Podcasts about olark

L'une des qualités principales d'un entrepreneur c'est de savoir être efficace. Alors il existe plein de techniques de productivité, et beaucoup de livres sur le sujet : la semaine de 4 heures, the one thing, la 25ème heure, miracle morning, je vous laisse choisir. Mais sans remettre en cause toute votre organisation, vous pouvez déjà gagner un temps précieux en utilisant les bons outils : ceux qui vous permette de faire mieux et plus vite ce que vous faites déjà. Aujourd'hui je vous propose de voir comment on peut facilement et rapidement changer les choses. Allez c'est parti, je vous emmène dans les coulisses de mon activité et je vous présente les 13 outils que j'utilise le plus souvent et qui me font gagner un temps fou: Canva, Mailchimp, Loom, Video Ask, Atext, Go full page, Olark, Zencastr, Happy Scribe, Phantombuster, Tiny png, Ubersuggest et Zapier.J'en parle d'en l'épisode : Ecouter l'épisode avec Amy PorterfieldToutes les infos sur ma formation Stratégie IndépendanteMe suivre sur Linkedin  -------------------

From the archives:On today's episode I'm revisiting an interview recorded during the remote work life summit (2019) in which I share the secrets of blending human touch with technology in customer service with Ben Congleton, CEO and founder of Olark. Our conversation peels back the layers of how Olark revolutionized live chat communications, marrying real-time interaction with the convenience of digital platforms. Learn how they've upheld the human-centric philosophy since 2009, ensuring that their growth never eclipsed the company's mission to enhance efficiency and satisfaction for customer service representatives. Ben also reveals how they've navigated the waters of remote work, transforming challenges into opportunities for a flexible, yet deeply connected workforce.Navigating the complexities of a human-centric business, we unravel the threads of Olark's journey, from a shared vision among friends to a leader in empathetic customer service. Ben Congleton shares the significance of embedding a caring company culture into the fabric of their operations. He also illustrates how the company's approach has guided other businesses toward more remote-friendly and compassionate practices, thereby shaping the future of work. Our fascinating dialogue uncovers the intricate balance of technology and the irreplaceable human element in the service industry.Wrapping up with actionable advice, Ben provides a treasure trove of tips for standing out in job applications and acing the hiring process. He underscores the importance of aligning with a company's values and culture, as well as the power of effective communication skills. We also examine the critical nature of onboarding in remote work settings, ensuring that new hires are woven seamlessly into the organizational tapestry. Thank you, Ben, for sharing your invaluable insights, as we spotlight the heart of customer service and the art of human connection in a digital world.Want to work remotely from home or anywhere so you can avoid the morning commute and have more freedom? Download a list of 100 tech businesses that hire remote professionals and freelancersDOWNLOAD 100 Remote Business List FREE: https://remoteworklife.ioGet a Free eCourse and Remote CEO Insights That Reveal How to Grow Your Work-From-Anywhere Career, Get Hired And Thrive,PLUS Get A List of 100 Hiring Remote Businesses and learn:how to get clarity on your career direction so you can get hiredhow to thrive while working remotely so you can work at your best when you get hiredhow to network effectively so you can stay connected and up to date with what's going on around youhow to prepare for interviews so that you can get the remote job you wantSubscribe to my youtube channel for more tips and 100 more remote businesses just like this https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhJFgC4bbBsuSHOef8vpJw

In this episode, Jaime talks with Ben Congleton, CEO and Founder of Olark, about the results of his recent survey into how higher education leaders are allocating their marketing budgets. The survey sought to uncover where higher education marketers and admissions pros are planning to spend their budgets and time over the next year. As they delve into the survey results, Ben raises the curtain on its most compelling findings. Takeaways include: ·       Insights into the top priorities of higher ed marketing and admissions leaders·       How resources are allocated at different institution types·       Guidance on which channels might be on the rise – and which may be on their way out·       Tips for planning your own budget priorities·       Insights into the implications of spending trends This episode is brought to you by our friends at Mindpower:​​Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO is sponsored by our friends atMindpower- a full-service marketing and branding firm celebrating nearly thirty years of needle-moving, thought-provoking, research-fueled creative and strategy. Mindpower is women-founded and owned, WBENC certified, nationally recognized, and serves the social sector – higher education, healthcare, non-profits, and more. The Mindpower team is made up of strategists, storytellers, and experience creators. From market research to brand campaigns to recruitment to fundraising, the agency exists to empower clients, amplify brands, and help institutions find a strategic way forward. Learn more about Mindpower here!  About the Enrollify podcast Network:Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network.  If you like this podcast, chances are you'll like other Enrollify shows too!  Our podcast network is growing by the month and we've got a plethora of marketing, admissions, and higher ed technology shows that are jam packed with stories, ideas, and frameworks all designed to empower you to be a better higher ed professional. Our shows feature a selection of the industry's best as your hosts. Learn from Mickey Baines, Zach Busekrus, Jeremy Tiers, Corynn Myers, Jaime Gleason and many more. Learn more about The Enrollify Podcast Network at podcasts.enrollify.org. Our shows help higher ed marketers and admissions professionals find their next big idea — come and find yours! 

Introducing Density64/12/23Looking for a powerful CRM to manage your customers? Look no further than RhinoLeg CRM! With 73 features and starting at just $49.97/month, RhinoLeg is the perfect solution for any business. Developed by Antonio to gather a cult following, RhinoLeg will soon be available on both Apple and Android as apps, allowing you to take your CRM on the go. RhinoLeg also offers $99.97/month and $297/month subscriptions, giving you the power to choose what's right for your business.With RhinoLeg, you'll never have to write your own emails again. Our AI email writer takes care of everything for you. And the more you use the CRM, the smarter it gets. RhinoLeg is like having 40 assistants and 40 salespeople working for you.But RhinoLeg isn't just any CRM. It's a CRM that connects to your social media, finding people similar to those in your CRM and creating a message to send to potential customers. Antonio wants RhinoLeg to write, talk, work, and think for you, making your job easier than ever before.RhinoLeg offers a wide range of features, from contact management and sales tools to marketing and customer service tools. With RhinoLeg, you can segment customers, manage knowledge, track customer journeys, and much more. Plus, RhinoLeg integrates with social media advertising platforms and website analytics tools, allowing you to run targeted ad campaigns and gain insights into customer behavior.So what are you waiting for? Head to www.rhinoleg.com today and sign up for RhinoLeg CRM. Your business will thank you!Focus for Today We are not launched yet. This is not your plan. Your plan is #1 in App Store. How do you get this done? Antonio has been gathering data and being disruptiveToday, he's in beta statusAntonio's Guide to Being DisruptiveGet attention immediately at all costsGather a cult followingServe that cult following wellFix your prototypeGo back to the cult following and serve them well againYou should've been making more money the whole timeMake more moneyThe internet gives you options, which is the best and worst thing to happen to entrepreneurs   How can we make this the Instagram or TikTok of Business.     How can we dominate the cellphone? Do we really need a website? Do we? How can we create 1,000 super fans a day?  How can we get users to log on 2 hours a day? https://sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-stats-for-marketers/?amp How can we use the 4 major Social Media's to grow like Instagram did? How can we disrupt the Major 4 players like Instagram did? How can we make people look good, like Instagram Filters? Maybe makeover— but this will need to be instantlyHelp women look goodRhinoLeg CRM73 features$49.97/monthAntonio built RhinoLeg to gather a cult followingAfter the website comes out, it will be available on Apple and Android as appsCRM will be available to connect to your social mediaWill find people similar to the people who are already in your CRM and create a message to send to your potential customersAntonio wants the CRM to write, talk, work, and think for youThere are also $99.99/month and a $297/month subscriptionsAI email writerYou don't have to write your own emailsVYBNShort video platform that creates content for youCan digitize your face and avatarSample your voiceTranscribes your scriptsPushes out content for youThe more you use the CRM, the smarter it will getRhinoLeg is 40 assistants and 40 sales people.RhinoLeg FeaturesContacts: The core of any RhinoLeg system is the ability to store and manage customer contact information. This includes basic details such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses.Sales: RhinoLeg systems often include sales tools to help manage the sales process, including lead management, sales forecasting, and sales pipeline tracking.Marketing: RhinoLeg systems also often include marketing tools to help manage marketing campaigns, including email marketing, social media management, and customer segmentation.Customer Service: Many RhinoLeg systems also include customer service tools to help manage customer support requests and issues, including ticket management, knowledge base management, and customer feedback tracking.Analytics: Finally, most RhinoLeg systems include analytics tools to help businesses gain insights into customer behavior, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness.mobile app integrationMobile device access: The ability to access the RhinoLeg on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, for on-the-go productivity and customer management.Lead routing: The ability to automatically route leads to the appropriate sales team member based on specific criteria, such as territory or product expertise.Customer segmentation: The ability to segment customers based on demographics, behavior, or other factors, and tailor marketing and sales strategies accordingly.Knowledge management: The ability to create and manage a knowledge base of product information, FAQs, and other resources to help support teams provide fast and accurate answers to customer inquiries.Customer satisfaction surveys: The ability to send customer satisfaction surveys to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement.Forecasting and trend analysis: The ability to forecast future sales and revenue based on historical data and trends, and analyze market trends and customer behavior to identify new opportunities.Lead nurturing: The ability to automate targeted campaigns and communications to nurture leads and move them through the sales funnel.Multi-channel communication: The ability to communicate with customers across multiple channels, including email, phone, social media, and chat.Contract management: The ability to manage contracts and other legal documents related to sales and customer interactions.Payment processing: The ability to process payments directly within the RhinoLeg, making it easy to track payments and manage customer accounts.Social media engagement: The ability to respond to and engage with customers on social media platforms directly from the RhinoLeg.Customer journey tracking: The ability to track and analyze the entire customer journey, from initial contact to conversion and beyond, to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences.Marketing attribution: The ability to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and attribute revenue to specific marketing channels.Field sales management: The ability to manage and track field sales activities, including route planning, appointment scheduling, and order management.Voice-enabled commands: The ability to use voice commands to perform tasks within the RhinoLeg, such as scheduling appointments or updating customer information.Virtual meetings and webinars: The ability to host virtual meetings and webinars directly from the RhinoLeg, allowing for seamless collaboration and communication with customers and team members.Inventory management: The ability to track inventory levels and manage orders and shipments within the RhinoLeg.Customer feedback management: The ability to collect and analyze customer feedback, including surveys and reviews, to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.Machine learning-based lead generation: The ability to use machine learning algorithms to identify potential leads and recommend personalized outreach strategies.Document automation: The ability to automate the creation and sending of documents, such as proposals and contracts, directly from the RhinoLeg.Integration with social media advertising platforms: The ability to integrate with social media advertising platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, to run targeted ad campaigns and track their effectiveness.Integration with website analytics tools: The ability to integrate with website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to track website traffic and behavior and gain insights into customer behavior.Partner relationship management: The ability to manage relationships with partners, including tracking deals and commissions, and collaborating on joint marketing and sales initiatives.Social listening: The ability to monitor social media and other online platforms for mentions of your brand or competitors, and track sentiment and engagement.Gamification: The ability to use game-like mechanics, such as rewards and badges, to motivate sales teams and encourage healthy competition.Artificial intelligence: The ability to use AI and machine learning algorithms to automate tasks, provide personalized recommendations, and predict customer behavior.Predictive analytics: The ability to use historical data to predict future trends and behaviors, and make data-driven decisions.Sales coaching: The ability to provide training and coaching to sales teams, using analytics and feedback to identify areas for improvement.Business process automation: The ability to automate routine tasks and workflows, freeing up time for sales and support teams to focus on more important tasks.Data visualization: The ability to create visualizations and dashboards that make it easy to understand complex data and identify trends and patterns.Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots: The ability to use AI-powered chatbots to provide customer support and answer frequently asked questions.Social media integration: the ability to manage social media accounts from within the RhinoLeg software, schedule posts, track engagement, and monitor brand mentions.E-commerce integration: the ability to integrate with e-commerce platforms, manage orders, and track customer interactions across channels.Document management: the ability to store and manage documents related to customer interactions, such as contracts, invoices, and proposals.Calendar management: the ability to schedule and manage appointments, meetings, and tasks within the RhinoLeg software.Customizable dashboards and reports: the ability to create customized dashboards and reports that show key performance metrics and provide insights into sales and customer behavior.Collaboration tools: the ability to collaborate with team members on customer interactions, such as sharing notes, tasks, and files.Email marketing: the ability to create and send email campaigns to targeted customer segments, track open and click-through rates, and measure campaign effectiveness.Referral tracking: the ability to track referrals from existing customers and measure the effectiveness of referral programs.Integration with phone systems: the ability to integrate with phone systems to log calls, track call duration, and record call notes.Localization: the ability to support multiple languages and currencies, and adapt to local business customs and regulationsContact management: A central database for storing and managing customer information, including contact details, demographics, and communication history.Sales Team and Customer Opportunity ManagementQuantifying the opportunities that your sales team has with customers is a relatively basic feature of RhinoLeg. Referred to as lead scoring, it allows users to identify the customers that are most likely to convert. This helps streamline sales/marketing teams, improve efficiency and optimize your sales process.Lead management: Tools for tracking and managing leads throughout the sales funnel, including lead capture forms, lead scoring, and lead nurturing workflows.Sales pipeline management: A visual representation of the sales pipeline, including stages, tasks, and deal value. This can help sales teams stay organized and focused on closing deals..Mobile app: A mobile app that allows users to access their RhinoLeg data from anywhere and stay connected with their customers on-the-go.Sales Analytics. On the subject of reporting, sales analytics is one of the most valuable features of a RhinoLeg. Users can create better sales campaigns in the future by analyzing the hard data of past campaigns. RhinoLeg helps you collect data from social media, polls and website traffic, then analyze it — all with the same software.Sales Forecasting. A large part of customer relationship management is determining a metric for success. Forecasting lets you create a benchmark by which you can determine whether your results are actually on par with your efforts. You can also use this data to determine where you need to direct future efforts.Email Client Integration. You can now gain all of the automation and the organization of a dedicated email client inside of your RhinoLeg user interface. Don't depend on Outlook or IBM notes — find a RhinoLeg that will do double duty for you. Then when a customer calls needing support, your reps can easily pull up their previous interactions and information to give them the best care possible.Workflow and Approvals. One of the ways in which your company will instantly increase its efficiency is by optimizing workflows. RhinoLegs can facilitate optimization by automating processes like data collection, data analysis, marketing campaigns and other tasks that were previously done manually. They also offer reporting and analytics to help users identify problem areas in order to improve them.RhinoLeg Data/File Storage. In order to maximize the usefulness of data, it must be properly stored. One of RhinoLeg's key features is a proprietary method of data storage so users can pull up the data in an efficient manner. RhinoLeg stores and manages all your sales-related files like proposals and quotes. It also offers safeguards to protect and backup this important data to prevent losses and security breaches.Files Sync and Share. RhinoLeg functions as the synchronization platform for many of your outside programs. Upload emails from Outlook, sync with Google Drive, import spreadsheets and more. Because of the sharing features of RhinoLeg, you can view all of your feature set from one platform.Inside Sales Console. The platform for increasing sales performance through a more efficient UI is known as the inside sales console. RhinoLeg systems offer optimized UI and data analytics to further streamline and improve the customer experience.Sales Performance Management. Among other RhinoLeg system features, sales performance management offers a range of benefits to sales teams. Managers can easily see what aspects of the sales team are performing well and which need improvement. Data can be organized by sales rep or by other quantifiers. You can manage the performance of sales partners from the platform to ensure your team is performing at its best. By identifying problem areas with concrete data, they can be more efficiently addressed.Marketing Automation Integration. Marketing automation allows you to more efficiently and strategically target audiences that are likely to be interested in what you're selling. A good RhinoLeg platform will allow you to control the terms of automating parts of your marketing program selectively.Chat Integration. The chat feature is priceless to a modern user. By integrating a chat program like Olark or LivePerson directly from your RhinoLeg, you can chat with employees, partners and provide customer support, all from the same UI.Product Level Quotes. A RhinoLeg functions as an inventory database for your products. Keep up with quotes for the products that you sell individually. Find out which products are doing well with customers and where sales are lost. Access this information from handheld devices, desktops and more.Campaign Management. Campaign management features allow you to manage your entire sales campaign from a single UI. This includes campaign ROI, scheduling, analytics and more. A RhinoLeg combines analytics tools with data collection software, then gives you and your employees numerous access points.Customization Options. Customization is one of the more basic RhinoLeg features, but it has far-reaching implications. The more customization, the more flexible the RhinoLeg. It's crucial to know your needs when it comes to customization before making a purchase. Will the software grow with your organization? Does it have the capability to adapt to and integrate with existing software used by your organization? Can it incorporate desktop productivity tools? Can it change when you need it to? If you answered no to any of these questions, you may need to find more flexible software.Social Media Management Integration. Dedicated SMM efforts can be managed from the RhinoLeg UI. Integrate management platforms like Oktopost and Hootsuite to streamline your social media management and allow multiple team members to work together from different access points.Case Management. Online case management allows you to manage confidential information in a secure environment. You can keep sensitive information of your customers and leads away from prying eyes that might use their data for identity theft or other harmful activities. This is essential to avoid cybersecurity issues and data leaks. The last thing any business needs is to get in trouble due to data security issues!Customer Service Automation. As the name states, RhinoLeg software is about managing relationships with your customers. Users can manage each customer case individually to improve customer satisfaction levels and track, close and reopen existing cases. It delivers automated services to personalize client communications. You can create a consolidated knowledge base of support information for quick access.Tracking. This RhinoLeg feature helps you keep track of customer journeys from the first point of contact to purchase and after-sales interactions. You can also monitor business-specific metrics like lead source, win rate and customer lifetime value.Project Management. Missing meetings is such a bummer, right? Instead of jotting down important dates in an Excel spreadsheet, RhinoLeg's project management capabilities make it easy to manage meetings with clients.With real-time alerts, you stay in the loop for upcoming events as well as any changes made to sales documents by your team members. Quickly overview your pending projects, so you don't miss any deadlines.Territory Management. You can route leads and accounts according to the customer's location. RhinoLegs let you segment accounts based on "territories" — geographical location, product type or even industry. Create hierarchies based on countries, states, cities and zip codes.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-secret-to-success/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Parlons d'expérience client aujourd'hui, et plus spécifiquement d'outils qui peuvent intervenir dans l'expérience de tes clients pour l'améliorer, voire même l'enchanter. Les outils ne sont pas indispensables dans ton expérience client. En revanche, ils peuvent être d'une grande aide ou apporter quelque chose de différent. Aujourd'hui je ne te parle pas d'outils lambda, d'automatisations, etc… On en a déjà parlé dans d'autres épisodes dédiés à l'expérience client.  Dans cet épisode, je te parle de véritables outils, au sens propre, à utiliser pour ton expérience client. Un outil n'est pas un conseil, c'est un objet physique ou digital dont tu peux te servir pour améliorer ton quotidien ou, en l'occurrence dans notre cas, ton expérience client.

L'une des qualités principales d'un entrepreneur c'est de savoir être efficace. Alors il existe plein de techniques de productivité, et beaucoup de livres sur le sujet : la semaine de 4 heures, the one thing, la 25ème heure, miracle morning, je vous laisse choisir. Mais sans remettre en cause toute votre organisation, vous pouvez déjà gagner un temps précieux en utilisant les bons outils : ceux qui vous permette de faire mieux et plus vite ce que vous faites déjà. Aujourd'hui je vous propose de voir comment on peut facilement et rapidement changer les choses. Allez c'est parti, je vous emmène dans les coulisses de mon activité et je vous présente les 13 outils que j'utilise le plus souvent et qui me font gagner un temps fou: Canva, Mailchimp, Loom, Video Ask, Atext, Go full page, Olark, Zencastr, Happy Scribe, Phantombuster, Tiny png, Ubersuggest et Zapier. J'en parle d'en l'épisode : Obtenir 20% de réduction sur Canva premium Ecouter l'épisode avec Amy Porterfield Toutes les infos sur ma formation Stratégie Indépendante Me suivre sur Linkedin -------------------

Ben Congleton, CEO and Co-Founder at Olark joins the podcast to talk about the enrollment power of a live chat experience, and how these chat transcripts in the aggregate can become some of our most valuable inputs and feedback loops for website content improvements.

In higher ed marketing, it is important to stand out from everyone else and create a sense of belonging for prospective students. One of the best technological tools for accomplishing this are live chat systems.   In this episode, Ben Congleton, CEO and CoFounder at Olark, talks about his journey to live chat systems from the early days of website chat providers and how they create a more accessible, seamless journey for prospective students.  Join us as we discuss:  How live chat differs from chat bots, automation, and AI  Where on your website to deploy live chat systems  What are best practices for staffing a live chat system 

In this episode, you'll hear from Ben Congleton who is the CEO of Olark, which provides live chat for university websites. You'll hear him talk about: the importance of live chat, and what its benefits are over texting how different universities have utilized chat and what their successes have been how universities can manage live chat, even with a small or understaffed team

In just a moment, you'll meet Ben Congleton —  Founder of Olark, a live chat software and data tool that serves colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes. Growing up, Ben wanted to be a professor like his father before him.  And while he completed both a bachelors and masters degree from Virginia Tech and started his PhD at the University of Michigan, Ben ultimately realized that he was a bit more interested in business than in higher education.So he decided to pursue one of the many business ideals he had noodled on for a few years. After starting a webhosting company, Ben realized that there was a dearth of great website chat tools – and he had this vision of making chat software that was as easily to install on a website as Google Analytics.And it was this idea that granted access to Olark (which was called Habla at the time) to Y Combinator, the most famous and prestigious of startup accelerators.So, he and his founding team moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and that's where things really started to take off. Tune in to hear the story of how Ben ended up living in Elon Musk's house next door to an apartment that Mark Zuckerburg had rented and ultimately bootstrapped the company to success. Discover more about how Olark can help your school get started with (or get better at) utilizing live chat at https://olark.com/enrollifyConnect with Ben on LinkedIn here. This episode is brought to you by Goodkind - an easy-to-use video engagement platform designed to make each of your prospects feel special, cared for and seen. Increase applications, increase yield, and decrease melt with the power of Goodkind.Starter Stories is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network.  If you like this podcast, chances are you'll like other Enrollify shows too!  Our podcast network is growing by the month and we've got a plethora of marketing, admissions, and higher ed technology shows that are jam packed with stories, ideas, and frameworks all designed to empower you to be a better higher ed professional. Our shows feature a selection of the industry's best as your hosts. Learn from Mickey Baines, Jeremy Tiers, Jaime Hunt, Corynn Myers, Jaime Gleason and many more. Learn more about The Enrollify Podcast Network at podcasts.enrollify.org. Our shows help higher ed marketers and admissions professionals find their next big idea — come and find yours! 

In this episode, I'm really excited to have as my guest, Sunir Shah, the founder and CEO of AppBind which lets digital agencies manage subscriptions to software and ads for the clients without getting stuck in the middle of the billing. He formerly ran partnerships at FreshBooks, marketing at Olark live chat, and founded the Cloud Software Association, the 4,000+ SaaS partnership network. AppBind helps digital agencies deliver projects faster by taking care of their clients' entire marketing system. In our discussion, Sunir talked to me about: Creating a solution by building a system Making things easy for your customers How the subscription economy helps businesses grow sustainably Listen to the podcast to learn more. https://innovabiz.co/sunirshah (Show Notes and Blog) https://innovabiz.com.au/innovabuzz/ (The Podcasts)

Featuring Sunir Shah, CEO of AppbindAppBind lets digital agencies manage subscriptions to software and ads for the clients without getting stuck in the middle of the billing. Shah formerly ran partnerships at FreshBooks, marketing at Olark live chat, and founded the Cloud Software Association, the 4,000+ SaaS partnership network.Episode quote:“There's a lot of things in the ecosystem around a customer, where they have to go to other companies or people. And those companies and people are the ones you have to work through in order to get your story told to the customer. And that's where you need the relationship. When you need to get someone else to tell your story to the customer and be unique, and they [partners] get to decide whether they do that or not”Visit the complete episode page to learn more. Or subscribe to the GRIN Gets Real podcast where you listen to podcasts.

Sunir Shah is the founder and CEO of AppBind. They've made it easy for service companies to purchase and manage subscriptions to software and ads without taking on the financial risk of being between clients and the recurring billing. SaaS companies are doubling their service channels' activation rates by fixing all the problems service companies have. He's also the President and founder of the SaaS partnership network, the Cloud Software Association; formerly head of partnerships at FreshBooks and CMO at Olark live chat; dad, and a bad dancer. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here: https://linkedin.com/in/sunirshah Learn more about his business and company links here: https://www.appbind.com https://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com

Ben and his co-founders of OLark graduated from the famous Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley with the opportunity to raise millions of dollars from investors. They opted not to raise money and bootstrap their company. A decade later OLark is a strong profitable SAAS company.  In this epiosde you get Ben's top tips. For the full story how Ben and the Olark team started the company, decided to turn town investors, bootstrapped the company and have been able to grow over the last decade, tune into episode #36.

Həftəiçi 5 gün, saat 08:00-10:00 arası 107.7 Avto Fm radiosunda "Tam vaxtı" səhər şousunu dinləməyi unutmayın !

