Nopadon Wongpakdee: Does Your Website Help Your Customers?

In today’s digital age, a website is often a company’s first impression. Yet, many businesses struggle to create online platforms that truly resonate with their customers.

Nopadon Wongpakdee delivers brutally honest critiques of the websites of willing audience volunteers and asks the question, “Are you helping your customers?”. From a fast-growing, $50million revenue SaaS, to a mature data analytics business and more, this session resulted in the volunteers and many attendees in the audience, rewriting significant amounts of their web copy.

You’ll learn the top four things that kill B2B conversion and some simple ideas and frameworks to help your audience understand what you do and why you care. 

Slides

Transcript

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Hey. So, a little bit of housekeeping. Couple people have asked me a couple of people have asked Bob, but yesterday, was that scripted? Was that rehearsed? It was absolutely not scripted. It was absolutely not rehearsed. There were no scripts. I wasn’t looking anything. I was looking down. So that’s one. Absolutely real, too. I was excited to call my mrs. and tell her the great news. Try to get some credit. And she was like, I’ve been planning that for years. She’s like, Do do you think you’re golfing by accident? Do you think we have a car by accident? like Inception? Oh. Yeah. So Bob, you said my response to hers, then you should be more direct. That way. She won’t have to languish when frustration and not making progress. So thank you so much again, BoS team for having me here doing this. This session was actually someone last year got COVID dropped out. We had a slot. And we decided why don’t we try this, turns out, you know, some fun for some people, maybe not for others. So what we’re going to do, this is the audience participation portion of the, the conference. So we’re feel free to shout out. You don’t have to raise your hand, well, there’ll be a point to ask you to raise your hand, Matt’s gonna be up here as well. He’s going to contribute. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to you’re the content, we’re gonna take a look at your websites, right? And we’re gonna run through your websites, do you have a website that sells that helps you sell? So show of hands, who has a website that actually helps them sell? Thank you for the volunteering. This is amazing. Perfect, perfect. So what we’re going to do is I’ll ask you, volunteer website, don’t tell me don’t tell us what you do. Okay, how you help people? And maybe give us like a 10. Second, who is your customer? What’s What’s your ICP? Just those two things, and we’ll take it from there. And then I’ll ask you, how do you want your feedback on a scale of one to 10? One being, I guess, gentle. I don’t know how to do. And then 10 being burned it down. All right. Also, times when I’m thinking, I may look like I’m angry, or I’m annoyed with you. I’m not. That’s just my face. That’s my thinking default resting face. So I’m not annoyed. I’m not angry with you. So some volunteers. Oh, come on. What’s your name again? That’s right, you were in the session yesterday. Do you want to give Matt your URL from next time I should do the whole what what Valentina just did, which was awesome.

Kevin Boyle 
It’s gearset.com. G-E-A-R-S-E-T.com.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Okay. And those make those weren’t close it as soon as it comes out. Looking like beautiful it is. Okay, so gearset.com And who is your ideal customer profile?

Kevin Boyle  
Ofcourse admins that are struggling to move changes around in

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Salesforce admins and developers?

Kevin Boyle 
Yep.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Do we have any of the ICP in the audience?

Kevin Boyle
Oh, no.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Okay, some developers? Yeah, okay. So let’s comprehension test this file. Here we go. Use your imagination. There we go. All right. What was it? What do you guys get? What did it say? Complete? complete solution DevOps. What else did you get? Oh, yeah, sorry. Thank you. I was defaulting to Ted already. Sweat.

Kevin Boyle 
I don’t mind. How about it?

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Okay, so we got DevOps we’ve got, what else? Complete solutions. What else? Okay, so what we’ve just done really quick here is what we call a comprehension test. All of you can do this. All right. Now, for a business like this, that has a very specific ICP, you should do it with ICP. For the rest of you, who’ve got a business that most people should understand. This is what we call a five second paper test. You can take your laptop, you can put it in PowerPoint, walk to the lift, walk to Starbucks, show it to them, five seconds, don’t tell them you’re gonna take it away, take it away and say, What did you just see? And they say, I don’t know, some yellow picture and DevOps. Okay, fine. Give it back to them. Let them spend a little bit more time with it, maybe five to 10 seconds, take it away. So what is it that we do? How do we help you? Right? And this is a simple way of testing comprehension. What we find is lots of times, traffic bounces, there can be loads of reasons for this, right? Poor web page loading time, poor traffic, all of these things. But what eight, eight times out of 10, we find it’s literally because they don’t understand the words on the page comprehension. And so with our website, what did you do?

Improving website headlines and CTAs for better conversion rates.

