Improve Your Agency's Website and Convert More Clients with Khalid Saleh | Ep #629

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This is an exciting episode. Check it out. I'm excited to introduce Khalid Sala. He is a CEO of Invest, one of the first CRO agencies in North America. We're going to find out what the landscape was like back in the day. Invest works with both large companies like eBay, 3M Target, Special Olympics to smaller startups. And in his prior life, Kyle was an E commerce software Architect. He built his career actually devising e commerce and optimization solutions for companies like. You've probably heard of American Express, Motorola, Citrix, and Khalid. You call yourself, at least on LinkedIn, a fusion. I think this is an accurate statement. A fusion of e commerce, conversion optimization, AB testing, and I want to throw in copywriter on there because you are really good at digging into the deep emotions of the customer. So thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me. And just by the intro you gave, I'm like, oh, gosh. I promised to reach out to Todd because we talked a week ago and I didn't. So here. That's another thing to do today.

So it's all. Podcasts are all about connections, right? So I love it. I want to start off with, you know, you talk about a $50 million mistake.

I do, I do. Oh, gosh. You take me back to 2005. So just kind of to set the stage. I lived most of my life in fairly warm climates prior to Chicago. I was in Texas, and I had. And this is diverting a little bit, but I was graduating from college. I had an interview in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They fly me out. Never seen snow my whole life, mind you, survived. You know, I don't know for how many years without snow. It was December. I'm running late to the interview. I opened my car, there's snow on the sidewalk. Don't know how to deal with snow. Didn't really know that you can slip when you run. So I'm like, trying to catch the interview. I'm running, and I take a tumble. I mean, I just flew in the air, landed, and I'm like, oh, my God, that hurts. I got up, clean my suit up, and, you know, fresh grad from college. And I look at them and I'm like, I will never live in the city. They're like, what do you mean? I'm like, I mean, I can do the interview, but I will not accept the job offer. They're like, you can't do that. I'm like, yeah, I can. And I just did. Of course, as fate would have it, I end up sending now a good chunk of my life between Michigan and between Detroit and Chicago. So in 2005, I was a software architect and I got this dream position. I was still based in Houston. Motorola building their e commerce website. They want to revamp the website. They're like, oh, gosh, you know, we haven't really caught up on this e commerce thing, and I think it's here to stay. They hire the consulting company I was working for, they bring us on in October and they basically said, here's an open checkbook, let's build this e commerce website. And we want to release it by the end of the year. Now if it's a small e commerce website, yeah, you can do it in three months. But it's Motorola, correct? I mean you talk about all the bells and whistles and like you know that you want to put in a website. The cost for the software was $35 million. The cost for the servers were $15 million. Imagine that in three months. And for me it was sort of a dream come true because I'm software architect, I got to whatever technology we wanted to use. They were like, let's just go ahead and use it. Is this going to help us build a better website? Of course it will.

So.

Endless nights, work in downtown Chicago. I call that period McDonald's period. Because I would finish work at 11:30 or 12:00'. Clock. Didn't really know Chicago. I go out and the only thing that's open is McDonald's. There was a period of a month where I just stayed downtown Chicago and I just ate McDonald's. That was the one meal a day. Oh gosh, it does things to you. Long story short, three months and we built the website. 120 engineers, I was one of three architects actually on the project. So we built the website. We are super excited. And I just, like many people, I would read different business books whenever I had time. That's how I, you know, that's my hobby. And I started thinking to myself, I'm like, wow, man, they've invested a ton of money. Are they going to have enough people coming to the website? That was the question. I tried to bring that up in call meetings and I think I had the looks, these looks from the marketing team, like, listen guy, you're the software guy, just build the website, stay in your land. That's exactly what it is. We go live. And they had so much traffic that our beefy sun microsystem servers went down within a couple of hours. That's how much traffic they had. So yeah, what I worried about when it comes to traffic was really a non issue. So we're super excited. Traffic is coming. We'll bring the servers back up. Traffic is coming. People are coming to the website. About a week later we started hearing some rumblings there's something wrong, but we don't know what it is. And then we start digging through the data and they're not getting orders for that first month. They Must have gotten about 10 orders for the $50 million investment. I was a software guy, didn't really impact me. We had finished the project, but things basically had changed in Motorola after you spent so much money and you have nothing to show for. So I always say some people lost their jobs and some people like me thought, oh, well, this is an interesting problem. I wonder other companies face the same issue, struggle, have the same struggle that Motorola faced. And that's really how the idea of INVESP was born kind of early 2006.

So you were thinking, we built this amazing infrastructure and system, but it didn't convert.