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com. Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Remix: Nathalie Phan, Tesha Richardson, and Morgan Pierce”#womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Nathalie Phan https://twitter.com/natphantastichttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nathaliephan/Guest,Tesha Richardson https://www.linkedin.com/in/tesharichardson/Guest,Morgan Pierce https://twitter.com/morgnpiercehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/morgnpierce/Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:On Vinyl Media, https://www.onvinylmedia.com/Olark, https://www.olark.com/SEBA, https://seba.swiss/Credits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Nathalie Phan, Tesha Richardson, and Morgan Pierce

What is up PartnerUp? Is it better to play against the Casino, or be the Casino? As the saying goes, "the house always wins." Same can be said for your go-to-market. Successful ecosystems are not about playing the market, but about BEING the market. You don't want to miss this one with the legend himself... We're joined by Sunir Shah of the Cloud Software Association (CSA), AppBind, and formerly Freshbooks and Olark. Sunir has seen well over a decade of partner transformation and as the Founder of the CSA, has probably talked "partner" as much as anyone in SaaS. Don't forget to join in and follow the conversation at https://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com

And On Today’s Episode …  Today I'm featuring an interview from the Remote Work Life Summit (2018) featuring Ben Congleton CEO Olark and he shares his philosophy and perspective on the importance of human to human connection to build a remote team. Let me know what you think. About the podcast and community  Welcome to the Remote Work Life Podcast, where real-world remote work CEOs and leaders talk about how they hire, network, collaborate and thrive. Join me and more than 5000 followers in customer success, marketing, product and engineering to learn skills you need to work online from anywhere. I am your Host, Alex Wilson-Campbell - I’m Interview Coach and Tech Recruiter on a mission to help you gain clarity and direction in your career AND uncover hidden jobs through one-to-one and group coaching.  

Today I welcome marketer and entrepreneur Sid Bharath to Your Partner In Success Radio. Sid is the CEO and Co-Founder of Broca, a platform to generate marketing content using AI. Prior to starting Broca - which is all about content marketing through the power of AI (artificial intelligence) - Sid worked with numerous tech startups as a marketing consultant.  He previously led marketing teams at companies like Thinkific, LemonStand (acquired by Mailchimp) and Gorgias. Sid has also consulted and run ads for dozens of companies like ClickUp, Typeform, Procurify and more. Sid was #7 employee and VP of Growth at Thinkific, where he was in charge of growing the MRR. During his time, they 20x the MRR and reached more than 6,000 paying users. He's also known as a marketing consultant who has worked with amazing companies in San Francisco like ShareDesk, Olark, CartHook, ReCharge and many more. Sid joins me to share tips about: How to identify your top marketing channelsA framework for growthLessons learned starting a new tech companyTips and tricks to raise venture capital  Find him on the internet: Website | Website| Twitter | LinkedIn

About the podcast and community  Welcome to the Remote Work Life Podcast, where real-world remote work CEOs and leaders talk about how they hire, network, collaborate and thrive. Join me and more than 5000 followers in customer success, marketing, product and engineering to learn skills you need to work online from anywhere. I am your Host, Alex Wilson-Campbell - I’m Interview Coach and Tech Recruiter on a mission to help you gain clarity and direction in your career AND uncover hidden jobs through one-to-one and group coaching.   And On Today’s Episode …  This is the remote work life's 'remote voices' where I highlight top remote leaders and CEOs to help you navigate the world of remote work. Today I'm featuring Ben Congleton (CEO of Olark) and I chose an interesting segment of our conversation in which he shares how his team enhances candidate experience in the hiring process. Let me know what you think.

Sid Bharath is an entrepreneur and SAAS marketing consultant. He works with software startups to help them identify their best growth channels and scale up in a data-driven and systematic manner.He was #7 employee and VP of Growth at Thinkific, where he was in charge of growing the MRR. During his time, they 20x the MRR and reached more than 6,000 paying users.He's also known as a marketing consultant who has worked with amazing companies in San Francisco like ShareDesk, Olark, LemonStand, CartHook, ReCharge and many more.He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Broca, an AI software that generates marketing content, such as ad copy and blog posts. Previously, he was a marketing consultant for numerous high-growth tech startups. Website: https://www.siddharthbharath.com/   LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/sidbharathTwitter: https://twitter.com/Siddharth87

Ben Congleton and his co-founders of OLark graduated from the famous Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley with the opportunity to raise millions from investors. They opted not to raise money and bootstrap their company.  Ten years later OLark is still kicking butt. Learn the windy road that led Ben to co-found OLark and how they've been able to grow the company into the top live chat software for sales and customer support on the internet.  Check out our monthly Build a Business Success Secrets newsletter.

Episode 435 : Nous espérons que vous avez survécu au plan caniculaire et aux chassés croisés de la semaine du 15 Août. Peut-être que vous êtes encore en vacances, en attendant, on vous propose une veille social media !Adobe Photoshop CameraPour les adeptes et utilisateurs de longue date de la suite Adobe, photoshop, indesign, Illustrator ou autres audition et Lightroom, un nouvelle app vient de rejoindre la famille et elle s’appelle Adobe Photoshop Camera.Pour vous décrire l’application en quelques mots :Tu prends une belle photo soit via l’application soit dans ta pelliculeTu y ajoutes la puissance des outils photoshop (d’ailleurs ton téléphone le sent passerUne bonne pincée d’intelligence artificielleEt ça donne des effets de dingueDans le principe on est sur une banque de filtre, comme pour les décos de stories ou les filtres snapchat ou les filtres en réalité augmentée. L’application dispose de quelques filtres de base et tu peux en télécharger d’autres.L’application dispose d’une Reconnaissance faciale; reconnaissance du ciel, des bâtiments et après la magie photoshop fait le reste.Comme pour les filtres de réalité augmentée, la banque de contenus met en avant leurs créateurs et leurs comptes insta.Côté retouchesChaque filtre dispo de plusieurs variantesEnsuite tu as les outils de base de photoshop pour retoucher l’image et le filtre : clarté variance ombres exposition saturationL’objectif d’Adobe avec cette app est d’ouvrir de nouveaux horizons créatifs et en temps réelEt on peut aussi imaginer que le roi de l’image commençait un peu a être dépassé par des systèmes certes plus modestes comme les filtres fait maison ou les panoplies d’effets développées par les plateformes sociales.source——Pinterest dépasse les 400 millions d'utilisateurs actifs mensuels, grâce à la nette progression du nombre d'utilisateurs des générations Y (+36%) et Z (+50%), mais aussi des hommes (+48%)Ce que j’ai trouvé super intéressant c’est de regarder plus dans le détail comment ils utilisent la plateforme qui se définit comme Pinterest, la plateforme multigénérationnelle incontournable pour vivre ses rêves.Première population qui s’est ruée sur l’application : la génération Z.La génération Z est arrivée en force sur la plateforme, le nombre d’utilisateurs de moins de 25 ans augmente 2 fois plus vite que ceux de plus de 25 ans. Et ils n’en font pas le même usage, ils l’utilisent pour littéralement organiser leur vie avec 2 grands axes : élaborer son plan de carrière, voire même son plan de vie, et les initiatives sociales dans lesquelles ils pourraient s’engager. Les recherchent portent autant sur les conseils d’orientation pour leurs études que sur l’égalité des sexes ou l’évaluation de la santé mentale. Rassurez-vous, ils en ont aussi une utilisation moins cérébrale et font comme tout le monde des recherches de déco intérieure et succombent aux modes les plus étranges, comme l’illustre l’explosion de la recherche « mode cottagecore » qui a été multipliée par 80 !Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça me demanderez-vous ? Je me suis renseigné et le site billie.ca en fait une définition synthétique qui le résume bien « Imaginez-vous dans un chalet rustique, vous êtes entouré d’animaux, un pain aux bananes dans le four, et l’album Folklore de Taylor Swift joue en trame de son. Voilà ce que représente le cottagecore ».Seconde tendance : les hommes prennent la plateforme d’assaut et ce qu’il y cherchent à de quoi surprendre.Pour une fois, il semble que le réseau social ne soit pas le ring, le stade, bref, le terrain des comparaisons. L’Homme semble vouloir y développer ce qu’il a de plus subtil et touchant, de tourné vers l’autre et les siens en premier lieu. Il y cherche des idées pour s’occuper de la maison (cuisine modulaire » x12) ou renouveler leur garde robe avec gout voire se maquiller ou trouver de jolis soins pour la peau, cuisiner des diners à la poêle ou faire du pain traditionnel. Pinterest devient l’exutoire où les hommes viennent exprimer leur créativité sans avoir peur d’être jugé ni ressentir le besoin d’être dans la surreprésentation de leur virilité. Je vais enfin pouvoir arrêter de faire semblant de m’intéresser aux tatouages traditionnels japonais des yakuzas et trouver de bonnes recettes de savon de Marseille à fabriquer soi même pour enlever les tâches de gras sur mes tee shirts blancs.Enfin, la génération Y s’y éclate toujours, surtout maintenant que le confinement leur a permis de faire le point. On doit avouer que c’est l’âge auquel vu de l’extérieur, t’es un peu chiant. les centres d’intérêt avérés sur la plateforme portent sur construire une maison de famille, acheter un salon de jardin, faire des plannings pour les enfants ou trouver des cours de maths pour maternelles. Petit grain de folie : 58x plus de recherches sur la coloration de mèches de cheveux et 111x sur la mode des bijoux en or, ça sent la refonte des bijoux de mamie en petits anneaux tous mignons qu’on peut se partager. J’aime bien la synthèse que nous en fait Pinterest dans son infographie : les objectifs des Gen Y, dont on fait malheureusement partie, sont acquérir des compétences de vie (je sais pas ce que c’est), trouver des idées pour organiser des réunions de famille et des conseils pour s’adapter à la nouvelle normalité (je sais pas ce que c’est non plus, peut être que c’est d’être devenus chiants en vieillissant).Je veux rassurer les autres générations, en vrai ce qu’on cherche sur Pinterest c’est comment fabriquer son propre ballon dirigeable pour faire triper ses enfants, les techniques des poètes du 19e pour faire vibrer d’amour nos moitiés ou encore comment maîtriser les rudiments de 18 langues pour pouvoir voyager partout dans le monde sans encombre et se connecter avec toutes les populations. Mais on se crée de faux profils, en général de filles millenial pour le faire, juste parce qu’on est pudiques.source : les echos techsource : pinterest neewsroomGoogle en veut à Linkedin et sort une fonctionnalité qui risque de faire très malBon vous le savez en ce moment ça ne va pas super fort pour Linkedin. En raison de la crise du Covid, le RS avait annoncé il y a un mois souhaité se séparer de près de 1.000 salariés et cette semaine la plateforme annonçait la mise en vente de son service SlideShare…Les signaux ne sont pas au vert et Google vient en rajouter une couche avec une nouvelle fonctionnalité « add me te search ».En gros Google va nous proposer de créerr notre propre carte de visite dans le moteur de recherche.Obtenir une présence dans les résultats de recherche en tant qu'individu peut s'avérer difficile. Certaines célébrité ont droit aujourd’hui à une sorte de mini ficheWikipedia et pour les autres il n’est pas rare que le premier lien qui ressorte soit votre profil Linkedin.En gros « add me to search » permet de créer sa propre fiche Google My Business mais pour un individu. Une carte de visite virtuelle qui peut inclure un lien vers un site Web, des liens vers des profils sociaux et un mini texte de présentation et même une photo de profil.La fonctionnalité n’est pour l’instant disponible qu’en Inde et on peut imaginer un déploiement courant septembre ailleurs dans le monde.Facebook optimise son plugin MessengerOn a parlé il y a très peu de temps des nouveautés sur les messageries du groupe Facebook et notamment les prémices d’un jumelage entre WhatsApp et Facebook messenger.Aujourd’hui, je vais vous parler d’une autre bonne nouvelle pour les pure players et les petites entreprises : le plugin Facebook messenger est en train d’évoluerLe plugin de discussion Messenger est un outil gratuit, qui prend la forme d’une fenêtre de conversation sur le site web des entreprises. Comme Zopim, Olark, iAdvizeIl permet aux marques d’intégrer le chat de Messenger sur leur site pour :lancer des conversations,apporter une touche personnelle à l’expérience d’achat en ligne,fidéliser leurs clients.La nouvelle version du plugin lancée par Facebook offre un nouveau design, qui facilite les conversations et les rend plus intuitives.L’objectif est d’aider les entreprises à toucher plus de clients et interagir avec eux directement depuis leur site web.La mise à jour du plugin de discussion permet à tous les utilisateurs de contacter une entreprise, même ceux qui ne sont pas connectés à Messenger ou qui ne possèdent pas de compte Facebook.Avec cette mise à jour, Facebook souhaite répondre aux besoins des entreprises, qui ont augmenté leur présence en ligne depuis la crise du Covid-19 et sont de plus en plus sollicitées par leurs clients.sourceInteropérabilité des messageriesCa fait déjà bientôt 2 ans que Facebook nous parle d’interopérabilité entre ses services de messagerie. Cette interopérabilité permettrait par exemple à un utilisateur d’Instagram d’envoyer des messages privés à un utilisateur de WhatsApp ou de Messenger.Et bien il semblerait que l’on s’en rapproche à très grand pas. La semaine dernière certains utilisateurs ont pu voir apparaitre une pop up Instagram leur proposant la possibilité de discuter avec des amis Facebook directement depuis Instagram.Alors pas la peine de mettre à jour votre Instagram tout de suite, il est fort possible que cette mise à jour ait été déployée de manière accidentelle et que Facebook ne soit en réalité pas encore tout à fait prêt.D’ailleurs le Groupe Facebook n’a pas fait encore d’annonce officielle sur cette mise à jour.Venus de Gillette et son s'engage pour l'acceptation du corps sur Animal CrossingLa seconde actuelle nous vient de Mathilde, qui fait une veille active pour l’agence sur Animal crossing, merci pour ça. On avait parlé dans un précédent épisode du Superdaily des marques qui débarquent sur le jeu, comme Gemo et son défilé ou Just Est, cette fois c’est Gillette Venus qui s’invite sur le jeu mais pas uniquement pour faire la promotion de ses produits ! L’un des enjeux forts de l’époque porte sur l’inclusion, l’acceptation de soi, partant du principe qu’il est difficile d’être inspiré par une marque ou une campagne de pub quand on ne se sent pas représenté.Avec sa nouvelle campagne Gillette Venus invite le grand public à accepter ses imperfections ou encore les petites particularités qui rendent sa peau unique.Concrètement Gillette Venus propose aux gamers "des centaines d'avatars incluant tout type de peau : vergetures, rides, acné, taches de rousseur, psoriasis, vitiligo, cellulite, mais aussi tatouages et prothèses". Au total, ce sont 8 tons et 19 types de peau différents qui dévoilés, pour plus de 250 combinaisons possibles.Pour bénéficier de ces nouveautés, les joueurs doivent déverrouiller la boutique Able Sisters et accéder au kiosque de conception à l’intérieur.Cette campagne fait écho à un spot vidéo diffusé par la marque au printemps dernier dans lequel on voit plusieurs femmes avec des peaux très loin des canons habituels, marquée de tâches brunes ou de vergetures et cicatrices après plusieurs grossesses, puis le slogan My Skin My Way, traduit en français par « c’est ma peau et j’en suis fière ».Ça me donne envie de faire une recherche sur Pinterest sur comment fabriquer un soin de peau adapté à ma peau de blondinet tannée par le soleil des plages de France ou des conseils pour se raser sur les tatouages sans abimer mon derme, ma fierté.sourceVolvo et ses avocats bataillent pour continuer à se gaver gratuitement de contenu UGCUne histoire rocambolesque comme je les aime. Volvo est accusé d’avoir utilisé des photos d’un compte Instagram sans autorisation. Ce ne serait pas la première marque, ni la dernière mais les arguments avancé sont carrément couillus. Je vous explique.En avril 2019, un photographe, Jack Schroeder, un photographe lifestyle, organise un shooting photo avec une mannequin mettant aussi en scène une Volvo S60.Jack Schroeder publie quelques images sur son compte Instagram. Les CM de la marque trouvent les photos tellement belles qu’ils demandent via Instagram si Jack est partant pour qu’ils fassent un repost dans le feed de Volvo. Ca se fait, c’est un classique.Jack répond qu’il n’est pas ok à moins que la marque le rétribue pour les photos. Après tout, ce sont ses photos et si elles plaisent à la marque elle peut mettre un petit billet non ?Tout aurait pu s’arrêter là mais quelques semaines plus tard, la marque décide finalement de poster malgré tout les photos de Jack sur le compte Instagram de Volvo sans autorisation et sans rétribution. Le photographe est targué par la marque mais aucun accord n’a été donné.Après de multiples tentatives infructueuses pour demander le retrait des photos du compte Volvo, le photographe se décide à porter plainte. Et c’est là que l’histoire prend une tournure rocambolesque.Volvo ne se laisse pas faire et estime être dans son bon droit. Après tout, Jack n’a pas demandé non plus l’autorisation à la marque…La marque automobile prétend d’ailleurs qu’Instagram lui accorde une sous-licence pour re-partager à nouveau toute photo publique. Que du fait du caractère publique du compte Instagram de Jack Schroeder il a de facto accordé à Volvo une licence directe pour partager ce contenu.Bof, pas bien sûre de ça pour ma part.Mieux… Volvo affirme également qu’en taggant le compte du constructeur, Jack Schroeder a accordé à Volvo une licence implicite non exclusive de partage des photographies Instagram.Le procès est en cours et pour l’instant on a pas le fin mot de l’histoire mais c’est vrai qu’il y a une zone de flou.Est-ce que lorsque je suis photographe, que j’utilise une marque sans autorisation dans mon shooting et qu’en plus je taggue cette marque… Est-ce que dans ce cas là, la marque peut reposter mon contenu sur son compte Instagram ? Affaire à suivre.. . .Le Super Daily est le podcast quotidien sur les réseaux sociaux. Il est fabriqué avec une pluie d'amour par les équipes de Supernatifs.Nous sommes une agence social media basée à Lyon : https://supernatifs.com/. Nous aidons les entreprises à créer des relations durables et rentables avec leurs audiences. Nous inventons, produisons et diffusons des contenus qui engagent vos collaborateurs, vos prospects et vos consommateurs.

Ever wondered how a company can maintain genuine human interaction in the age of AI? Join us as we explore this question with Ben Congleton, the founder and CEO of Olark. Discover the origins of Olark's groundbreaking live chat software, and learn why Ben believes that real human touch in customer service is irreplaceable despite the rise of automation. From the unexpected journey of transitioning to a fully remote company to the tangible benefits of remote work, this episode promises valuable insights for business owners and job seekers alike.Meet the man who turned a college project into a thriving business that champions human-centric technology. Ben shares his thoughts on the pitfalls of over-relying on automated bots and emphasizes the importance of empathy in customer interactions. Hear firsthand how Olark's meticulous hiring process ensures they bring on board individuals who align with their core values. Whether you're running a small business or looking to join one, Ben's advice on tailored applications and communication skills will equip you for success.Looking ahead, Olark is gearing up to introduce innovative live chat products designed to enhance both employee performance and customer satisfaction. Ben gives us a sneak peek into future plans, including exciting tools like Dino Insight. This episode is a blend of gratitude, forward-thinking optimism, and actionable insights, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in building a business that truly cares about people. Tune in to hear how Olark is making business interactions more human and what this means for the future of work.Refer a Remote Work Expert As a Guest On The ShowClick here remoteworklife.io to subscribe to my free newsletter Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to transform your career strategy? In this episode, we chat with Ben Congleton, CEO of Olark, who reveals actionable advice on aligning your skills with your dream job. Ben emphasizes the value of intentionality and long-term planning, offering practical steps like seeking direct feedback from hiring managers and understanding the importance of follow-ups after job applications. Learn how to navigate job applications effectively, turn setbacks into learning opportunities, and ensure you are always moving closer to your career aspirations.Ben also sheds light on Olark's unique human-centric approach in the tech world, reinforcing their core belief that the world is better when we help each other. Discover how Olark, a software as a service company, prioritizes fostering human connections, even in a tech-based environment. Ben's people-first mindset offers a refreshing perspective on how businesses can operate more empathetically. Tune in to find out why persistence is key and how Olark's philosophy can inspire your own career journey.Refer a Remote Work Expert As a Guest On The ShowClick here remoteworklife.io to subscribe to my free newsletter Connect on LinkedIn

Olark's Ben Congleton tells the story of how he and his co-founders decided not to raise money and how they bootstrapped the company to success. We talk about how founders get caught up thinking they have to raise money, but really you don't have to and in fact, not raising money might be your competitive advantage. Ben shares things in this conversation he's never told, you don't want to miss this episode. Remember, you're just one business plan away from building the business of your dreams.

Ben Congleton is CEO of Olark and in this little excerpt, he highlights the importance of human to human connection in relation to job search.  And I couldn't agree more because in the age of applicant tracking systems and job boards you'll need that human connection to get the feedback you need to move on, improve and bounce back...

Ben Congleton is CEO and Cofounder of Olark Live Chat. Olark is Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud, and helps over 12,000 businesses grow by communicating with the right customer at the right time. Ben is passionate about building strong work cultures where teams bring their whole-selves to work.