Matt Lerner
So I had, we had a terrible headline on our website, which of all people we should know better. So I just mocked up a new headline based on our customer interviews in PowerPoint. And I just put like a call out on a group chat, I’m in with a bunch of entrepreneurs and said, If anyone could spare five minutes, to give me some feedback on something, I’d appreciate it. And I just sat at my computer. And when people DM to me, I would open up a zoom call and just paste a zoom link. And I’d say hey, I’m going to say I do just this, I’m going to show you something have a look. I told my website for five seconds, and then I’d stop screen sharing. So hey, what did you see? What do you think that means? They didn’t understand my first draft. And what do you think it means in which words and this a that iterated through that over the course of two days, I went through about eight iterations. And by the end, we got to a point, I think our conversion rate from visit to lead, went from about 10%, to close to, like 35%, after those changes, and it was just repeating this and iterating and be oh, well, I don’t understand what that word means. And how is this going to work? And is this for SaaS companies? And just going through and making little changes based on their questions?

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Yeah. So this is something that’s quick, dirty, easy to do. So we’re obsessed with this concept of language market fit, right? Language is the easiest, quickest, dirtiest, fastest way to iterate, and to improve comprehension, to improve conversion, residence, all of those things. There’s a concept that’s called information forging. Turns out, we don’t actually read, we skim, right? We just kind of look over stuff. And when people are looking at a website, particularly your business, there’s a system one, system two, if you’re familiar with Kahneman, or fast, emotional, and slow and methodical, and so your top of your page as fast and emotional, from what they’re looking for is, am I getting warmer? Right? Is this on goal? Is this on target? Is this something? Do I understand this? And this is just a super easy way. And you’d be surprised at the amount of conversion lift you get just from paying with with a headline. So if we could pop up the website, you’re set? Yeah. Okay. So yesterday, Bob talked about supply side and demand side thinking. And we’re all I’m guilty of it often. And Matt is always like, “That’s that’s very supply side”, and like, “Okay, God dammit, I know better”. Most of us think, Hey, we’re actually we’re pretty good. Like we were customer centric. We love our customers. We all always have them at the heart of our of our decisions and discussions and everything. So for those of you who think You have a website that helps you sell, um, for those of you think that you’re not being supply side, take your phones out. Now it’s okay. Take your phone out and take a look at your website, your headline. Okay. Got it, everyone got your website? Here’s a simple litmus test, if you are talking about what you do, versus how you’re going to help people make progress, whether you’re talking about the drill or the hole that people are hiring, right? Simply you can add the words now you can to the front of your headline. Okay, and does it make sense? Is it now you can AI blockchain dada dada dada? Or now you can the complete Salesforce DevOps solution? Okay, so that is the first test, you should know your ICP well enough to know what is the outcome that they’re trying to achieve? And what looks like food to them. What looks like is end goal, they’re getting warmer, they’re getting hot they’re on target, is if they see that, right. So do you feel if I were to ask you what progress that trying to make? Would you be able to sort of come up with something?

Kevin Boyle 
Progressive, progressive driving is more effective.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
What is going on? Yell at Bob? What does that mean?

Kevin Boyle
Accelerated value on top of Salesforce get more from Salesforce how their teams

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
That’s directionally correct. Okay, so here is a simple test that you can run right now, are we talking too much about what we do versus how we help people? Right? You want to say? All right, second. Now they’ve seen the headline, they’ve looked at the image a little bit. Okay, cool, very nice design. sub headline does a lot of heavy lifting. This is now the next five to seven seconds. For them to figure out. Am I still getting warmer? Is this for me? The only platform you need for unparalleled deployment success, continuous delivery, automated testing and backups. Okay. This is where I see time and time again, teams struggle with this. And you don’t have to be clever. If anything, we want to err on the side of clarity over being clever, right? Unless you’re the massive incumbent, unless you’re the slack or you know, whoever you can be clever, witty, but for the most part, you should err on being clear and very benefit oriented. So, simple thing. Take a look at your sub headline now. And does that answer the three questions? What is this? Who is this for? And what’s the benefit? Right? Now a little asterix around? What is it? If you’re creating a new product category? Or if you’re truly something that’s new? Don’t waste your time trying to do that? Right? Forget it. But I think a lot of us probably are in a category. What is it? Who is it for? I want you to have a comically tight ICP, I want you to come out and say who is this actually what what stakeholders? What verticals? Right, who’s using this? And the benefit statement? You should? You should probably know, you already know that. All right. So we have a book a demo, we have a start a free trial as the key calls to action that we see right now. So out of curiosities, free trial, do you know the percentage or do you do not want to say it’s okay.

Kevin Boyle 
1.6% conversion from visitor to free trial.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
So if you see a lot of you will do do this today, your key call to action will be book a demo. Right. And we’ve done this long enough to know that if you get loads of traffic, that your unique visitor to demo ratio is going to be about 2%, 2% which means 98% or somewhere else.