Basically, basically people, people were coming. There was, it was not due to the lack of traffic, not due to the lack of people come to the website, but people were coming, browsing and browsing and browsing and then leaving. And ultimately, if you create the websites, the ultimate goal is like, okay, well it's great that they're browsing our website and they recognize the brand, but I want money in the bank, I want those orders, I want that revenue. And especially back in 2005, 2006, if you think about it, there were more and more e commerce companies coming online every day and they were doing really well. So when you see such a huge investment and nothing to show for. Yeah, you know, it's at least like, you know, put some questions in your head and like, I wonder if this is a serious problem and how many of those e commerce companies are struggling with this issue.

You know, Khalid, I wanted to pull up your site and walk through a few things because you just think and everyone listens to your content. You have some great videos online, just going deeper in that customer journey and we'll walk, walk through some of those and how you think. But I figure the best way to start the conversation is through your website and because when you look at your website and people can check it out, if you're listening, it's investro.com that's what we're looking at. From the video, you can see there's some differences between your site and when you go to a site and I've heard you talk about, there is a rhyme and a reason to what you did here. So I'll just have you walk me through what, what we're looking at and what some of the rationale is.

So it's interesting because this is kind of an evolution of the websites and compared to how it was a year ago. So about a year ago we had the website and we're always revamping our website and as we look at it, we start noticing that people come in, they don't scroll, they don't click. And the goal ultimately is, even for us, is to have conversions. We want people to come to the website and say, you know what? Oh, this is a really cool website. I want to contact those guys. So we revamped it completely. So every business owner that comes and talk to us, usually they say, hey, can you help us improve conversion rates? Well, as we dig deeper to say, well, okay, so everybody complains about their conversion rates, but let's dig a little bit deeper. What are you truly really trying to accomplish over here? I was talking to a company based in D.C. and I got introduced to them through a VC, a venture capital company that invests in them. And almost every year around October, November, I would fly out to dc, have dinner with them, really like, establish a good friendship with them. And every year I'm thinking to myself, oh, they are going to become a client. And then they don't become a client. And I'm like, what's going on here? We're kind of the best at conversion optimization and there's not signing that contract. So I'm talking to Kale, I'm like, kale, what's going on? Can we just have a conversation? This is the third year in a row where I fly in, we have a good conversation, and then nothing happens. And he's like, you know what, Khaled, let me tell you, when you're flying over here, basically, you have to understand I'm not thinking about conversion. So I'm talking to Kale, I'm like, kayl, what's going on here? Every year we have the same conversation. Are you considering other conversion optimization agencies? I mean, let's just have a very transparent conversation. And he just laughed. He said, khaled, when you fly over here every year, I have to consider what are the new initiatives that I'm going to be doing that are going to help me increase my revenue by 5, 10%? The fact that you're here, it means you are the company that if I'm going to improve conversion rates, you are the company that I'm going to hire. But you have to understand, I'm looking at 10 initiatives. I'm looking at hiring a company that does translation for our website. I'm looking at sending snail mail pieces like, you know, like regular, like, you know, those paper mails that we all receive and just throw away. And you are one of the options. And I just sat there as he said that, and I'M like, wow, I've always thought that we get hired to improve conversion rates. We don't really get hired to improve conversion rates. What people say is, yeah, help us improve conversion rates. But what they are really saying, they want you to come and help us grow our business. And if you had told me about our competitors, I would have told you, yeah, we compete with other conversion rate optimization companies. But in the mind of my customer, actually competing with the mail that you receive in your mailbox, and I'm competing with a translation company, and I would not. If you had asked me to list 10 companies that I compete with or 10 different industries, I would not have mentioned those. And thus, you see over here, you know, we've been expecting you. The idea is really, we want to speak at A, away from kind of the typical, very formal business, B2B, where we say, hey, we've been expecting you, just like a friend, and hitting really very clear on the thing that we do. It's time to grow your business. So that's one thing that we do. Now, this is what I call kind of an emotional headline, correct. Where people say, I can connect with this. This is exactly why I want to come to those people. But it's not enough to use emotions, because sometimes people use emotions and you look at them and you say, I have no clue what you do, my friend. Sometimes I look at, we got tired by this enterprise software company and I was looking at their website, and I kept on looking at their websites, and then I was talking to their VP of marketing. I told her, you know, it's really nice that you want to hire us, but I have no clue what you guys do. And I actually even went on LinkedIn trying to understand the kind of software, and you're just using such very fluffy, emotional language that I don't know what you do. So that's the reason you always want to anchor the emotion and the functionality. Seriously, by growing your business, improving conversion rates is the single best investment you can make. So we're telling them right away, here's what we. What we do. So right away, we used emotions. We anchored it with functionality. People recognize that. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. This is why I would hire people. And if you notice just our sub headline, right. The kind of. The second headline there. Why do people hire us? And we're also careful about how we chose this. Because lots of Times when you're B2B, people think, well, you know, yeah, why do companies. I'm like, no, no, we get hired by people. People make decisions emotionally and then they justify logically. And then we use again like, you know, so why do people hire us? We're using kind of that language, but we're very clear. Conversion optimization, user experience, design training, education, user research. People say, yeah, this is what I'm looking for. Correct. We're trying to use the terminology that the typical companies basically say, yeah, this is what I'm looking for. So we've hit on the problem that people say, yeah, I identify with this problem. Then we told them, yeah, people hire us to do this. The next question that people have is like, well, yeah, but do you really have experience? And that's, you know what you see over here, Our clients come in all shapes and sizes where we say, you know what, let's go ahead and put some clients, give that social proof to show people different companies that we work with and the results that we achieve. So as you highlight different companies, you'll see the different results. Jeremy, let me ask you this. What I see a problem here, by the way, which we are planning to test out, but what do you think the problem with something like this is? As you see those logos, as you see those names.

