EPISODE SUMMARY
The world of SaaS (Software as a Service) is ever-evolving, with new strategies and tools emerging to help founders navigate the complexities of attracting, converting, and retaining customers. Let’s explore innovative ideas and proven techniques shared by industry experts Christopher Hines and Matt Wolach. Their insights, drawn from real-world experiences and client successes, offer a roadmap for SaaS founders aiming to scale their businesses effectively.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Startup Founder Roadmap by Chris Hines
Episode: Episode No. 10: Demos To Sell Your SaaS – Matt Wolach
Guest: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Host: Chris Hines, founder of Startup Founder Roadmap
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Optimizing the Conversion Process: The Role of Software Demos
When it comes to converting prospects into paying customers, I highlighted the critical role of demos, especially for higher-priced SaaS products. For SaaS offerings priced at $75 to $100 a month or more, direct interaction with prospects through demos significantly boosts conversion rates. Data shows that while free trials convert at about 1-2%, demos have a minimum close rate of 20%, with some clients achieving rates as high as 67% or more.
Crafting Effective Software Demos
Effective demos are more than just product walkthroughs; they’re strategic presentations designed to evoke strong emotional responses from prospects. The Perfect DEAL Process outlines 40 key elements that make a demo compelling. These include understanding the prospect’s specific needs, showcasing relevant features, and building a narrative that highlights how the SaaS product can solve their unique problems.
Addressing Churn: Keeping Customers Engaged
Once customers are on board, the next challenge is retention. High churn rates can significantly impact a SaaS company’s growth and profitability. This underscores that retention starts with the sales process. Selling to the wrong customers or overselling the product’s capabilities can lead to dissatisfaction and churn. Therefore, right-selling—setting realistic expectations and ensuring the product meets those expectations—is crucial.
Strategies for Reducing Churn
Beyond the initial sale, providing excellent customer support and continuously delivering value are key to reducing churn. Regular check-ins, personalized assistance, and updates that align with customer needs help maintain engagement and satisfaction. SaaS founders should focus on understanding their customers’ evolving needs and adapting their products and services accordingly.
Learning and Adapting: The Path to SaaS Mastery
For new SaaS founders, the journey to mastering these strategies can be daunting. So I recommend a combination of continuous learning and seeking guidance from experienced mentors. My SaaS masterclass offers a structured approach to building a robust sales and marketing process. The program includes a core curriculum, a community of SaaS founders, and personalized coaching, providing a comprehensive support system for navigating the SaaS landscape.
Real-World Success Stories
Several of my clients have success stories. For instance, Robby improved his close rate from 18% to 67% after implementing my demo techniques. Another client, Chris, successfully sold his company for nine figures by adopting the right sales strategies. These examples highlight the transformative potential of mastering SaaS sales and marketing processes.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Power of Online Courses as a Nurture Strategy
Christopher Hines proposes an intriguing idea: leveraging online courses and workshops as a robust nurture strategy. Traditional lead magnets, such as simple eBooks or guides, are ubiquitous and often insufficient in engaging potential customers. Instead, Hines suggests offering a full-fledged course, complete with several hours of content and community access. This approach allows prospects to see the SaaS product in action throughout the course, subtly showcasing its utility and effectiveness.
Implementing the Mini Course Funnel
I highly support this strategy, noting that several of my clients have successfully integrated mini courses into their sales funnels. The process typically involves offering a free lead magnet that leads to a low-cost mini course. Throughout the course, automated videos demonstrate the SaaS tool in various scenarios, helping prospects understand its value. Helping, not selling, is also important to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
The Paid Mini-Course: A Gateway to High-Value Sales
While Chris initially considers offering the mini course for free, I advocate for a paid model. Charging a small fee, such as $37, creates a psychological shift in the prospect’s mind. Once they’ve made an initial payment, they’re more likely to invest in higher-priced offerings. This approach has been highly effective for my clients, leading to significant upsells and long-term customer relationships.
Conclusion: Embracing Innovation and Best Practices
The SaaS industry is dynamic and competitive, requiring software founders to stay ahead of the curve with innovative strategies and best practices. By leveraging online courses as nurture tools, optimizing conversion processes through effective demos, and implementing robust retention strategies, SaaS founders can build sustainable and scalable businesses. Continuous learning and adaptation, guided by industry experts are key to achieving long-term success in the SaaS world.