Matt Lerner
And if I can just caveat that if your target customer is a developer, they don’t like talking to salespeople know. And book a demo actually means talk to a salesperson. Yeah,

Overcoming inertia in sales and marketing

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
That’s absolutely right. We had we are a team based in Germany called Scanbot, they do a scanning SDK. So if you’ve ever used DocuSign, you use that SDK. And so when we met them, they said our key stakeholders, the product owner and secondary stakeholders, the developer, we did loads of interviews turns out the role turns out the developer was actually the key stake Hold on this. And so they had a sim, a page that was like get a trial, it was like a first name, last name, email, like your wife’s name every like everything, the whole list, right? It was crazy. And what they’ve done is what they did, what we realise is developers are allergic to marketing, anything that looks like marketing or sales that developer was not interested in. So a couple changes, we said, strip out all of the identifying information, have them put a app identifier ID, like you can even see they’ve they’ve gone into dark mode now, for the developers. So as you know, so put your app identifier D, they used to run a 30 day trial, they cut it down to seven, anything that was talking about case studies, and it was changed to documentation, right? GitHub, Slack support all of these things. And they increase that funnel by Forex, by realising that developers don’t want to be sold to. So they said, get out of the way, let the developers play. Let them integrate, give them Slack support while they’re trying to implement, not after they’ve implemented. Turns out what happens is, the product owner then goes to the developer and says, How to go like, yeah, pretty good works. Great. Let’s put out an RFP to three or four other companies and let’s test and the developer said, no, no, we’re not doing that this, this works perfectly fine. Great support. It’s within, you know, the specifications. And they were the deciding factor. So if you have developers, as your key stakeholder, we might want to think about different language around book a demo. Now start a free trial. Right, one of the bits of sort of habits of that Matt, Bob was talking about, you know, the inertia that keeps people from making change. So there are a couple factors that we’ve run across, right. Are you dealing, Are you selling to multiple stakeholders? All of you are? Yeah. Do you? Are you potentially a new product category? AKA, the stakeholders lack expertise? Don’t know what good looks like? Maybe, right? Does your tool platform software require a change in behaviour? Maybe, right? Is there a switching or an opportunity cost? And this one talking about is there a switching an opportunity costs? Probably right?

That’s why you have a free trial. Right? And so if you’re dealing with all of these things, I’m sorry, in the last one is inability to try. So think about your stakeholders. And if you have five of these things, congratulations, you’re running up against some significant inertia, right? Really hard for these people to make change. So when you’ve identified that you can have customer conversations to validate if this is true or not true, then we can come up with ways to overcome that inertia tactically. So inability to try could be start a free trial could be video demonstrations, right? Because they don’t trying is actually opportunity cost. Maybe they just want to see some videos of how it works, right? Multiple stakeholders. Well, that’s easy. That’s multiple stakeholder content, making sure that you understand who are the stakeholders involved in this decision making process and making sure you align with their outcomes? Right? New Product Category, it just means nurturing education, right? But we all of us sit and think about our features and USPS and, and how we’re going to sell, right? Why why people should use us. But we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the anxiety and that inertia that keeps them on the fence. And if you leave them unchecked. When I say this kind of you leave those forces unchecked. They’re more powerful as a direct competitor. And so you have to start digging into what are the key anxieties that your, your ICP feels? What are the key bits of inertia that are holding them back? Alright, so scroll down, please. Great, we’ve got social proof. Amazing. 4.9 out of five, great two minutes support response time. That’s awesome. Actually. Salesforce DevOps solved. Blah, blah, blah. I’m not reading it. I’m just skimming again. Okay, now we get to this complete DevOps, whose lives are uncomfortable. How dare you. unique problem analyzer secure and compliant. Smart Backup and Restore. Okay. So there are a couple of things here. So firstly, there are a few things that I would call sort of Captain Obvious, which is secure and compliant. Right? No one that comes out and says not secure, not compliant. No one says Done backup, right? So these are all sort of like platitudes, right. And we I see we do have areas of where we’re very specific, but really avoid this, like amazing customer service five stars, right? Because everyone sees that doesn’t mean anything. Here, one of the things that you need to think about, again, your ideal customer profile, what is the outcome that they’re looking for? What are the questions that are in their head? Right, before they come? What are the things that they’re struggling with? Right before they get to you? And here’s a classic example of features versus benefits. Okay, so we have a leading comparison engine, all of you do this, guaranteed? Not all of you, a lot of us do this, okay? Take a look at that feature, or that thing that you want to highlight. And I want you to ask the question, here’s a simple fix. So what? That’s it. So what does the leading comparison engine allow you to do? Get real time comparison results, lightning fast with actual insights in your metadata changes? What are they really looking to do with that? Comparison engine?

