website. That exercise where we said, okay, we're going to bring all the different conversion rate optimization specialists, the CROs, and they go through the website. I joke about this. It's the crying game. Or I tell people, I'm like, okay, so let's imagine that you are a person, you know, you're using like, you know, this other product and now you're coming because you're, you're considering like, and you're still in the initial stages. Correct. You're looking at other alternatives and you land on the website. And let's think from the perspective of that visitor, that might represent maybe 20, 30, sometimes 50% of your visitors. How would they interact with the website? How would they View it? Most SaaS websites are optimized for people who are ready to make that decision. Correct? Yeah, I was like, oh, select a plan. I was like, dude, I'm trying to figure out that you're the right person. We're still on a, like, you know, like this is a first date basis. We're not, we have not moved further. Yeah, go through that exercise and, and be as honest about as you can. Now there are people who can actually objectively look at their website and say, yeah, okay, so we have a problem. And I, and I would say that's about 30% of marketers 70% struggle. They're like, oh, it's perfect. I'm like, how is it perfect? Why do you think your customers actually don't like that? So you have two options in that case. You get somebody that you know, you tell them, hey, go through the process and I'll just sit and watch. And maybe as you're going through it, just speak out loud. That's one way to do it. A second way is to actually try and recruit. Some visitors come to your website to say, hey, can you help us out? What are you trying to do today? Well, I'm evaluating. And if they select the right option that they're evaluating, say, can I. Can we offer you an $50 gift certificates on such and such place, not on your website? Lots of times trying people marketers try and be cheap. I'm like, dude, they can give you so much insights. Give them a $50, $100Amazon gift certificate or Best Buy or whatever site. Let them go to another website. Because if you tell them, oh, I'm going to offer you, we had one client, they're like, oh, we're going to give them six months free subscription on our website. I told them, well, they're just evaluating. They're not even ready. Like, you know, it's not very useful to them. Give them something they can use away from you and then tell them, hey, can we jump on a quick zoom or gotomeeting? And just, you know, as you go through that, let's just ask you a few questions. You start seeing that there's things missing and you start thinking to yourself, okay, well, for somebody who is still early on, we need to add more content. We actually need to take them out and explain to them our story. We need to talk to them about how we're different. Somebody who's ready to buy, they probably checked all these boxes and they have the credit card. They're ready to subscribe. So let's just remove all the hurdles out of their way.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm loving this. Amazing. All right, so with that, we are moving into the next phase of our podcast, which we call the rapid fire section, which is all about asking you five lightning questions. The questions might be short or sometimes it might be fun, or it might put you on the spot, Whatever.

Oh, gosh.

So are you ready for that?

I am ready, as ready as I can be.

All right, so here's question number one. You say your biggest mistake during the first year of running INVESP was being afraid to look stupid. Can you explain that? And because I'm asking this because my wife tells me I specialize in looking stupid.

Oh my God. I wish I like, you know, I wish I could say that. You know what? So prior to invesp, I was a software architect and I worked for big companies. And when we started invesp, I'm like, oh, we have to put on this image of this professional company. And we're small, it's just like, you know, two partners and we're actually a husband and wife team. And sometimes like, you know, like people don't know that.

I'm like, yeah.

And my wife will tell me like you're giving an image of who of a company that I don't know. I'm like, but I tell her that's what companies want. They want that professional image. And I discovered that because I want to give that professional image. I, I, I'm like, every time I have an idea I'm like, oh, but that might, might make us look stupid. I was so self absorbed that I thought everybody's watching what I do. And the reality most people didn't. Most people, 99.999% of the our target market didn't know that we exist. So it didn't matter whether like you know, we did something stupid or not. We're just experimenting. And until now whenever I talk to, to our team, I tell them, listen, you want to experiment with something, do it. I highly doubt that you will do something that will kill us. Just be careful that you'll destroy the company. But experiment is fine. We'll make some silly mistakes, we'll learn from them. And you know what, it also gives a taste and a feeling to the company where we're like, okay, you know, this is our personality. And this part of by the way, sort of funny, it's part of a B testing and conversion optimization. We're testing things out, we don't know whether they're going to work or not and we'll try it out.

So yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And there is always a difference between mistakes and blunders. So yeah, absolutely. With you.

I've had few blunders as well. So that's a whole other conversation.

No, we'll be learn through that. Absolutely right. So here's question number two. If you had to suggest just one channel for an E commerce company to go all in, what would it be?

Oh man, that's a tough one. I have seen them in all honesty, all work. I mean we have clients who have made affiliates work. We have clients who have made influencers work, social Google, I think the channels don't matter if you're willing to invest the time and understand the channel and give it a chance and have the right person or team execute on that channel. Like I said. Now the most successful email I can, I can comfortably say that then is between Gmail and social, those two kind of like, you know, exchange based on, based on the client, based on the product. But then like, you know, again, I mean we have one client, two man operation, two students by the way, which is absolutely amazing. They are still students. They are doing $1.5 million in revenue per month. 1.5 million. Two students in college, I mean one of them actually his senior year, one of them the founders in his junior year. Absolutely amazing. And what they've done is influencer marketing. And I'm like, wow, you know, they made it work and you know, it's absolutely incredible.