Whether you’re just starting or looking to refine your approach, these insights provide a valuable roadmap for navigating the complexities of SaaS growth. By focusing on helping rather than selling, understanding your customers’ needs, and delivering exceptional value, you can create a thriving SaaS business that stands out in the market.
TOP QUOTES
Matt Wolach
[03:50] “Offering a free lead magnet that leads to a low-cost mini-course can help prospects see the SaaS product in action, subtly showcasing its utility and effectiveness.”
[09:30] “High churn rates can significantly impact a SaaS company’s growth and profitability. Retention starts with the sales process, and right-selling—setting realistic expectations—is crucial.”
[15:30] “By focusing on helping rather than selling, understanding your customer’s needs, and delivering exceptional value, you can create a thriving SaaS business that stands out in the market.”
LEARN MORE
For more about how Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.
________________________________________________________
Check out the whole episode transcript here:
Christopher Hines 00:00
What’s up founders Welcome back to the Startup Founder Roadmap. I’m your host, coach, Chris, super excited to have Matt Wolach. Here on a podcast. He is a SaaS expert, startup guy, one of the people couldn’t wait to have on because as somebody is building my startup, I always like to have conversations to kind of gauge my progress against the information expertise they have. It’s been helping me a lot. So Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Wolach 00:25
Thanks, Chris. Super happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Christopher Hines 00:27
So when it comes to you, and SaaS companies, what made you want to work with software? You know, because I think I always get a different answer for this is one of my favorite questions to ask. Some people says because of money, so people say it’s just easy. Like, what made you get into SaaS in the first place?
Matt Wolach 00:44
Yeah, that’s a good question. I actually fell into it. So it was back in the mid 2000s. Before SaaS was really a big thing. There are only a couple other SaaS companies. And one of my buddies said, Hey, I’m starting this new company, my wife has an idea and I’m going to build it, I’m going to be the tech guy. She’s going to be the, the kind of expert in the space. And we want you to be the marketing and sales guy. And so I’m like, Okay, I’ll try it. Let’s see what happens. Never done software came from the hospitality space. And it was really interesting to really kind of dive in, really, with no idea of what I was doing no guidelines, no mentor, nothing. And really, the first several months and years were a struggle, it was really, really difficult to try and figure out what to do. Because, no, it was in the early SaaS days, there was no LinkedIn to go look at everybody else talking about their SaaS company. Nobody had had a SaaS company.
Christopher Hines 01:45
No blogs or anything. Twitter wasn’t popping, yet nothing. He just went out there figuring it out.
Matt Wolach 01:51
It’s so true. So true. Exactly. And figuring it out was not happening. It was a it was rough. Like we were not selling anything for a while. And it, it was and then a couple sales here and there. And it’s just, it wasn’t happening. So I figured, hey, I’ve got to solve this, we can’t let this thing go. If we put a lot of effort into building this product and, and launching it, we can’t just, you know, make it a make it something that dies on the vine. And so really worked at trying to figure out how to get this process just right and attended seminars on sales and looked at all kinds of different articles and pulled some things from here and there and realized software’s just different. And trying to incorporate old sales skills from other industries into software doesn’t work. I have a lot of clients who come to me, and they say, Hey, I used to be able to sell in this other industry. But I get into software, I have no idea how to do this. I don’t know why my tactics aren’t working here in the SaaS world. And it’s so true. And so I had to kind of figure it out the hard way, which is frustrating.
Christopher Hines 02:51
Point of it’s different, because that is one thing I have noticed is like it’s just so much different from selling, consulting, or selling digital products. Like I’ve been making money online for years. And now I won’t say all of them were super easy, but I could kind of fairly figure it out. With SaaS, it’s been like a year run of like, trying this, trying that little progress like it, nothing can compare to this in terms of difficulty. It’s just a different beast.