Kevin Boyle 
Move metadata changes from one environment to the other? And

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
what’s hard about that?

Kevin Boyle 
It often results in errors.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
Okay, so what’s the moment of high potentials? So when they’re sitting there doing this, and they’re like working, and they’re getting these errors? What sucks?

Kevin Boyle 
Well, you’ve done the work you wanted to do, you just try to appointment is, is a staff that you don’t really care about, you just want to be able to copy and paste essentially, from one environment to the next.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So it’s like, kinda like admin,

Matt Lerner
Deploy faster with a five minute comparison engine, with comparison engine results in five minutes, something like that?

Kevin Boyle 
It results in on parallel, on parallel deployment success. Up at the top.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Okay, so take a look at your own websites, right? And think about that area where you’re highlighting that like your special sauce that feature and ask your team, ask yourself, so what, what is the thing? Allow people to do? Right? What’s that question that it’s going to answer for them, and that will be far more that would look far more like food to them. Right? Part of the thing that Bob was saying yesterday is we throw up all of these feature feature feature feature feature, right? And what we essentially do is a prospect potential customer, you figure out how you’re going to use this, you figure out where this fits into your life, right? As opposed to think of when you’re in a pitch or a demo. Right? You’re sitting think about last time you were in a demo? What did you do? You sat down with a person you asked hopefully a lot of questions. Right? You got very specific about their pain. And then you diagnose them you ignore probably, I don’t know, 90% of the other things that you did only to highlight the two or three things that you knew that would help them out. Right? Your customers aren’t that different. Your website? How different is your website than your actual one on one demo? What do you say? Do you use sort of high level 10,000 foot language with them? Or do you get very specific? Right? You need to get specific, right? Let’s scroll down. Okay. All right. So here is the other issue that we see. That’s kind of an easier thing to think about. Wasted opportunities when it comes to social proof. All right, here we’re highlighting a testimonial. It says from Dan, “If you’re looking for something to work for cross functional teams of admins, and here’s the GearSet is really a no brainer.”. It’s a nice, it’s nice. It’s a nice thing that they like you. Right? But what is success is their quantifiable success that they’re trying to do. What is this testimonial actually say? Was that Brent was the owner, maybe what else?

So if you see a lot of you will do do this today, your key call to action will be book a demo. Right. And we’ve done this long enough to know that if you get loads of traffic, that your unique visitor to demo ratio is going to be about 2% 2% which means 98% or somewhere else. And

Kevin Boyle 
It does say this, it does say something about the island. If it does say something you might recognise in yourself about who you are. There’s something about who it’s for. Okay.

Nopadon Wongpakdee 
But what is the success look like?

Matt Lerner
What is when it’s unparalleled? What does that actually mean? Like, what are the metrics.

Kevin Boyle 
Shares, actually, this one is about the fact that it’s cross functional. So one of the real challenges for Salesforce teams is you have this this mic I’m speaking into, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t work. The difference you have is that spoke to my BA background, and get those two types of people that work together is really challenging. So that’s why we call it the cross functional.

Matt Lerner
So it’s like it helped our software and our BI teams work together on Salesforce, or it enabled them to something like that.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So do an audit, go across your website. All of us are in SaaS. So we should have goldstar, some sort of quantifiable testimony that says I achieved blah, blah, blah, efficiency, or what do we have here? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no testimonials. You’re a Salesforce user, and bla bla bla, bla, bla, bla bla bla. So okay, go through and audit your website, find your testimonials. Take a look at make sure that the testimonial you’re highlighting actually aligns and says the thing that that ICP wants to do. Sounds like a no brainer. But I understand that getting testimonials is difficult. And you’re like, first of all, we have to have something a customer who’s willing to come on the record and say something, right? Craft your testimonial say, “Would you be okay with saying something like this?”. Sometimes it’s sensitive, and people won’t be willing to come out and say, you know, before using you know, such and such were absolute mess. All right. redact the company name see leading something, something something right, because people do understand, it’s hard. If you don’t have any good testimonials, take one of your prospects, right? And this is your headline. Ask them, What is it that we allow you to do? Describe the transformation you would expect from using us? Right, whatever that comes out of their mouth. That’s kind of your headline, that’s the now you can, whatever comes out of your mouth, you can actually use that for a testimonial. Right? That’s not, that’s not misleading. They actually said that.

Using testimonials to demonstrate software’s benefits.

Matt Lerner
I just put up some examples of testimonials from another site from a BoS attendee that I think does a good job of highlighting the benefits in a measurable way. The specific benefits.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Yeah. Now you can get more sales from your emails.