Helpful links from the episode: Zendesk Helpscout Olark Zapier GatherUp app on Zapier GatherUp User Guide MozCon FULL SHOW NOTES[intro music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 10: Building Customer Success and Support for your SaaS.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to The Saas Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of Gather Up and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:44 Aaron: Welcome to The SaaS Venture podcast; I'm Aaron.00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:49 Aaron: And we have hit double digits, my friend.00:52 Darren: This is it. We've finally made it, big time.00:55 Aaron: Let's just shut it down.[chuckle]00:58 Darren: 10 episodes; this is our final episode.01:01 Aaron: But somebody that's just listening thought we maybe meant 10 years, but no, we just mean 10 episodes, but that feels good for five months into doing this.01:12 Darren: Yeah, we're gaining some traction. I think we're building a following, and I'm having a great time; it's been good.01:18 Aaron: Absolutely; I agree. So, hey, what's been going on with you since we last talked on the last episode? 01:26 Darren: What's been going on? Let's see... Well, I have a fun story to tell. Just the other day I was waiting for Violet and Jill to arrive at the gym, at the gym that I work out, and so that's also where Violet does her jiu jitsu class. So I'm on the treadmill and I'm running, just waiting for them to show up. And I never ride the treadmill, it's just that it was right by the door so I could watch. So I pressed the Stop button on the treadmill when they pull up and I go to get off. But because I don't ride the treadmill I didn't realize that it has, like, a slow down process. [chuckle] So I turn around to get off the treadmill, I realize it's still going as fast as it was when I was basically running full steam, and I was, like, full... Like arms, legs in the air, and landed hard on my back. [chuckle] And there were like three people come running over to see if I'm okay; I'm totally fine. I go to the car, and Jill is, like, in tears; she can't even speak because she saw the whole thing happening.[laughter]02:27 Aaron: Oh, perfect.02:28 Darren: And she's laughing non-stop. Thankfully I didn't really hurt myself, I just kinda got like a rug burn-type injury on my elbow, but I wish I could get the security camera video for it 'cause I would love to see it.02:44 Aaron: It would likely be a YouTube sensation, or make it into one of those compilations that you see on Facebook of exercise fails.02:52 Darren: I think it was worthy of that, for sure, yeah.02:55 Aaron: Well, I'm glad that your elbow is the only injury because, man, I've seen people... It looks like they... You can get knocked out if you fall on your head.03:05 Darren: I think so, yeah. So I was fine, just my biggest injury was my pride. I felt like a bit of an idiot at the gym there. But yeah. [chuckle]03:13 Aaron: Now, have you ever seen people who will walk on the treadmill, and it's set up where they can work... They're on a laptop while they're walking? 03:20 Darren: Yes, I have seen that before, and in fact, one of my employees, a developer that used to work with us, he had a setup like that in his office. And he would walk something like 15,000 steps a day. [chuckle] He was just, like, walk all day long while he was on his laptop.03:34 Aaron: Oh my gosh, I don't think I could pull that off. I would probably make it five or ten minutes; my focus would go elsewhere, and I would be like you. And then even at a walking speed I would end up down on the ground somehow.03:46 Darren: Yeah. You gotta really train and get used to that whole thing about working while walking. It would just be awkward, really, trying to type, I think.03:54 Aaron: Yep.03:54 Darren: Yeah.03:55 Aaron: Well, we gotta keep you upright, so let's leave the treadmill alone for a while.04:00 Darren: So we launched our new service, that Google My Business service that we were talking about last episode, and so I'm pumped about that. We were a little bit... We sent the email out to our mailing list on July 3rd, where I think most people were like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be gone", 'cause most of our customer base is in the US, and so maybe it wasn't the best time for a promotional email, so we're going to circle back on that in a couple of weeks. And we're trying to just do more promotion and build up the service; I'm excited about that. I'm also very excited about how our new account system is coming together, so with the Stripe integration and rebuilding all of our order forms, and just that whole user flow of signing up for our software or our services. So all that's being rebuilt in Stripe; that's awesome. And then of course, getting ready for MozCon which is next week. Can't wait to see you in person there. I should get my presentation finalized and all done here.04:56 Aaron: Yeah. By the time this episode airs we'll both be in Seattle and at MozCon; you speaking, GatherUp's there as a sponsor, but we'll get some time to hang out in person, and we're gonna try to record episode 11, in-person as well while we're in Seattle.05:16 Darren: Yeah, I can't wait; it's gonna be fun. We have to figure out where we're gonna do that recording.05:20 Aaron: It's gonna be a very top-secret location so that we don't, all of our fans aren't trying to break down the door to talk to us.[chuckle]05:27 Darren: Maybe we should at least have a window where the fans can watch.[chuckle]05:30 Aaron: Totally. Like some morning news show where they're just, like, screaming and holding signs.[chuckle]05:38 Darren: Yeah, totally.05:38 Aaron: We could pay somebody to do that; that would be the only way that would happen.05:42 Darren: I think, yeah, we would have to pay, definitely. How about you? What's up with you? 05:46 Aaron: On my side, I'm catching up after enjoying an awesome Fourth of July week where I was out of the office the entire week, just probably spent an hour to two hours each day on email and keeping some things moving, but it was a lot of time off, a lot of time with the kids. Time on the lake, which was awesome. But it always makes... The week you get back and all the things you kind of put off or said, "Schedule the call next week", now I'm basically living with the headset on the last few days, but all good.06:21 Darren: I was gonna say, it's like you get punished for taking that time off.06:24 Aaron: It is. It's double the work before you leave, and double the work when you get back, and that's right. You gotta make it count when you're gonna be out. It's like if you're gonna take all that punishment, then make sure you enjoy it.06:34 Darren: Totally.06:36 Aaron: Amazingly, we've talked a lot about my need and the work; we've had a specific episode on sales, but we have hired two outbound sales positions that start for us in the next couple of weeks.06:50 Darren: Amazing.06:50 Aaron: Yes.06:50 Darren: Yeah, I'm very curious to hear how this goes. Outbound sales, it's a whole new world.06:55 Aaron: Yes. So I'm incredibly excited; we got two great people. Both from referrals of one internal team referral and one from outside and few different things had to happen to get everything to align, but they're starting at the same time. So, a lot of my week... This week when I have spare moments is on materials and trying to get as much together for them to hit the ground running. So, plenty of work to do along those lines. And then related to the product, a really big piece that we've been working on for months that this is probably the first time we've had a feature big enough where we've built an Alpha of it first, usually it's a Dev Server in a Beta and pretty workable solution once we get going, but we've created an insights report that we have tied in with IBM's Watson to do natural language processing.07:53 Darren: Yep, that's nice.07:53 Aaron: So, you'll be able to... Yeah, understand sentiment of reviews... 'cause you might have a four-star review, where the customer talks about three really great things about the business, but then maybe has two things that weren't as good, and we wanna start to separate those kind of things out for you, instead of just attaching all of that content to a four-star review. We want you to understand what are the impact of, what are things that go on in a five-star experience compared to a two-star experience, so you can try to close that gap as a business and understand what those differentiators are. And then trends, what's happening on a week or a month or a quarterly basis that's increasing or decreasing, good or bad within how customers are talking about your business. So really big feature, a lot of work behind the scenes. We will be showing it off at MozCon and... Yeah, excited about that. And we're kind of targeting for the end of the month to get into an Open Beta with people.08:51 Darren: Great. Well, I'd like to get in on that Open Beta, check it out.08:55 Aaron: Yeah. No, I'll have a lot of fun giving you a demo with it. So, that will be fine.09:01 Darren: Yeah, I know it's Watson, is that a paid API you have to tap into? 09:06 Aaron: Yep, yep. Paid API, so we just have to tie into it, which that part obviously is already done. And now, you just get into the training part. We evaluated probably four or five different natural language processing APIs and theirs, I guess, kinda out of the box so to start with. We had two things going for: One, one of our engineers was already familiar with it, had used it in another capacity. And two, when we did some sample test results between these four or five solutions, we felt like it had just the most accuracy out of the box in the way that we were looking for. And no matter what... I mean, it's all about training, right? So you have to train the machine and everything else. But we felt like it was just a better starting point with it.09:56 Darren: Really cool. Yeah, awesome.09:58 Aaron: Yeah. And with that, new features are all about trying to make things better for your customers, the topic that you brought up I think is a fantastic one to address even deeper as taking a look at customer support, customer success teams, what do you need to do to build the right criteria, pieces, elements, processes, team, everything else to support your customers and to lead your customers to success.10:31 Darren: So I brought this topic up because I think we do a pretty decent job of it at Whitespark. If you look at our reviews, a lot of people talk about the excellent support that they get at Whitespark. We have good processes in place, we have a good ticketing software and live chat software that we get through Zendesk. But I wanted to bring this topic up 'cause this is gonna be an episode where it's like Aaron teaches me all of the awesome things. [chuckle] 'Cause I think that you've thought really deeply about this at GatherUp and you've really taken things to a next level and so, I wanna learn from you and I'm gonna be the question asker I think, and you can help me see some of the great ways that you guys have really taken your support to the next level.11:15 Aaron: Oh, I'm on the hot seat.11:16 Darren: Yeah, a little bit. Not really. I think that this will flow more naturally than a straight Q&A. But honestly, I really feel like you've got a lot to share here and that's why I want to bring it up.11:27 Aaron: Yeah, and truth be told, it's an area where we... It was probably almost two years ago now, where we realized we wanted to put a lot of focus into it. To your point with Whitespark and how you guys handle it and customers talk about that, I really think as a bootstrapped SaaS company, like "You have to win there," right? 11:49 Darren: Yeah, for sure.11:49 Aaron: You're not gonna win feature battles, you're not gonna have the 100 person sales teams, all these things that larger VC companies that can scale faster can have. You have to win with service and support as a bootstrapped SaaS company. We looked at and realize we need that to be a differentiator because some of these other things. We can build smarter features/cooler features, but they're gonna be able to build 50 to every five that we build.12:19 Darren: Yeah, exactly.12:21 Aaron: So, in looking at that it's like, "Yeah, you need that as a differentiator." And we realized that a long time ago. And to me, the biggest arc in this that yeah I'd love to talk about what we've done in questions you have but just this arc, right? It was a couple of years ago and funny enough, we were actually in Seattle. I think we were... I can't remember if we were at one of the... When they used to have MozCon Local. I think maybe it was at that, but we stayed a day or two later and we actually used Moz's offices to have an exec team meeting and we white-boarded out this timeline of what the arc looked like between customer support, which is completely reactive and customer success, which is completely proactive.13:08 Darren: Right.13:08 Aaron: And we tried to mark along those lines, like what are steps that we can take to continue to add more proactive and prescriptive things to what we provided and to make our team... We realized we needed more focus on customer success, as well as support but we really needed to make that entire piece the focus of GatherUp.13:31 Darren: Yeah, that's the interesting thing and I think this is where WhiteSpark can certainly improve and that's that proactive approach. Moving from Customer Support, which is when people are asking new questions to customer success, which is you're proactively reaching out to them and onboarding them, helping them out with things, noticing when they're not active in the tool. All those kinds of things that's where I'm really excited about, the potential for support and customer success. And I wanna hear more about what are some of the things you guys are doing like what... Do you actually divide them up into two teams at GatherUp? Do you have people that answer incoming questions and people that are trying to be proactive and reaching out to customers.14:17 Aaron: Yeah, so from a labeling standpoint, all the same team but we have started to... We look at where people's talents are and things like that and we are more giving them roles or responsibilities of this person based on experience, knowledge, personality. They're a great support person. They're great to answer email tickets and do these pieces and whatever else, where someone else like, "Okay, their level of understanding is really deep. They have a lot of confidence to recommend how to use features and they can be a little bit more leading with the customer. Like they're better fit for a customer success role. So we kinda call everybody the same, but we have started to differentiate what their main duties, what the majority of their time is spent on within that process.15:09 Darren: Yeah. And then I'm also curious. So tell me this, what percentage of your customers get a proactive outreach? Do you have to have a certain number of locations in order to sort of fall into this bucket where we're gonna proactively reach out or do you do that with everybody? 15:26 Aaron: Yeah, based on our pricing model, for us it is multi-locations. So the biggest thing for a new client, if we sell a multi-location that's almost always gonna be one-to-one demo and then we're gonna try to do a SOW with them to get an agreement to try to get them on an annual contract and part of that is an onboarding process. And then making sure we get everything set up right. We walk them through, we make them aware of features and all those other steps. And then what we've recently... And I know I've mentioned a couple of other podcasts, we had our team and then we hired a VP of Customer Success and Taylor came on and looked at like "Alright, great. You have this great set up and onboarding process but it kinda stops right at launch". And what he added was a 5th phase to it that's like, "Alright. Now, let's make sure in the first 90 days that you're hitting success metrics and you're getting value either statistically or emotionally out of the product and then graduating and then setting up quarterly business reviews to like, are they still hitting the things that you need them to? Are you on track to do the right things? 16:37 Darren: Yeah, that's that whole next level. That's I think really valuable when you start to tap into your best customers and really making sure that they're getting the most value out of the software. And then that also is a really great relationship building with your best customers where they just feel like you actually care. You're taking the time to reach out to them and they just feel really great about working with GatherUp.17:00 Aaron: Yup. And you discover so much about them when you have those types of conversations and when you get knee-deep in their data as well. And it's given us a more formatted approach. All the time in the past, I'm constantly jumping in and out of accounts and looking for signals on are they doing well, are they doing great, are they struggling, is there a challenge that I can see that I can reach out to them with. And now we're just building more and more of a system around that. We've talked in past episodes and we're just getting into this where we're gonna bring data to the table to help tell us more of those things more in-app analytics. That's still the piece of the story we're missing there. But now for our more valuable accounts, we're doing those types of things.17:45 Aaron: And then the other challenges then on the small business like the one location side, how do you wrap in when you have support opportunities to still provide them a little bit of success with it and as well provide them with as many resources as possible to be successful so that there are things on demand when they need answers or easy ways to talk to the support team I think are really important when you can't give all of yourself to a $40 a month customer or a $75 a month customer but you can give a little and also put them on to "Hey, here's a ton of content or tutorials or other ways that you can get your answers and be successful.18:29 Darren: Yeah. I think that's where we do a pretty good job. We have an email funnel. So when someone signs up for an account they're gonna get their welcome email, their next steps and then there's a series of emails that they're gonna get that sort of tell them about features of a tool and guide them through using the software. And it's pretty self-served. And so if they're not reading those emails, then we don't know. And the one thing that we don't do is we don't segment based off of account size and I think that's an opportunity for us. So if we did segment and we put a little bit more time into those higher value accounts, that's really a good take away for me, personally. And this one is to get a process in place to identify those accounts and then how are we gonna reach out to them and how we're gonna support them a bit better.19:13 Aaron: Yup, yeah. I would say that segmentation is really important and then the outlining exactly what you're talking about. How you can get to 'em. That has definitely been a game changer for us and it makes our customer success team is now in charge of renewals when they signed a one-year or two-year deal when that comes up for renewal. As we say, we should know with 99% certainty that they're gonna renew because we've been talking to them every quarter about of things are going.19:39 Darren: Absolutely.19:40 Aaron: You're not crossing your fingers. Will they renew or not? It's like, no, no we know how they feel about the product and how things are going and that we're a core part of what we're doing or we know like, hey this account is in trouble. We need to make an impact and a change quickly or they're not gonna give us any more runway to make an impact.20:00 Darren: Right? And your account man... You think you have an account managers, they're customer success people, but they're also account managers, and they're responsible for what 20, 30 different accounts that they have to keep an eye on.20:12 Aaron: Yeah, and that's some of the stuff we were just trying to... It'll be really interesting for the rest of this year and we're definitely gonna have some talks but how do we start to understand what each customer success rep can handle within their mixture of things especially is now we have sales people that are hopefully bringing more accounts that need to be onboarded, but we wanna try to get some amount of framework in place, so we know, when this happens, if we're sending out this many SOWs, we know this is the likelihood they're gonna close and so we know the likelihood we're gonna need additional help at this point in time, so we can just be ahead of it instead of reactive, where the team is like, "Hey we're buried. Please send help". That's usually when it's too late.20:56 Darren: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this fine line between support and sales. Like at my company, we don't have a dedicated sales person, we have our support team, which is basically frontline sales for us. People come in, they have questions about the product, our support team answers those questions, will send them links to sign up for things, they'll make recommendations about what would make sense for them. So they kind of become the sales people in a lot of these cases. If it's a large looking account, they send it to me, or to Nick. And we handle more of the SOW type account set up. In your case, like how do you do that? Does your front... Does your support offer sort of sales stuff for signing up ike the one-offs, is that how it works at GatherUp? 21:48 Aaron: Yeah, so our customer success team will do a couple of our single-location demos within a week. And there really isn't a hand-off at all for them. 'cause it's more of a give demo, answer questions, if there's any straggler questions, answer those, then it's self served to go sign up and then they'll reach back out if they have questions. We have the process things to what you alluded to drip emails, a quick start guide, we have a very in-depth user guide, we have a number of ways to help them start with this minimal human touch as possible and then the support team is there to answer questions as they need it. For anything larger, our hand-off is basically when that agreement is signed, so when the SOW is signed, then I will go to Taylor and say, "Alright, here's what the deal is, here's what it looks like." and a lot of times we're even having conversations before that, but then we're like, Alright, here's the person, our team is gonna handle it, we have a little, small internal information hand-off and then I'm reaching out and saying, "Hey great news. Here's your customer success rep, is gonna be Josh. He's gonna schedule your first meeting, and layout what onboarding looks like for you. And now, I'm here just to ride along if you have any overall questions or whatever, but you're in great hands and move forward. So we use that intro email and scheduling that kick-off meeting as the handoff from sales to customer success.23:15 Darren: Yeah, that makes sense. And what's your you cut off? So let's say, how many people will self-serve that happen to have 20 plus locations, do they just come through the website and, "Oh wow, they just signed up."23:27 Aaron: Yeah, yeah very few. [chuckle] And we really find some of the things that we've done to help identify that. We have our multi-location pricing is behind a gateway. So you have to put in who you are and how many locations when you're looking at something. So we use that to reach out and be like, "Hey great. You looked at our pricing you saw it's completely competitive and very valuable. Would you like a one-on-one demo?" So we use that to get them into the sales process at that time and the majority come in that way and we really sell... I would say the biggest differentiator we do customer success with anyone that's paying a set-up fee.24:07 Aaron: If someone says I just wanna handle it myself and do whatever else then we might back off it a little bit, but we find most people like, "Hey I'd rather pay the fee and I get a tour guide, I get all this one-on-one support, I get a process that really is gonna help me get the value out of this." and then we know that customer is pretty serious too so that format has worked really well for us. We will get on occasion, a 5-10-15 location that comes in and they do sign up themselves and put stuff into it themselves and if we run across it, we'll likely ping them. And just, what are things looking like? Is there anything we can be of help with? Would you like to jump on a call to know more? So we will try to intercede with that, but we really find the majority of them end up coming through our sales process.24:52 Darren: Yeah, that makes sense, especially since you have it behind a form. So if you've got multiple locations, you wanna see that pricing they're already in that funnel where the next step is to set up a demo and then it leads to SOW and a set-up contract and all that, stuff.25:06 Aaron: Yeah, and we had a lot of internal debate when we moved to that when we rebranded we went to that method for our reseller pricing and our multi-location pricing, and I ultimately settled like, "Okay we're showing our one location pricing, this is as expensive as it gets per location. And see the other... Who are you, your email, your business and the number of locations, the minute you submit that you see the pricing right then and there you can bookmark that URL and review it as many times as you want. And our sales process isn't... We reach out with one or two emails max just to make sure that they understand everything correctly. Do they have questions on pricing, would they like to see a demo? So we're just trying to be helpful, we're not gonna over inundate them. There's a few on our team that were a little apprehensive and it's worked incredibly well for us and...25:56 Darren: Oh, that sounds great.25:58 Aaron: Yeah, haven't had any push back on why can't I see all of your pricing, and to some extent a lot of our competitors don't even show one location pricing, you have no idea the cost at all until you talk to somebody. So...26:10 Darren: I hate that, whenever I go to a website, it doesn't have pricing and I'm like, Well, no, obviously it's too expensive, so I'm not gonna sign up. There's only one reason why you wouldn't show me your pricing. It's because it's like $20,000, I don't want it, so that's how I think about it every time. [chuckle]26:26 Aaron: Yeah, totally.26:27 Darren: I think your approach is really smart actually. And maybe, I don't know how prevalent that is, but showing the single-location pricing and then for multi-location pricing, fill out this little form. Now you've got the great lead-capture and you have delivered the pricing to them up front. They still feel good. All they have to do is just enter their name and email, they're gonna get that pricing immediately, and then you have your customer success team outreach to them. Now, those will be sales leads, right? For your new sales team.27:00 Aaron: Yep. Which is perfect to give them a handful of those coming in even though my new sales people, their main focus is... They're outbound, they're gonna be generating their own love in the world.27:12 Darren: I got so many questions, but we'll save that for the next episode on sales. Let's keep talking about support. I wanted to ask you about support contracts. This has come up. We have a number of multi-location clients that are unbelievably time-consuming on support. Like seriously, five hours a week, we spend answering their questions, going back and forth, re-answering the same question six times. It's just like some of these clients, we love them, they're great, they are awesome people, but they really need a lot of hand-holding. And I'm wondering... Right now, we do not have support contracts. How do you deal with this, with these really needy customers that need a lot of time and hand holding? What do you do at GatherUp? 28:00 Aaron: So we're just starting to address this as well, our last exec Summit, a month-and-a-half ago, this was one of our topics. And coming from the world of agencies, you had some of these same things as well. And you try to build those into retainers and kinda have it factored out that way, but I think support contracts are really important and I think most of it has to do with how you position it right up front in the process. And the best way to look at it is you outline... You're able to outline for... In our case, the initial conversations we had was something around like three tiers of support. And I guess I should maybe go one backwards. You're probably in the same position as... You offer amazing support and as your company gets bigger, that amazing support becomes harder and harder to be equal all the way across the board. 'Cause where you were doing it for dozens or hundreds, now maybe it's thousands of customers.29:02 Aaron: And to get the same responses within hours and outcomes and all those different kinda things becomes increasingly hard. And I feel the best way to handle it is to kinda say, "Alright you have three different options in working with us," like "Here's the software fee, but then we also have support that you can decide to purchase or not purchase. And if you don't purchase it here is kind of our standard rule of thumb: You'll get a response within 24 business hours or 16 business hours." But something that gives you leeway for them to understand. "Hey, I'm not gonna get something in an hour and I have to live with that, I want it included I want it has a for free, and I'm willing to live." And the right expectations have been set.29:52 Darren: Yeah, that's the key. That's sort of differentiating is 'cause this is the thought that someone may have is be like, "Well, can't I just get support? Why are you offering support to all these other people? Why do I have to pay for support?" And so I think those different tiers is where you can actually make a case for a support contract. That makes a lotta sense.30:10 Aaron: Yeah. Because you end up showing them like, "Hey if you really value this and you want fast turn time and you want guarantees and things like that, well then you can have it, you have to pay for it." It's like anything, if you want a better version that is bigger, better faster, whatever that might be, there's value attached to it, and so you're willing to pay for it. And then when the expectation is off, then you're at least able to say like, "This was communicated, you declined that. You said, 'I'm willing to live with two days or three days to reply for no additional money.'" So we'll see. This is in theory. And we used to do... I've done similar things like this in agency before around development contracts and e-commerce, and website builds. And they worked really, really well in those scenarios. It's just getting all of it to be done up front. The most important part is selling it upfront instead of having them get in and then when they have a problem, and then saying, like, "Oh, well, you can pay to get help faster." And then they're like, "I would've paid from the get-go, now I'm mad because it didn't meet my expectations. You didn't set proper expectations." That's when you get into trouble if you don't have that available, and they didn't make that choice, then you're just making where, "Oh, it is an option. You never asked, so we didn't tell you."31:34 Darren: Yeah. So absolutely getting it in advance is the best way to do it. So I have a client or two now that is quite needy, that I would love to get on a support contract, but it is a very awkward conversation at this point. And then the other potential concern I have is, you have this client who they send you, once a week, a 15-point list of really long complicated obscure edge casey questions. It's like the most obscure stuff you could ever imagine. And even if they're on whatever a free support plan is they're like "Yeah, I don't need a response in 36 hours, I can wait till next week." But man, they just sent us seven hours of work, so much time to go through, look at what their weird edge case concern is, playing around with the software, going back and forth with the dev team. It's just, it's frustrating when you have these specific clients.32:37 Aaron: I would say since you have that historical data, I would use that to your advantage and say, "We've looked at this, we want to serve you at the right level to make you successful and based on our interactions in the last three months, six months, year, this is the amount of interaction, this is the amount of emails and tickets and request... You would be smart to pre-purchase five hours of support a month for us at this rate, otherwise we will have to look at going to a time and materials with this just because of the amount that it is and it's all to ensure you're successful. So it isn't easy but you have to realize what it takes. Ann a good customer and a good relationship, they'll realize that anyway and if they don't, then that's starting to send you some other signals like they have no problem taking you down with them. [chuckle]33:32 Darren: Yeah, I think that they're probably in the back of their minds are like "Boy, how long are we able and get this free support for Whitespark?". Because they know they're sending us so much extra work to do it. They must know that they're just waiting for the email to come where we suggest we're gonna have to start implementing hourly fees for all of this stuff.33:53 Aaron: Yeah. There's always a way to address it when you have history. I think you use that history to your advantage. These are knowns.34:00 S2: Yup.34:01 Aaron: We're not guessing how much you might need, these are complete knowns and here's how we can continue to help you at this level, Now that we understand the level of help your requesting all the time.34:11 Darren: I like it. Thank you. I will take that approach. How do you measure your... At Whitespark we use Zendesk. So Zendesk has this really great dashboard for statistics. So we can see how many tickets and what are the common things. One thing I really love in the dashboard is the search queries. People that are searching our help center, that's a gold mine of ideas of what people are looking for and what problems they're having. So what do you guys use at GatherUp? I'm just curious how you measure and measure success and what's important in support.34:50 Aaron: We use Help Scout and have for a long time and it's at the point where I'm not in it daily, does everything that we needed to and same things you're talking about. Response times, ticket close times, all of that information is available to us. We obviously have it wired in, integrated to a ton of things from everything from... For live chat we use Olark and if Olark's... If we're offline with live chat then it automatically goes and creates a ticket in Help Scout so we can address it that way. And then the same... Right, using tagging, we also do the same on who's asking, what are they asking about. So we track very, very heavily and we share it in our weekly team meetings. Here's the amount of support interactions in total, here is the amount of support interactions from small business, from multi-locations, from agency resellers and then here's what people are asking about. Like review widget is always one of our leading topics. And then we look at other ones? And that's really great 'cause that helps inform us, do we need to do more with some of our other support features like user guide documentation or something in our emails or do we even need to look at something in the product based on popularity or what are they asking about or what's confusing? 36:16 Aaron: So that has definitely led to us doing a number of things to try to be proactive by taking that reactive data with it. So can we decrease those numbers or be of more help? And even the support team. If they have just one link, they can drop in like "Yeah, your question. We get asked all the time. Here's a very detailed user guide post on this with screenshots. Go to here, and this will help you do exactly what you need to".36:42 Darren: Have you built a email response templates at Help Scout where for really common questions, you've got a template you just fire it up and hit send for the most part? 36:51 Aaron: Yup. They have a few of those put together for the most common ones because there are certain ones it's like, "Yeah, we're gonna get asked what review sites do you monitor?". Boom, here's the answer and here's the link to that full list. So absolutely, efficiency plays are huge.37:08 Darren: That's actually gave me a thought right now. Anywhere we have a template, that would actually probably be a good auto email. So for all customers, when they sign up it's part of the email funnel. It's like email number five is most commonly asked question number two. Right? So just putting all of those frequently asked questions that we have templates for into the auto email and so preemptively giving those to customers that might be wondering.37:36 Aaron: Yeah, totally, totally a good idea that having that information makes you smarter about what people are likely gonna hit as a point of confusion or needing some education or needing to be better is huge.37:49 Darren: Yup. I also was thinking about... I picked this up from that podcast we listened to and talked about last episode about proactively showing more obscure features and ways to use the software into that email funnel. So email number seven in the funnel is like "Did you know that the software can do this? And here's a quick little video on how to do it". Right? I like that a lot too in Email funnels.38:14 Aaron: Yeah, that's something we could definitely be better at because we have so many features. We kick so many out. It's like how do you expose those to more and more users and expose them at the right times for them. Getting smarter around all that stuff is definitely an area I have massive interest in. How do you produce great targeting, right message at the right time for them to be like, "Oh yeah, this is exactly what I should use" or "This will make me more successful with the product".38:44 Darren: Yeah right.38:45 Aaron: Couple other things that I think have been really helpful for us, one, we actually use our own product that after a support instance we send that out to gather feedback and then also request reviews.38:57 Darren: Right.38:58 Aaron: So first surface level, yeah, it's great 'cause we find out is a customer happy with that answer, where they serviced timely, was the interaction with their rep great. But secondly, we have driven more Google reviews for us because you're asking for a review, when somebody's just had a great experience of being helped and again, when we talk about that differentiator as our support team. We see that over and over again where people are like, "Yeah, and man, I loved working with Gatlin. So Gatlin was awesome, helped me do all these things, whatever else. And now I wanna go write a review and I'm talking about Gatlin or I'm talking about this other team member." And that's been really huge at not just getting feedback on the support experience, but people saying, "Yeah, your brand and your service are awesome and I wanna tell everybody about it." So that's been really interesting.39:50 Darren: So wait a minute, are you saying that when a customer support ticket closes in Help Scout, they get into a GatherUp funnel where the GatherUp is spinning the how did we do email? That's coming from GatherUp, not from Help Scout? 40:05 Aaron: Yep. Yeah, so we have our... We basically, our customer success has its own profile within GatherUp. We added that as a location. So the wording's different, the survey questions are different and everything else. And then it allows us to look at what is the net promoter score for our customer success team. And then within the last couple of weeks, Taylor and the customer success team has implemented this for onboarding as well now. And we've just got a couple of those in and that's been great to see where, "Hey, here's how I felt about the level of detail and the timing of it. And man, this person was so helpful in onboarding us." And when you're able to read that feedback from a 200 or a 300 location client, that's a very good client for you and you realize what a differentiator that is. And now that's content you could possibly share with your next prospect, "Hey, here's this company. This brand name and you know this brand name really well. Well, here's what their team said about our team and getting started with our products." So not only do we know the same thing that GatherUp does for other customers, we're producing marketing material to inform the next buyer.41:11 Darren: Oh man, I love that. We're gonna do it too. So we basically, right now we just have the default Zendesk email that comes out that rates customer satisfaction, which is not bad, but GatherUp is so much deeper and so much more valuable. So I'm curious, how are they connected when a customer support ticket closes do you have a Zapier connection? Is that what you've done or do they manually go and enter that person? 41:39 Aaron: Nope. I would believe we have it automated. I don't know specifically if we're using our API or we're using a Zap for it.41:46 Darren: Yeah, I can figure that out 'cause I gotta figure out how I can get Zendesk now talking to GatherUp so that I can integrate that.41:55 Aaron: Yup. Nope, you can absolutely make that happen.41:57 Darren: Cool, well maybe I'll talk to the helpful people at MozCon when I come and visit your booth.42:01 Aaron: [chuckle] There you go. Let's look at it. Let's figure it out.42:05 Darren: Yeah. Well that's awesome. How do you know... Are you measuring ticket volume and using that to identify when it's time to hire another support person? How are you figuring out or you're just waiting for your customer support head, your director of customer support to tell you "oh we need to hire some more people"? 42:28 Aaron: Yeah. This... It's kinda the same to where we were talking about with customer success. We wanna have framework for this. We definitely track support volume that same... In our weekly meeting, customer success department has their section and they're gonna say, here's how many tickets, here's how many conversations, here's how many phone calls, here's how many live chats. We break down all of those things by the medium that they're being handled on. But we don't have anything yet that says this is too much, this is too low. We track the flow of where those are. And sometimes we'll zoom out and say, "All right, what does this look like over the last 12 months?" But being more predictive by using those numbers is definitely a next step for us so that we're able to say, "Alright, where we're at here, one rep full time and two part time on support with the rest of their time on onboarding, we're fine, but the minute we hit this, then we need another and the minute this increase then we need another." We'd like to get it to be a little bit more regimented and predictive.43:30 Darren: Sure, yep. That makes sense. Yeah. For us it's just like we just start to feel it. It's like, we're getting overwhelmed and our response time is taking longer. We've just got too many tickets coming in and then we hire again. But so far we're doing fine right now, but we'll see as we grow.43:46 Aaron: There you go. You never know. What do you feel like is your guys's biggest challenge within your support team right now? 43:53 Darren: I think the challenge is being more proactive. So I don't know if challenge is the right word, but it's the next thing we need to do. Moving from a reactive support position to a proactive success position. And I think we have the resources right now. I don't believe that the support team is completely booked all of their time. And so getting a process in place where we can be more proactive and identifying those high value clients and really trying to reach out to them and help them get set up. There's a big opportunity there that I really have to focus on.44:29 Aaron: Yeah, no, that's exactly where we were two years ago. And the first thing is just identifying it, making it a priority so that everyone understands it and then you lay out what are these, if being proactive is the strategy, what are the tactics that support that that we need to put resources into or make sure we have tools to do. And yes, just you stair step and start picking those up and move up the ladder one at a time while you keep everything behind it at the same level it's at and you can get there. We're two years into that and we still have a ton of way to go. You're always trying to perfect it.45:09 Darren: For sure. It's interesting when you think about you talk about the difference between a bootstrap company and a VC funded company like you see these companies like Yelp and Yext that have invested so much into their sales force and not much into their customer support. And it's just like, it's a complete switch of values. They're just focused on signing people up, not supporting them. And it's such a backwards way to approach business, it seems to me.45:36 Aaron: Yeah. Well customer acquisition gets all of the love and depending upon what size you are, how much does retention make an impact for you? And when you're in a smaller bootstrap company, retention is massive because you might not have the resources to do acquisition all day long. For us we're over five years into the company and we're really truly building. We've had one salesperson on the agency side, I do our sales, but only a very small percentage outbound. But now five years later, now we have resources and we have the right fit with our product where we can very confidently say, "Yeah, now it's time to put fuel on the fire and take the fight to people and go and be outbound sales with it as well." So when you don't have the ability to do that, retention is really huge because as much as you need to land those next clients, you need to keep the ones that you have.46:36 Aaron: Obviously we spend a whole episode on Churn. You could do a whole podcast just on Churn all by itself. But yeah, no, it is super important. And yeah, for some people, I think the bigger they get, the numbers become so macro that a lot of it seeps through the cracks. And we're seeing more and more of that in the space right now where people are coming from some of our larger competitors and they're saying," Yup. I spent a year or two years with them. I didn't get a lot of love. I was paying for features I didn't even utilize. It looks like you guys aren't trying to have everything in the kitchen sink and you absolutely have what we need and you have a few other things that they didn't have because you're a little more focused on the SEO and the local search end of things and wow, it seems like people are raving about your service. So let's work together and that's fabulous. I want that to happen all day long.47:24 Darren: Yup. Well, we should keep that happening all day long for all of our services and products.47:31 Aaron: Totally.47:31 Darren: All right.47:32 Aaron: All right, my man. That's a wrap.47:34 Darren: We did it. We're gonna see you next week and we'll record another episode. Dan, I can't wait for that. It's gonna be great.47:40 Aaron: Yeah. All kinds of fun in Seattle awaits us. And yeah, we'll find a way to hide out and record episode 11 at MozCon in Seattle. And I don't know, we'll have to bring something really festive to the table with us being in the...47:56 Darren: Something, yeah.47:57 Aaron: The same area to record. I don't know if we can sit face to face that might not work, but we just might be like a hotel room away from each other.48:05 Darren: Or back to back.[laughter]48:10 Aaron: Totally. We might have to include some video clips of this.48:14 Darren: [chuckle] Totally. Alright.48:14 Aaron: Riveting stuff.48:15 Darren: Good. Well thank you. It was a good chat. We'll talk to you next week.48:20 Aaron: Alright. Thanks everybody. Remember to subscribe to the SaaS Venture podcast or share the SaaS Venture podcast with someone you know that is interested in sales, SaaS anything to do with software products. We appreciate building our audience more and more and it's all thanks to you guys. So thanks everyone and have a great week. We'll talk to you next time.48:41 Darren: Talk to you next time.[outro music]