Matt Wolach 03:24
So true. It’s so true. And I was going through that same exact process, trying to figure it out myself, Chris. And it’s really frustrating because you think, Oh, this is definitely going to work. Nope, that didn’t work. And then you do something and you think it’s the right thing. It’s not but then you realize, later, like two or three years later that that was the right thing, and you just stopped too early. And so how do you know when Oh, should I keep going even though I’m getting no results, because I’m don’t want to stop too early, or should I pivot and do something totally different. It was so frustrating for me to try and work through this process. Fortunately I did, it took several years to actually figure it out. fortunate that we were able to keep the company afloat. And that company actually took off, what I did was I put my process in place kind of took all the ideas from all the different sources, blended it together. From my experience as well. I kind of added some tidbits and a dash of this dash of that, and came out with my process that made it so that we could actually sell we could grow, we could scale and we took off we hit Inc 500 multiple years in a row. That’s the fastest growing companies in America and eventually exited that company. I did it again started a new company with a new product, a new market, new team and had the same experience great process that I now had I was able to plug in. So instead of all of that struggle period, I skipped over the struggle and just went right to the growth. We sold that company in just two years. So when you have the right thing, it works really really well.
Christopher Hines 04:54
Yeah, I can see that man and I think that’s kind of where I kind of get caught All openness where I think a lot of founders should invest in learning and just being around other people who’ve done that. Because even I think you can even learn from the people who have exited businesses, even if you yourself don’t want to exit. Because building a business, you can exit from means you have a company where it can run without you, essentially. And I think that’s the real goal that everybody has under the make all the money or the popularity and fame and attention. But most of us really want is a company that can run and we just show up a couple of days out of the week, couple hours here and there for the big stuff. And they can just run, it can just flow. I think that’s what most people actually want.
Matt Wolach 05:41
yeah, that’s so true when you get to that scale, and that repeatability and something that’s actually happening. And yeah, with software, it’s pretty cool. Because you can get to that scenario where, hey, you kind of step back, maybe you’re the chairman of the board, you’ve got somebody else running it and doing all the things but you’re collecting big time paychecks every month. Great. But software is also unique in that the multiples on an exit are tremendous. So I’ve had a lot of people who said, Yeah, I was gonna do that and just kind of collect but then these people came in and offered me $100 million. What was I supposed to say? And if you get, I mean, if you get your company to a good revenue number that can absolutely happen and have a have a nice exit. But you know, you could also just hold on to it. So it’s kind of cool how you have multiple options when you get things right.
Christopher Hines 06:24
Yeah, I agree, man. So let’s get into some of these tactics. Man. I love the video on your website, attract, engage, close and scale. I went and watched it, it was super interesting, because something I’ve used for all of my brands online is simply attract people, nurture them with some kind of content, and then have a conversion mechanism. Super, super simple has worked for me for years. How was it something like that translate into SaaS? Like, what’s that process? Let’s break this down.
Matt Wolach 06:55
Yeah, good question. Firstly, so that’s exactly one of my models. And that’s one of the things that really helped us take off, it’s just kind of breaking down each piece of what we do with a prospect and then a customer, so that we really understand it fully, and so attract, that’s where we’re generating the lead. That’s where we’re getting people to be interested in us see that this is a product that can solve their problems. So with with marketing, obviously, step number one is you have to know your market. And one of the things I love that you said right as we started was you’ve been having lots of conversations with people in your market. I have a podcast myself, and people that I bring on are SaaS CEOs who’ve had success, and I asked them, Hey, how’d you get started? What was it that did it? They said, Hey, we just went and talked with a whole ton of people who would be ideal prospects with us. But really more of asking them about what problems are you going through? What are some of the key pains, what are your goals, all that kind of stuff led them to really fully understand what they needed to build. So you can make your development happen the right way that get that got them to realize exactly how to market to those people using the right lingo and the right voice, got them to realize exactly how to sell to them with the right process. And that is kind of the the catalyst to everything, have those conversations with people in your market. And that’s really going to accelerate. the companies that I see struggle, I’ll ask him because I have a bunch of clients come to me to say, hey, we’re struggling, how do we improve our sales? How do we grow? And I asked him right away? Well, have you identified your ICP who your ideal customer profiles, and if you had 50 conversations with people in that exact fit? No, we haven’t done that yet. Okay, well start there. Because you’re going to uncover a whole bunch of stuff, that you had no idea that is happening, and people are thinking about that you’re going to be able to market to and start closing deals.
Christopher Hines 08:39
What I do for my attraction strategy, and this this, this helps me a lot, is I just interview the people on the podcast, like you said, like, it’s one of the ways like my bigger agency that I have. That’s my most profitable business is with podcasting. And part of what I think most founders should do is have a podcast because if you can sit down and talk to your ICP, two or three times a week different people continuously and build an audience at the same time. It’s just it’s such an easy way to build a brand. Like it’s easy to build a brand. And it’s like you’re doing market research at the same time. I don’t think there’s an easier way to do this, because reaching out on Facebook or LinkedIn is fine, but that just gets kind of tiresome, versus hey, let’s do a 30 minute interview. You tell me your story. And then after the interview, we ask questions. We had a great call at the greenroom and we just talked for 10 minutes about what they’re currently working on what they’re struggling with. Like that little tidbit of time. Oh, man, it’s completely changed my life.