Kevin Boyle 
You say to your client, 360s, they will work with you. And then they say, “Okay, sure.”. You send it, you send them a list of questions ahead of time, blah, blah, blah, then you ring them up, or you go into whatever you go through the discussion, you take notes, or you record it. And then you say, look, would you mind? And if it’s favourable, right, you would have done it otherwise, would you mind? I some of these back to summarise this back to you. And if you’re okay with it, would you mind them posting is the recommendation on LinkedIn. So you do that, you tighten it up, make it look neat, emphasise the bits you want, send it back to them, feel free to change it, say and then they usually tweak it, and then they post it on LinkedIn. And the advantage of posting it on LinkedIn is you can’t post recommendations about yourself on LinkedIn. Right? They post it on LinkedIn. And then of course, you could extract it and put in your website wherever else. Anyway, a suggestion.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Thank you. Yeah. Just make sure that that outcome, though, is exactly what they’re looking for. Yeah, don’t waste this wasted opportunity around. And again, these are fine. I think not all testimonials are created equal. So I would curate better. These are curated, but um, you know, I’m not actually reading these. Do we have any case studies on this page? Are they hidden in a place called “Resources” or company ebooks, white papers, webinars, recordings, upcoming events? Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. How about under customers? I bet you those studies, more customer stories. Okay. So here’s, here’s another thing. You have to sell your case studies. This is like marketing 101. This is like, basic, you make a claim. You have to prove it. All right. Every one of us loads of us actually go through and hide our case studies in the menu somewhere under customers or resources. What you want to do is you want to take a page out of newspapers, right? And there’s a concept called Relevant Abruption, where it’s a headline, and you’re walking down the street and you see some headline and you stop, it snaps you out. And you’re like, oh, what’s going on here? Right? You want to utilise Relevant, Relevant Abruption to sell case studies. What does that look like? I guess open up audience again, I’m sorry, you guys are doing it. So, here, scroll down. Keep scrolling.

Matt Lerner
There must be a, here we go.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Do keep going. Okay, there we go. So my only criticism of this is you have a testimonial audiences unearth hidden insights that I can’t wait to start implementing. So to get a gold star on this, I would have to say have a face happy customer quote is their their title. Another way that this could have been improved is having some sort of ROI on it. But there was see how all right, they’re scrolling through their page. There look. Oh,

Matt Lerner
There it is. That’s a better one.

Creating a lead magnet for a software product

Nopadon Wongpakdee
There’s another keep going. That 150 2% increase in revenue for marketing emails, your job is to make people call bullshit on you to say no way that that happened. scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, no way. 52% I bet some small company. And then Oh, Pastor, evangelist. I’ve heard of these people. Download the case study, right? This is how you sell a case study, you would bend over backwards to get prospects to see your case studies to highlight your success. Why do you hide them? Don’t make them work, treat them, you know, spoon feed them the information you want them to see. So this is a great way to stop people from scrolling and to present them with the outcome, the exact outcome surprise that was in their head that why they would want to use you. Does that is that clear? Right? So audit your case studies. Take a look at them. Is there something quantifiable in that? Why is that not in the headline? Why is that hidden? Move that up. And here I can guarantee it’s not gated. gating means where you when you you have to give an email address or something to download the the thing. And so great. Don’t gate your case studies. Again, you would pay money to make sure that people read your case studies. Right. Don’t get in their way. You want to share your success you want to show off. All right.

Matt Lerner
Great, do the new honour. Do you want to keep going on? Yeah,

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So I hope that was some of that.

Matt Lerner
We’ve got we’ve got to another volunteer. And it’s Simul8.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Okay.

Laura Reid
So Laura, what’s the euro? Are you up to this? All right, and on a scale of one to 10. Okay, and what’s your website address?

Laura Reid
It’s www simul8, S-I-M-U-L-the number eight.com.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
What is it?

Matt Lerner
Simul8

Nopadon Wongpakdee
I know but I wanted to hear the URL once more

Laura Reid
simul8.com

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Okay, Could you spell it

Laura Reid
S-I-M-U-L-The number eight.com

Nopadon Wongpakdee
How many times you have to do that

Laura Reid
Okay, we’ve even had an employee that couldn’t pronounce it after working with us for seven years.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Okay, so did we pop it up yet?

Matt Lerner
Haven’t yet

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So ICP?

Laura Reid
Industrial engineers, data scientists the people are going to be using it.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Data scientists and industrial engineers. Okay. So let’s see. Whether without data on a desktop, what else? Simulating something okay. Okay. Okay, let’s see if you’ve been paying attention. What are we going to look at next? Okay, let’s see. On whether we can just Alt Tab to like, move between tabs or something like that. Now you can simulate decisions in minutes. From day to day to okay, I’m a bit annoyed with that. But Is anybody else a bit like having to wait? So show of hands? Something to consider. Okay. For a notebook, what are we looking for in a sub headline? Now you can say, what’s the sub headline? What three questions are we answering?

