9. Not Important Relative To Last
Slide
0
40000
80000
120000
160000
200000
Profits (Through 2012, Excluding
AR)
Training
Consulting
BCC
Day Job
10. And how will I know that people buy it?
What Should I Make?
11. Quick Wins To Pay For
Microconf 2014
Look for the star!
$X,000 in return for under 2 hours of work.
12. The Fundamental SaaS
Equation
Traffic is hardest to optimize for – see Rob
Walling‟s presentation or mine from 2011.
Conversion rate throughout funnel is easier to
optimize (A/B testing, funnel analytics, etc), but
takes weeks/months to see results.
ARPU you can manipulate with a few minutes
of work
Churn: run your own Operation Retention
16. How Is This Different Than Last
Year?
Drip email marketing is often/typically pre-
signup, lifecycle emails are post-signup.
Lifecycle emails require more app-specific
logic.
Very helpful: good understanding of funnel
Not required:
Lots of volume
Great copywriting
17. Get People To Upgrade To Annual
Billing
Offer discount (“1 month
free”) if they switch to
annual billing.
Offer it to “loyal
customers” over email
One click + confirmation
to switch.
Conversion rate from
10% to 25%+
Immediate revenue of
$200 per email sent
18. Raising Your ARPU, Trivially
Consider Bob, who has
280 appointments a
month and is on Small
Business ($79).
Is Bob happy? How can
we make him happier?
We should do Bob a
solid and convince him
to upgrade to Office
($199), perhaps at a
discount.
19. Did This At A Consulting Client
“Run my a SQL query of everyone who is
within 20% of quota on
FEATURE_1, FEATURE_2, or FEATURE_3”
(~3 minutes)
Add in 3 extra special-offer plans, which were
equivalent to existing tiers but at a slight
(~20%) discount (2 minutes)
Write a two paragraph email and interpolate
their account data (25 minutes)
Made +N% of yearly recurring revenue
20. Investigating Low Conversion Rate
Takes ~20 minutes to do in Rails or whatever
Put it on a dashboard which you use for
Customer Support tasks, review daily-ish
Get qualitative feedback no matter how
poor/small data is
23. My Trial Email Sequence
Day Zero: Auto-generated welcome
Day Three: Personal welcome from me
Day Twenty:
If trial is successful: sell them hard
If trial is unsuccessful: rescue the trial
Day Twenty Seven: “incoming charge”
25. Personalized Welcome
Styled to look like sent one-on-one
Announce your availability
Ask for email
“Sent from my iPhone” – maybe not
Lots of folks send this automatically within an
hour, almost certainly a good idea but I don‟t do it
personally
26. Free Trial Going Well
Simple heuristic
Do ROI calculation
Close sale (or
mention it is
automatic)
Immediate incentive
27. Free Trial Not Going Well
Simple heuristic
Figure out why they
aren‟t doing well
Offer a trial
extension if they
talk to you
Great opportunity
for customer
development
28. Weekly Checkup (“Get Them
Promoted”)
High perceived
value
Great engagement
Creates “ongoing
earned media” via
the option to embed
announcements/link
s/etc
Makes ROI
discussions
academic
29. Digging Into Individual Accounts
If he cancels or has a
CC billing failure
he gets a phone call.
Everybody gets a
dunning email, sent three
30. [Action Required] Appointment Reminder
Could Not Renew Your Subscription
Get to the point ASAP
Prominent link to
capture updated CC
data
Extend a 3 day grace
period, try daily within
grace
Don‟t forget a “You
didn‟t update so we
took the liberty of
pausing your account”
email
32. But Patrick, Why Would I Quit
Consulting?
People say consulting doesn‟t scale.
Horsepuckey.
Ways to scale consulting:
Move your rate up, dramatically
Hire people
Improve your utilization at the margin
33. So Why Really?
Constant rat race to get new clients
Lots of unpaid time doing prospecting /
proposal / administrative work
You have a boss and you have to go to
work every day
35. Why Not Replace With A SaaS?
$0.00
$1.00
$2.00
$3.00
$4.00
$5.00
$6.00
$7.00
$8.00
$9.00
$10.00
Scaled Revenue for Appointment Reminder
36. So What Do We Do Then?
Productized consulting
Your most common / most valuable consulting
engagement, delivered without the full dance
An e-book / video course / etc
A training event / seminar / etc
Sell it through email
Offer it at a variety of price points
Make several gigs worth of money in a
repeatable, scalable, tweakable fashion… with
lead-in time of 2 weeks to 3 months, not 6 months
to 5 years
37. My Non-software Product
Most common consulting engagement (2010):
“We send no email. Can you, like, fix that?”