Well, I mean, I mentioned in the front of the interview, it may alienate a smaller company. You know, I did mention the front. Like, you work these big companies and you also work with startups. So I don't know if that's what you're referring to, but, like, if there's a smaller company, it's not like ebay. They may be like, well, they only work with larger companies. I don't know if that's what. That's what this makes me think of.

Yeah, you hit the nail on its head where when I look at this, if somebody's coming in now, let's say they're doing a couple million dollars or $10 million, they look at this and they're like, oh, gosh, those guys must be expensive. Correct. It's like when I go to a SaaS website and I click on pricing and they don't show me pricing. Like, contact our sales guy. And I'm like, oh, God, if I'm going to contact sales guy, you must be expensive. It's funny because I subscribe to this one service and it's like 50 bucks a month. And they're like, oh, you have to talk to our sales guy. And I jump on the call with the sales guy. I knew their price before. And I'm like, dude, I don't know how you guys make money, but $50 a month is not Worth me and you having a conversation. Maybe like, you know, like if you're charging like $5,000 a month, we need to have a conversation. But the idea over here is to show some logos and some results. Yeah. Now again, we wanted to lend credibility and we said, okay, we have the big name companies. So as you see over here, they were not sure if we can help them because they thought they were small. But then when they saw the results. So again now we're hitting for the smaller companies to say, hey, we've achieved results. I'm thinking about the mind of the visitor who's coming to the website. And my idea there is to show them the results that we achieve, the companies that we achieve. Because it's really when you're hiring a consulting company, when you're hiring an agency, you're always worried, you know, are they going to be able to deliver results for me or are they just a fly by night operation and they're just going to take my money and run away with it. So if you see that's those three sections, even the next section where we have videos from companies that we worked with, video testimonials are very powerful.

I know Jeff Cohen, by the way.

Oh Jeff, like you know, was kind of like early on because we have not done videos in a long time and now we're back to doing videos and I'm sorry, there is this one company I know I'm connected to them on LinkedIn to the founder where they do on site video testimonials and I'm like, I need to find out. That's actually one of my to dos for today. And I'm like, I need to send videos because anybody can claim correct they can put a case study together and then think about the visitors like oh, is this real? Is not real versus you put it out there with the, with your own, with the customer that we worked with, the client that we worked with and have them describe the work that we've done, the results that we've, we've delivered. So that's kind of the idea over here, kind of showing all these different videos that we have really lending credibility again.

Well, Jeff is with Amazon now so maybe you need to start working on Amazon and redo and do another case story how you improved Amazon.

So as you see like you know now, now it's like, you know, kind of like the dish Jeremy is in Wisconsin and then again we're trying to move kind of typical B2B is very formal and what I'm trying to do with the website we're trying to do with the copy is to say, you know what? Here is our story. Here's the human, here are the humans behind invesp and here's the kind of work that we do. So you see the INVESP story and it's interesting because when we look at Heat Map, people highlight this section where we say, okay, yeah, like, you know, this is really cool. People actually spend the time to read it again, if you notice like now go from a lot of guessing to and scatter testing to big results time and time again. So we're hitting that because lots of the companies that we talk to struggle, hey, I've tried a B testing. Like, you know, we're just guessing random things to say, you know what? We are going to deliver big results. So here's what we are going to do for you. We spent a lot of time kind of working through the copy to say, you know what? Okay, yeah, here are the pains that people have. And as you see over here now again, the team, you know, we're showing the team and it's not even. This is probably like an older version. Like, you know, because we're constantly expanding the team. Kind of one of the biggest pains that we have is hiring the right talent.