Matt Wolach 09:46
It’s so true. I mean, when you have a podcast, you open yourself up to so many opportunities, and I’ve had my show for several years now. And I’ve met so many incredible people across the industry. I mean top CEOs and people who are movers and shakers. And it’s amazing that I’ve been able to have these conversations with them. And you’re right, I’m soaking up so much learning. I’ve got people who have come to me with marketing and sales and product development and team growth and HR and all kinds of different things that I’ve learned about the industry from these experts. But more than that, like you said, once you have a podcast with somebody, you kind of become buddies, like they trust you, they’ve had a good conversation with you, they believe in you. And so if they are perfect for your product, it’s easy to kind of invite them to take a look at it. And it really becomes very simple from that point forward. And it’s so cool kind of this community that you can create through podcasting, I’ve definitely seen that. And one thing that I actually recommend with my clients is also go out and get yourself on some shows, go out and be a guest on some of the some of the great shows in your industry, identify with shows, or good shows with good hosts in your industry, and go be a guest, because let’s say you’re just starting a company, and nobody really knows you. And then all of a sudden, you’re a guest on some great show like I am right now with Chris, people identify with that person, people see Chris as this awesome, amazing guy that they trust. But now here’s this new guy, Matt, well, guess what they’re on the same level, they’re having a side by side conversation, they must be on the same level, which means Matt is elevated to Chris’s level, which is awesome. So if you can do that host your own show and have great guests, then people will identify with you, though people from their audience. And same thing, go get on other shows. And all of a sudden, you’re everywhere. And people see you as one of the subject matter experts. Yeah.
Christopher Hines 11:31
And you could just build on that, like the reputation you build, it just continues to just grow. And I think that’s part of kind of the nurture strategy for me too. Because I think that next step, after you attract people is to build that trust, get them to like you show proof of what you’ve done. For me, I use content to do that as well. But how do I do this and integrate my SAS product into it? Like, if I’m doing an attraction with the podcast guesting in my own show, and I’m building the platform making connections, what is the nurture strategy look like when you’re a SaaS founder? Yeah,
Matt Wolach 12:06
I think it’s still important, you can absolutely do that. And I’ve had several SAS founders on my show who’ve been able to build their audience because of it. One of the things we think about is I have to push the product, I have to push the product. But really, if you push your own personal brand, and talk about how you can help and the stuff that you’ve gone through the results you’ve helped people achieve, how that happened is kind of secondary. They just know that, hey, if I work with Chris, I’m going to be able to get this result, how it happens. Nobody really wants to know that or needs to know that at the initial stage, but they say, Hey, I better talk to Chris. Because all these people talk to Chris, and all of a sudden they’re getting great results. Well, let me talk to Chris boom, and realize, oh, this is cool tool that they use, they implement this, and they’re good to go. Awesome. So the personal brand is so powerful, but so many times we think, oh, I need to push the product and you push the company. And we put out stuff about our company brand. two bad things with that. Number one is the algorithms of all the different social accounts, Twitter, LinkedIn, all of them, they don’t care about the company’s brand, they will actually throttle back, like, if you go on to LinkedIn, and you post one post from your company brand and one post from your personal brand, your personal brand is gonna get 3-4-5 times the engagement, not just because of people, but because of the algorithm itself doesn’t push it. But the second biggest reason is people buy from people, people, trust people, people believe in people, and they can come to understand you and get you and connect with you. You know, Tesla has like 15 million followers on Twitter. Elon Musk has like almost 200 million followers on Twitter, people connect with people, not with brands. And so we think we need to push the brand. And yes, obviously, you’re gonna have some marketing for the brand. But if you can go out and build your own personal brand, talking about these challenges that you faced, or the people in the market are facing, and then talk about results that people have gotten, how they’ve overcome those challenges, will just a very natural introduction of the products gonna get people wanting it and meeting it.