I would implement:
Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012 presentation)
Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
It generally required:
Lots of sales / convincing
A bit of coding
Copywriting delivered by me, the non-expert
38. Goals For Productized
Consulting
Convince people who already find me credible
that they should be doing email, too
Teach them how to implement:
Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012 presentation)
Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
This generally requires:
Lots of sales / convincing delivered at scale
SaaS products I could recommend and glue code I
could describe in high-level detail rather than write
Copywriting that I could teach them to do
themselves
39. Why Would You Buy That Over
Consulting?
Because it‟s $500 versus $20,000
Because you couldn‟t find somebody to do this
for you
Because you‟re not sure you can get to it right
now
Because it‟s a cheap, easy way “to test the
waters”
40. Why Not Get It Free On the
Internet?
Because real businesses spend money on
problems
“Free if you have two week to research it” is
not free to someone who cuts paychecks
bi-weekly
Because paid initiatives signal quality and help
to reduce roadblocks to adoption within an
organization
41. The Key To Marketing It
Started building an email list a few months in
advance
Focused 75% on teaching people stuff
(pricing, selling to enterprises, A/B testing, etc)
and 25% on telling them about upcoming
product
Sent two, count „em, two sales emails
Sent folks to a long copy page
42. My “Squeeze Page” For Emails
http://training.kalzumeus.co
m
Promotion:
• Put a HelloBar lookalike
on blog, mentioned
occasionally in blog posts
• Tweeted once or twice
• Ended up on HN once
because the community
knows me
Not just for the “Internet
famous”: I got 5,000 signups
but total “unknowns”
routinely hit X00 in a day
43. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #1
Establish value
proposition very
early
Main heading and
subhead only there to
convince you “In or
out, do you want to
read more?
Note “intriguing”
copywriting like
“unreasonable
44. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #2
Use a case study
from your
consulting career
Copywriting wise, just
because it‟s long copy
doesn‟t mean it has to
be a Giant Wall of
45. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #3
Personal testimonial
from a consulting
client with graphical
call-out
Customer is more like
Jason than like you or
me
46. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #4
Acknowledge
prospects’
objections and
answer them
(Amy Hoy: “Can you
smell the guilt here?”)
47. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #5
BENEFITS OF
TAKING THIS are
more important to
the customer than
what it contains
But be explicit on
that, too.
49. Nathan Barry Is An Effing
Genius
“Designing Web Applications”
Three packages: $249 / $99 / $39
Sales focuses on what customer
gets not on what the price is
So how did that work out for
Nathan?
50. Packaging Is A Huge Win
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
Book Alone $49Book & Videos $99Complete Package $249
Nathan's Sales By
Package
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
Mo' Packages = Mo' Money
Complete
Package $249
Book &
Videos $99
Book Alone
$49
51. What About The Actual
Product?
Me speaking into my webcam and a $60
microphone
Loosely scripted. If I do it again, will add slides.
Took ~2 weeks to record plus a video editor
(ARGH) that cost about $3,000, but added fairly
little value over $300 on oDesk.
Hosted the videos on Wistia and rolled my own
delivery platform (you should probably use
Gumroad or similar)
Partnered with folks with related interests:
additional value to customers at vanishingly little
work to me
52. Funny Story About The
Revenue
Launch day (sent an email, it got on HN):
$12,862
Next week or two: $16,576
“Reminder: the sale ends today” : $15,579
Total to date: $64,608
53. Keys To Product Success
Email, email, email. Get people on it, delight
them with the things you can teach them, sell
only very occasionally.
Target a pain point which you know there is a
demand for. Consulting = validated
market, right?
Work on your copy. You don‟t have to be a
genius. I certainly am not. (Joanna has a
book, buy it: copyhackers.com 100X ROI
for me)
Deliver quality products, because you only
have one reputation.
54. For more details
Get on my email list @
training.kalzumeus.com
Special bonus for Microconf folks: You can
have the lifecycle emails product for free if you
didn‟t already buy it, or the next one (probably
on A/B testing) if you did. Send me an email. I
trust you.
55. Thanks for Listening
Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com
Slides will be posted. See @patio11
Send me email. I love chatting about this.
patrick@kalzumeus.com