Audience Member
Who? Who watch and when?

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Who sat down? The lady’s voice? What do you do? Who is it for? Oh, thank you. Yeah, you want me to say it again? Yeah. So what is this? Who is it for? The ICP? What’s the benefit? How are you going to help me where others have failed? Right. So does it pass the test? doesn’t pass simulation software. Okay, simulation software. I’m not ICP, but I think that’s what it is. The benefit? It’s intuitive, fast and effective. But who’s it for? Right, so it doesn’t pass that. So who is it for? So if I were to put you on the spot to wordsmith it again, what would you say? What is it simulation software? For data scientists, industrial engineers. Yeah.

Matt Lerner
So you can? What’s that? Like? Why would I want simulation software? So I can…I mean, I would guess that I want to make better decisions faster. But yeah.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Okay, fine. So we’ve got the headline sub headline. And then we got get a demo, demo. I don’t even know what news simulation is. So my my clicker on that? Scroll down, man. Okay, we have a video not gonna watch it scroll down. Oh, that’s actually pretty good.

Matt Lerner
So good. Now you can. Well done.

Laura Reid
I wish who does that get credit for that.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Is your marketing team here?

Laura Reid
No, no, no one’s here.

Matt Lerner
That might be a good main headline for the site, and then just pay it off with simulation software for so you can sort of.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Yeah. So next thing that we’re doing here on the right, which I think is interesting, is you’re taking a very complex sort of workflow or concept and showing not telling, right, so it’s easy to sort of base your decision on truth on HANA. Take a look on the right. Okay, like I kind of sort of starting to get what’s happening here. Right? Keep scrolling, here we go. Ah, good. Understand, reveal forecast. How did you choose these words?

Laura Reid
It was done a few years ago as a group exercise, but what we try and do with our users, I mean, in some ways, we’re lucky because we do have a team of consultants who do what our users do.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
Can we go back to the homepage, Matt? Yeah. Did we have any case studies? Keep going. These are great. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Okay, social proof. Ah, oh. quantifiable. Gold Star 400%. Demand. Amazing. I’m caught I call bullshit on that. So I want to click that read case study. Great. Scroll down. That’s awesome. That’s really good. Other than your flash, other than your flashing but the the thing also sort of bring up that I don’t see here yet. Do we see anything gated man?

Matt Lerner
In terms of like call to action? Yeah,

Nopadon Wongpakdee
nothing gated.

Laura Reid
Shouldn’t be there shouldn’t be anything gated.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
What’s gated? There shouldn’t be anything. Okay. So here we go. apologise for those who were sitting in the corner, you have to hear this again. So if get a demo is your highest priority, right? If you don’t get a demo, what’s the second highest priority? What’s the second highest priority for you? Rich? You can market. Okay. So capture some sort of identifiable information, right. But what do we do? Sign up for our newsletter? Follow us on our socials. Why do I need an like, why do I need to sign up for newsletter for an accounting software? Tell me why don’t care. Right. So all of us when we’re trying to make progress, particularly when we’re buying software, right? We go through stages, right where we recognise we have an issue. Right? You know what the issue is? Now you begin researching what the space looks like, figure out what my options are, what directions I can go, then hopefully I land on your site. Right. I’ve shortlisted you. And now I’m making loads of mental trade offs around what’s going to work for me what’s not going to work for me. I looked through the features through the checkboxes, all of those things. Before they get to you, what are they trying to understand right away, I want you to think about this as I want you to become a trusted adviser. I want you to help your prospect, make progress. How do I do that? So imagine a friend of yours came to you, who’s an ICP of your product or service? And they said, Hey, I’m struggling. What should I do? Okay, what would you do with your friend, you would say, Alright, tell me a bit about where you are. Okay, interesting. Your stage, there’s probably two or three paths that you can take, okay, you could probably go down this, this path, it’s a bit expensive. And this is what they don’t tell you, if you go down this path, be careful of these things. Or you could go down this path, and you probably get going much quicker, you’ll probably run into some blocks here and there, and then you’ll probably have to transition off of it. Once you get bigger, right? That’s you being a good friend, that’s you, you know, explaining the lay of the land. That’s what your lead magnet, your first lead magnet should be. When someone is coming to your site, they’re not trying to figure out, you know, if they’re not getting a demo, they’re not ready to speak to a salesperson, how many of you have prepared for demo, meaning bend the prospect? Did your homework, looked around, looked at pricing first to understand what the competitors are offering so that when you sat through the demo, you felt like you could have you could defend yourself in the demo? And say no to this, or I need this? Anybody ever do that? Or am I the only like paranoid one? Okay, so think of all the questions all that time researching, you had to do to come up to speed on how things can be solved, what technology is available, who it’s appropriate for, think of all that work and desktop research you had to do. You need to bundle that up for your prospects can you can get that because it’s actually something useful. But this is not a sales pitch. This is not all roads lead to our company. This is not all other solutions or shit, you have to use us this is you really having to be a trusted adviser, and showing them, hey, we’re confident enough to say you can go down this path we might not be for you. Does that make sense? Right, this is not a brochure,