Two questions on that. One is I'm going to get back to the about page and I don't know, you know, typically I've heard it whatever the second most visited page on the website. But you could see that your navigation's on the left side as opposed across the top. But I'm wondering if there's a reason for that.

We used to have it on the top, but what we found, and we've tested this quite a bit where we found the side navigation that you have over here, primary navigation, the home about services on the side works better for us. So I can say that this works better for investment audience. But then you have the secondary navigation, the services, the software and the education. Correct. That secondary navigation because we have the services and everybody comes to us for the services. But then when we looked at, we said, okay, we have the software which is now is even a separate entity, but it's still there. It's kind of our sister company and we're like, we need to drive people there and we launch our educational course. And we're like, hey, how can we get people there? So this is main navigation. So this style of navigation, we've tested, it works a lot better than the top navigation, you know.

Yeah, I mean people kind of pick their choose their adventure here. And I just want to point out, you know, I opened up the about page. What I like about your about page is really interesting. I don't know if I've seen this anywhere else, but when you scroll down you have these, you know, navigations here. So you have the about us and then you have our story, which I love because you kind of have a nice timeline here and then our team and our clients. So you kind of have this navigation within the about page that I think is really interesting.

Yeah, lots of times people have this as a dropdown in the top header. As you see over here. We go into the top header but they have it and we said, you know what, let's if somebody is coming in, let's put it inside the page and let's kind of drive them to click to different sections. So we're like, you know, kind of crafting really the user journey inside of our website to say, you know what, here's what I want you to click on next and here's something else because you'll be interested to learn about the story and the the team and the client. So let's just put it all.

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And I think, you know, for any business is instructive College. You know, the way you thought about this is you mapped out kind of inside what is the customer user thinking along this journey. And this is what you're answering and you're answering in their words, right? And that from that story of time to grow your business, you're not talking about changing a button or the conversion rate. You're talking about what's the main result that they want from using you and then that kind of goes through. So I would, I would encourage anyone check out invest CRO.com. just look at what they're doing here and mapping out the customer journey and using their, the customer's words. And I know you're a big proponent of really talking and digging deep with a customer. And I don't know your next book. I thought of the title of your next book. I don't know if you will come up with your next book. But when I've researched you, it's really, you're humbled by the customer. And even though you've been doing this many, many decades, you're not high on your horse. Like, you're always looking at it from being humbled by the customer and just doing deep research on it. Because most people in your position may be like, you know what, I kind of already know. I've been doing this for so long, I kind of already know. Right? And you are humbled by the customer. And I want to talk about the emotional research and some of the emotional triggers that you've seen when you're doing research for these companies, why people buy. And I want to have you give a few examples, but I often don't laugh out loud when I'm doing research for these. But you said something in one of your talks. I don't know if you don't know what I'm going to say right now, but you know the saying is always, why do you buy a drill, right? Oh yeah, because you're not buying a drill, you're buying a hole. But when you talk about it, and this hit home for me, you're not buying a hole, you're buying appeasing your nagging wife. I mean, and I like that is totally spot on. True. That is why I'm buying that drill. Or I'll hire you to come over and do the drill because I am not handy. But talk about the emotional research and what you found. Because even though you've had, you've had, you have. Which if you're looking at the screen, figpi right here, f I g p I I.com, which is a software I've heard you talk about, you will watch over someone's shoulder on what they're doing and how they're navigating. So talk about some of the emotional research that you found.

Let me mention something about being humbled by people. So our work at Invest, basically, I always say, I always joke, you peel the onion, you two things happen, you cry, and then you discover that's, oh, okay, we look at the website, we find out problems on the website and we say, oh, well, there is a problem here. Here's how we fix it. Here's a design. Here's better design, better copy. So yesterday I was doing. I was doing a recording for a webcast showing some case studies for Black Friday Cyber Monday and Black Friday Cyber Monday are coming. And I was like, okay, well, okay, so if you have a discount, show the discount. And if you have a timer, let's show the timer as well. Kind of like best practice. Everybody would agree with that. Very simple, very straightforward. The issue always is in the implementation. Well, how are you going to show the. How are you going to show the discount? How are you going to show the timer that, hey, you have two more days until the Black Friday deals run out? So the team, of course, produces four different designs and they always ask, so which design you think is going to win of those four different designs? And I look at them and I know. I'm like, gosh, man. I always pick like the design that's going to lose, but I mean, gotta be design number two. I mean, like, it's. It makes sense to me and in my mind and I try and justify it. Well, okay, so like different people in the company pick different designs and then we a b test it. So we released the four designs.

Always be testing.