In a world where customer service is a commodity, it can be your secret weapon! This week on the Feed U Podcast I give you the scoop on how to stand out and excel in customer service when most of the rest of the planet is truly SUCKING at it.  Here are the top ways to stand out from your competitors in the arena of customer service. Personalize everything!  There is no better way to let your audience, prospects and customers know that you care than to personalize how you communicate with them. This includes emails, video, sales letters and advertising.  Are you personalizing your messaging to your ideal clients so they feel like you are in their head? Create and send videos.  Tools like Loom and BombBomb make it easy to record and send a quick video to clients, prospects and new email subscribers.  It may take a little time, but you will definitely get stuck in their heads as memorable.  You can also send quick education tips, simplify complicated processes and ask questions.  How will you use video? Tell me on Instagram. Make yourself available. In our very digital world, answering a phone call, hosting a live video chat or using messenger to call or video with someone is rare.  The more you can personalize your interactions with the people you want to work with, the higher conversion you will have - G-U-A-R-A-N-T-E-E-D! Add chat to your website. You can't be available all the time, but using a chatbot or messenger marketing to answer Frequently Asked Questions and give your prospects next steps is a great way to engage and follow up with leads.  "44% of customers say having their questions answered at the time of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer." (Forrester Research) Easily get started with Facebook Messenger and Manychat.  I did a whole episode with chatbot expert Kelly Noble Mirabella, you can listen to that here. If you want to get fancier check out Live Chat for WP, Olark and Zendesk for fancier chatbot experiences.  I'll have more on chatbots next week. Create a Siri Search friendly website. By 2020 it is predicted that over 50% of online searches will be by voice search.  Here are some simple tips to help you ensure that Siri is able to find answers on your website.  First, make sure you test your page speed load with GT Metrix or Google Page Speed.  Second, use a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to keep google happy and secure visitors information. Third, use clear language and short sentences in your website copy.  Last, answer well known search queries on your website in blog posts or page content. For more website tips, check out Episode 29 - Why Your Website Isn't Making You Money. Use screensharing tools with clients and prospects.  Tools like Zoom and Skype make it easy for you to have conversations and personalize relationships with your clients and prospects - giving them extra time with you and also showing you care enough to show up in person.  Use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) tool. Having a tool that enables you to store information about your customers is invaluable.  You can keep it as simple or make it as complicated as you would like.  But sending a birthday card or a personalized gift when they least expect it, is a sure fire way to get people singing your praises.  I recommend Dubsado, Insightly and Sales Force   How are you raising the customer service bar?  Let me know over on Instagram via Direct Message.   Download the transcript here.      

Meet Sid Bharath, our favorite SaaS consultant and growth marketer, who specializes in growing SaaS companies and was previously the VP of Growth at Thinkific, an online course platform that he's helped grow to the leader in the industry. He's also a marketing consultant who has worked with amazing companies in San Francisco like Gorgias, ShareDesk, Olark, LemonStand, CartHook, ReCharge and many more. In this episode, we bring back Sid Bharath who was a guest in episode #3. Since then he's been working in San Francisco with top SaaS companies so he has lots of insights into what's happening in the SaaS marketplace, what's changing and where are we going. You'll hear about the SaaS strategies that are actually working in today's B2B space. You'll learn the biggest mistakes Sid sees most SaaS companies making in marketing, the exact KPIs and systems you absolutely must have running to scale any marketing you have going and finally, the shifts in the SaaS marketplace that you need to be aware of for 2019. This is a really fun episode! Show Notes: 04:05 Helping SaaS Grow and Scale 05:55 Big Wins Running Summits 07:25 Creating a Summit Playbook For The Team 07:40 Using a Partnership Model 09:40 The Planning Phase 11:00 Trying to Grow Quickly Without Product-Market Fit 12.40 Finding Real Product Market Fit On Funded SaaS vs Bootstrapped SaaS 13:35 The Drawbacks of Pushing Customer Acquisition Before Product-Market Fit 15:40 Different Types of Partnerships 18:05 Long Term vs Short Term Strategies Business Conversations 19:40 Mistake #1: Not Knowing Where Your Customers Are In The 1st Place 21:40 Mistake #2: Not Setting Up Analytics Upfront 22:10 Recommended KPIs and Tools 24:05 Advanced KIPs 25:20 Budgets and Value 27:30 Marketing Budgeting: Overall vs Per Item 28:40 Start Building Out Manually Then Automate 31:40 Hire Over vs Automated System 33:30 B2B SaaS In 2019: Better Alignment on How Marketing Is Generating Leads and Personalization 37:05 Lightning Questions

My team and I just finished up with the launch of my new course, Digital Course Academy, and I want to share some new strategies I used that really resonated with my audience and resulted in a big boost in sales conversions. The three strategies all focus on personalization and are something that you will easily be able to replicate in your own launch.   Live launch personalization is more important than ever, especially when people are used to canned responses and bots. Having direct communication from a human is next-level when it comes to customer service these days. When you incorporate personal touches to your launch, you are helping your prospective customers to be able to decide whether they want to purchase your program, product or service. Here are the three personal touches that I go over in today’s episode will be game-changers for your next live launch: Personalization #1: Recording Audio Messages Via Snagit Learn how I used Snagit, the quick and easy screen capture and/or recorder application, to provide personalized customer service messages that really wowed my audience. I also mention how I’ve recently been introduced and have begun using Loom to handle the same task. Personalization #2: Live Sales Page Chat With OlarkLearn how I used Olark, to provide stellar live sales page chat during my launch. This tool will allow you to answer real-time questions, in-the-moment from your potential customers when they’re making the buying decision. When handled right, these conversations will significantly increase your conversions. These prompt, “real-time” conversations are priceless. Whether it’s you in there or someone on your team that’s very familiar with your content, make sure to set up a system for live chat support during your next live launch. Personalization #3: Recording an Off the Cuff, From the Heart, Final VideoThis is a video to record in real-time and send out on the final day when you’re closing the doors for people to be able to purchase your program, product, or service. I’ll tell you what to include in the email to deliver the video (the subject line and body copy) and what you should say in the video. The timing of recording this video is critical because you want to be feeling all the emotions that you will have on that last day. You will be coming in raw, honest, and extremely helpful with this last bit of communication to your prospective customer. There you have it! I’ve shared my secrets and I hope you take what worked well for me and incorporate these strategies in your next live launch. Believe me, you will never be sorry for adding these personal touches. Click here to listen now!   This episode is brought to you by: SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW IN ITUNES Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. I’m adding a bunch of bonus episodes to the mix and if you’re not subscribed there’s a good chance you’ll miss out on those. Click here to subscribe in iTunes! Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in an read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!    

In this series, we investigate the big why behind remote team retreats. There are countless teams across the globe that consider in-person retreats a vital tool in making the everyday work life harmony possible!In this episode Kimberly Bringas, HR and Culture Enthusiast at Olark shares with us why Olark views company retreats as an absolute must as there is nothing that can replace seeing somebody in person. Kimberly lives in Denver, Colorado and has been working with Olark for 5 years. The Olark team operates from all across the globe!Olark is a tech company that is known for their live chat software. Olark Live Chat can help you grow your business by increasing sales, providing support, and acquiring leads!

Today we get to know Tesha Richardson of Olark. Olark Live Chat connects you to the right customer, in the right place, at the right time. This episode is powered by SpyCloud - https://spycloud.com/ - Protect employees and customers from account takeover & Impact Hub Austin - https://www.impacthubaustin.com/ - Inspiring coworking, shared office spaces, programs and accelerators in the heart of Austin. Tweet @womenintechshow and @EspreeDevora https://www.olark.com/ http://twitter.com/womenintechshow https://twitter.com/espreedevora

Welcome to this special SaaS Breakthrough episode with our host, David Abrams, covering the Top 10 Insights from our first 25 episodes. What a milestone! We've learned from great companies like LucidChart (who has 16MM users), Chartmogul, Hotjar, AppCues, Olark, Buffer (gaining 1.5M unique views on the blog), Gainsight, PicMonkey (with over 450,000 subscribers and 3.5 Billion images edited, JotForm, Groove, and a ton of other amazing companies. We started this podcast with the desire to find great companies and learn from the marketing teams in the trenches. We wanted the down and dirty tactics that are working today. Not to just get a 1,000 foot view of a company, but learn what it takes to actually MARKET to users, find the right prospects, what it was like to find product-market fit, and then how they made a lead generation system to bring in customers month after month. What you continually hear in these episodes, is that SaaS marketing is not an easy feat to do. It's about understanding your customer, involving your product with marketing, solving pain points, articulating that message, and attracting the users in a moment of pain. SaaS Companies of all shapes and sizes have been on this show, but these things hold true. For those of you who are marketing and in the trenches, or growing your own SaaS, this podcast breaks down the 10 of the biggest insights I've taken away so far. Enjoy!

Remember our fun live pilot episode back in January 2015? In case you forgot about it or missed it, it was on How To Build A Happy And Productive Remote Team with Ben Congleton the CEO and Co-Founder of Olark. In it, we debunked a number of remote working myths such as:   Remote employees won’t be as productive and progress will stagnate Communication between remote employees and remote teams will break down A remote team will be devoid of culture   It was great for teams, but then we got questions from individuals who wanted to know how they could get started. So last December, we revisited remote working and focused the conversation around How to Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position with Femgineer’s very own Community Manager: Meghan Burgain.   And it seems like we have only scratched the surface because we still get a lot of questions and concerns on the topic from startup founders and hiring managers.   Most recently, we’ve received questions and concerns are around the hiring process like:   How do you know someone is a culture fit without a face-to-face meeting? Can you hire a remote worker for any role or only specific ones? How do you test a remote worker’s capabilities and competence? What is the best way to onboard and train a remote worker?   So this month we decided to revisit the theme and created three more episodes on the topic, focused on recruiting, training, retaining, and managing remote workers.   To help us out, I’ve invited a pro on the topic: Holly Cardew the CEO and Founder of Pixc. Holly has grown and scaled her team across Australia and Asia. And has done so in a number of job functions spanning both the business side with roles such as virtual assistants and marketers, to the technical side hiring software developers and designers to build the product.   As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:   The benefits of remote working for employers and employees The criteria you need to set to source candidates Roles that are well-suited to remote work How to suss out culture fit without a face-to-face meeting What to watch out for—red flags to spot early on when hiring remote workers Why it’s good to give people a test or trial project and how to structure it Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   ## How To Recruit Remote Workers Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:        We've covered a number of benefits when it comes to remote working in previous episodes. If you've missed any of them, I've included links below. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to actually go about recruiting for your remote team, so stay tuned.                     Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.                     Remote working is becoming the way of the future, and employers who have started embracing it are starting to see the competitive advantages. It's very attractive for employees. In today's episode, we're going to dive into the numerous benefits that employers and employees face when it comes to remote working, and we're going to talk about some of the best practices when it comes to recruiting and retaining employees. And to help us out, I've invited Holly Cardew, who is the CEO and founder of Pixc. Thanks for joining us.Holly Cardew:       Thanks for having me.   Remote working benefits for employersPoornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, thanks for joining us. You and I have experienced a number of benefits when it comes to running a remote team. For our audience out there, maybe you can share some of the benefits as an employer.Holly Cardew:       Running a company, a remote company, has been beneficial for us, or beneficial for any employer, because what you can do is, you can scale up and scale down depending on what task you need done. You can also hire from a remote pool...Sorry, global pool of talent, rather than a local one. We can also provide customer support 24/7, and in other languages, which is amazing. It's also great because as a company, we're flexible. If something goes down or something happens on the weekend, the employees or the team members can also jump online. They're not so constricted to a specific time.   Remote working benefits for employeesPoornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, and I'm sure there's a number of benefits for the employees, so let's jump into those.Holly Cardew:       I think, for the employees, they love it because it is flexible. At the end of the day, they can live and travel and be wherever they want to. They can work the hours that they want to work. I don't expect someone to be there 9-5. I didn't want to build a company and be in an office 9-5. The employees don't have to necessarily spend an hour and a half in traffic each way every day. So, they can spend that time really focusing on their task at hand.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Another thing I learned recently was that people who are disabled, or an elderly population, can stay in the workforce longer because of having the ability to work remotely. So, I think that's another great thing, if we can keep maintaining the size of the workforce.Holly Cardew:       Definitely, fantastic. I've also seen that with mothers. We've hired content writers, proofreaders. They're mothers in middle America, or the Philippines. It doesn't matter where they are, they're now able to be with their children before and after school, be really flexible at home.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, we've got one, Meghan, who's been on an episode before. So, yeah, I think it's great for motherhood as well. These are great benefits. Let's talk about the types of roles that are conducive to remote work.   Types of roles for remote workers Holly Cardew:       I actually think anything can be remote. I mean, there are definitely times when you need to be on the ground with the customer, or you need to build a physical product, if you're in hardware or other industries. But really, we have, I don't like to use the word "outsourced," but we have people doing legal, accounting, bookkeeping, engineering tasks, design tasks, customer service, marketing. You name it, it's been done with us. So, I think you can actually use a remote or distributed team for any job.Poornima Vijayashanker:        But I'm sure there's some employees who are better suited for remote work versus others, so tell us what somebody should be looking for in an employee.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, definitely. I find that the people who are most proactive and take initiative are the ones who are better off when they're remote, because they don't need the guidance or the team around them to keep them motivated. I also find that someone who is slightly entrepreneurial, like they may...I had someone who was in the Philippines, and I said, "What do you do in your free time?" And she said, "I import things from America and I sell them at the market on the weekend." And doing that, it makes them think outside the box, as well. You don't have to train them as much.   What to watch out for when recruiting remote workersPoornima Vijayashanker:        That makes sense. And are there signs that you want to watch out for?Holly Cardew:       The signs I would watch out for are people who do need to be around others, and they do need that guidance and training, and they're waiting for you to tell them the next thing to do.Poornima Vijayashanker:        So, people who maybe aren't as self-directed, or possess some of the self-leadership qualities.Holly Cardew:       Definitely.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Which I think is necessary for any employee, but...Holly Cardew:       Definitely, but there are people who are starting out, and they're not used to taking the initiative to go find something. They're used to turning to the person next to them at the office, or university, or wherever they're starting out, and finding the answer.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, that's a good point. So, being proactive about being resourceful, and getting the answers that you need on your own.Holly Cardew:       Especially if they're remote, and I'm sleeping, and another team member's not awake, so they can't get help that way.   Criteria for sourcing and filtering remote working candidates Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, that's a good point. So, do you have a set of criteria for sourcing candidates that fit?Holly Cardew:       We have quite a, I wouldn't say strict, but a process that we follow every single time. Essentially, we always hire contractors straight away. The reason for that is that we don't have to onboard them for every single task.   So, what we do is, we put out simple things when we put out the job. People, nowadays, they're applying for absolutely everything. They just click the apply button. So, we'll put some sneaky question inside the job, even it's "start your cover letter with a smiley emoji."   And then you can clearly filter out the people who have read the job description. Because when you're remote, there's a lot of reading, rather than face-to-face conversation. So, that filters down some people.   Interview process for remote workers                    And then we make a short list, and we interview, and just have a Skype call, about 10-15 minutes. In 10-15 minutes, you can figure out if you're going to...if they culturally fit with the company. I think that's really important. They may be the most amazing person on paper, but if they don't fit with your remote culture, it won't work. And then we give them a trial task, and then after that, if they're successful, we hire them for approximately two weeks to a month to figure out how it works with the company, and then we scale up from there.   How to setup a trial project to test candidatesPoornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. The trial task is one that I do, too. I call it a "task project," and I time box it to about 5-10 hours. I limit it to maybe the two people that I feel have gone through the interview and done a good job, and I actually end up paying them for that trial time.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, that's exactly what we do. Exactly the same. We also do a trial task, about 5-10, depending on the role. If it's a social media thing, it might be, give me 20 posts that you would post up, or some advice on what you would change on our current social media. But if it's an engineering project, yeah, it would be 5-10 hours, maybe a page, and pay for that task, and then decide from there.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. And how do you communicate that to them? Because I know some people are immediately like, "I'm not doing this," and then some people actually take the effort, and I can tell just based on that, who's going to be a good employee versus, OK, clearly you're not interested. So, do you start to see signals like that?Holly Cardew:       We've definitely had the same thing.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah? OK. Why a trial project helps filter candidates   Holly Cardew:       It's sort of like a self-filtering mechanism for us. I think most people who have already...If they're local and they haven't had a remote job yet, they're probably a bit standoffish. But most people who are freelance, or have worked remote, they are used to that.Poornima Vijayashanker:        And then there are some people that think remote working is for them, even though they've never done it before. Like you said, someone who is new to remote working, and they might not know the criteria. Do you have any filters, or ways in which you recruit them?   How you can spot signs that a remote worker can be self-directed and resourcefulHolly Cardew:       I think, what we have looked at is that if people are entrepreneurial, they usually have done some small task by themselves. The other one is, I've asked if they've done any side projects, and I ask them to show me their side projects. Like, what do they do in their free time on the weekend? If they don't do something that is slightly work-related...engineers may build something. Marketing people might start their own website to self-promote. So, I look for those things before hiring someone who hasn't had a remote job.                     If they have started, it's really about trial and error, and talking to them, talking through. I have friends who are definitely, they say straight up, "I need to be around people." The other option is, you can actually provide them with co-working space.   How to provide remote workers opportunities to be around other people                     In some situations, I've either provided them with co-working space, or there was another situation where I had someone in Manila, and I knew the people at the Uber office in Manila, so I made a connection for her to go meet with the community manager at Manila, so she could learn from them. And then, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to have the people in your company around them, they just need inspiration from other people.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Nice. Yeah. And that's a good point, because it does get lonesome, and coffee shops don't always have the best internet. The co-working could be great. Hiring sight unseen can be challenging. I know, when I initially did it, I wasn't as good, but over the years, I've gotten better. How have you managed to get the best candidates out of the pool?   What to watch out for—red flags to spot early on when hiring remote workersHolly Cardew:       I think, going back to my previous answer, is that really it's about the cultural fit of the person. If your values and the culture doesn't fit, it won't work. I had someone who I was interviewing, and they were so good. I really wanted them. They were an early employee at a huge company that's IPOed. They would have been...It would have been really beneficial to the company, but we didn't see eye-to-eye on hiring, growing the team. We discussed how we would grow the team, and how we would go about it, and it did not fit. Even though it wasn't an issue then and there, I could foresee, going forward, that it would be a huge issue when we wanted to expand the team. So, it was really about the values.                     The other thing is that you really need to trust your gut. At the beginning, you're early on, you're starry-eyed. You think everything is amazing, and you just want to get these people on board, but deep down, if you know that it's not going to work, don't do it.   Crucial conversations to have with candidatesPoornima Vijayashanker:        One nugget in there was having these crucial conversations, right? You said that you had the conversation about how they were going to approach hiring, and you didn't start to see eye-to-eye. So, maybe when it comes to the tasks, or whatever the next milestone is, have those conversations, and that way, you start to uncover what their philosophy is, to see if there's alignment and a good fit.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, definitely. I think, it's like any relationship. You need to be able to have a hard conversation. And sometimes, you don't...As a CEO, what's really challenging is, you don't actually get along with everyone perfectly. But as long as you can have a hard conversation, and come to a conclusion, then it's OK. But if something really doesn't fit in your values...Poornima Vijayashanker:        Better to expose that early on.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, exactly. Move on, rather than try and make it fit at the beginning.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Well, these are great practices, Holly. Thanks for sharing them with us.Holly Cardew:       Thanks for having me.Poornima Vijayashanker:        So, now, Holly and I want to know, if you have put a remote team in place, what was your process for recruiting? Let us know in the comments below. And that's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll talk about how to hold employees accountable and retain them. Ciao for now.                   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