Matt Lerner
I guess the thinking here is if you’ve got book a demo, and 2% of people are clicking on that, the other 98% are probably good traffic, I can’t imagine why someone would go to simulate.com. If they weren’t looking for a simulation software, they’re probably good prospects, it’s just not the right time. So then the question is like, what can you do for the other 98%, that will endear them to you be helpful, and maybe get the email so you can drip on them.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
But before just want to say one more thing, if you aren’t leading this conversation with your prospect, someone else is, if you’re not the person who’s telling them what the lay of the land is. Right, being a trusted adviser, you’re opening the door for someone else to be their trusted adviser. That’s up to you, Bob,

Laura Reid
This the story that I didn’t talk about yesterday was from auto books. And what we realised is a demo was on our sales process. But when we learned what a demo meant in their buying process, we actually need three different demos, a demo and passive looking as I need to learn the language, a demo in an active looking at show me the possibilities, a demo and basically deciding is show me the trade offs. And so they actually added three demos, instead of having one so they had to ask where are you in your buying process? One, and then two is based on that we can actually help you go through it. Now you’d think it’d be more but it cut the sales process in half and time and almost doubled. The number of of closes. But the fact is, is we tried to create one demo to fit everybody. And it turns out it’s more important of where they are in the timeline than basically your demo. Yeah.

Matt Lerner
So then you created three demos, like learn the language, understand the trade offs, see the product. Yeah, right.

Laura Reid
There are plenty of cases where I mean, Bob mentioned the intercom case where there’s different jobs. And sometimes there’s even some contradictions between the jobs, you know, and I’m wondering, you know, there seems to be this kind of we all get go down this path where there’s like the headline and the subhead and I kind of like struggle with how to think about that, like, do we abstract it all up to something in common and then break it down and, and do I don’t want to make like three different marketing sites, even though I kind of feel like I should, like, how do I connect those together, just kind of dealing with multiple jobs.

Matt Lerner
So there’s a couple options are, it’s a great question. Most of you probably have more than one target customer. One option is if you can find a single thing they all have in common. Like, I hate asking people for a copy of their passport, it’s, it’s not going to be something vague like all in one, blah, blah, blah, it’s gonna be a really specific, so if they all have one thing in common, great lead with that. If not, if you can really clearly distinctly call out the different desired outcomes in a way that’s not going to confuse people. You can make like a multiple choice like, com does this really well actually, it’s not b2b, but the best b2b example I know is in German. But yeah, like, so what do you want? What do you want to hear, improve your sleep quality, improve your focus, you know, relieve stress. And then you know, person and the simple, right? Like this is going to lead into their onboarding, but a simple version of that just leads to different landing pages. You know, what do you want to do deploy faster, you know, reduce errors, or collaborate better with my team? And then just split it up that way?

Nopadon Wongpakdee
We’re gonna go off piste a little bit. Let’s just talk about this for a second. So this is extra credit. Okay. So all you all of you like, have you done a cohort analysis? Have you taken a look at? Is this relevant to you guys? cohort analysis? Yes. Now? Anybody? Yes. Okay. So what do you do? You run the numbers, and you’re like, oh, surprise, February, retained slightly better than Jan, did we change a campaign? Did we? Did we do an event what happened? Right? You’re missing a key bit of information to actually have a useful cohort analysis. Take a look at this for a second. We’ll do this as an example in like a couple of minutes. And then I want you to think about it, how what it means for your business. Why people are hiring you? What are they trying to do? So congratulations, you’re now all the CEO of calm. Okay. So can we agree that all of these things this improve focus and self improvement, reducing stress and anxiety could fit under the umbrella of some sort of mindful sort of mindfulness umbrella? Calming umbrella? Yes. But can we agree that the outcomes are very different? Someone who’s looking to improve sleep quality, or someone who’s reducing stress and anxiety, are they different.