Exactly. And the site gets just a ton of traffic. So I think within a day they get almost like, especially in Black Friday, about 100,000 visitors. So you get test results right away. And of course, the design that I had picked, you know, loses. And I'm like, really? Let's just come on, people, you know, one time help me here so you can rationalize something. And I think every designer, every executive, marketing executive or CEO or a business owner, they say, oh, this is the better design. Well, you will discover and you'll be humbled by your visitors because they will pick something else. We're working with a really, really nice lady. She has a really nice website. And I'm like, hey, you have a problem here. People don't know you have a ton of orders coming through your website, but doesn't show on your website if you have it flaunted. So, you know, might as well do that. And she's like, yeah, yeah, I social proof, it makes sense. Just go ahead and implement it. We don't need to ab Test that. We go back and forth. And I'm like, listen, yeah, social proof, we can all agree, but here's four different designs for the social proof. Which one? She's like, well, they all look good. I'm like, well, we literally Went back and forth for almost like two weeks negotiating with her until she agreed to test it out. We test it out and then I come back to her with the data and I'm like, let's take a look at the data. Two of the designs that you thought were absolutely amazing, they actually reduce your conversion rates. And she's like, what? I'm like, one of them increased your conversion rates by 4%. 1 Increase your conversion rate by 17%. Guess what? We could have just deployed maybe one of the losing designs. And then you look at us and say, what happened? That's the reason you need. You need to test.

Love it.

You know, let's go back to the.

Emotional really quickly before we move on to the emotional.

Yeah.

Can you tell me what did you. It's, you know, hindsight's always 2020 in the 17% lift, 4% versus negative.

Yes.

What did you see, looking back of why do you. What's your hypothesis of why that 17% converted better?

Well, it's sort of interesting because social proof, everybody agrees on social proof, but what kind of social proof are you going to use and what you see it, and this is really fascinating, different websites and different customers, different people come to the website, are impacted by different social proof. For some websites, you are a fashion website and being mentioned by like, you know, influencers really resonates really well. For other websites, magazine mentions works really well. For a third website, the number of customers who have placed an order works really well. For a fourth website is video testimonial videos that are really very raw shot on iPhone. So it's always this journey of trying to figure out for your particular audience what works really well at a high level. Yeah, we agree social proof works well, but which social proof is going to work better? We work with a company out of Australia, they sell those blue lights glasses and we were testing something where we said, do we need. Which works better? Is it the social proof from scientists basically in scientific research, or is it the influencers? Oh, God. The data shows that people who come to that website absolutely could not care less about scientific research. They don't care. That just tanked completely. They want to see influencers. They want to see influencers and they want to see influencers basically saying that this is an absolutely amazing, amazing product. Whenever you're running an experiment, you have a hypothesis and you hit the nail on the head when your hypothesis is correct. But the tough question that you always want to ask, ok, so my hypothesis resulted in four or five different implementations. One of them won okay, that's great. But those that lost, why did they lose? That's really the tough question, because you're trying to rationalize and you say, well, yeah, maybe people don't like scientific research for this particular audience, or people don't really care for magazine mentions. Can I actually say that consistently? No, I need to test that again. Maybe after two, three other experiments, I can come back and say, every time we've tested magazine mentions, we end up tanking the conversion rate. Let's avoid mentioning magazines on our website because it doesn't work for our audience.

So I could totally see, maybe for that particular. Those glasses, they want influencers, and maybe there's like a nutraceutical company and it would convert better with scientific research. Or maybe not.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's all I always tell people. For this particular website, for this particular audience, I can make an assertion. For another website, different audience can make any assertions. We got to test it out. But the point is, you have to start by thinking through it and saying, okay, well, let's test this out. Lots of times people, they got up in the morning and they say, oh, we should test this. I'm like, well, yeah, we can test it, but let's think through the process of why you want to test this and what is the problem that you're trying to fix. Because just randomly testing anybody can do that. Just wake up in the morning, we'll test this new headline, and next day, let's test this new image and this different visitor flow. Okay, well, no, because otherwise you end up just spinning, you know, like constantly and not achieving the results that you want to achieve.

I remember I had called Joe Sugarman, who was a founder of Blue Blocker Sunglasses, and I don't remember if they split tested the infomercial, but what won out was the video of the user reactions when they put on the glasses and they show like, wow, it's amazing. So you just don't know what's going to convert into you. You test a few things and you see what people are drawn to. So talk about the emotional reasons. When you're looking, you've looked over probably many, many people's shoulders on how they're using something and why they're using it.