Meet Kasey Bayne, part of the marketing team at Olark live chat, the most beautiful and effective way to talk to your customers for sales and support. In this podcast episode, you'll hear about the mindset shifts you need to make to create and build strategic partnerships, like Olark has been doing, as well as, re-thinking the experimental techniques Kasey's team been implementing to win in a super competitive market. We also find out how they were able to scale up from word of mouth marketing using automation and centralized communications and Kasey gives us her best tips on where to find the expert advise you really could use. 03:40 What Olark Live Chat Does 04:10 Joining Olark With 10k Paid Customers and Great Culture 06:27 The First 10000 Customers 07:36 From Word Of Mouth To Automation and Centralized Communications 10:08 Narrowing Down On User Problems, Case Studies and Website Redo 14:18 Paid Traffic: Embracing An Experimental Mindset 19:12 Defining Baselines For The Experiment and Data Analysts 21:20 Surprising Wins With Partners and Integrations 23:49 The Mindset Shift You Need To Build Strategic Partnerships 26:42 Marketing In 2018: Experimental Mindset and Experts In The Field 28:55 Finding Expert Advise: Conferences and Getting Involved In Your Community 30:27 Lightning Questions

I don’t know about you, but I cringe at the thought of having to commute. The traffic, road rage, not to mention having to find parking… it was enough to make me throw in the towel 7 years ago!   Since then I have been managing remote teams around the world, and as I continue to scale my team I learn best practices from companies who have been doing it for longer than I have like Olark.   But, I know there are a lot of people out there who just don’t know if they can do it.   Maybe you’re one of them. You worry if you’ll be productive, able to communicate effectively and fit into the company culture.   One of my employees, Meghan Burgain felt the same way about a year ago. She had a number of reservations having never worked remotely before.   In today’s Build episode, Meghan and I are going to dive into some of these reservations, how you can get over them, and of course the wonderful benefits aside from working in your jammies ;)   You’ll learn:   The tools and processes to use to stay productive and on top of your projects and tasks How to handle working across multiple time zones How to communicate more effectively with your teammates across a number of channels How to train new hires when you can’t sit right next to them How you can cultivate a great company culture across continents   Here’s another great source to check out on managing your day-to-day when remote working, from our friends at Skillcrush.   Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   Transcript for Remote Working: How To Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position    Poornima Vijayashanker:        Hey, guys. I'm hanging out here in beautiful Bordeaux, France, and taking you behind the scenes this week to show you what remote working is like at Femgineer. If you've been on the fence about taking a remote position, stay tuned for a number of tips in today's *Build* episode.                     Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. For the past seven years, I have been managing remote teams around the world for my startup as well as other companies. Today, I'm joined by Meghan Burgain, who is the mother of twins and expat who lives here in Bordeaux, France, and is Femgineer's community manager. For the last year, Meghan has been working remotely and she's going to share some of her favorite tips to help you get over any reservations that you might have when it comes to taking on a remote position. Thanks for joining us, Meghan.   Meghan Burgain: Thanks for being in France, Poornima.   Remote Working Reservations   Poornima Vijayashanker:        I know a year ago when I approached you about remote working, you were on the fence. Let's talk about what some of your reservations were.   Meghan Burgain:     Yeah. My education and a lot of my experiences are in education. I was actually a teacher before I moved here. I was a little concerned about getting up to speed, getting trained at Femgineer. That was one of my concerns was getting trained.                     The other one of course was that Bordeaux is nine hours ahead of San Francisco. I knew that there was going to be some difficulty there. Would I have to stay awake at night to get all of the work done or not? Those are my two concerns.   How To Handle Time Zones When Remote Working   Poornima Vijayashanker:        While you got over the hurdle and joined the team, I know there was that first hiccup that you had where you missed a meeting due to the time zone. What did you learn from that experience?   Meghan Burgain:     Time zones are really tricky. I learned that basically communication is paramount, especially when you're working remotely. You need to be explicit, very clear, search for the clarification, ask the questions that you need and really just be polite when you're dealing with people through email. With chat, it can be difficult to maybe misread something so just to be polite and that avoids 90% of the issues.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Then you eventually got over that and learned a number of things over the last year. Let's start with the first thing that you learned.   Recommended Tools And Processes To Stay Productive As A Remote Worker   Meghan Burgain:     Right. The first thing I learned basically was the importance of the tools that we use. Being that we're not in proximity, we use the tools like Trello and Slack. Trello is great because obviously for communication you can see who's doing what, if it's done or not, but also allows for transparency. You can see the bigger picture: what we're focusing on at Femgineer, what the priorities are, and how that should affect how I prioritize my own tasks as well.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Now, I know another thing you've learned that is even though we're a remote team we still do weekly check-ins where we sync up. Walk us through how weekly check-ins have benefited you.   Meghan Burgain:     Weekly check-ins are really important. In startup plans, especially, products change, priorities change, and the weekly check-ins really help me, us both I feel, to stay focused and to stay in the same page working towards the same goal.   Training New Remote Hires   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Now, I know the third thing is that you were concerned about training, getting trained, training other people. I know as we've scaled the team, you had to train others. How have you gotten over that hurdle?   Meghan Burgain:     It's funny that that was one of my reservations and that's actually something that I've been doing at Femgineer. Well, I've realized that training someone via Zoom or Slack, it's not that much different than training someone in person and, in some cases, can actually be better because we can record the training and use it in the future which is what we've done a lot. I've also been relying a lot on our handbook.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        What's our handbook?   Meghan Burgain:     Our handbook is basically a recipe book for anything that's recurring at Femgineer so whether it's daily or just a certain time of the year, if it happens more than once, it's in the handbook. It's outlined. There's helpful tips and there are links to any outside resources that we might need.   Remote Working Benefits   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Great. Walk us through what a typical day is like for you.   Meghan Burgain:     A typical day I wake up. We get the girls ready. Send them off to daycare. Then I have the majority my day to do the daily tasks that I need to get done, answer emails that came through to do all of my tasks. Towards the end of the day, when the States wakes up, I'm able to schedule phone calls, have meetings and that sort of thing. It's where I base the first part of my day, I didn't have any of those interruptions. I was able to just do whatever I wanted at my own pace. At the end of the day, I have all the things that I need to interact with people. Then I do my to-do list for the next day and it's off to get the kids.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Nice. It sounds like you have a lot of flexible hours.   Meghan Burgain:     Oh, yeah. Well, for sure. I have deadlines just like anyone else, but I do have a lot more flexibility with how I get those things done.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        What do you think are the key benefits that you've experienced by remote working?   Meghan Burgain:     You mean besides being able to work anywhere in the world and in my own kitchen and in my own sweatpants?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yes. Those are great benefits, by the way.   Meghan Burgain:     I would say that the biggest benefit of working remotely is that I've really been able to find a work-life balance that works well for me. I'm able to not only be there for my kids and my family but to provide for them as well. I think that that's just an invaluable thing. It's a win-win.   Remote Company Culture   Poornima Vijayashanker:        I know for some folks out there they might be on the fence about remote working because of the culture. They might feel like, oh, it's isolated or distant. How have you managed to manage that?   Meghan Burgain:     I could see how it could be lonely. You don't have someone just next to you to talk to or whatever but I haven't felt that way and I think to go back to the weekly check-ins, that that's really one of the reasons is that we do get that face time. Also we have Slack which we can talk to all of our team members. I would say when it comes to the culture and the team feeling, you get what you give. It can be tempting in any working relationships, especially in remote working, whenever you find someone that's available within your timezone to just ping them with the 20 questions that you have or to ask a hundred things of them. But, I would suggest to all of you that the first thing that you do to someone should really be to ask them how they're doing, to find out what their interests are. It goes a long way towards creating the spirit and creating a team.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Building a rapport maybe through a water cooler channel on Slack.   Meghan Burgain:     Yes. Yes. That's what we have.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Wonderful. Well, thank you, Meghan. This has been really helpful. I know our audience out there is going to benefit from these tips.   Meghan Burgain:     It's been my pleasure.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Wonderful. Well, that's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where you'll get more helpful tips like this.   Meghan Burgain:     Ciao for now.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Ciao for now.                     This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.                     Hey, guys. I'm hanging out here in beautiful Bordeaux and I'll just start again. All right.                    In today's Build episode, we're going to talk to you about ...   Meghan Burgain:     Remote working.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, I know. I forgot what I should introduce you before I ... I think I do need to. OK. Take two.

Running Olark, a company with 12,000+ customers, Ben shares the biggest leadership lesson he wishes he learned: The importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence as a leader. Claire: Hi everyone, I'm Claire Lew and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company, and today I've got a really special guest. We have here Ben Congleton who is the… Read the full article

On this episode I sit down with a friend of mine with over a decade of experience in Public Relations. The Voice of Olark, Karl Pawlewicz joins The Beautiful Minds to reflect on changes in the Marketing Industry over his professional career, and attempts to forecast the changes to expect for the Millennial demographic. Follow Olark on Twitter: @olark Instagram: @olarklivechat Facebook: @olarklivechat

Ben Cogleton talks about mental health and culture.

Hi everyone, today we're talking to Ben Congleton, co-founder of Olark, a tool that lets over 10,000 companies chat with their website visitors online. The tool lowers the first-touch communication barrier and helps with sales, prospecting, and funnel optimization. Today Ben's got some interesting insights on setting up a strong remote work culture and what it was like to start off with just four people in a small town house. Click here for show notes. Leave some feedback: What should I talk about next? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here. Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes. Get the non-iTunes RSS feed Connect with Eric Siu: Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #361, Eric and Neil discuss how to create engaging Instagram story ads. Instagram is an effective tool that can be leveraged for your marketing strategy, but you need to know how to use it right. Tune in to learn how you construct an effective Instagram story and why Instagram is more beneficial for increasing brand awareness than it is for ROI. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Create Engaging Instagram Story Ads 00:55 – Instagram story ads are the ads that pop up in between Instagram stories 01:04 – Instagram story ads are similar to Snapchat story ads 01:15 – The only time that Eric watched an Instagram story ad was when it was from Brendon Buchard 01:21 – Brendon made his story ad look like the usual Instagram story 01:38 – It was a selfie video where Brendon was teaching 01:58 – Target who you need and want 02:33 – Your conversion will go up if you’re targeting the right profiles 02:40 – Most ads aren’t relevant to a person’s profile 02:58 – It is more advantageous for you to try and get 10K followers and above 03:11 – The swipe-up option is powerful and you can push people directly to your website 03:18 – Every Instagram ad needs to run for a long time for it to be effective 03:27 – Instagram is more for branding 03:42 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is a live chat software tool 03:56 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:59 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 04:04 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Any ad on Instagram needs a long period of time to work, there’s no instant ROI. Create Instagram story ads that are natural and don’t feel or look like an ad at all. Stay relevant to your target profiles. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #361, Eric and Neil discuss how to create engaging Instagram story ads. Instagram is an effective tool that can be leveraged for your marketing strategy, but you need to know how to use it right. Tune in to learn how you construct an effective Instagram story and why Instagram is more beneficial for increasing brand awareness than it is for ROI. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: How to Create Engaging Instagram Story Ads 00:55 – Instagram story ads are the ads that pop up in between Instagram stories 01:04 – Instagram story ads are similar to Snapchat story ads 01:15 – The only time that Eric watched an Instagram story ad was when it was from Brendon Buchard 01:21 – Brendon made his story ad look like the usual Instagram story 01:38 – It was a selfie video where Brendon was teaching 01:58 – Target who you need and want 02:33 – Your conversion will go up if you're targeting the right profiles 02:40 – Most ads aren't relevant to a person's profile 02:58 – It is more advantageous for you to try and get 10K followers and above 03:11 – The swipe-up option is powerful and you can push people directly to your website 03:18 – Every Instagram ad needs to run for a long time for it to be effective 03:27 – Instagram is more for branding 03:42 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is a live chat software tool 03:56 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:59 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 04:04 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Any ad on Instagram needs a long period of time to work, there's no instant ROI. Create Instagram story ads that are natural and don't feel or look like an ad at all. Stay relevant to your target profiles. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #360, Eric and Neil discuss 7 growth hacking examples you can learn from. Tune in to be inspired by how these companies skyrocketed their branding and acquired more customers using a few tactical strategies. If you want to grow your company effectively, it doesn't hurt to look to the best! Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: 7 Growth Hacking Examples You Can Learn From 00:37 – First is Dropbox 00:40 – Dropbox used pay-per-click to acquire more users 00:51 – Dropbox was making $60 in revenue per customer 01:23 – Second is Airbnb's growth story 01:29 – Airbnb got people to post on Craigslist 02:08 – Third is SEMrush 02:16 – SEMrush started with a free usage model with the option to upgrade 02:56 – Fourth is Hotmail 03:05 – Hotmail added “sent from Hotmail” at the end of their email to generate signups 03:38 – Fifth is Hubspot 03:43 – Hubspot is a content marketing machine which drives a lot of signups 04:00 – Hubspot also decided to create free tools 04:10 – Hubspot can generate more leads from their free tools at a lesser cost 04:26 – Sixth is the Paypal case study 04:31 – For every signup, they gave away $20, then reduced this amount over time 04:46 – eBay was originally owned by Paypal 05:00 – Startups create press 05:20 – Startups are directing Facebook and Google's paid traffic to pages that have incredible content written about them 05:54 – By directing traffic, PPC isn't that bad and the conversion is quite high 06:18 – This only works for an authoritative site; the quality of content you have is what attracts people to sign up 06:35 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is live chat software tool 06:48 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 06:52 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 07:00 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Make people WANT to know more about you and your product; the quality of your content is the means to do this. Offering an initial incentive can drive signups to your product. Create great press around your product to show the value of your product. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #360, Eric and Neil discuss 7 growth hacking examples you can learn from. Tune in to be inspired by how these companies skyrocketed their branding and acquired more customers using a few tactical strategies. If you want to grow your company effectively, it doesn’t hurt to look to the best! Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: 7 Growth Hacking Examples You Can Learn From 00:37 – First is Dropbox 00:40 – Dropbox used pay-per-click to acquire more users 00:51 – Dropbox was making $60 in revenue per customer 01:23 – Second is Airbnb’s growth story 01:29 – Airbnb got people to post on Craigslist 02:08 – Third is SEMrush 02:16 – SEMrush started with a free usage model with the option to upgrade 02:56 – Fourth is Hotmail 03:05 – Hotmail added “sent from Hotmail” at the end of their email to generate signups 03:38 – Fifth is Hubspot 03:43 – Hubspot is a content marketing machine which drives a lot of signups 04:00 – Hubspot also decided to create free tools 04:10 – Hubspot can generate more leads from their free tools at a lesser cost 04:26 – Sixth is the Paypal case study 04:31 – For every signup, they gave away $20, then reduced this amount over time 04:46 – eBay was originally owned by Paypal 05:00 – Startups create press 05:20 – Startups are directing Facebook and Google’s paid traffic to pages that have incredible content written about them 05:54 – By directing traffic, PPC isn’t that bad and the conversion is quite high 06:18 – This only works for an authoritative site; the quality of content you have is what attracts people to sign up 06:35 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is live chat software tool 06:48 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 06:52 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 07:00 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Make people WANT to know more about you and your product; the quality of your content is the means to do this. Offering an initial incentive can drive signups to your product. Create great press around your product to show the value of your product. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #359, Eric and Neil discuss 5 tools that'll help you track your search engine rankings. Tune in to know the benefits of SEO tracking, why it's good to see how your competitors are doing and how tracking can help you see what you need to tweak with your SEO. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: 5 Tools That'll Help You Track Your Search Engine Rankings 00:36 – Search engine rankings are important if SEO rankings are important to you 00:46 – First is Google Search Console 00:58 – It's not the best, but it's a good starting point 01:04 – Second tool is Ahrefs 01:18 – You can compare your performance and your competitors' performance as well 01:29 – Third is Authority Labs 01:38 – It is geared towards ranking 01:47 – You can see if your SEO efforts are paying off 02:01 – A Now Provided report shows you keyword opportunities 02:05 – Fourth is SerpBook which tracks your ranking accurately 02:31 – Fifth tool is SEMrush 02:41 – It is growing and updating quite fast 03:15 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is a live chat software tool 03:22 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:26 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 03:32 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Track your search engine ranking, especially if your SEO ranking is important to you. Consistently checking your ranking will help you see if your campaigns and efforts are working. If you track your competitor's rankings as well, you will have an idea of how you can improve and revamp your strategies. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #359, Eric and Neil discuss 5 tools that’ll help you track your search engine rankings. Tune in to know the benefits of SEO tracking, why it’s good to see how your competitors are doing and how tracking can help you see what you need to tweak with your SEO. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: 5 Tools That'll Help You Track Your Search Engine Rankings 00:36 – Search engine rankings are important if SEO rankings are important to you 00:46 – First is Google Search Console 00:58 – It’s not the best, but it’s a good starting point 01:04 – Second tool is Ahrefs 01:18 – You can compare your performance and your competitors’ performance as well 01:29 – Third is Authority Labs 01:38 – It is geared towards ranking 01:47 – You can see if your SEO efforts are paying off 02:01 – A Now Provided report shows you keyword opportunities 02:05 – Fourth is SerpBook which tracks your ranking accurately 02:31 – Fifth tool is SEMrush 02:41 – It is growing and updating quite fast 03:15 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is a live chat software tool 03:22 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:26 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 03:32 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Track your search engine ranking, especially if your SEO ranking is important to you. Consistently checking your ranking will help you see if your campaigns and efforts are working. If you track your competitor’s rankings as well, you will have an idea of how you can improve and revamp your strategies. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #358, Eric and Neil discuss whether a focus group is still worth the investment for market research. Tune in to learn more about focus groups and how technology has played a major role in how we conduct market research today! Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: Are Focus Groups Still Worth the Investment for Market Research? 00:38 – A focus group is when a group of people that are your ideal customers come to discuss a certain product that you may be launching 00:56 – Neil did a focus group that was paid by Yahoo 01:09 – The people discussed Yahoo and its competitors 01:50 – Focus groups were very effective before, but it won't be as effective now 01:58 – Technology has changed the face of market research, people can find their answers online and surveys to collect information are done online as well 02:32 – Eric doesn't see the need for an in-person focus group 03:02 – Mileage may still vary 03:12 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is a live chat software tool 03:24 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:30 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 03:26 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: A focus group is a group of your ideal customers who meet you in person to discuss a product. Focus groups were effective for market research before mass improvements were made in technology. If your targeted customers are seniors, focus groups might still work as they prefer face-to-face surveys and conversations. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #358, Eric and Neil discuss whether a focus group is still worth the investment for market research. Tune in to learn more about focus groups and how technology has played a major role in how we conduct market research today! Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: Are Focus Groups Still Worth the Investment for Market Research? 00:38 – A focus group is when a group of people that are your ideal customers come to discuss a certain product that you may be launching 00:56 – Neil did a focus group that was paid by Yahoo 01:09 – The people discussed Yahoo and its competitors 01:50 – Focus groups were very effective before, but it won’t be as effective now 01:58 – Technology has changed the face of market research, people can find their answers online and surveys to collect information are done online as well 02:32 – Eric doesn’t see the need for an in-person focus group 03:02 – Mileage may still vary 03:12 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Olark which is a live chat software tool 03:24 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:30 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 03:26 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: A focus group is a group of your ideal customers who meet you in person to discuss a product. Focus groups were effective for market research before mass improvements were made in technology. If your targeted customers are seniors, focus groups might still work as they prefer face-to-face surveys and conversations. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #357, Eric and Neil discuss 3 creative ways to attract your ideal customer. Tune in to learn how you can draw the most curated customers to your website without coming off as spam. They’ll also discuss the benefits of hosting an event with a curated guest list of your liking. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: 3 Creative Ways to Attract Your Ideal Customer 00:40 – Eric usually throws a dinner with marketing directors 00:59 – People like doing business with people 01:36 – Emailing potential customers is another way 01:53 – Neil puts remarketing pixels in the email 02:04 – Eventually, people will click the links 02:20 – Eric uses Dux-Soup which enables you to scan profiles on LinkedIn 02:38 – You can set the search parameters 03:05 – Dux-Soup is $15 a month 03:15 – Caffeine can keep your screen on 03:40 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription of Olark which is a chat tool that you add to your site 03:54 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:58 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 04:05 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Hosting a dinner gives you the power you choose who to invite, making the dinner more exclusive. Customers will most likely click on your site when they see the value. Leverage online tools that can help you see who the right customers are for you. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #357, Eric and Neil discuss 3 creative ways to attract your ideal customer. Tune in to learn how you can draw the most curated customers to your website without coming off as spam. They'll also discuss the benefits of hosting an event with a curated guest list of your liking. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: 3 Creative Ways to Attract Your Ideal Customer 00:40 – Eric usually throws a dinner with marketing directors 00:59 – People like doing business with people 01:36 – Emailing potential customers is another way 01:53 – Neil puts remarketing pixels in the email 02:04 – Eventually, people will click the links 02:20 – Eric uses Dux-Soup which enables you to scan profiles on LinkedIn 02:38 – You can set the search parameters 03:05 – Dux-Soup is $15 a month 03:15 – Caffeine can keep your screen on 03:40 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription of Olark which is a chat tool that you add to your site 03:54 – Subscribe, rate and review Marketing School 03:58 – Text MARKETINGSCHOOL to 33444 for those in the US 04:05 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Hosting a dinner gives you the power you choose who to invite, making the dinner more exclusive. Customers will most likely click on your site when they see the value. Leverage online tools that can help you see who the right customers are for you. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Nathan Bashaw is the Co-founder & CEO of Hardbound. After discovering the world of startups during college, and driven by the desire to build things and implement his own ideas, Nathan became a self-taught developer. He knew pretty early on, that he wanted to leverage technology to create new forms of education and storytelling that was native to new devices like smartphones. After joining Olark as an intern and then working in San Francisco as a full time developer, Nathan decided to pursue his own project - Scratchpad. It was later acquired by General Assembly, where Nathan worked as a Product Manager. While in San Francisco, Nathan met Ryan Hoover and helped him create the first version of what would become Product Hunt. Nathan then decided to focus on pursuing his vision for what would become Hardbound. He and the team recently completed the Techstars Boulder program, raised some funding, and have released a completely new version of the app. Nathan joins us to share his story, some of the biggest challenges he faced in becoming a Product Manager, why he’s so passionate about new forms of education and storytelling, what it’s been like building Hardbound, some of the biggest challenges they had to overcome, what it’s like raising money, what it was like going through Techstars in Boulder, and much more.

Find out how to enhance your online customer service with tips from top experts; Ash Harris, CEO​ ​of AKEA Web Solutions, Ben Klaver, Marketing Manager​ ​of DBI Office Interiors, Chris Hall,​ ​CEO of Big Shot Video, Karl Pawlewicz, Head of communications​ ​and Voice of Olark and Katherine Mays, Head of Customer Experience at Nutshell.

Find out how to enhance your online customer service with tips from top experts; Ash Harris, CEO​ ​of AKEA Web Solutions, Ben Klaver, Marketing Manager​ ​of DBI Office Interiors, Chris Hall,​ ​CEO of Big Shot Video, Karl Pawlewicz, Head of communications​ ​and Voice of Olark and Katherine Mays, Head of Customer Experience at Nutshell.