Christopher Hines 14:02
So in terms of tactics, would you say it’s good to have more of a cadence for posting on social and focus on that with their personal brand? Or is it like, hey, set up a two month email sequence that you send out to people where they subscribe to your list?
Matt Wolach 14:18
I think it all works together. So you can absolutely post on your personal brand, build that account up. And I love lead magnets. So a lead magnet would be some sort of value that you’re sharing. And once you’ve built an audience, that becomes pretty straightforward. I’ve done this on Twitter, I’ve done it on LinkedIn. But basically you come up with some sort of document or spreadsheet, something that gives you the capability to to, I don’t know, get people more value. Get people to understand what you’re about and how you can help. And if you’re able to share something that like like say the five biggest mistakes new founders make like something that you might share with your audience, the five biggest marketing mistakes podcasters make and if you have something like that, that you can share with your audience that you give away for free for the cost of an email, now you’re able to start to get them some value, get them some help. And once they see that you’ve helped them with that little bit, once they’ve kind of put themselves out and trusted you. And you delivered, you gave them some good value. Now they’re willing to trust you further, what else do you have? Oh, well, I have this product that if you want to go to the next level, this thing is super cool. You just plug it in, you’re good to go. And so you can take that personal brand, build that audience even further build the trust, and lead them right into the product.
Christopher Hines 15:32
I have have kind of an idea, something I’ve been working on for a couple of months, I can’t wait to get your feedback on this. I was thinking because online courses and workshops and all of that stuff is just so prevalent right now, like everybody knows what it is people love them. I was wondering what that would look like as a good nurture strategy. Right? So instead of a lead magnet being just one simple thing, what if it was like a full on course, like three hours of content, you know, you get access to this community, or whatever it is. And obviously, throughout the course, in every module most, a lot of the lessons you’re using the SaaS right? Now, in time, people get to see Wow, he’s using the software over and over again in this course, maybe I should check that out. I was just thinking that could be really, really huge in that space.
Matt Wolach 16:27
Oh, so huge. Having a mini course I’ve had several of my clients set this up, and it works brilliantly. So you can actually have that lead magnet, you kind of build the whole funnel, right? They get to know you, they get that lead magnet, the free guide or whatever that leads them to the next step of needing a mini course, they do that two or three hour course. And in that course, it’s a it’s a it’s automated videos that you’re giving. By the way, when you do this, they download, it’s automatically delivered to them. They’re watching you that you recorded months ago. And in that you’re going through the tool, say okay, if you’re going to solve this, you need this thing. But watch how I do this boom, boom, boom super easy, that’s what I do. Yeah. And that’s what a lot of people I know are doing. Oh, by the way, if you want that tool, here’s a link, go grab it. And it just becomes part of the process. It’s not like you’re pushing a thing, you’re helping them. And this is one of the biggest things that I tell my clients help, don’t sell, help, don’t sell. If you help and help people pass their challenges and help them to their goals, then you’re not really selling, you’re just getting them to another point.
Christopher Hines 17:21
So you advise your clients to make the mini-course free as well. So it’s like the free lead magnet and in a free mini course.
Matt Wolach 17:28
And no, it’s paid.
Christopher Hines 17:30
Wow, it’s paid.
Christopher Hines 17:31
Wow. Yes, yeah, I think for a lot of people that would help a lot of SaaS founders need something like a mini course, because you can just deliver so much more information than like, always trying to get on demo calls or trying to do webinars when you’re not really good at them. I just think that we have to kind of think outside of the box now with the SaaS companies with all these brands, because it’s just so much stuff out there. I’m thinking and now we have to just do things differently.
Matt Wolach 17:31
It’s paid. So here’s why. So make it a very low amount paid. So free lead magnet, make it low amount. So for example, my mini course is paid, it’s $37. Right? Oh, but they get the free thing, then the next step is small amount. And the cool thing is there’s a psychology that once somebody pays you once even for a little amount, they’re much more willing to pay you for a big amount, once they’ve opened their wallet to you one time and it’s just a little bit. If you deliver if you give them good value, they’re willing to go a lot more. So for example, within my coaching funnel, same thing, we have a lead magnet that leads to a mini course until just 37 bucks. Then after that the coaching is 1000s of dollars. But so many people have done that and gone through each step that it’s it works so well. And it works great for products as well.