Yeah, this is, by the way, fascinating to me with the drill that I keep on mentioning that story until now. It proves that my wife does not listen to my podcast interviews, because until now, I've survived without her mentioning anything. So everybody who goes to business school gets to hear the saying, no one buys a quarter inch drill. Everybody buys a quarter inch hole. The hole that you put in the wall. As Professor Lovitz from Harvard, who said that, now I move into Chicago and I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, okay, we have all these paintings, but when you just get a new house and there's about a million things going on, but I'm gonna get to the paintings at some point. This is like one of those projects that my wife keeps on nagging me about. And I'm like, yeah, I'll get to it. I will get those paintings. And by the way, we just moved to a new house and the paintings again, are not up. But, you know, we were just trying to find time. So I invite some friends over and I'm like, oh, gosh, need to put the paintings up, because we've spent some money on those paintings. I don't have a drill. I'm not exactly the most handyman, but, you know, I. I can live with that. Now as I. I'm near 50, I go to Home Depot, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, let's buy a drill. Walk into Home Depot. And I literally, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to buy the $150 drill, because, I mean, I'm just going to use it once or twice, and I'm not going to buy the $20 drill. So we're going to choose something in the middle. So I spent 50 bucks on it. I'm walking outside and I'm thinking, no one buys a quarter inch drill. Every buys. Everyone buys a quarter inch hole. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, but the drill bought the hole in the wall. But really, I bought two other things, if we're being honest. One which is very important, is my wife is going to stop nagging me about putting the paintings up. No more. Not thinking that. She's going to also complain about how poor of a job I did hanging the paintings. But that's a whole other discussion. And then the other thing that I really bought is I have friends coming over and they're going to see those paintings and they can tell me how nice they look. And, you know, I'm like, oh, so there's the emotional side, the satisfaction that I'm going to get. And then there's a social side, correct, of, like, my friends looking at it and thinking to themselves, oh, God, man, this guy's like, knows how to buy paintings. Every action we take, if we are willing to kind of peel the onion, peel the different Layers, we'll discover that there's three aspects to it. The functional side of things, the emotional side of things, and the social side of things. Functional. The functionality that I'm getting. I buy a car because I want to get from point A to point B. The emotional. I buy a specific kind of car because I want to show off if I want to admit to it, because otherwise everybody was going to be buying a $20,000 car. And then there's the social how I think my peers and the group that I hang out with is going to look at me. Getting people to admit to those is a little difficult. So that's the reason you want to interview customers and you want to drill a little bit deeper. And really, it has to be a very conversational style interview. And as you start drilling deeper, going back to the example of, are you hiring conversion rate optimization company? No, I'm not hiring a conversion rate optimization company. I'm actually hiring a company to help me improve revenue. Why are you doing that? Well, I'm doing it because my bonus depends on it. And then my family is going to be able to take vacations and because I want everybody in the company to think that I'm an amazing CMO or VP of marketing. Correct. So getting people to really share those insights from you is difficult, but it's very powerful. And then usually we do interviews, and they're very conversational interviews where we start by saying, so, hey, what was going on in your life that day when you decided to buy this item? And then they're like, oh, this happened. It's like. And then instead of going forward, it's like, so how was the experience buying it? And do you like it? No, no, we don't do that. We go backwards. So when was the first time you thought to yourself, you know, this is an annoying problem that you want to solve? And you start really going deep and having conversations. And it is absolutely amazing because you can tell whenever you're interviewing somebody when you hit that emotion, that raw emotion, and they just open up and is like, oh, gosh, yeah, we got it. I think one time. And I'll just give this example. I'm interviewing a lawyer out of D.C. and she bought a pajama. Pajama set. That's expensive, $150 pajama. But she's a lawyer. Oh, gosh. Difficult to interview lawyers. And I'm trying to drill really deep. And she just like, you know, she would give me like, three forward answers, and I'm like, okay, so, like, you know, we're 35 minutes into the interview, and I'm like, okay. I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. And then I'm like, so. I'm like, okay. So you bought the pajama. It was in February when you bought it. I'm like, did you. Did, I guess, like, you know, anybody from your family commented about the pajama and how nice it looks. I'm just now, like, really just grasping the straws, trying to find something. She's like, no, I bought it for myself. I'm like, okay. And she had a sigh, and she. Then she goes on to continue. She's like, you know, I just felt I needed this. And I'm like, okay. At that point, as an interviewer, you just keep quiet because you allow the person you're interviewing to open up. I'm like, yeah. So she says, well, I mean, I. I told you I'm a lawyer, but what I didn't tell you is I work in. In Congress. And if you remember, you know, we had. At that point in time, it was the whole mess that happened in D.C. and she was there basically when the crowd was trying to enter basically Congress, and she felt very threatened, so she bought that pajama and she started crying as a reward for herself. So we go from, I am not going to open up to, oh, I am rewarding myself. I need to do something really nice for myself. We went from like, this is awkward. I'm not able to get anything out of her to, oh, this is awkward. I'm not even sure what to say at this point, because she is crying during the interview. But you can tell that emotional trigger where you took her back to that moment where she just felt about, like, okay, what happened? And, oh, I need to reward myself.