Matt Lerner
But if you’re looking for help sleeping, and you come to a website, and the headline is reduced stress and anxiety or improved focus, you’re probably going to think you’re in the wrong place.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So we’ve got two different outcomes. We agree they’re slightly different outcomes. So in your onboarding flow, would you onboard them the same way? No, no? Is the answer the activities that you would start them with, aka setup your dashboard for you guys or other things? Would you start from the same way? Maybe, maybe not. What I’m going to tell us if you know why people are hiring, what they’re actually trying to do. When you do your cohort analysis, it tells a different story. It says, Oh, shit, it’s the improve sleep quality people who always activate and always go to the paid tier. Oh, it’s the bring calm to my organisation that always churns after a month. Then you can run through with your bring calm to my organisation glasses, go through your flows, onboarding, signups? And do we say, do we actually help these people? No, we give them a generic onboarding. We don’t get have anything specific for them to do. That’s why they don’t activate. That’s why they don’t retain. I’m telling you now that when people come to your business, there’s not one thing that they’re trying to do.

Matt Lerner
Go ahead, I’m just gonna try to find a better b2b example.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
There’s not one, I think quantify changed, because

Brennan Dunn
Rightmessage.com

Nopadon Wongpakdee
And so what we’re trying to understand is the jobs right what why are people hiring you? And once you’re able to do that, then you can actually figure out

Brennan Dunn
What people scroll down a bit, you’re gonna see a little pop up in a second. Oh, you gotta get halfway down. So, here, what we do is we capture what basically what kind of business they’re in at the minute so say you choose software’s it’s rolled a software company. What will happen is now so go to like exit the page. So trigger the exit pop up. You’re gonna see now that all the messaging on the site is now going to be tailored, assuming that you’re a startup, so pricing page, even blog posts, stuff like that we actually go further that if somebody does opt in, we find out like what their CRM or email platform they uses. And then we do the same thing. So progressively, you’re gonna see if you use Active Campaign and your software business. You move around and you start seeing mentions not of like, Active Campaign, Infusionsoft HubSpot, blah, blah, blah, active campaigns, front and centre. And we’ve seen, obviously, this is kind of our we’re biassed, it’s our bread and butter. Yeah. But we’ve seen significant lift for both us and customers who it’s basically just niching without actually niching, which works really nicely.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So thank you. Yeah, great example. So think about your business. Right? Why do people hire you? What is it that they’re actually trying to do? No be when you do your customer conversations, you’ll find that the many reasons what you need to do is surface that as part of the signup process surface to that as part of the onboarding. And then we’ll be able to actually run an effective cohort analysis to see if we actually help those people make progress. So look, I’m we’ll stop here. If there’s any sort of general questions, we’ll talk. But for those who who volunteered, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Like very brave that. I mean, this was generally a massive q&a session anyway. So there’s any queue. Oh, Meredith. We’re gonna take two questions. Who hasn’t had? Like, I’m around anyway. So like, you want me to take a look at your website, like just grab myself or Matt or Martin? Who had questions? Mark? No margin, you know? Yes. Claire.

Audience Member
You said partway through that your advice would be different if you were the massive incumbent. We are the massive incumbents are being horribly disrupted. What might you say differently to for us?

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So when I was talking about the massive incumbent, generally what I find is there’s, they’re being clever with their sort of language and things like that. So what is your company?

Audience Member
IELTS, were the biggest high stakes English test in the world. Okay,

Nopadon Wongpakdee
so your ICP knows you, whatever. Okay, so I think you have permission to play to be clever, or whatever. But you should still be sort of benefit oriented in all of your, when you’re talking about your features, particularly just a headline, right? Like, Nike has an ad that’s like, Be your own hero, right? But even back in the 70s, when they did it, their ads were super functional, like waffle soul, like pointing at features, right? But now they’re Nike. And so congratulations for being the incumbent. All right.

Mark Littlewood
Oh, double congratulations for being aware that humility, yeah. Our work to do.

Nopadon Wongpakdee
So audit your website’s. Right now you can. So what? Align the stakeholders with outcomes? Audit your site’s for appropriate calls to action? Don’t waste your testimonials. And then yeah, grab us if you you want us to take a look at anything. Thanks a lot, guys.

Nopadon Wongpakdee

Partner, StartupCoreStrengths

A long-time practitioner of JTBD, Nopadon spent time learning from (and teaching with) Bob Moesta, pioneer of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework. He has refined this approach in his work at Startup Core Strengths, helping over 100 startups apply the Jobs methodology specifically to accelerate growth. Previously, he was an Entrepreneur In Residence with Citi Ventures, and coached in 500 Startups’ accelerator. He’s been working on SEO and inbound  since the late 90s, and has worked with over 100 companies.

When he’s not inspiring teams Nop enjoys Thai boxing and buzzing around London on his  one-of-a-kind custom-built Triumph T100 TR9C Roadster.

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