Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today gonna be answering a few questions that you all have sent me in email or in DM's or on social media over the last few weeks. And a couple of questions that I've been getting in my coaching engagements, anonymized, of course, but to share things that I know y'all are thinking about, things that I'm thinking about in my own business to all help us level up and grow our business faster. If you have questions going forward, I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me a message podcast, ogstartups.com. you can hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn as well. Links for me and those places will be in the description below.
[00:00:35] So first of all, thank you to Charlie, who reached out with this question after he and I had a coaching engagement. And his question was, hey, how long do I give a channel before knowing if it's working or not? I talked about this a little bit in my last episode, I think talking about sometimes you just gotta decide on something and then put the blinders on and go heads down and just go hard on this for 90 days, 66 months maybe. And I think the question is like, how do you know when it's evaluation time on the other end if this thing is working or not? And I think the answer is, it's different for everyone in every situation. So I'll give a framework for how I think about it. Instead of just an answer, I'll give you a part of an answer. I think in a brand new channel, less than 90 days is not enough time. Almost ever. If you've been in a channel for a while and you're trying to optimize or tweak it, 90 days may be sufficient, but. But probably longer. I think we often give up on channels earlier than we should because the reality is any channel can work. You can't do all of them, right? We're all limited by budget. Even a big old company like HubSpot or stripe or something can't do all of them really well. But especially as bootstrappers, we got to typically pick one channel to sell one thing to one type of customer. And so to Charlie's question, like, how do I know if it's working or not? I think, one, give it 90 days, right? That's a minimum. I think, two, you want to look at what the most leading indicator in that whole process is, right? So think about posting on LinkedIn and LinkedIn as a growth channel just because that's something that's popular for a lot of b, two b folks and can be really effective.
[00:02:10] You might look at, hey, how many DM conversations am I having? As is this working? But that really is like middle or towards the end of the customer buying journey. So that's probably not a good one. Things like post engagement would be slightly earlier in the process. So that might be slightly better. But the one I would probably look at is if I'm publishing organic content, what about impressions that I'm getting? So, hey, is my content interesting to LinkedIn? Do they know who my audience is? Is that showing up in people's newsfeeds? So just off the top of my head, like, to me, that's about the earliest thing I can imagine in like the LinkedIn customer buying journey as far as like a marketing activity to tell me if something is working or not. It's just like, hey, is this thing showing up in front of people that I care about? And if so, cool, let's optimize the next step, right? Which is engagement, maybe. So, hey, are my hooks good? Am I asking interesting questions? Do I have cool CTA's to where people are liking and commenting on things? That's cool. From there, if they engage on stuff, am I able to dm them? Okay, great. And from there, if I'm dm them, dming them, am I getting them into some kind of sales conversation? Even better. That's the customer buying journey and the whole kind of funnel, if you will, on LinkedIn, thinking about what the very first thing is that you are doing that you can affect, and that would be something like impressions. And you have the same analogy on SEO and on YouTube, cold email. It's like, how many emails am I sending and what's the open rate? Maybe because then from the open rate and reply and opportunities and deals would be the funnel there. So I hope that helps in terms of a framework about how I might think about is a channel working or nothing? If it's a new channel, give it 90 days, for sure. If it's an existing channel, I still think you give it 90 days and then look at where is the first thing that I'm doing or the thing that I know is broken in my funnel. So if you know your numbers, again, the numbers paint the picture for you to determine where to focus your efforts. So if you don't know the numbers, you're just guessing. But if you know your numbers of kind of what's going on in your funnel and what the conversions are at each step along the way you can decide where to focus your energy to optimize them.
[00:04:17] So, Charlie, that's how I would think about that. Thanks for the question.
[00:04:21] Next question is a bit anonymous, and it is, how do I know whether I need to hire for support or sales or customer success? And I'll go through the mindset that I have around the function of each of those roles within an organization and when and where and why you would want to hire for each of them. So to me, support is probably the most straightforward. I view this as mostly a reactive or preventative function within organization. This is maintaining the knowledge base and answering support tickets or chat. So if you're using intercom or help scout or whatever, the person's gonna be living in there most of the time. And they are answering questions that customers have pretty straightforward. They may go on the occasional call to help onboard a customer. They may do technical troubleshooting. Our team definitely does. They may have kind of billing inquiries or things like that, that customers have all good in a more slightly advanced role. They may do things like an onboarding weekly call. I know help Scout as a company did this when I first became a company or a customer a while ago. It was great. So they have a call every Tuesday and Thursday, I think, and you can get on and a person from there, probably success team know that I'm saying it will walk you through things. Okay, so maybe that bridges the gap to success.