Matt Wolach 18:46
It’s so true. I saw a mini course delivered beautifully by an AI writer, basically this tool that writes articles for you and stuff. And basically they had a lead magnet that kind of was talking about AI. So people always download that because AI is hot right now, it led into a mini course where you could learn about how to use AI effectively and what prompts to use and in that they used their AI writer. And so you’re saying okay, well, I need this. And they showed results of here’s someone who use this and did this same prompt and put it into this writer and got these articles. And now they’re making zillions of dollars, whatever it is. So you can absolutely set up that same type of funnel and it works great.
Christopher Hines 19:23
I love that man. And I love how we’re going through the whole process, guys. And now we’ll get to the actual selling part. So out of all the conversion mechanism that you’ve used to get those customers from that free tier where they don’t know you yet. Now they’re at the end of the row and they’re ready to buy, what’s your go to conversion strategy.
Matt Wolach 19:42
So it depends on your price point. But if your price point is $75 to $100 bucks a month or more, in most cases, you’re going to have a much better conversion rate if you talk to them if you actually have a conversation. I know the dream is if you’re a SaaS founder, oh man, I can just sit back and I don’t have to do anything to able to start buying, that sounds amazing having it be self serve, guess what, that doesn’t really happen easily in the real world, even companies that are self serve. Now when you hear of big ones like, you know, Asana or something like that, well, they started as actually talking to their, their prospects and their customers. And they were able to get it to a self serve PLG model. And so I’m really big on if you have a price point, that’s 100 bucks a month or more, you’re going to need to do demos, demos have been shown to be the number one most powerful way to convert your prospects. And if you don’t have a good demo, that’s the number one way to kick them out of your funnel and get them to hate you and not realize they, they need you. So we want to make a demo that’s really, really powerful. That takes people from Hey, I just kind of want to see what this product can do. That’s how they enter the call. But they leave the call saying whoa, I have no idea I was so far behind and that this thing’s gonna accelerate me, I need this now. And the best sellers doing demos are doing that they’re getting buyers to that level of emotion, so that they can close the deal really fast. If people don’t have emotion, if they don’t feel like they need something. They’re not going to take action on it. We’ve got to get them emotional.
Christopher Hines 21:08
Oh yeah, man, that’s interesting. I didn’t think demos were so well, I guess it does the price point. That makes sense. That actually makes a lot of sense. Because if people are going to pay more, they’ll have more questions, there’ll be more engaged and have to think about it more versus if it’s $20-$30, even $50 bucks. It’s like, Oh, here you go. When it’s $100 plus, it’s like, now we have to think this out. If it’s a b2b SaaS, then I got to talk to the team about this if we’re adding a $300 a month subscription. Wow, that makes a lot of sense. So can we go into what makes it good?
Matt Wolach 21:43
If you take it to the extreme? Yeah. So if you take it to the extreme, you think about that? Are you sure it’s $100? Well, we’ve done a lot of studies on this, but actually take it to the extreme, nobody’s clicking around buying a $5,000 a month product, they’re not like, Oh, this looks neat. Click, I’m gonna buy that for $5,000 a month, nobody’s doing that. And nobody’s really spending time on demos for a $5 a month product, you’re not going to want to spend any time on somebody who’s just going to pay five bucks. And so we have to find what that breakpoint is. And it’s usually around $100, depending on the industry and such. But once you’re above that, you absolutely have to do a demo. And to give you an idea, let’s say you have a free trial. And there’s no demo process, free trials convert across SaaS at about one to 2% of the number of people who enter your free trials, we put 100 people into the free trial, one or two of them’s eventually going to sign up for your product, which feels weird, everyone’s like, well, we’ve got a great product, I’m sure they’ll love it. Yes, it would be amazing if it converted higher, but it’s very rare to convert more than that some people do get four to 5%. One to 2% is average. However, demos, just the minimum close rate on a demo, when you talk to somebody, the absolute minimum, meaning you’re not really growing, but at least you’re not dying is 20%. So it’s literally 10 times the conversion when you talk to them, versus when you just try and push them through automatically. And if you think about it, it makes sense. They can look in your eyes, they can trust you, they can believe in you, they can hear it in the tone of your voice. You can explain things specifically about them. Instead of just here’s some videos, maybe one of these matches what you need. You can say, Hey, what’s your need? Oh, I need this. Cool. Let’s talk exactly about that thing. And it becomes much more powerful to the buyer. So demos are impactful. Wow.