What thinking goes into creating an amazing customer experience? Shep Hyken speaks with Lynn Hunsaker, who talks about a mistake that companies typically make in this process. First Up: Shep’s opening monologue takes a look at two companies that truly understand the customer experience. First is Olark, a live chat software company, that chose not to hire a person dedicated to handling customer service. Instead they rotated the job among the four partners. This allowed each of the founders to not only learn how to answer questions and deal with problems, but to also find out what customers were actually experiencing when they used their products. At the second company, Anheuser-Busch, in what could be an early version of Undercover Boss, executives were required to ride with the route salesmen in their beer trucks. As a result, these executives received first-hand knowledge of the customer experience. Featured Interview: Shep interviews Lynn Hunsaker who says that in Silicon Valley the danger exists to think that a concept like innovation can take precedence. Many companies in her area think, “What is the next new mouse trap that we can create?” The concept of attempting to retain existing customers rather that to attain new ones seems a bit foreign to them. So Lynn wrote the book "Innovating Superior Customer Experience," to find a common ground with her peers in Silicon Valley. She discovered that everybody in the organization should have a role in being creative and in making suggestions for customer experience innovations. In Silicon Valley, Adobe gives us an example of such a company. Anybody at Adobe can make a suggestion, have it presented to a peer review board, and fast track their ideas into reality. Everybody at Adobe can have a stake in setting the customer experience. Many companies, to help them manage their customer experience, create customer personas. Lynn tells us there is a much simpler and easier process: just look at the ultimate aims and sets of expectations across those many customer personas. Once you truly understand your customers, through the use of personas or otherwise, you are better able to market to them. Customer service and customer experience are the new marketing. And when you understand who your competitors are, not just your direct competitors, you can begin to craft a better experience for your customers. When you examine the customer experience, realize that the time and effort customers expend as well as the stress they experience is a huge part of why customers churn. When you are thinking of customer experience improvement, you should be aiming to minimize the occurrence of these issues. We ask ourselves, how do we engage our employees to make the customer’s plight better? For example, how can we simplify something for a customer? When you are thinking about engaging customers, think first about earning their trust. If you focus on earning their trust, they will engage. But if you focus on engaging them just for the sake of engagement, that effect might be short-lived. Take for example, loyalty programs. In addition to your own loyalty program, your customers may also be subscribers in all of your competitors’ loyalty programs, thus defeating the purpose of your program. Many loyalty programs are simply marketing programs. Ask yourself, would a customer still do business with you if you eliminated your loyalty program? Have we been able to earn their trust? That is how good you need to be! And if you have a loyalty program, use it to thank the people who continue to do business with you. Certainly do not offer even better deals to first-time buyers. Otherwise you will certainly offend your loyal customers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Episode #130, Neil and Eric list the ways you can use live chat to grow your business. The two men discuss that there are right and wrong ways to use live chat in order to increase your sales. Also, tune in to discover how Neil tests Eric's own live chat service without his knowing just for our benefit. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 – Today's topic: How to Use Live Chat to Grow Your Business 00:48 – Live chats should pop up at engaging points of interaction to work well 01:25 – Avoid using live chat to interrupt the sales flow 01:47 – Eric has tried Olark and Zopim as live chat tools in the past 02:08 – Eric found out more people are using Intercom.io for their live chats 03:17 – Neil drops what Eric doesn't know! 03:46 – Intercom.io and Drift are two most popular live chat tools 04:26 – Get in touch with people at certain engagement points 04:58 – Neil messaged Eric on his website using the live chat! 06:03 – Always put the person's name on the chat 06:25 – How Eric does his live chats 06:42 – Try to help first before pitching your sale 07:38 – “When you engage with someone 4x…they're much more likely to buy what you sell them” 08:12 – Always have someone manning the chat 24/7 08:30 – Neil gets his chat agents from Upwork 08:59 – Ask for the customer's email 09:17 – Connect Drift or Intercom to HipChat or Slack 09:39 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Live chat that pops up in the right engagement points work. It's not just about the tools, it's also about when pop ups, pop out. Live chat is NOT for sales alone – remember to help people out. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #130, Neil and Eric list the ways you can use live chat to grow your business. The two men discuss that there are right and wrong ways to use live chat in order to increase your sales. Also, tune in to discover how Neil tests Eric’s own live chat service without his knowing just for our benefit. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 – Today’s topic: How to Use Live Chat to Grow Your Business 00:48 – Live chats should pop up at engaging points of interaction to work well 01:25 – Avoid using live chat to interrupt the sales flow 01:47 – Eric has tried Olark and Zopim as live chat tools in the past 02:08 – Eric found out more people are using Intercom.io for their live chats 03:17 – Neil drops what Eric doesn’t know! 03:46 – Intercom.io and Drift are two most popular live chat tools 04:26 – Get in touch with people at certain engagement points 04:58 – Neil messaged Eric on his website using the live chat! 06:03 – Always put the person’s name on the chat 06:25 – How Eric does his live chats 06:42 – Try to help first before pitching your sale 07:38 – “When you engage with someone 4x…they’re much more likely to buy what you sell them” 08:12 – Always have someone manning the chat 24/7 08:30 – Neil gets his chat agents from Upwork 08:59 – Ask for the customer’s email 09:17 – Connect Drift or Intercom to HipChat or Slack 09:39 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Live chat that pops up in the right engagement points work. It’s not just about the tools, it’s also about when pop ups, pop out. Live chat is NOT for sales alone – remember to help people out. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Da dove pertire per progettare il tuo sito web? Ci sono alcuni tormentoni degli ultimi anni come la tecnologia del responsive web design che permette al tuo sito di essere compatibile con i dispositivi mobile, ma quali sono gli ingredienti specifici che non devono mancare in un sito web progettato (o ri-progettato) nel 2016. Scopriamo insieme come creare un'esperienza di navigazione veramente personale con tecnologie come la live chat di Olark ( https://www.olark.com ).☞ DIVENTA PRODUTTORE DEL PODCAST > http://youmediaweb.com/finanzia☞ SCRIVI UNA RECENSIONE > http://youmediaweb.com/recensioni☞ ​SEGUIMI SU SNAPCHAT > https://www.snapchat.com/add/giuliogaudiano☞ ACQUISTA IL MIO ULTIMO LIBRO > http://youmediaweb.com/youtubeperilbusiness

Da dove pertire per progettare il tuo sito web? Ci sono alcuni tormentoni degli ultimi anni come la tecnologia del responsive web design che permette al tuo sito di essere compatibile con i dispositivi mobile, ma quali sono gli ingredienti specifici che non devono mancare in un sito web progettato (o ri-progettato) nel 2016. Scopriamo insieme come creare un'esperienza di navigazione veramente personale con tecnologie come la live chat di Olark ( https://www.olark.com ).☞ DIVENTA PRODUTTORE DEL PODCAST > http://youmediaweb.com/finanzia☞ SCRIVI UNA RECENSIONE > http://youmediaweb.com/recensioni☞ ​SEGUIMI SU SNAPCHAT > https://www.snapchat.com/add/giuliogaudiano☞ ACQUISTA IL MIO ULTIMO LIBRO > http://youmediaweb.com/youtubeperilbusiness

Episode 118 “Crapalytics” 2:00 And we’re live! Josh apparently is cracking the whip on Derick. Derick is doing the brunt work on researching for marketing and he i working on the persona or avatar for the course he is building.  6:40 Derick mentions he has 254 plus people signed up the webinar launch. Derick hope to gain customers from the webinar. Derick is looking for a guess speaker for the webinar, so he can focus on the marketing.  10:00 Derick says he wants to tie in the Watch Me Code projects into the webinar and continue the questions in for the products in the Slack channel. Derick mentions the webinar will be available on YouTube. 16:00 Chuck talks about how to understand an avatar for marketing purposes. Josh explains the demographics of an avatar and how to marketing to this particular type of person.  22:00 Derick talks about how working on the marketing material such as emails are sharpening his marketing skills other areas. Like marketing for his new bundle. 26:00 Josh talks about how getting into ‘the work’ will trigger something for you to understand the actual experiences and pain points of your audience or customers. EntreProgrammers talk about the Myers Briggs Test.  Derick talks about how this help you understand your preferences and should not to be taken to seriously.  30:00 Derick share a book he is reading by Alex Harms at: leanpub.com/littleguide. Derick shares that this will help understand empathy on a technical level.  35:00 Josh helps Derick with the analytics for projected sales of the annual passes to Watch Me Code. Josh talks about maybe speaking with people who bought the all access pass and those who were on the fence about buying. Josh says that this would give Derick huge insight to the customers ideas about the product.  46:00 Derick says he has to much to work on for the business and does not know where to start. Chuck talks about gaining more clarity on the project. Derick talks about working his ass off to get the marketing email right after a years worth of understanding the market.  54:00 Derick talks about picking the right story to tell for a marketing strategy, but and things just don't fall together easily for him. Derick mentions having a difficult time figuring out what to do with the emails and creating marketing material. Derick says he has no time to create the marketing material. 1:02:00 Derick asks how he could find the balance to find customers in the next few weeks and also do research.  Josh shares what he thinks the process Derick should take for the Watch Me Code. Josh thinks that doing a webinar once a month could increase sales on the full access subscription.  1:08:00 Chuck talks about the frustrations he has with creating his Rails Clips material, and getting overdue projects out of the way. Josh shares that Simple Programmers sales have finally picked up.  1:12:00 Josh shares that he is doing a marketing project for Dan Martel. Josh talks about interviewing John, as he talks about failed attempts an an entrepreneur.  1:17:00 Josh talks about doing an email via Java Code Geeks. Josh says that LeadPages has fail him again. Josh talks about writing over an thousand word email for the competition.  1:24:00 Derick ask about the live chat system.  Josh mentions FreshDesk and Olark. EntreProgrammers discuss the types of chat system they could integrate on their sites.  1:30:00 Josh talks about where the fall off was on the Simple Programmers Site. Derick shares that he might have to reverify that the registration page is working correctly.  1:35:00 Chuck asks for some advice on paid traffic, and maybe using Facebook for the traffic. Josh talks a how paid traffic works and that you have to spend a lot over time for an ROI. Josh does not think it is time worry about this project.  1:45:00 Josh says Chuck should focus on emails and growth instead.  Thoughts of the Week Chuck -  Keep your head above water!  

With so many tools and communication channels available to us, choosing how you support your WordPress product can be a real head-scratcher. Luckily, in today's episode, Devin and I are here to explain the best methods we've found that work in our respective businesses. If you've been in the WordPress product business for a while now, you know how interesting support can get. Depending on your product, your support channel can span fairly broad spectrums. From supporting agencies that are using your plugin for client work, all the way to first-time WordPress users that just purchased your theme. Bridging that gap is always a challenge. Our products are expected to work in an ecosystem that we have very little control over. Think about the various hosts, versions of WordPress, and conflicting plugin code a user might be running. It's actually quite scary when you think about it. Recently the team at Yoast wrote about their headaches launching a new version. A good read for anyone considering pushing out a major update. Support channels mentioned in this episode While it's best you listen or watch the video, here are the areas of support Devin and I discuss: Documentation Blog post Seminars/webinars Helpdesk (like Helpscout, Freshdesk, intercom.io, etc) Forums (BBPress, Discourse, etc) Ongoing training videos (like an “academy”) Live chat plugins (Zopim, Olark, etc) Provide a solid upgrade and development path Provide industry knowledge relative to your client Automation (for segmentation and follow-up) Content marketing in the form of blogs & educational shows/podcasts Listen to the audio [smart_track_player url=”https://soundcloud.com/matt-report/how-to-support-your-wordpress-theme-plugin-customers” title=”11 Ways to support your WordPress theme & plugin cusotmers” artist=”Matt Report” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ] Watch the video   Like the show? Consider joining the newsletter. ★ Support this podcast ★

While a lot of people talk about the financial benefits of a remote team, that’s actually NOT the reason why Ben Congleton and his team decided to build a remote team. You’ve probably also heard over and over again the importance of company culture, but Ben actually breaks down what him and his team at Olark do to build a strong company culture! During the show we covered the following 3 misconceptions people have about remote working: 1. Employees won’t be as productive and progress will stagnate 2. Communication between employees and teams will break down 3. A remote team will be devoid of culture In the pilot episode of FemgineerTV Ben and I tackled each of these misconceptions. And Ben shares how he and his co-founders have built an amazing remote team of 30-people, which spans San Francisco to Europe.

Ben Congleton is the CEO and Co-founder of Olark.com. Olark helps you sell more with your website by directly chatting with your customers. Initially funded by seed accelerator Y Combinator, Olark has gone on to profitable success by providing a compelling product and amazing service. As our personal gift for listening to the podcast, you can enroll now for Free to our 10-day Growth Hacking Course at 10-Day Free Growth Hacking Course. If you want to access all the tools and resources we talk about in the interview, please visit our website: The Growth Hacking Podcast      

Today's question comes from Pim, who wants to interact with people who land on his sales page. What’s a good tool for this? In this episode, I talk about the live chat feature, Olark (https://www.olark.com/), the heat map tools that can help you improve optimization, Crazy Egg (http://www.crazyegg.com/) and ClickTale (http://www.clicktale.com/). If you have any suggestions for Pim, share them using #AskPat351. Do you have a question about increasing your sales page conversions? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. Thanks to today's sponsor, AWeber. Your email list is your most valuable asset—get started today. Go to http://www.aweber.com/askpat.

Ben Congleton, Co-Founder and CEO of Olark, explains why live chat is a critical communications channel for customer success, how to build a customer-centric culture in a remote team, and what the upcoming "phone vs chat" showdown is all about.