So love it. Right? So here's question number three. You say some of the best brand marketing is long term giving without any expectation of return. And I agree with that 100%. In fact our CEO Aditya says that, you know, he talks about customer experience in pretty much every small thing that we do. But what do you tell people who think CRO and brand are entirely opposite poles?

Oh then like no, we need to have a long conversation. Strong brand makes CRO so much easier this year for our software I'm like, okay, you know, once we have a marketing budget for figpi, like let's invest in Google Ads. And it's sort of interesting because we released our software January of last year and within a year we had a thousand customers. We didn't do any marketing for it. It's this companies that know me know invesp and they're like, oh you guys have software, let's use it. Absolutely amazing this year I'm like, oh, now we're going to like we actually have a marketing budget. So I decided to take $25,000 and put it in Google Ads. The worst investment, it's like my donation to support Google because the brand did not exist. It existed for a smaller group of companies. Correct. It existed in the hearts and in the minds of people who know me, who know invest, who know like you know, my partner. But when we go to Google and we're like oh let's, let's bid on heat maps and a B testing and let's try that. Those are people who don't know the brand. They're not aware of us. And Google was very happy to take our money. A strong brand Would have made the life much easier. So I took the rest of the budget. I'm like, you know what? Okay, enough, like, you know, giving Google money. Let's go ahead and focus on building the brand. And I can tell you by the way, our investment there is already paying off, like, you know, so much better by focusing on the brands, like, oh, guess what? People are actually converting. Every day I log in, new companies are signing up and paying. And I'm like, oh, well, I wish I learned this. And it's funny, correct?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As your brand value goes up, the CAC comes down.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Love it. Love it. All right, so here's question number four. What's one advice you would give to marketers in today's attention economy?

Oh, it relates to the previous question about the brand. You're really competing on people's attention and everybody copies everybody else. Correct. It's like, no, that's what we do. As marketers copy. Somebody discovers a technique and he's, oh, look at what I discovered. And here's a PDF and the lead magnet to show you how to do this. And everybody uses the same kind of style and what was very successful six months ago, nowadays, everybody's doing it and it's like, okay, well, that tactic completely died and. And that doesn't work anymore. Well, being authentic, being curious helps you build a brand, helps you build a tribe. Nothing more powerful than a tribe that believes in you. Um, I joke about this. Cause I used to think you really have to have a really good product because marketing with a bad product is going to give you lots of trouble. But oh my God, you have the right tribe that loves you, loves your product. They are willing to overlook certain things and they're like, oh, it's okay, we can wait, we can deal with this. Just because they love the brand, they love the founders, they love the story, they're there to support you through your journey, which is very powerful. Now, how do you get there? Again, being authentic, being curious, trying to be. Being different, standing, you know, differently from the rest of the crowd is hard. But when you crack that nut, oh, gosh, floodgates open.

Yeah, yeah. It's all about that trust and relationship. Absolutely right. So here's the final rapid fire question. Sometimes in a B testing, you don't know whether you should be tweaking the design a little bit or should you be tweaking the usability or whatever. And here's where you have a theory called 99% into 85%. So can you walk us through what it is. What's the logic behind this?

I mean, it's an interesting question, by the way. Way there are times where you tweak and statistically you need to have the numbers correct, where things are figured out initially. What we like to do is tweak and try and kind of understand the different levers that move people. So we might tweak a little bit and then go for something completely drastic. Where we're looking, I'm looking. We tweaked 1, 2, 3, 4 and now we have a version. We've won a couple of times, we stagnated a couple of times and now we're going to go completely drastic. So that's one approach. And we've also approached it, by the way, completely differently where we're like, you know what, there are absolutely too many things broke on this page. I want to fix a whole bunch of them and produce a new, like a completely new, different design. Now the problem with a completely new different design is, well, we've changed 12 different elements and we don't know which one actually worked and which one didn't work. Maybe a couple of them worked. Maybe, you know, a couple of them like, you know, pulled like, you know, a couple of them gave you a 50% increase in conversion. A couple of them took that 50% away. That's fine. That's just the reality of the game. You go for something drastic and guess what? That new drastic is as if, like, you know, you're just starting conversion optimization from the get go. This is day zero. Now you forget about the old version. This is the new, like, you know, the new page. Now you can tweak it. Now you can start experimenting and breaking things down. The drastic approach works really well if you have a low number of conversions. Let's say my website generates 200 subscriptions per month. If you're going to tweak, that is going to be a death by like a thousand tests. This is very slow and very painful. So if you only have 200, 300 subscriptions a month, let's say your SaaS, or if you're an e commerce, 200, 300 conversions per month. I like to go for something drastic or like, okay, we're going to redesign this cart page, we're going to redesign this pricing page completely. And 20% of those complete redesigns or 20% of the testing ideas should make you feel very uncomfortable. You're like, whoa, dude, what's going on here? Because if you're just doing things that make you feel comfortable, your Conversion rate's probably going to stick around. Like, you know, like, oh, yeah, it will go up now and then. But those drastic changes where you're like, I don't know how people are going to react to this and maybe they'll hate it, maybe they'll love it. But I always joke to say I've been humbled way too many times with looking at a design and saying, oh, this is great. And then you launch it and people hate it. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, that was a humbling experience.