So you even talk about, you know, when you're doing this and you're talking to a client or customer that you even kind of gauge on the point, what time of day was it, where they were sitting? Also the location and everything.

Definitely, yeah. And people always find it very funny because whenever we start our interview, I tell them, hey, just imagine us shooting a documentary. So if you want to be in a documentary, this is your chance. You are going to be the hero. I'm the director. I have a cameraman standing behind me. People laugh. But then when you start asking them, so. So, hey, what time of day? Maybe it was the morning. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it was like, no, Saturday morning. I'm like, oh, can you describe the weather to me? And where. Where were you sitting? And it's almost like you're trying to take them back to that moment. Correct. Because initially they say, well, I don't remember. Maybe it was the weekend. And then it's like, oh, do you remember what is night or day or night? And they're like, oh, no, it was around 4pm oh, it was really nice weather because I was sitting and I opened the window and. And like, who was sitting there? You're really taking them back to that moment, to that struggling moment where they said, I've had enough. I am going to do something about this pain. I am going to solve it. I am going to buy this product or this service. And you can feel it in their voice.

I want to talk in. Just to talk about your process and a little bit more about what you do. And let's take for example Z Gallery. When, when they, where do you start with them?

So Z Gallery is fascinating because it's one of those things. So it was early November, maybe November 1st, 2nd, 2017. VP of Marketing at Z Gallery reaches out and says, hey guys, Black Friday is about to come. I typically see my sales increase by 25% during Black Friday. And people say, oh, only 25%. I tell them, listen, when you're a million dollar company, 25% is, you know, is really like, oh, you should be able to do 50%. But when you are doing 700 million, 25% is really significant. So I'm like, okay. And the gentleman who's, he's a good friend now, I'm like, okay, so what do you expect? He's like, anything above 25% is really like, you know, I'd love that. If you guys can do that. Can you actually put the team together, get started. We have three weeks until Black Black Friday Cyber Monday. Of course. I mean, I'm a business owner. Who would, who wouldn't want Z Gallery as a client? I'm like, yeah, sure, turn around, tell the team. Put the team together. They already signed the contract. We have three weeks. Let's run a whole bunch of campaigns now. Ziggy specification. That's a short time frame, a scary time frame because it meant that especially towards that last week, people were sleeping in the office. So lots of sleepless nights. And the idea there. Okay, so we have Black Friday Cyber Monday. People are coming. They're highly motivated. Correct. If you think about it, Black Friday comes. I'm looking for a deal. I've saved some money. What you need to do. Whenever you're looking at, especially promotional periods, you want to really look at your Messaging, you want to look at your offers and you want to remove the hurdles from the way of, from the way of your visitors. Just make it easy for them to place an order. So we spent three weeks putting a whole bunch of campaigns. We launched that Thursday night and from Thursday night and I think it was November 24th and still for about 10 days we're running, constantly running different campaigns. And I think at the end of the 10 days we have a call with Karam and he's like, guys, you've just paid for yourself for many years to come just from during those, during those 10 days. What's fascinating if you look at the actual work, because optimizing a website to improve conversions is very complicated, but optimizing for such a short period is very powerful because all we said you went to the homepage of Z Gallery at that point in time and they had, you know, items worth 50% discounts, item with 30% discounts, item with 25, 25% discounts. And we were watching session recordings and people were just kind of clicking all over the place. We said, you know what, you're just confusing people. Paradox of choice. Let's just limit this, you know, one big offer. Here's our hot sellers and let's test this out. And by making tweaks, I don't like the word tweaks usually whenever I'm trying to improve conversion rates. But Black Friday, Cyber Monday, yes, we tweaked the website where we said, you know what, clear messaging, clear discounts, clear offers and remove the hurdles out of people's way. And that translates for millions of dollars for them during that, during that period. Now after we got done with that, we went to actual optimization, the really slow process of saying, let's analyze the website, let's find out all the problems.

What else can you do now that you.

Oh gosh, yeah. So, and you know, this has been fascinating working with Z Gallery.

So with Z Gallery and we talked earlier about, let's give an example of a smaller company. So you worked with Tiege, which is men's skincare.