Highlights of my conversation with Tejasawi Raghurama Growth Save 300 administrative hours per month Automates accounting for ecommerce stores Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India Increasing monthly recurring revenue and reducing churn Transcript Heather:    Hello. It’s Heather Smith here. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you are doing well. Today I speak with Tejasawi Raghurama which I’ve probably pronounce incorrectly but I refer to him as Tej. Tej is a growth hacker at ZapStitch. ZapStitch is a data integration platform for small business to automate data flow across cloud business solutions. They are automating accounting for a thousand plus e-commerce business from North America, Australasia, Europe by integrating Shopify, Bigcommerce with Xero. ZapStitch automatically imports sales orders into your accounting application’s invoices. Discounts, taxes and shipping rates are sync’d seamlessly which is something he emphasises in the show. An average business using ZapStitch saves 300 plus hours every month spent in manual accounting, freeing up their time so they can spend it with the customer and family. ZapStitch is the number one ranked and rated accounting add-on in the Shopify app store. Tej believes no human should do a machine’s job and small businesses can grow huge with automation. He places part by educating and working with customers. When not learning from business, you’ll find him watching South Park. He joined ZapStitch in February 2014 as one of the first employees there. He was inspired by the vision of the founders, the fundamental impact the way businesses manage tedious processes. I started by asking Tej who was his favourite South Park character and why. Tejasawi:       Awesome. That’s a great question to start with. I think Cartman because I’m fascinated by climatic and realistic people. I always look at the world around me, “That is good.” “That is bad.” But there are people who actually recognise it and live through it. I would see Cartman in South Park as being the most pragmatic and he is who he is. He doesn’t mould himself according to the people around him and he has his originality intact. Yes, he is cruel, I don’t recognise that spirit but I think he’s on his own. Heather:        Sensational. I don’t watch South Park so I don’t know the character but I thought that our listeners might find that interesting. I know that my son watches South Park but I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay. So Tej, can you tell me a little about ZapStitch. Tejasawi:       Sure. ZapStitch automates accounting in commerce stores. In simple English, what we do is we create platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce with accounting apps like Xero, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       ZapStitch enables seamless data syncing between those apps. We sync data for all the customers and anything related to the invoice and sales tax automation. What we enable at the end of the day is exponentially faster reporting in accounting and accurate data and peace of mind. I mean the most common feedback we get from our accountants and from business owners who use ZapStitch is peace of mind. At the end of the day, accounting shouldn’t be an intimidating step in the process, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       That is one feedback we often get. At the company level, our vision is to automate business apps across verticals. When we were founded … we are a cloud integration platform, so our long term two year or three year future is to integrate at least 300-500 business apps on the cloud. Heather:        Oh okay. Tejasawi:       We are starting with e-commerce and accounting because we believe there are immediate gaps in between them, and we want to solve as many problems in accounting as possible, and go in depth in accounting automation. Who are your typical customers? Tejasawi:       Typical customers are twofold. One is an e-commerce business owner or the business team of a 10-man or 15-man e-commerce team. The second end user is the accountant who has multiple e-commerce tools as clients or is working part time as the bookkeeper. Those are two end users but our business is somebody that’s doing let’s say a $2 million dollar revenue per year and who actually feels the pain of data entry, right? A typical business of where we work with spends at least 500 hours in accounting per month. If we can solve that pain point, I think that’s where our end customer is. Heather:        That certainly makes … if you can resolve 500 hours at your price point, then that certainly is of benefit to the client. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Where about are you actually based? Tejasawi:       We are based out of Bangalore in India. It’s called the Silicon Valley of India, so it’s the Bangalore start-up hub in India, yes. Where about are your servers based? Where are the data for your company based … for the client data based? Tejasawi:       We are based … we built it on EWS, the server side across EWS in Singapore if I’m not wrong but I need to get some technical knowledge there. The servers are on EWS and we don’t locally store data. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not locally stored. It’s always a question that people ask us. Tejasawi:       Yes indeed. Heather:        It’s an unpleasant question I guess but the customer is always going, “Well, where is my data?” “Is it in the clouds?” “Where is it?” So it’s important to know. Tejasawi:       Yes, just to add to that point, ZapStitch believes in transparency, so we don’t store any local data on any server for that matter. We only move data from A to B. there will be apps and I’m sure you’ve interviewed and talked to some where they’re stored locally and in the app they show the data, right? We enable seamless syncing of data and not storing of data. Yes, that’s a belief we are in right now. Maybe going forward when we add features like reporting inside the app we will look at storing data but right now we are only moving data and storing metadata like number of orders … Heather:        I thought it might be like that. What’s your internet connection like in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India? Tejasawi:       Internet connection is a problem maybe sporadically but we have good broadband speeds in Bangalore. We have a speed of let’s say 22/30mps. That serves our purpose and we haven’t felt the pain of internet speed at all. But sometimes the sporadic connection is due to the team load rather than the internet speed. When we grew as a start-up, there were logistical issues which were solved of course but yes, there is no problem with the internet. We are not consciously aware of the speed, yes. Heather:        Tej, you describe yourself as a Growth Hacker.  What does that mean? Tejasawi:       I mean that’s something I’m figuring out. Heather:        It sounds very impressive. I actually like that title, ‘The Growth Hacker’. Tejasawi:       Right, so how growth hacking works, it’s a term by an accounting marketer called Sean Ellis who is inbound marketeer and he has a start-up. What he says is like when you build a start-up, that is a predictable good … you can achieve. You can draw a straight line which is not a hockey stick but is like a 45 degree angle, right? What a growth hacker does or growth marketing is like it recognises certain bursts in the marketing cycle and exponentially recreates it. If the growth hacking is successful, you find an unconventional way of growing and you make it repeatable success. So that’s how you differentiate your start-up from the rest of the competition. You actually blow the competition off because you have tested and repeated success with an unconventional method. That’s what growth hacking, the term is coming from. Heather:        That’s interesting. I should mention in there … I’m guessing I’m right, you’re referring to grass hockey rather than ice hockey for our North American listeners which is … actually would he be referring to ice hockey rather than grass hockey? Tejasawi:       He’s an Australian guy so I don’t know. Heather:        Because they’re two very differently shaped sticks, I know that. Tejasawi:       Indeed. I think I get your point now because … Heather:        So I think it’s actually the ice hockey stick he’s referring to isn’t it because that’s the one with the 45 degree angle, whereas the grass hockey stick is actually quite … very, very short. Tejasawi:       I know it looked like that. Heather:        I’ll go and Google it and see if I can work it out afterward. You have, in the first year of launch, you managed to attain 250 paying customers with inbound marketing. How did you go about doing this? Tejasawi:       We have an install base of 1,000 stores but when the free trial ends, that’s how the paying customer starts. We are a SASS based B2B company, product company. At the beginning we were very clear that we were targeting certain markets where these platforms have good penetration. For example, US, Canada, Australia and UK, right, where the amalgamation or the integration can serve a purpose immediately. We targeted those and we founded the channels which were the app stores. As a company, we didn’t invest in a sales asset team. We didn’t hire any sales persons. We only invested in customer success. When I joined as a third team member in February of last year, I was straight away sent to customer support as a role. I didn’t go to marketing for the first four months. So what we learned from that is if you actually delight your customers from day one, they sell the app themselves. They write reviews. They talk about you. They recommend you to users and the Shopify system is pretty vital in that sense. People talk about their issues. So we actually focused on two things. One was the forums, community forums, across the business apps and the second is to actually get good reviews on the platform. People read reviews before they read features actually, often. Heather:        I completely agree with that, yes. Okay, let’s examine that a bit further. In terms of the forums you were looking at, what forums were you looking at? Was there a specific Spotify forum? Tejasawi:       Shopify and Bigcommerce … Heather:        Shopify sorry. I said Spotify. Shopify, yes. Tejasawi:       No, they’re very similar. Shopify has a very active business forum which is Shopify.comforums. Even we actually got the business idea thanks to those forums because customers were talking about specific data, manual data problems, manual accounting problems. When you go to the forums, there will be these customers who talk about, “How do I move my data from Shopify to Xero?” “How do I manage accounting?” “What are the best practises of accounting?”                         We position ZapStitch as a thought leader in those forums saying, “We know your pain point and we know how accounting can be a pain sometimes and how our solution solves it.” So rather than out-selling, we out-educated our competition in the forum. That’s a philosophy we believe in is that if you related the pain point, we talked about how you can move data seamlessly between Shopify and Xero, and automate the reporting and just focus on business reports rather than actually entering data. The forums were a great place where people were actually talking about the problems and we just plugged in ourselves as somebody who knows what they’re talking about and we can solve it. Heather:        I think going on the forums is very smart. Also as well as it being authentic, I think it also probably gives you really good SEO because people go … I know I personally, I go in and search there, and I know people who have a high level of credibility and if they’re supporting a particular product I’ll go, “Okay, I don’t need to do extensive research on it because this person has said it’s okay, so I’m sure it will be okay.” Tejasawi:       Right. How did you encourage your clients to give you reviews? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. Many companies, product companies especially, have a way of irritating the customer in terms of reviews. They keep bugging the customer saying, “Why don’t you write a review?” “Give a link,” all those things. What we did innately or subtly was have a live chat support in our app. When the on-boarding happens, and TradeGecko is a great example where the onboarding is seamless, but when we started as a company we didn’t have that leverage of a beautiful design, an amazing out of the box design. We focused on simple and subtle design, and when the onboarding happened, the user got delighted and our automatic chat would plugin, “How did you find the experience?” “Do you need any help?” “What is the next setting you want?” All those things. As the engagement happened in the live chat, we started to see the customers delighted and we can actually ask for review. It’s about instant gratification rather than sending them mail or calling them and saying, “How did you like the app?” The live chat client helped us a lot. I would recommend it to any product company starting out because that’s a great way to learn from customers on the spot and also solve the problems instantly and also, of course, write a review if the user is delighted. Heather:        Yes, it sometimes amazes me that some of the companies are not as receptive to talk to an individual person. They’re like, “If you’re not a partner, I’m not going to talk to you,” and you’re like going, “Well, I need to talk to you before I consider becoming a partner.” Now, in terms of reviews, it sounds like you’re not focused on getting reviews on other sites. I know that Xero has an add-on marketplace and actually encourages people to review there. Are you directing people to go and review there? Tejasawi:       Yes, so with Xero, we just launched that Heather. We want to get as many reviews there but it’s just two to three weeks old and we actually started getting paying customers as well from Xero. I mean review becomes a natural … Heather:        Progression in the cycle. Tejasawi:       Yes, by-product of success. We want to ensure product success with Xero first and then the review I’m sure will be there but we are not biased in any platform as such. Heather:        So for our listeners, we’ll just share with them that ZapStitch is now on the US Xero marketplace but you’re also looking for approval on the other country marketplaces. Is that correct? Tejasawi:       Yes. I should give credit to Xero because they are one of the most active developer support forums out there. They’re very transparent in how they deal with partners like us. Heather:        That’s sensational. Tejasawi:       So unless customers actually say that sales type automation works with ZapStitch, they will not approve it. We have seen other apps which you are aware of, where community is like … you like your app, the customers like your app, okay you’re globally approved. Here it’s more like every country has a specific use case and unless you actually meet them practically and the customer talks about it, you are not approved. We had beta customers from the US and UK, so we got approved and UK should be very soon right now, and we want beta customers from Australia and New Zealand which is the biggest Xero user base, to approve it as soon as possible. That’s our main focus in February. Heather:        Yes, sensational. How many customers does ZapStitch need to be successful? Tejasawi:       As a B2B company we are focused on two metrics, right? One is MRR  monthly recurring revenue, and second is to reduce churn. Rather than talking about the number of customers, we’re talking MMR in at least our philosophy, so we want to get to at least 100,000 MMR by end of year or by next year, early next year. That’s how we are growing and our month on month, at least to reach that, would be 35, we are at 38 this moment. We are going at a good speed but that’s how we look at our growth. Heather:        Excellent. You’ve targeted multiple markets to penetrate the cloud based software specifically in e-commerce and accounting, what have you observed through that and what have you learnt through that targeting of the different markets? Tejasawi:       Right, so when we actually launched the beta product in 2013 end which is like December or November if I’m not wrong, I was not onboard. The founding team had tested it with Indian customers. The problem with Indian cloud or cloud eco system is they’re not very progressive or they haven’t understood the impact a cloud app can bring to their business. We still are believing in manual bookkeeping or CD based software of accounting, Excel sheets. The penetration was getting harder and harder so we naturally went to the most progressive marketplace which is the US. They already know the pain points they have and they do actually look to build a multi-million dollar business within one or two years. The e-commerce stores there are built on Shopify or Bigcommerce were looking at, “How do I grow faster?” Accounting needs to be fast, needs to be painless. “How do I find the solution?” “Okay, ZapStitch is there.” We got our first paying customers from the US, then Canada, so we started progressing in those geographies first and then UK and then Australia. So in terms of progressive eco systems for cloud software, we thought and we have analysed that US is by far the leader. Heather:        Oh really? Tejasawi:       Yes. In terms of multiple processes … they don’t look at one process to automate, they actually want to automate the whole business and focus on customer success, focus on sales, marketing, and the data is a burden to them. Right? They look at multiple apps to automate multiple sites of their business. Australia was a close second to that and Canada is very close to Australia. Heather:        I would have thought from speaking to people, and I don’t have any stats behind me, it would have been New Zealand. Tejasawi:       Yes, in terms of user base I’m talking. Heather:        Okay, so in terms of user base, I completely agree because they’ve got such a bigger number. Tejasawi:       Indeed, yes. I appreciate that because I was talking not in philosophy of approach to the business but in terms … I meant that, yes. Heather:        The user base number, yes. As soon as you get the US buying into anything, you expand exponentially don’t you. Tejasawi:       Yes, and I’m sure with Xero, we would test the New Zealand market much better because with Shopify and the other accounting app, we didn’t have much user base in New Zealand so we couldn’t get real data measured with that. But I’m sure Xero … I have seen the data that Xero is more in Australia and New Zealand already so that should be good data to work with. Heather:        Yes. How can customer service be a differentiator for start-ups in a competitive market? Tejasawi:       When you look at cloud based business, there’s no geographical limitation. For example: we are an Indian company but working seamlessly for a US audience, right? We work in their time zones. Our support team works at US and UK time zones. When you come to a company … company to a marketplace, you have to find a differentiator. It cannot be price always. You can’t be the cheapest solution out there. That’s not a good business model to work with. Heather:        Absolutely. Tejasawi:       What you want to do is you want to delight your customers and if your app is not at the self-serving mode in the initial days, customer success or customer support is the easiest way to get that because as I said, businesses want to talk to a human at the end of the day. They don’t want to just write them email and get a response. They want to talk to a human. They want to relate to their problems. They want to talk about their problems. Our initial days or initial growth has to be credited to seamless customer support and of course a great product which enables delight.                         I think from our learnings we can safely say that if you actually put in place tools to automate customer support, to have things like live chat, email automation, and then actually have a product which is centric to the user and not to a developer. You don’t need to be a scientist to use an app. If you look at those three verticals as customer success, you are already in a good path to grow outwardly so that would be our learning in that space. What tool do you use for your live chat? Tejasawi:       We use Olark. We have been a huge fan of Olark. Heather:        Olark, okay. What email automation do you use? Tejasawi:       For customer support we have two things. One is the support which is on Freshdesk and for customer interactions we use Intercom. What Intercom does is it gives you the app usage of every user, you know, “Has he done a sync? What type of data did he sync? Is he actually happy with the product?” All those customer analytics. We use Intercom and we send trigger emails based on the actions inside the app. That’s how our customer support cycle works, onboarding works. If you’re dealing with people during business hours in the US, it sounds like you’re not getting much sleep over there. Tejasawi:       No, we don’t work 18 hours a day. How we divide this is like the marketing and product team works in Indian hours and the support and the customer success team works in US hours. Heather:        Okay. Tejasawi:       As we expand into markets, I’m sure the whole team will find a challenge in the one or two weeks but we are a global company so we should act like one. Heather:        Yes. Do you have staff outside of India? Tejasawi:       No, we are a 15 member team in Bangalore in India. Heather:        That’s really large. That’s a really large team. Do you attend any of the Xero roadshows or Xerocon events, the big Xero conferences? Tejasawi:       Yes, we would love to because there are these industry specific events. I know as you mentioned people like you hang out there but right now we are not focused on that. That’s one differentiator we have … Heather:        Your support is online rather than showing up at those events. Tejasawi:       Exactly, we don’t have a sales team. Yes. Heather:        Sensational. Can you share with us some of the businesses using your solution? Tejasawi:       Sure. One of the most successful businesses who was an early adopter of Zapstitch  is Bolder Band. They won the Shopify build a business competition last year. Do you know about the build a business competition? Heather:        No I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay, sorry. I’ll give a brief … what they do is Shopify promotes businesses who grow to a million dollar business every year. Heather:        Oh, and of course they’d know wouldn’t they. Tejasawi:       Exactly. It’s like a cross promotional activity. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       What the build a business does is like you need to sell as much as you can in year one of your business, after launching your business. So whoever sells the most in that calendar year becomes the winner. Bolder Band is a Shopify store who launched in late 2013. When they adopted us, we were just one month old. Heather:        Wow. Tejasawi:       They had at least 200 orders per day, right? We were like blown away. Okay, this is a great store. This is a large store. They also became our product evangelist and they gave active feedback how to make our product better. How they function is like they have a very niche segment of customers. They sell head bands for people, you know, gyming and sports personalities? Heather:        Okay, yes. Tejasawi:       Who like anything – jogging, hiking and everything. They sell headbands and they grew to a million … I think they are now $3-$5 million dollar business within one and a half years. Heather:        Wow, I didn’t know headbands had come back in … had made a comeback. Tejasawi:       Yes, so they were one of the most successful lead customers and then Pop Chart Lab is one of the most creative businesses we have. They create charts on any topic. For example: how did Nike involve their shoes? How did [Wine? 00:27:15] evolve from 1800 to 2000. Heather:        So people then buy the chart from them? Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Oh okay, that’s interesting. Tejasawi:       So these two were the most [ugliest? 00:27:29] and biggest customers. There are many but as customer successes, these are the first two that come up to my mind. Heather:        Did you find yourself in the developer stage reacting to their needs? Tejasawi:       No. Heather:        They said, “Okay, we need this,” and you were able to implement something like that? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. As a product company building a cloud app, we necessarily don’t go by feedback from just customers. What we go by is data and market need. When we talk to let’s say five or six customers and they want sales tech automation, we build sales tech automation. But it’s not like building a customer solution for big clients or working with them over time to see what do they want and going in depth to their needs. We want to serve collectively as an ecosystem for Shopify users, Xero users rather than just a multi-million dollar business. Heather:        Yes. So if someone has your product in place, they’ve got Shopify, they’ve got Xero and they’ve got ZapStitch in place, what additional financial information can they attain through having that integration? Tejasawi:       Good question. How ZapStitch works is we don’t store any local data. We don’t generate reports in the app but what we do for example is let’s say … I think this is one of our differentiators is that the sales tax, the other apps, don’t go to specific sales tax and invoices. What these apps do is they have one sales tax rate and they apply it to all the invoices they sync. What ZapStitch does is it actually breaks down the taxes as is from the invoice and maps it to the Xero accounts for those sales taxes. That is automated and an accountant or a business owner just needs to go to the sales tax or account in Xero and just generate a report within a second. If you go to the manual side of things or non-automation, it would take at least five minutes to do for every invoice: entering the sales tax, mapping it to the right account and everything. So maybe one or two minutes is saved on every order. If you look at a growing business like let’s say Bolder Bands, they get 300 orders per day that would be 6,000 minutes, right? If you click a button, we can automate the data sync in ZapStitch, so they don’t even have to login sometimes. That happens seamlessly and the accountant just focuses on generating reports and accurate data and non-duplicated data. Heather:        Excellent. Tell me what the start-up scene is like in Bangalore. Tejasawi:       Bangalore is a hub of start-ups in India. It’s maybe the most popular city in India in terms of start-ups and of our national capital New Delhi is a close second if I’m not wrong. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       How Bangalore works is a lot of product companies exist here. Product companies need investment early on, right? There’s a huge oversea and [internal? 00:30:58] investors community here that is eco systems like incubators and accelerators. We are still learning in the entrepreneurial eco system globally but in India at least, Bangalore is very progressive for start-ups and there are lesser challenges I would say. I’ll put it like that. Are venture capitalists coming from India or are they coming from overseas? Tejasawi:       Venture capital firm is mostly Indian who invest in Indian start-ups. They have global investors who are in contact with them and they actually scout talent but they don’t actually actively invest in Indian start-ups directly. As in an early investor but if a huge Indian venture capitalist has invested, then they see the talent, they scout it and the foreign investors come in. Heather:        Yes. I think you’ve told me this but I’ve forgotten. How old is your company? Tejasawi:       We launched our product of February 2014 and we launched our company in December or November if I’m not wrong. Heather:        So you’re coming up to your one year anniversary. Tejasawi:       Yes, my own and companies as well. Heather:        That’s amazing growth for a company that’s been around for a year. What have you learnt in that time of growing the start-up in India? Tejasawi:       One of the central things is if you want to build a fast growing or any growing start-up which doesn’t die in the first year, you need to focus on customers. One skewed emotion any start-ups have is they want to build a perfect product, right? What we had learned very early on thankfully is that if you actually build a minimum viable product for, let’s say, our market, actually the customer will do the rest of the thing. They will give it the requirements. The market will drive your product rather than you building the perfect solution. If you focus on customer success and actually giving a damn about them basically, they actually give you back and more than you actually ask for: so in terms of advocacy of the product, advocacy of your customer success, giving active feedback in terms of their product needs. I think that is one major learning and second challenge and learning is the marketing side of things. You want to build a repeatable engine of bringing customers, bringing progressive e-commerce businesses who want to try automation, who want to solve this problem. That has been one major challenge, you know, where do these guys hang out? Where do these guys talk about their problems? So building an inbound channel of customers is a challenge and we are still figuring it out but I think if we do our thing right, it’s just another start-up challenge. Heather:        That’s certainly interesting. I totally agree with you in what you’re saying in the focus on the customer. It does seem to be what a lot of people are saying these days is, “Focus on the customer.” I know sometimes I’m speaking with people, like I’m going into the start-up places and I’m like, “Have you sold this? Is anyone using this?” “No, no, I can’t show it to them until it’s perfect.” It’s like, “Aww, that looks like you’re putting a lot of money in that.” Tejasawi:       Also one thing is like no assumptions. We don’t assume that your customer is happy. You need data. You need customer interviews. You need everything to consolidate and, you know, actually generate actionable data rather than assuming you know customers are happy or you know they like this feature. Tools are important to measure everything actually inside the app. Heather:        Can you explain what some of those tools are that you’re using? Tejasawi:       Sure. For example, a classic case is Intercom. Intercom helps us analyse the product functionality: What is the customer actually doing inside the app? For example, let’s say our early customers came into the app, they set up the sync settings but they never ran the sync. If we see that the data shows that there is a time of login, there is a time of sync, and if their time between those two events is let’s say 15 minutes, we are on the wrong side of things. We want it to be less than 3 minutes or 4 minutes. He sets up that account and runs the sync.                         So the product team looks at the data and wants to change the design, and then the design team comes along and says, “Okay, this is the button that’s not very inherently …” Heather:        Intuitive. Tejasawi:       Yes. “So let’s make it intuitive. Let’s iterate on the design and make the onboarding time less than 3 minutes.” Heather:        That’s really smart. Tejasawi:       Also one thing it allows you to do … any such tool like Intercom, it triggers emails or contact touch points with events inside the app. For example, let’s say you have an error in the app, a chat will automatically come and say, “Okay, I saw you had an error in the app, how can I solve it? I am your customer success manager.” So rather than relying on the customer to get back to you, you have to be proactive in customer support. These apps let you do that because they can trigger events based on customer actions. Do the customers freak out that they think big brother is now watching them? You know, “Oh, I’ve made a mistake and then you’ve sent me an email telling me I’ve made a mistake.” Do they freak out about that? Tejasawi:       No. I mean it’s complete contrary. The most successful of our customers actually understand that we are thinking for them, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       Because when you deal with data integration, it’s sensitive data. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it immediately. So they are happy to let us fix it immediately rather than worrying about transparency or how did they know about it? Our customers are actually surprised in a pleasant way that as soon as they get an error, they are figuring things out and we are right there the solution. Are you able to actually jump in to actual individual accounts and sort things out if necessary? Tejasawi:       No. we don’t log into any accounts. What we do is we look at the metadata. For example, let’s say in an order case, the order didn’t sync. The development team looks at the metadata and sees okay, this is the date the order came from, this is the shop the order came from, so let’s read on that sync. That’s all we do from the backend. Heather:        Sensational. That’s really interesting. I think people will find that really interesting to listen to. I completely agree that it’s good to have the automated identifying of errors. I just know that some people are like, “Oh my goodness, they’re in my data, they’re in my data,” and their freaking out. So it’s good to have that conversation and be open with them but like I say to a lot of my clients, I just say as part of the sign up, “I’m letting the company automatically access your data.” But it’s not accessing your data, it’s accessing … if there’s a problem it will get sorted out a lot quicker than if we actually have to go through that manual process of getting it out there. Tejasawi:       Yes, but the more ideal case would be like … and that is a very common case. An ideal case is, for example, let’s say you are selling in multi-channels. You have multiple sales taxes across different regions, so you don’t know which setting to have in the app. What you want to do is like you are figuring out settings and you can ask the live chat support saying, “Okay, how do I solve this business problem with integration?” That’s the automation we have built in rather than just error resolution because that’s a very common case. The support is more proactive in business cases, how to integrate for your business rather than just broadly integrate to apps. Heather:        Yes, sensational. What does the future hold for ZapStitch? Tejasawi:       We were born as an integration platform. Our vision is to build a cloud integration platform across business verticals. For example, the next logical would be CRM or marketplace automation, for example: Amazon and EBAY. We want to logically progress through the verticals and integrate the most progressive apps and the most popular apps in those verticals. In a two year, three year time line, we see integrating 200-300 business apps across email marketing, CRM accounting, e-commerce. Heather:        It would be interesting to see because I know some of them … like I know I’ve worked with Amazon and it kind of works in an interesting way in that 10 of the transactions are normal and then one kind of like is a summary transaction and it never comes across properly and you’re going … and the client sets it up themselves perhaps and they come to you and they’re like, “Wow, 90% of it looks fine but then 10% of it looks like it’s going to take me hours to fix up.” Tejasawi:       Exactly. You know, you’re coming to the exact problem which ZapStitch is solving, is the reconciling of data. When you have different types of invoices, reconciling becomes a pain. What ZapStitch wants to do with Xero is become one of the very few solution providers which actually enable faster reconciliation and not just data automation. When we talk to one of our biggest customers, he had an Amazon store as well. This was the first point that he brought out that, “Bring support for summary invoice when you build integration because that is one of the major use cases in Amazon.” Heather:        Yes, absolutely. As soon as you have something in place that makes it easy to sell, it means you can sell so much more. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Like when I was dealing with this client, I was just like, “Stop selling stuff because this is a nightmare.” It was just like creating this bigger and bigger and bigger mess. Definitely installing a solution that simplifies the accounting process means you have the capacity to sell more which is exciting for the business. Tejasawi:       Yes, and we know one of the … I followed the name of the customer once, this guy sells iPhone batteries. Most of the successful businesses we have are niche businesses: iPhone batteries, headbands, wine collections. Heather:        That’s the joy of the internet, isn’t it, that someone can go out and go, “I think headbands should be brought back into fashion and I’m going to sell them.” Tejasawi:       Yes, so this guy told us that his accounting team is spending money on watching Netflix movies more than accounting. He was very happy that we solved this problem but he was pleasantly not happy that his accounting team is now having a lot of fun which is good but … Heather:        Oh okay, so they’re under capacity now. Tejasawi:       Yes, he was saying, “I don’t want to fire people but this is how our team is, they’re having fun, I’m spending more time with my family.” I think the data is just a part of the business end. It shouldn’t become the business. When you actually integrate well, your customer should do what he likes doing, selling, customer success, or spending time with the family. Heather:        I think this is part of the integration process when it goes in. I’m not sure whether … do you have cloud integrators come in and assist with the integration process or are you doing that yourself? Tejasawi:       We have partnered with Shopify and Xero, so their APIs allow us to pull in and integrate any data we want for our customers. There are limitations of course. There are API limitations in terms of business use cases. Heather:        But would a consultant like me come in and do the integration or would a consultant like me come in and watch you do the integration and just sort of sit in the background? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good point actually. As a strategy of building the right product, we want to onboard experts and consultants but when you actually run the thing, use the app, it’s like the click of a button. But in the backend when we build features, for example summary invoice, we can’t know about the requirement unless I talk to somebody like you. We bring experts when building the product but not when using the product. The using is like click a button . Heather:        And they should be able to do it on their own. Yes, fair enough. Tejasawi:       Yes. Heather:        Thank you very much for speaking with me today Tej. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure. Heather:        I’m sure our listeners have gained a lot from hearing you talk, especially if they have a Shopify client or are considering a Shopify client as something they’ll definitely look at. Now, I need to ask you before you go to see whether you know, what are the birds making all the noise in the background? Do you know what bird types they are? Tejasawi:       No, actually not. My mum is a bird enthusiast but I’m not. Heather:        They sound like seagulls but I didn’t want to be that bland and suggest that they would be seagulls. Are you near the water? Tejasawi:       No, so how Bangalore works, it’s a bustling city. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not going to be seagulls. You can send me an email sometime and let me know what the birds are. Tejasawi:       Sure. Heather:        It’s normally when I have these sessions my birds are noisier than anyone else’s birds. Tejasawi:       Yes, I think I heard in one part, yes. Heather:        My birds stayed quiet today and your birds went off on a racket. Thank you so very much for speaking with me today and I’ll leave links for how to get in contact with you in the show notes. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure Heather. If I’m not pronouncing correct – Heather? Heather:        Heather. Tejasawi:       Great. I mean you are an inspiration. I want you to know that because when you maybe record and publish the podcast, very few people actually talk to you about it, right, I mean physically. So I wanted to thank you that you’re an inspiration to all of us and our team actually looks up to experts like you, your stories and the podcast is an inspiration. I wanted to make that very clear. Thanks a lot of taking the time out. Heather:        Thank you very much and hopefully it gives you an opportunity to hear the other add-ons and perhaps connect with them and learn from them and to move you from sort of cold to warm with these guys. Tejasawi:       Indeed. Heather:        Because we’re all in it together. Tejasawi:       Thanks a lot Heather. Heather:        Thank you. Cheers. Tejasawi:       I hope the seagulls were not too noisy. Heather:        No they weren’t. I like birds. They weren’t too noisy, I just wondered if you knew what they were. Tejasawi:       No, I’m sorry. I’ll get that. Thanks a lot Heather. Bye. Heather:        Thank you. Tejasawi:       Have a good day. Heather:        Same to you. Cheers Tej. End of Transcript Mentions ·        ZapStitch - http://www.ZapStitch.com ·        Bigcommerce - https://www.Bigcommerce.com ·        Xero - https://www.Xero.com ·        Shopify - https://www.Shopify.com ·        TradeGecko - http://www.TradeGecko.com ·        Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com/ ·        Emera ·        Olark - https://www.Olark.com ·        Freshdesk - http://Freshdesk.com ·        Intercom - https://www.Intercom.io ·        Bolder Band - http://www.bbolder.com   Contact Heather Smith Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/   Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU  Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU    