So, yeah, I remember this conversation with David Cancel where he was saying that, you know, sometimes it so happens that people design a beautiful page and it looks awesome, but they might have probably taken away everything that was working previously.

Definitely. It's like, I was like, you know, with SEO, you know, you have to have the right amount of content to rank. Right? And it's always the question is like, what is the right amount of content that actually gets you to rank? Gets people, you persuade people that, oh, we're at the right place and at the same time remove the fluff. Is this a fluff? Isn't it the fluff? You gotta test it out.

Correct. Yeah. Amazing. You know what? You pretty much hit every rapid fire question out of the park. That was amazing. You did really well.

Thank you. Thank you. And those were tough questions. I'm like, oh, man, you've looked through what I said as well.

Awesome. But before I say my thank yous and let you go, I. I would like to ask you if you would like to share a parting message with our audience. Predominantly our audience is B2B SaaS, people with about five plus years of experience around the globe.

I would say there is a lot of focus in the marketing space about technology and using the latest smart tech. And listen, I'm a computer science guy and I'm a software developer, but marketers are best when they do marketing, which is focused on humans having that human conversation. That is money in the bank, that is so powerful, that is millions of dollars. And that sets you apart. Correct. Having the courage to actually have the conversation. Because many marketers talk about knowing your customers. Very few actually go through the exercise of talking to customers and then sitting back and saying, oh, well, that was, that was very insightful. You can always bring developers who can make fixes and changes, and if you're fascinated by that, it's fine. But don't forget about being curious talking to your customers. I commit to at least doing about 5 to 10 hours every month of talking to Actual customers, I want to hear from them. And those are amazing conversations. Those are conversations that can take products in completely new directions. Where you're like, oh, this is fascinating, I haven't thought about this, but being open minded to listen to that feedback and when you talk to them, yes, you can get feedback on your product and what's happening with the product, that's fine, that's great. But understand from them, you know, what was going on in their lives when they decided, oh, today is the day that I'm going to solve this problem. And what was the problem that they were solving? Because that's a, that's a very important thing. And what's alternatives that they consider and what was the status quo before they started using your solution and how they're using your problem product. It's absolutely amazing to me where you have a product you design a certain way because you assume people will use it for a particular reason, but people are using it for something completely different. They're like, oh, well, that's one way to solve that problem. We need to think about that. So I think this can be very powerful, can be really a whole new experience for any marketer.

Absolutely love this story. I was nodding my head all the way like a bull while you were saying this. Absolutely love this. Because, you know, I've seen this in personal examples. Like there's one famous story here in India that, you know, there was a washing machine company that was trying to segment the market into two different regions in a city and they said that, hey, you know, this area is going to be all about hnis high net worth individuals where there will be more washing machines sold, whereas the other region, not so much. But at the end of the day it was the other region where they sold a lot and they figured out that these folks bought washing machines in bulk to actually make milkshakes. Wow.

Wow, that's, that's fascinating because you're selling them a washing machine, guess what? They're like, you know, buying a milkshake machine. Completely different, you know, and that's fascinating. You know, there's a sleeping pills that you buy over the counter. It's actually flu medicine, but people were taking it prior because they're like, you know, it's like, oh, this actually can help me fall asleep. So when the pharmaceutical company looks, it's like, oh well, we can remove the ingredients that we have to treat the flu and just leave the sleeping ingredients and ask how some of the sleep pills were actually born. It's like, oh, well, same product. But use in a different context.

Happens a lot with cough syrups as well.

There you go.

Awesome. So if the listeners of the podcast want to connect with you, what's the best place and what are the different reasons they can connect with you for?

So I do hang out at LinkedIn quite a bit. I'm fascinated by LinkedIn. I would say I've been on LinkedIn since 2007, but I've been on LinkedIn only since 2020, so it's just really fascinating. So you just search for my name, Khalil Slader, and you'll see me there. I'm usually very good about responding to messages. In all honesty, if somebody wants to chat about conversion problem, I get digital marketing specialists who reach out and say, hey, how can I actually get into conversion optimization? I get CMOs of large SaaS companies saying, hey, we've just launched this new homepage and dropped our conversion. Can you take a look and see what you can advise us on? So I always love to jump on a quick call and just kind of connect with people.

Absolutely love that. And, and I can absolutely attest that, because I've spoken to a couple of people in Khalid's company and everybody is very, very responsive. And that's the way I even got connected to him. So that's so amazing. All right, so with that, that's the end of this episode and until we connect with you the next time with another guest and another topic, this is goodbye from me, Yag. Have a good day and take care.

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