Tiege. Absolutely love the company. They're based in Chicago, so. And we worked with them. This was a two man operation. And I don't know if they would get annoyed with me, but I will mention it and then I'll apologize. But I think one of them was not even full time at that point in time. And it's a skincare product for men. Men don't care about skincare. That's the reality of it. I don't know if I don't use any skincare products. And it's funny because I subscribe to Teege and I think the only people that use the products are my brother in law, my brother's in law, where I get it. I'm like, here, this is for you, this is for you, this is for you. And what we did with Teege was absolutely fascinating because this is our standard project where we during the first six to eight weeks, we come in and we say, listen, we've done so many a B experiments, we're 24, 25,000 A experiments at this point based on our experience. What are the quick wins? What are the low hanging fruit that we can see on the website? Let's just come up with a whole bunch of those and usually we hit the ground running within a couple of weeks. We have a list of low hanging fruits and we're just fixing them, testing them again. Our methodology is, oh, I see a problem over here. Here's different ways to fix it. Let's test this out. Your visitors will have the final say. So we test this out. Meanwhile, as we're doing all these quick wins, quick fixes, we're doing very deep research. That's when we look at your data, your analytics, your heat maps, your session recording, looking at your competitors, stealing some of their ideas, not copying them necessarily, but saying, oh, this is an interesting idea. I wonder if I can fix it in a different way. Look at doing those deep customer interviews. One of the fascinating things when we worked with teach, we thought that we're going after certain segments in the market and we discovered that they have a completely different segment that's actually willing to pay for a monthly subscription. We came back to the TH team and we said, hey, by the way, everybody we interviewed said that they really would love an acne medicine. And I think initially when we mentioned that they're like, what? This is not what we do. We're not an acne company. Like, you know, we don't offer, we don't offer acne treatments. Well, now they do. So again, customers and the customer insights can drive a lot of the business and how the business goes. TJ is a very successful company. Now, five, six years later, I think they're, they're about three or four times larger than INVESP as well.

So, so listening to your customers is key.

Oh, definitely unlocks so much. We, we got hired by, I think the second or the largest SEO company, SEO company. They hired us and they said, hey, can you help us improve conversion rates? Part of our process is interviewing customers, customers or clients of our clients. So I'm talking to the gentleman, he is the grandfather of the industry. And I'm like, can we introduce some customers? And he looks at me, I mean, very well respected in the industry. He's like, khalid, what were you doing back in 1996? I'm like, I was still like, you know, freshman in college at that point in time. He's like, well, I was doing marketing and sto back then, okay. So I'm like, well, can we just do the interview? So we go back and forth. Finally the team agrees and we start doing the interviews. So we're talking to their clients and we're asking them questions. Again, similar questions. What was going on in your life? Kind of drilling really deep. After we finish those interviews, we send them to the agency that hired us and their VP of marketing emails me back. He said, you know, it's like we're not sure about those interviews if they're going to be provide any value in all honesty. But you know, you guys kept on pushing, so we might as well. We said might as well. We'll see. Is it the value that we got out of those interviews if you don't even touch. Our website is just worth tens of millions of dollars for us. And I'm like, well going. Coming from a company that said initially, really we don't want to do this into oh God, this is worth tens of tens of millions of dollars. It's really a good testimonial.

I love it. Colin, I have one last question before I ask it. I want to just encourage people to check out invest CRO I N V E S P C R o dot com. Check out your website also figp F I G P I I dot com to learn more. That's their, their software side where you, you mentioned kind of getting the full heat maps and data and analytics and all of that. That's where they could check that out. My last question is you mentioned business books and you really like different business books. Over the years you study different business books. I'm wondering what some of your favorites are as recommendations to listeners of what they should check out.

One of my most favorite business books, the Road Less Stupid. Keith Cunningham. Absolutely recommend the book. And I recommend, by the way, listening to the audio version of the book a lot better than the book because if you just read the book you'll be like huh. But the audio version and Keith is the one who actually reads it. And a friend was telling me that Keith actually teaches kind of gives the book in a seminar format two, three days in Austin, Texas, because that's where he's based. It's about $7,000, so it's a bit more on pricey side. But if you're running a business, I highly, highly recommend reading that book. Another book that influences really what we do. And now like the name escaped me.

Robert Cialdini.

Well, is that your thing? Everybody recommends, everybody recommends that Competing against luck. Absolutely. Easy read. I always joke about many business books that you read could be summarized in a blog post, but you know, the authors have to say a lot to justify the publisher paying them. But Competing Against Luck is absolutely fascinating. It is the foundation of the jobs to be done framework, which is what we use when we whenever we do interviews. So that's a really, it's a quick read. I think it took me about four or five hours to read, but it really drills going back to the emotional side of why we make decisions. Lots of loss of good case studies that come out of that book.

Carl, I'm the first one to thank you. Check out investcro. Com and thanks everyone.