In this brand new episode I have my first guest on the show! This is the first of many great interviews to come. Now if you've listened to most interviews, quite frankly they usually suck. Everybody talks about "their story" and you get no real value. Not with this interview. In this interview Kavit Haria and I interview each other. It's like sitting in on a high level mastermind group. We'll get into the SPECIFICS of what each of us do with our clients to get such outstanding results. It's one you won't want to miss. In this episode I'll discuss... Kavit's advice for anybody launching a new product into the marketplace... Exactly how, when and why to do surveys in your market... *Ninja tips on how I 6x'd my optins for my side business using popups... Our top 3 book recommendations each... And MUCH more... It's a great interview. Check it out, share it, and let me know what you thought! Resources Mentioned Funnel Day OptinMonster InsiderInternetSuccess.com SurveyMonkey Transcript Jeremy Reeves: Hey guys, this Jeremy Reeves from the Sales Funnel Mastery Podcast and I have on the line with me today, Kavit Haria, you have to let me know if I said that right. Kavit Haria: Kavit Haria. That's right. Jeremy: Right. Kavit Haria. So today, Kavit and I have been talking and we decided that it would be kind of a cool thing to do. So instead of having a one-person interview, we're just talk and brainstorm and kind of almost like the little mastermind group. I think that's going to be most beneficial for both of our audiences. So if you're a listener of mine, you know who I am. My name is Jeremy Reeves and if you're not, if you're one of Kavit's subscribers, then you may or may have not heard me before and if you don't, again, my name is Jeremy Reeves and I am a Sales Funnel Specialist. I basically help people figure out what their sales funnel's going to be, the whole automated marketing funnel thing? That's what I help people with. So taking people from prospects, from when they first hear about you, and making sure that you have the right positioning in place, the right offer, and having them go through automated sequences. Emails, sales letters, videos, and everything that makes up a sales funnel. And do that in the proper sequence and have all the right offers for people to greater profits and automate your marketing so you can focus on higher leverage activities and all kinds of stuff that we'll get into today. My website is JeremyReeves.com if you've never heard of me before. I'm going to pass it on to Kavit and let him explain what he does, who he is, so that my audience can get a good understanding of what he does. Kavit: This is a pretty interesting thing, Jeremy. I guess we are co-interviewing and co-answering also. So not only am I being interviewed, I feeling like I'm also interviewing you, so that's pretty cool. My name is Kavit Haria and I've been online for about 10 years. I've been trying to build businesses online. Succeeded in a few different ways. Got into a few, different, cool ventures. Ultimately, I like the fact that I'm a musician and I play (02:30-02:32) and I use that to launch business online, selling music education to other musicians. Kind of like helping them work in a good (02:41-02:42) that marketing is very important in my career. I needed it to help me get out there and show my music. If I wasn't good at marketing, I wouldn't get (02:51). If I wasn't good at promotion, I wasn't going to get an exposure. Nobody was having me sign up for a band. Nobody was signing up for promoting and my music essentially is part of my dream. So I learned that marketing is very important. To cut the story short, really, the problem at first is inside our music business where I learned to create info products and sell a lot of educational material and automated funnels, which is what we're going to talk about in a second. I also learned that I have this ability that I engineer a process where somebody would come to the site and really engage with me and really engage with my stuff and buy my stuff, not once but over and over again within a period of time, that my lifetime customer value is really high in such a short period of time and I was doing all that, once build, and never having to touch it again. So I heard some really cool things there that I didn't go out on a flight to other businesses that I went out to consult in before starting my current business InsiderInternetSuccess.com. Where we basically work with people that have profitable business ideas or business ideas that they think will really work and we sit down with and walk them through a business strategy, a business model, and build the entire thing on the web. So we're kind of very similar in what we do, so it's really good to collaborate with mastermind right now. I'm talking a little bit about how we're building sales funnels individually and have different angles to it, but it's all very creative work and also scientific work and also how other can benefit from just listening in on this. Jeremy: Yeah, definitely. I even said we're almost semi-competitors but I'm kind of on the mindset that there's more than enough people, that everybody has their unique flavor to what they do and people respond differently, they resonate with people differently. So it's cool once you get two people together that do similar things and pull the intricacies of what we do. I think it's going to help both our audiences quite a bit. So really quick, when I first heard about you and when I read about you, your whole music thing, I didn't realize how you're very humble about how you said that because I saw your 'About' page, you did performances with Paul McCartney and Jimmy Paige and all these heavy-hitters and famous musicians, so tell me a little about that. I'm curious. Kavit: Well, and they are really awesome and nice. I remember them very, very clearly and they were also in big venues. We're all about world festival in Holland and U.K. and lots of places. I've performed in different continents, also. But I guess I (05:44-05:45) to get out and play my music. Because I know how to make instrument but I didn't want to play with Indian music, I really want to fuse it with the Western stuff and we hear it a lot these days. Now, it's a lot more mainstream. A lot of R & B and Hip-Hop scenes. Even rock music and Latin music, even that you hear these days. I can hear it very intricately and I can hear the same drum that I play up here in that music and people don't even know what it is. They key was I had to learn to build confidence. I had to learn how to very clearly articulate what I did, and very clearly know exactly know what I did and help somebody else. And as soon as I started to do that, as soon as I started to tap into other musicians and show them how this could work for them, how it could really help them stand out if they were to use this kind of stuff, and then we started to perform and get known, it lead to other bigger opportunities. And so I remember performing for our best musician called 'Donovan', and he was celebrating his wedding anniversary as a concert in the Royal Albert Hall. He was singer from back in the day and he was singing with the London Contemporary Music Orchestra and his friend who was a special on the show, was a performer was Jimmy Paige. So I remember this occasion. I actually, I got (07:10), I have to admit. Music and Jimmy and Paige, didn't know what he looked like, don't remember his music, nothing. But I remember we were in the musician's canteen and the orchestra was performing and rehearsing with Donovan and I was sitting there and I ordered a bit of food from the musician's canteen, I was a nobody, I remember at that time, still with music, to be honest. And this guy walks in and comes and sits with me because I'm the only one sitting there, so he comes and sits, so we start talking and I realize that this is Jimmy Paige, I realize that Jimmy Paige is a great guy, I started to feel a little interested in what he was doing and we talked for 45 minutes, right before the performance. I didn't even know he was there to perform, I had no clue, whatsoever. We then went behind stage, we practiced for about an hour and we performed on stage and it was beautiful. It was absolutely beautiful. Jeremy: That's awesome. That's a really cool story. Kavit: So the picture you see on my 'About' page is us sitting in the canteen, having apple pie or custard, basically. Jeremy: Sounds good. I can go for an apple pie, actually. That's one of my favorite desserts. I haven't had one in a long time. So let's jump in more business stuff. We each have our own approach to how we work with clients, how we work with customers, that kind of thing. Let's just say someone was coming to you and they didn't have anything. They had no assets in place, whatsoever. If they were basically starting from scratch and wanted to build a lifestyle business, that's a big buzz word these days, what would be your process to help them from that first stage of business, going from nothing to 6-figures is the big first mark and then it's like half a million and then a million. So what would your advice be like? What would your process be working with somebody to get them to that first stage? Kavit: For an automated business system, there 3 stages. The first stage is strategy. We basically sit down and think about their profitable business idea. At the end of the day, you got to have an idea. If you don't have an idea, then you generate a whole list of ideas (09:21) with analyzing and testing information and find the best one. But generally, apart from that one, you got an idea, you got to simply think about, "What is the product that I want to sell?" And the way you think about that, first of all, is "What are the problems that the market that I'm attacking or going for has and what is the solution that I can provide to them?", so you got this idea, you got this market, you got this huge problem that might be facing that you're trying to solve in the service or product and you've really made it knocked down. For me, the biggest way to test and do all these things is surveys. And I do a huge number of surveys. In the beginning, at the end, after purchase, before purchase, throughout the lifestyle of the client. And I'm trying to find out and get into my head and really understand what is really important for them? What challenges do they have? How can I help them with their challenges? What would it mean to them if I helped them solve their challenges? So I really want to get and understand all of this stuff. And it's really, really worth the time to do that because even one or two, three insights that I get could change the way that our (10:29), could change the way that I present it when I speak it. I'm sharing my value with them and that could mean a lot more sales. So surveys are (10:36-10:37) that. And essentially, what I'm looking for is a sales funnel that has two key parts. The first is what I call the '24/7 Marketing Machine' which is really giving a lot of value on the front end to solve that problem that that person might have in their market and giving them a value in exchange for their information, for some ideas or survey questions that they might complete and then giving them a series of emails that builds on my relationship with them and then that segment which is the '24/7 Marketing Machine'. The second segment is the 'Simple Sales System'. The way that the Simple Sales System works is once you build the trust and engagement in your emails, once you give them the value of building an engagement with them, the next step would be to figure out, "How would I take these people who are now hot leads and convert them to sales?" It could be a sales letter, a webinar, just an application form, that they speak to you on the phone, it could be any of these things. But what is the process that would work best based on what that person is selling? So there are two key systems. These are really crucial. What most people do is mix the marketing with the sales when really, they are different things. You can't sell to somebody if they're seeing you for the first time. It's very unlikely that they're going to buy so I've always found that take the time to invite somebody, to court them, to nurture them so they're ready to be sold to. Otherwise, you're (12:12) to people that don't want to be sold to and then you're why you're never getting sales. That is because they don't want to be sold to. So the first thing to ((12:21) is there two parts to that process. Get that person ready and then have it processed to sell to them. And then anybody that's starting out should always be thinking, "Well, there's so much to build, there's so much to do, how do I get all of these things done?" And the first step is to take each step at a time. So set up the first element, the marketing section and then set up a sales section. Put it all together. The second thing is then to stop thinking about how you can bring other people in to help you to do that because there is a huge amount of work and you want to whatever you can to get it right from the beginning. It might be about the cost, it could be systems, it could be technology. But whatever it is, I'm not saying you have to spend money on hiring people, but it just could be the right technology to help you automate the things that you  need automate so that you've got more time off to go back and spend sending traffic which (13:10-13:11) part in the system. Jeremy: Yeah, and it's funny a lot of people make the mistake of putting their time in the things that don't make a difference. You have to figure out what your unique ability is, like what you're best in the world at, and make sure that when you’re working on your business, you're working on those activities. One of the easiest ways to find growth in any business - doesn't matter what stage you're at - is to just get rid of those activities that aren't giving you the highest leverage and hand them off people who are still capable of doing them. Whether it's a freelancer, like a part-time kind of thing, just outsourcing or full-time employee, whatever it is and focusing on the activities that are bringing you highest leverage for your time. Beyond all the sales funnel stuff and that makes it all automated, for the stuff that you're doing on a daily basis, it's so important to figure out when you sit down, when you're at your computer, at your keyboard, you know what you should be spending your time on. That makes a big difference. You mentioned about surveys. That's a huge part of my process too. In fact, after we get off the call, I'm setting up a survey for a client that I'm working on. A lot of people stop with just an online survey. Most people don't do any type of surveys. They really don't understand their market at all. They really don't understand their frustrations, the pain points, what people are there for, what ways to segment. Surveys are a really good way to segment your audience so that when you're sending out your emails, you're sending them to the right people. So doing the survey is step one. And then if you really want to get in tune with your market - and this is especially crucial if it's a new market or if you're trying to get to the next level of growth whether that's from 500,000 or to your first million, whatever your next level of growth is - talk to people on the phone. So when at the end of the survey, you have a question like, "Hey, do you mind if we call you? Leave your phone, it's optional of course." you'd be surprised how many people leave that. I know when I have clients, a lot of times, I'll ask them to send out an email saying, "Hey, we're trying to improve your experience. We have someone that wants to call you and understand how we can help you better.", then I'll call their customers and do that. For some reason when you get on the phone, you can get 200 survey responses. And that's usually around the number I'd typically recommend because over that, you start getting the same thing over and over and below that, you're not really able to see trends as well. So 200 is a pretty good number to start with. But if you talk to five people for 20 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever out of your time, you're going to get so much deeper of an insight than what you get with just online text surveys. That's one thing I would recommend when you're doing this. Regardless of where you are in your business, you should be doing surveys. Kavit: That's a great idea. Do you have a formula for how you make them work? Jeremy: What do you mean for how to make them work? Kavit: Like, how do you get the maximum input from your users or your prospects? So like, they're giving you the really good information that can help you turn a lousy campaign to a really good campaign. Jeremy: Do you mean on the phone when I'm talking to them? Kavit: No, in the survey itself. Jeremy: I don't have any specific templates. Like, you're asking for their biggest challenges. It's kind of different with each market. I write them specific to that market. Like, "When you're doing this, what's the biggest problem you're having?" or "What's the biggest challenge you're facing?" or "What's the main reason you're doing this in the first place?" For example, if people want to lose weight, "Why are you losing weight?", and it's so different. Some people want to do it because they want to look good for their spouse, other people will want to do it because it's more of an ego thing, they want to look good for other people or walk down the beach with their shirt off. That's a good idea. I should come up with templates for it. I usually do it based on that market. When I start any new project, I always obligate a questionnaire. I always talk to the client about it and a lot of times I do funnel days. It's like an in-person consultation with the client so I spend the whole day with them so that I have a good understanding of the market and then I base the surveys off of that. But even just to get started, even if you have a two-question survey that is basically, "What is the greatest challenge that you're having when it comes to..." and then whatever you're trying to help them with. And then also "What's the number one reason you're trying to achieve that goal?" If you just start with that, then that would help quite a bit. It's a really good place to start. And then you can get deeper as you go, take those questions, talk to people and you'd be able to come up with other questions based off of those. Because you'll start seeing trends. I really should get templates, though. Kavit: Quick question about that, how do you then use the survey information? Like, do you segment your mails? Or do you use that information on emails? What do you do? Jeremy: That's a good question. One of the main reasons I do surveys is obviously, number one, to understand the market and that's for all the pieces of the copy. There's a lot of times that I've used actual quotes in the copy or I kind rearranged it a little bit and used it as a headline if I see it coming over and over again, it's a huge pain point. What I do is when I go through the survey, I make a list. Let's just say that's frustrations. So the two main things are the frustrations, the challenges, the problems and then the other side is the reason why. So depending on the market, what I do is I go down and I have two separate Word documents and I go through all the surveys manually because you just get a lot out of it. You can do multiple choice but I usually do open-ended questions because people give you real answers rather than whatever you want to give them, basically. So I go through it. I spend half the day or whatever. So let's just say I'm reading through and I see seven big objections coming up all the time, I write them down in a bulleted list and then  mark down how many times it comes up. So if one of the main objections is price, then I know to counter that and write a copy to overcome that objection more in the copy and I place it higher on the page. And then the same with the reasons why their doing it, I segment that based on the reasons why. Let's just say I have a side business and I did surveys to find the reason why they want to dress better. So I went through it and I found out that the three biggest segments were: Number one, getting girls, attracting other people to them for dating and things like that. The other one was confidence. A lot of guys, this is a guy's website, they feel more confident when they're dressed nicely. You just feel different when you're dressed in a nice suit rather than comfy pants. You stand tall and get more confident and all that kind of stuff. And then the third one was success. There's a segment of guys that are young professionals, they're trying to get a raise, they're trying to get better (21:56), all that kind of thing. So I look through that question and I mark down segments based on that and then I can in the emails. So that just gives me three segments. You can also do this with quizzes, by the way. So let's just say three segments. It could be two, it could be ten, but let's just say three. In the first email, somebody comes into your funnel. So there's two ways to do this. Number one is you can segment with your lead magnets that you get. Like the free value it could be free video, free report, whatever it is. You can segment with that. For example, I might have three different lead magnets. One is appealing to guys who want to dress better for success. Seven ways to dress better to get a big promotion or whatever it is and then you can segment that going to a separate list that talks about success and overcomes the objections, the frustrations they're having that area, it gives them tips, and builds relationships specifically to that. So that's one way. And then the other way is if you have more of a general lead magnet. Then let's just say 'How To Dress Better In The Next 4 Days', like, we have a four-day crash course  on how to dress better. So what we can do with that is in the first email, "Hey, I want to send you these emails that are you going to tell you how to dress better but in order for me to send you the most relevant information, I just have a quick question - what's the biggest reason that you want to dress better? Is it to pick up girls? Is it to get more success in life? Or is it to feel more confident?" And for this, you need Ontraport or Infusionsoft, like a CRM. Basically any email service that can automatically segment based on a link that they clicked. Then they click the link and then they go into that specific segment. So then there's a little process after that. Does that answer your question? Kavit: Yeah, that's great advice on surveys and segmenting and stuff like that. What I want to know is, and I think this will be useful to everyone, what is the process you go through to build a sales funnel? You're sitting down with a client, you're talking through the while process, what is it? Jeremy: The first thing I do is I get in touch with the market. Research. Understanding the market, understanding what they want, and then looking at the different products. Some clients already have the product. Maybe they're successful in another business. They hired me for a new business, whatever the case, we have to build the products. Actually, the guy that I'm working with coaching is doing that. So we find out what are the needs that are not being met in the market place? And that's based on surveys, talking to people. You can look at your competitors, see what they're doing. I do more for ideas rather than ripping them up. So that's first. The second is there are three stages - before, during, and after for the sales funnel. And one of the things that you talked about was not every sales funnel is the same thing. There’s a lot of people that are like, "The 8 Sales Funnel Templates", and it doesn't really work well because different types of funnels work for better for different markets and for different needs and for different products. In one, you might have the typical free report and then the emails and then the upsell sequence and then buyers' sequences. For others, you might want to start with the webinar. For example, I'm working on a project right now and he's selling a $7,000 coaching program to cold traffic. So that is very much different. There's a lot of relationship-building and trust-building and... Kavit: And it depends on what they're selling, the price point, the audience, the mindset, what they're used to or accustomed to, all that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, whatever you do has to, in my opinion, get the person ready to (26:48-2:50) Jeremy: Yes. Exactly. And one of the big things is time frame with that. If you're selling a $5,000 coaching program, you need a little bit more time for them to warm up with you first. Video's really good if you want people to bond with you a little bit faster. If you're selling $27 e-book, you can do that in a lot shorter time frame because it's not much of a risky for them. But you still need to create that bond. But you can do it a little bit faster. So the first thing is figuring out what do we have to do? People come to you when they first meet you. They first sign up to your list. They're on the left side of the line, that's where they are right now. And then the right side of the line is where need to be to buy your product. And again, that line is going to be bigger or shorter, depending on all the different things you said. The 'Before' process. What do you have to do? What emails have to be in place? What bonding has to be done? What authority has to be shown? What trust has to be built? That kind of thing to move people down that line. So each little touch point that you have - you show them a case study, it moves them to the right a little bit. You give them results in advance, it moves them down the line a little bit. I always think in my head, instead of like, "Oh, let's do x amount of emails", and then that's it. It's more of how do you gain control of their buying process? So you're constantly thinking, "How do I move them down the line?" rather than like, "Okay, let's just throw ten emails in here. It doesn't matter." and you just mish-mash them. It has to be done in a specific sequence. Kavit: It's psychology. So the whole point is that it doesn't matter emails you're going to do. It could be as little as sixteen or it can be as many as fifty, but the whole point is that person's got to be ready to buy. Jeremy: Exactly. So that process, part A, the 'Before'... Kavit: I have a question there. How do you know when they're ready to buy? How do you decide that? You, know, this is the number of emails or this the point where they're going to buy? Jeremy: I wish there was an answer to that because I would be a billionaire by now. It's kind of based on intuition and market research and doing best guess. If there's any way to figure that out specifically, I would love to sell that. Buy it's just based on understanding the market. Each person is going to come to you in a different way. I've had people that found out about me whether it was on the podcast or a guest article and I've had people do $20,000 products within one week of finding out about me. I'm doing a sales funnel for somebody and I forget, like, 13 grand or something. And I never spoke to them on the phone. I did it all through email. And that's because it was a referral. So that's a very different process from if he's never heard about me, he got referred to me by someone that he trusted. so he was already three-quarters down that line. And because he was using that trust from the referral, pushed him all the way down the line. He didn't have to go through my typical process to be able to do that. So everybody comes in there differently. And that's why even from the beginning I give them the chance to buy. I'm not really a believer, and everybody has different opinions on this, I mean there's really no scientific answer for this - again, it just comes out of my gut feeling - but even from the beginning, I always want them to know that the product and services are there. It's a really soft sell for a while. But at the same time, they still know that they're there. So if they are ready, then they just click the link in the email and they're good. A little bit more aggressive stuff come later. And I never really get too aggressive because I'm a huge bonding kind of guy. My scale of aggressiveness is less than most. But that comes a little bit later. Again, I wish I had a specific way. That would be incredible. So at that point, that process gets them to guy for the first time. And you touched on this before. There's a process for getting them to buy for the first time and then there's another process for getting them to become repeat buyers and higher value buyers because they already built that trust with you. Whether your first product is the (32:08) like the really small-priced thing. It works well with some markets. It doesn't really work well with other markets. If you're selling a really high-end coaching program, it really doesn't work well in my experience, at least in those circumstances just because of positioning. So the second phase is what happens during the buying process? They literally just bought your product one second ago. That's the typical upsell experience. I think most of the people listening to this probably understand what that is so I won't go into that much. But it's the process of the one-click upsell where they just bought the product and you give them offers for buying products. It could either be at a discount or they get a special bonus if they buy it right now. And that can be done. Just look up one-click upsell script of software. Most CRMs like Infusionsoft, Ontraport, Hubspot have that built in. I think what shopping cart does, auto-responder, Aweber, email services like that, you can always integrate with a shopping cart that does it. Kavit: I find a lot of people don't do the upsell clicks. Everyone talks about it but not everyone does it. Why is that? Why do you that is? Jeremy: I don't know. Kavit: I think it could be a lot of work or it could be they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to automate it. It could be those reason. Apart form that, do you think that there's people out there that are concerned that it might irritate people? And how do you go with that concern? Jeremy: It's a very valid to think but in reality, it's very rare to get complaints from people. Everybody always uses the McDonald's example. You go in there, "Do you want fries with that?" sorry I haven’t been to McDonald's for ever. But super-sizing, that's it. And you don't get mad at that. They're just offering you a question. I think a lot of what it comes down to is how the copy's done, how you position it. If you're really aggressive with it, then people might get mad at you. I's all about relation and bonding because that person just gave me money, I want to take care of them. I want to make sure that they know that I am someone they can trust and relate to and bond with and have a relationship with. Mine is always worded in a careful and considerate way. It's kind of like, "Hey, you just bought this. This other thing is going to give you...", usually, the big three are better results, faster results, and easier results. So if you're thinking about what to put in your back end, whether it's an upsell sequence or it's just in the back end, that's always what sells best. Easier, better, faster. Kavit: Well, there's some people that are starting out that are listening to this. So easier, better, faster, what do you mean? Jeremy: So let's go to weight loss. You sell them whatever the initial product is and then 'better' could be, you're going to get the same results, let's just you're going to lose ten pounds, here's a seven-day blueprint to lose ten pounds. So they're getting the 'faster' and 'better' in that. Or with 'easier', it could be just adding "Without giving up your favorite foods". Whatever the things that work really well is software. Like, "Our software will do it for you", that's always another good one. I went through a webinar, I'm actually going to buy it (36:39). Probably tomorrow. So I went through a LinkedIn training on how to connect with people on LinkedIn and gain more traffic through LinkedIn and his whole thing, was "Here's the process for doing it but if you want to just automate everything, my software will do it for you.", so that's his upsell. It's easier, you get better results because it actually gets done faster because the software does it for you. So it hits all three of those points. Kavit: That's interesting. Jeremy: So software is a really good way to do it but there's a lot of different ways. Coaching is another good upsell because that's faster and better and easier. It's kind of like, "Hey, you can do everything by yourself, or you can work with me and I'm going to show you, step-by-step how to do it. We're going to get things done so much faster..." Hopefully, that gives you a couple of good examples for people that they can use in their business. Kavit: Let's talk tricks for a second. I want to make sure to understand, what are cool new things that I can add or do on my website? Because everyone's using all these tools like online chat and pop-ups and all these things. What are your (38:09)? What are your favorites? What do you see worth creating well? If you were to give me your secret advice, what would it be? Jeremy: I would say Live Chat is a good one and it's really easy to implement. You can go and just get Olark, theyr'e one of the free live chats, there's a bunch of them. Most of them have free plans. Usually, if you have live chat, it'll bump up your conversions just by having it regardless if people use it. For some reason it just gives them that feeling of confidence. Live chat is a good one. Compare to the amount of people on your pages, you don't get a ton of people that use it. I don't do my own live chat anymore, I actually used to. That's another good way to do research, by the way, just to throw that in there. Even if you just want to talk to your customers and do research. My employees do that for me. They're saved a lot sales because people will be, just for example, on the order form, and they're having problems, and they're like, "Hey, I'm having x problem, what do I do?", you can just outsource all of this and have your employee walk them through what might be happening, refresh the page, try this, and have them go through the whole thing. So live chat helps. I'm a big fan of pop-ups. But instead of having the same, it all comes down again to segmenting. Instead having one pop-up on the whole website, what I've seen really helps is - and I did this in my side business and I think it was probably about 6x how many opt-ins I get. Again, instead of just having it on every page, you have it on specific pages. For example, on our sales letter. I was looking for my Analytics and people who got this one email, converted at 4x the rate of just the average person on the (40:25) and that email was giving them a sneak peek of the product - so I was like, "Wow! That's a pretty big increase!", so I thought, "How do I scale that? How do I get that to more people?". My idea was on my sales letter, when they leave the sales letter, it says, "Hey, you weren't interested but maybe that's because maybe you wanted to take a sneak peek at the product first and make sure that it's for you." So then they opt-in, they get it. So that was my way of using analytics and then you say, "Okay, how do I scale that? How do I put that in the business?" So that bumped up the conversions quite a bit. That's just one example of using pop-ups in a much smarter way than just throwing it on there. If you have different categories for blog pages, let's go back to the weight loss example. Let's just say you have recipes and nutrition advice and strength training advice. So there are three very different segments. On all your category pages for recipes, you can have a pop-up that offers them. It's like, "Hey! You came here, you enjoyed the recipe, do you want our free e-book that gives you fifty more?" On the nutrition letter it's like, "Hey, you enjoyed our nutrition article, do you want one that gives you our 30-day nutrition plan?" You can also do that on your blog pages. I use Opt-in Monster, by the way. That's my preferred opt-in plug-in. So you can do that. One of the things that I did for Kinowear, the side business, is they have one specifically designed for mobile. They have the normal one and there's one specifically for mobile and when I added that, the mobile actually gets more opt-ins than the regular one. I have to split test this. This is kind of just like conjecture, but I think the reason that it converts so well is because of how I positioned it. I positioned it as, "Hey, you're on your phone," and this wasn't the actual copy, it's the concept, but it's like, "Hey, you're on your phone, it's probably going to be hard to read the website, why don't you sign up here and I'm going to you free advice on getting stylish and the next time you're on your email, you can read it. It's just going to be a lot better of an experience for you." I forgot the exact copy that I have on the opt-in form but its' like that concept but it's like, "Hey, let's make this easier for you. You opt in here, and I'll send you this through email. You can check the next time you're on your computer." So that helped quite a bit. Kavit: That's awesome. You know what I wanted to do was (43:30-43:31). So for a while now, I've been creating and testing a lot of different lead pages, especially when I do advertising. I know on my own site, I got a lot of lead boxes all over the place. Inside blog posts, I've got specific blog posts about lead pages. Like one, if it's a report about content marketing, I've got something I'm giving away about content marketing, there's a lead box for that. If it's a blog post saying about a plug-in, I've got to push for that. And then I got video episodes like podcasts. Then I transcribe each episode and I give the PDF away but in order to get the PDF, they got to opt in. So every single episode is like a lead page. And that's 90+ lead boxes just for the episodes so it's really, really cool. Then I'm building lots and lots of opt-ins, Then (44:19) segmenting in so many different ways. And I found that although some people opt in, like, 10, 15x in different lead boxes, because they want different things, the more they opted in, the more I'm able to segment them and say, "Hey, you seem like an active user. I think I'm going to follow up with you to say maybe you want to come up on one of our discovery (44:40)" or whatever it is just they are more hyper active. Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. That's a good idea. I like that. Kavit: We're running out of time now, so I got a question for you. I think for me, whenever I want to get to know somebody, I want to know what they read because what they like to read tells me a little about the kind of person they are. So what are your top three recommended books? Jeremy: Let me give you two business books because we're talking about business. But I'm also a huge fan of a life of balance. Like, not just working all day because I have one-year-old, I have a three-year-old, I have a wife and with a good relationship with her. So I want to see all them. All of our family lives within a 15-minute radius of us. We actually have friends coming over tonight. So we're always doing stuff with family and I think that if you just work all the time, and a lot of people are like, "Oh, my business is my passion" and my rebuttal to that is, "Okay, I think it's kind of a limited life if you only have one passion." I love this. I absolutely live working all day but I have a lot of other passions. I'm getting certified as a chef right now just because I love it not because I'm going to go out and cook for people. My wife likes it. Kavit: But this is certified chef. Jeremy: Basically, like a professional cook. But there's online classes and stuff that you can take and get professionally certified but I'm just doing it because I love to cook. Anyway, I'm also going to give you one non-business book. The number one person of influence is Jay Abraham. Sometimes I think a little bit too strategically, that's I have number two. The first person is Jay Abraham, any of his books, just read them. Kavit: If I was to answer the same three questions, the first book to have on my list is 'Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got'. Jeremy: That's number one for me. Kavit: That's really good to hear. Jeremy: So 'Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got', that's number one. Number two is Dan Kennedy. Basically, anything by Dan Kennedy. He's got a whole bunch of books. I would say like off-the-top-of-my-head, the one that really resonated with me is 'My Unfinished Business '. It's almost like autobiography. And also another one is Richard Branson and his autobiography was awesome (47:44-47:45). And then the non-business one, I don't know if you're familiar with Strategic Coach but they have a thing where you have either a focus day, which is your top priorities, top leverage activities, your buffer days which is more delegating and kind of just like those stupid, little projects that you have to do, but they're not contributing all that much. And then free days. When I take a free day, there's zero business, whatsoever. I can't talk about business, I don't look in my email, I don't answer my phones calls. It's just to completely unplug and it makes a huge difference in your motivation levels, your creativity. In fact, this weekend, I'm doing Saturday and Sunday free days which is cool. So my non-business book would be anything in the Alex Cross series. But Jane Patterson? Those books, last January... Kavit: You know what? James Patterson and Lee Child, I absolutely love Lee Child. Jeremy: He's actually on my list for... Kavit: You got to read his stuff. Jeremy: Yeah, I'm reading 'Dracula' right now. Kavit: I'm just saying, Lee Child inspired me to write better email. They're short. (49:00) it's as if you're speaking. Personality, it’s (49:03). Jeremy: And that's the same with Alex Cross. One of the big things that I've learned from him, and another thing is when you read novels? You really do become a better writer. Because you pick up and you're like, "Oh, man." Like the way he structured that, with Alex Cross, his cliff hangers, they're just unbelievable. It's absolutely brilliant. On my free days, I'm always reading novels. Like I said, I'm reading 'Dracula' right now. Again, Lee Child is on my list for after 'Dracula'. So I'll be buying a couple of his books. So those of are my three. Kavit: That's pretty cool. (49:44) and I appreciate that stuff. Jeremy: Yeah, how about you? So number one, 'Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got'. Kavit: Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got', and then number two, I would have to say would be 'The Ultimate Sales Machine' by Chet Holmes. Jeremy: Okay. That's a good one. Kavit: That's a pretty good book. At number three, and it's non-business, I would say 'The Four Agreements' by Don Miguel Ruiz. It's like a spiritual slash (50:12) those kind of books. Really, really good four agreements that (50:16-50:19). Jeremy: I bought a whole bunch of bookmarks that has the four agreements on them. Yeah, we seem to share a lot of very similar interests. Kavit: Yeah, but of course, like I said, the books that I generally read that are not business-related are Lee Child and that kind of stuff so that's kind of cool. Jeremy: Nice. Kavit: Well, I appreciate you inviting and I inviting you on this cold call and I hope that everybody gets some really good benefit from this (50:50). Hey, Jeremy. Where can people find you? Jeremy: I'd like to think that my website does a good enough job of "selling me". I won't send to a free report or anything like that, if you just go to JeremyReeves.com. When you go there, it basically tells you who I am, what I do, you'll be able to see testimonials, case studies, results that I've gotten for people. And then there's three things like if you're interested in working with me or doing anything with me, you can either get on my list and there's a free report there. I have automated webinars and stuff that you can go on to get tons and tons of value. There's a 'Services' button if you're interested in working with me. There's a 'Products' page if you're interested in looking at the products that I have. I would say just go to JeremyReeves.com and see where it takes you. Kavit: Brilliant, brilliant. Jeremy: How about you? Kavit: InsiderInternetSuccess.com. You should just check it out and you'll see what I'm talking about. Jeremy: I highly recommend his 'About' page so you can see his music stuff. That was intriguing for me. Kavit: You should write more about your chef stuff and family stuff. Jeremy: Oh, I do. Kavit: That was new to me. Jeremy: Yeah, in all my emails, that's where I have most of that stuff. Hey, it was great talking with you and everybody will get a lot of value. Kavit: Yeah, speak to you soon. Jeremy: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.  

Ben Congleton is the co-founder and CEO of Olark, a tool that brings hassle-free live chat to your website. Olark is a Y Combinator startup that was founded in 2009. Today, Olark has over 5000 customers in 151 countries and has grown into a multi-million dollar business. Links & Resources Mentioned Olark Ben Congleton - @jaminben or ben [at] olark [dot] com Omer Khan - @omerkhan Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Ben Congleton is the co-founder and CEO of Olark, a tool that brings hassle-free live chat to your website. Olark is a Y Combinator startup that was founded in 2009. Today, Olark has over 5000 customers in 151 countries and has grown into a multi-million dollar business.Links & Resources MentionedOlarkBen Congleton - @jaminben or ben [at] olark [dot] comOmer Khan - @omerkhanEnjoyed this episode?Subscribe to the podcastLeave a rating and reviewFollow Omer on TwitterNeed help with your SaaS?Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support.Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue.Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Roland shares the origin story behind Olark and why they started doing all hands support and why they keep doing it today with more than 20 people. We talk about how all hands support contributes to the product at Olark and tips on how to get started with all hands support. Show Notes: Olark All […]

本期由 Terry Tai 主持，邀请到了 Workor网 的两位创始人: 一位是前 Biu网 的创始人韩吉云，还有前果壳网 team leader 刘连响，来和他们一起聊聊他们的创业故事以及背后的一些技术选型。 Show Notes: workor 视觉中国 果壳网 Django Lua Biu v2ex Medium Michael Bleigh The Lean Startup GoToMeeting join.me WebRTC Sqwiggle LiveMinute Google Hangouts mixpanel Zendesk Olark 漫咖啡 Backbone.js node.js Flask mongoDB PostgreSQL Pusher Go Rob Pike Linus Plan 9 beego python-cn Sinatra Tornado web.py Quixote Skala Preview Stilly 当我谈跑步时，我谈些什么 远程工作之个人效率篇 Special Guests: 刘连响 and 韩吉云.