Christopher Hines 23:23
So let me ask you this, if somebody is a new founder, they’re starting off, they’re building their company. They’re excited, they got MVP ready, and ready to try to go to market essentially. How many demos should this person be doing to measure? Right? Because you said 20% conversion rate is great. So what’s that demo amount that you feel comfortable with in terms of conversions, to where you can say, Okay, we have product market fit at this point.
Matt Wolach 23:48
So when you’re getting started, the conversion rates gonna be really tough. There’s a lot of reasons for that. One is, you may not fully know your market yet, you may not know exactly what they want to hear. There’s some, you know, trial and error in terms of should I say this? Should I say that? And likely, if you haven’t been trained on how exactly to give a demo, there’s exact processes, we deliver this and it takes several weeks to get this implemented with our process or with our clients. But there are exact ways of getting clients to feel really emotional getting those prospects that say, Holy cow, we need this now. Versus Hey, this was nice, thanks a lot, really appreciate. Now, we don’t want that. We want emotion. We want people to say yes, if you don’t know that, and you don’t know exactly what to do, then it’s going to be really tough in the early days. In fact, we’ve done studies on this. We have a process called The Perfect DEAL Process. It’s a demo specific process. And basically it outlines 40 things that you need to do in your demos that help get the buyer emotional enough to close. The problem is already across software. And this doesn’t include just the founders but even experienced sales reps in software are only doing 16 out of 40 which means if you’re not fully trained on this, you are missing most of what will get your buy You’re emotional enough to say yes, I want this. Wow,
Christopher Hines 25:02
that’s impactful man that’s making me think demo training because that’s something that I never see talked about in like the SAS community. Well, people will say it’s important, but nobody talks about what makes a good demo. Good when it comes to SAS. And I think part of the problem is the demo trainings I’ve seen, and I didn’t like them. And it always felt like they will use the same webinar strategy that people use to sell courses and stuff, which I guess is understandable. But it’s like, if I’m selling a SaaS product with a subscription price point is different, like you selling the SAS is way different from selling course. It’s not the same thing. So I don’t think we can use the same exact process. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Matt Wolach 25:44
No, no. And if you if you actually do this, right, it works really well. One of my clients, Robby came to me with an 18%, close rate, he was really frustrated about that he knew he was below the 20% minimum threshold, it was a real struggle for them. We identified some things that he was missing that he just didn’t know about. And of course, nobody knows about these are not intuitive, you have no idea. And we implemented those, he updated that process and his demos. And now he converts at 67%. Two out of every three person he talks to signs up, and they do not have a cheap product. It’s 10s of 1000s of dollars. And he’s converting two out of three. So if you have the right process and understand how to do a demo. I mean, it works. It’s like gold.
Christopher Hines 26:23
Wow. Okay, okay, it’s making a lot of sense. So we went through the attracting the nurturing, and even conversions. So what do you think are kind of the key elements to keeping those customers around? I got them signed up, they’re paying users now, I can kind of understand why churn is such a big deal in SAS, because you almost feel like you’ve accomplished the goal when you get them to buy and say yes, especially if it’s on a demo, you get excited, too. What are the things that you kind of tell your clients that help them keep their users on the platform?
Matt Wolach 26:55
Yeah, great question. And there’s a lot of things around that. So churn is actually impacted by so many different parts of the company. And that’s why it’s a big deal, obviously, your product, because people say, Well, you have to have a great product to sell that’s wrong, I can teach you to sell a very mediocre product, and you can sell great if you have the right process. But once they’re in, if they don’t like the product, they’re gonna leave. So we don’t want to sell a bad product, we want a good product. So you gotta have a good product, you gotta have a good service around that product. So you want to make sure that you’re taking care of people’s needs. But actually, what I like to do is because I’m very sales focused, obviously, as I like to make sure that my clients understand that churn can actually be impacted by your sales process. For example, if you sell to the wrong person, even if it they finally agree to buy, which that’ll be a tough deal, because they will feel like it’s not right for them, and they may not buy, but even if they do buy, then once they get in, they’re gonna think oh, man, this product is not good. It doesn’t help me here doesn’t help me there. And the team doesn’t doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Well, so they’ll think it’s a terrible company, a terrible product, but actually, they’re the wrong person for it. So they’re going to tell the world hey, this thing sucks. It’s terrible. But actually, you sold the wrong buyer. And because of that, now they’re shouting to the world how bad things are. So do not sell to the wrong person, that is a very bad negative. The next thing that we can do in sales to help turn is don’t oversell, don’t sell all these amazing things that they’re gonna be able to do if they can’t do it, sell Exactly. So it’s called right selling, sell the right thing, don’t try and exceed their expectations on the sales process, and then under deliver on the actual product. And it’s basically an old saying that everybody knows undersell over deliver. The reason that as an old saying is because it works really well. Get them to understand what the product can do. So one of the things people do is they sell vaporware. Selling vaporware is the process of selling something your product can’t do yet, but the development guy just told you that they’re building it, it’s going to happen. And somebody asks you, Hey, can you do this? And you’re like, Well, not yet. They’ll probably be in by the time they sign up. And the reason I’m making fun of this, because I’ve done this and gotten burned out, and it’s a horrible feeling. Because they just told you this is coming in two weeks. They’re like, Well, you’re not going to sign up for a couple of weeks. Okay, yeah, we have a you can do that. And then they sign up the product, the feature gets held up in development and QA and they have to pull it back and it doesn’t launch. They’re like, Hey, you told me I could do this. Where’s that? Yeah, about that. Now, that is a very upset customer, they’re gonna turn they’re gonna hate you. They’re gonna hate the company. Not a good thing. So don’t sell vaporware. So what I’m saying is, yes, we can fix churn with service and with product and all those things. But it really starts up front within a sales process. Let’s do that. Right. And let’s make sure we can make the best possible chance of having a great retention rate.
Christopher Hines 29:37
Man, this was a very interesting conversation. I’ve learned so much in this 30 minutes. It’s making me think a lot about what I’m building and just my ideas and stuff because I think if you know a lot of I think to work in SAS and to really have a successful company, you should have some baseline understanding of business. But I’m noticing that to be successful. You have to kind of push that to the side and be willing to learn about startups and SAS specifically. Because there are some fundamental elements of like how to sell and how to market. But everything in this space is like done at a different level, it’s done in a different way. Like, that’s really the key thing I’m learning is it’s kind of the same method, but it’s just you got to do a slightly different. So
Matt Wolach 30:22
true, so true. And it was it was kind of a slap in the face to me. And it took me a while to realize it. But once I did, we took off sold multiple companies. Since then, many of my clients, I’ve had 23 exits from my clients who’ve been able to sell because they’ve learned this process, right? And so that’s, that’s one thing I do is basically I host mastermind roundtables with software founders so that they can get together and chat about what their challenges are. And then somebody else can say, Oh, we had that. Here’s how we fixed it. And basically, I help them through the problems. And it’s pretty cool to see somebody who goes from that struggle, not understanding exactly what to do phase, all the way to amazing success, where they’re so good that they can even help others. It’s really cool. I
Christopher Hines 31:01
love it, man. I love it. You keep mentioning his program, all your clients and stuff. You gotta let the audience know where they can find it, because I’m pretty sure some people want to sign up.
Matt Wolach 31:08
Yeah, for sure. So we call it the SaaS masterclass. And basically, what we do is go through exactly how to set up a SaaS marketing and sales process that generates incredible results. One of my clients, for example, Paul, he’s in the UK, he went from 26%, close rate to 87%. close rate. Another one of my clients, Chris sold for nine figures his company after they put this process in place. So basically what we want to do is get you an understanding even from the very beginning, we have people start right when they start their company, so they make sure they get everything right from the beginning, they don’t miss any great customers. So we have a combination. It’s a three prong approach. I give you a core curriculum, which is a step by step of exactly how to implement your sales and marketing process for your Sass company. This is only for b2b SaaS companies. And then the core curriculum leads you right into the community. We have a community of 250 plus SaaS founders from around the world, all b2b SaaS, and we get together weekly in a roundtable so that we can talk about what we can fix what we adjust. We also bring in special guest speakers, and we do break downs of demos live right in front of everybody, and then also coaching so you’ll have opportunities to meet with me one on one so I can personally help you through your struggles and get you results.
Christopher Hines 32:20
I love them. And I love how thorough it is. I think that’s perfect for a lot of founders. Man. If you’re found after listening to this, you got to take advantage of work with somebody like Matt man, this is clearly somebody that has experienced the skills the track record that’s actually doing it and helping founders get to work, man. So Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. This was a perfect, perfect conversation.
Matt Wolach 32:44
Thanks, Chris for having me. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.