[00:05:34] Success being how do I have this person that is the customer get the most value out of the tool? How do I help them convert to a paying customer? And then how do I help them ascend to paying us more money and upgrading plans or getting more usage or seats or whatever billing units within the company. So typically this is after someone has signed up, we want to get engaged with them for them to get the most usage out of the product so that they convert to being a paying customer and have expansion revenue along the way. The interesting thing about this is I find there's slightly more overlap with success and sales than I do support. And usually the first time we think about this, it's the other way. It's, hey, success and support are the same thing. Not true. I think if you have an established, say like organic funnel and people are coming in to your website and they want to talk to you and they want a quick demo or something, that might not be the best place for a salesperson because really they're just an order taker. It's just, hey, show me these three screens and tell me how to pay you money. That might be a really good application for a success person within your organization. Sales to me is much more about the I'm going to go out and find new business, I'm going to generate demand, I'm going to close enterprise deals that have six month sales cycles. And the truest kind of meaning of it, it's I'm going to go create revenue for the company, sometimes out of nothing. And that's what sales is to me in the purest sense. Now you could have, hey, we have a heavy inbound kind of motion and salespeople just have to take calls and close deals. That's cool. That's a pretty light version of sales. Now it's not, that's not important or affect. The person doesn't need to be effective. I'm just saying if sales is a spectrum, the most extreme is, hey, this person is out there hunting and closing deals and all this kind of stuff. Whereas if you're getting a bunch of inbound and somebody just needs a demo to see the screens of your application for them to sign up or sign on as a customer, that could be handled by a success person. And in that instance, what typically is happening is a success person is paid salary with maybe like a bonus and a salesperson has paid commission. So you're thinking about, hey, we're going to pay a salesperson a lot more because they're doing a lot more to get revenue for the company. Whereas success person typically is like salary, maybe a bonus based on retention or expansion, and then a support person would be more like just paid salary. Okay, the next one is more of a general framework, but really comes up in most every conversation I have with founders is like, what do I work on next? What's, how do I decide what the most important thing to my business is?
[00:08:12] And generally what I like to think about is the most important thing that I can do is the thing that is the closest to customers and revenue. And so not forsaking the things where we're going to plant the seed now for the thing tomorrow. Like, I totally get that, but I think a lot of times, especially when we talk about like digital marketing, we all get very fancy and we like to do all these complex funnels that have multiple touch points and I'm doing all this automation and things like that and what that can be, and I'm not saying this is you, but what it can be is just procrastinating and avoiding the topic that may be difficult, which is just fucking get out there and sell something to someone I was on a call with a client last week and the answer to what should I do is you should go have a dozen calls with friends and people in your network and try to figure out how you can sell something to somebody that either them or someone that they know. Especially early on, like figuring out this big, complex paid acquisition funnel or webinar mechanism is largely a waste of time because you don't know enough about the business and who you're selling to and the value prop and the objections and the pricing and all the shit that you got to get right on a really automated customer acquisition motion. You don't know like any of that, really. So especially early on, if you don't have a lot of data, the most important thing for you to do is to pick up the phone and talk to somebody who could be a customer. And it might not be that person's a customer. It could be like, hey, this is just a buddy, that because of the, whatever, seven degrees of Kevin Bacon, they might know somebody who could be a customer for you. But I think that the goal that early on is just to get data about what's important. Because oftentimes, and I know, like for myself when I owned sales camp, is affiliate management software, I didn't have enough concentration of good data for me to make well informed decisions. And so what we did is we had messaging and we had product and we had a lack of focus all over the place. Because one person would tell me this thing and another person would tell me this other thing and another person tell me this other thing. Because I didn't have enough conversations with people who were my ideal customer Persona to know what's important to them. I thought I knew because I fucking, I run a SaaS business, I should know, but. But I didn't. And that is a lesson I would carry over and hope that you would is if you don't know 100% how to sell your thing, don't get too fancy and just go talk to customers. If you're a little further on, you have some of that data, but I would still encourage you to do things as close to customers and revenue as you can and avoid the things. And you all know what I'm talking about that are ephemeral and brand and all these kinds of things that don't move the needle. What is a thing that if you keep doing it that you'll bring in more money for your company and then figure out how to scale that, delegate it, hire a team, create systems, automate it, all that kind of stuff. But just figure out how to do that thing really well and then work on worry about amplifying it. Right? It's the classic do things that don't scale. Okay, the last one's more of a tip than a question, but the topic is around ways to test paid acquisition in a discreet, simple way. And the thing I really like here is some kind of sponsorship of a newsletter or a podcaster, paid placement in a YouTube video or something like that. The thing I really like this about this is instead of, okay, I got to figure out targeting and audiences and all this kind of crap within meta ads or Google Ads or YouTube or something like that, how can I go find an industry newsletter in my space or a YouTube channel in my space and pay a little bit of money one time maybe to get my stuff placed there in front of hundreds or thousands of people? Like, to me, if I wanted to test a new thing, this is what I would do. And this is what, we're experimenting with this with castus as well. Hey, can we, instead of going to figure out freaking YouTube ads and do that on an ongoing basis, can we sponsor a couple of interesting newsletters in our space to put our offer in front of people? I like it because it's simple. It's discreet. Like you do it once or twice or four episodes or something like that. That's usually not a huge commitment. They absolutely have the audience. They will know what will work and what won't work. They'll probably tell you no if they don't think that your thing will resonate because they want you to pay them more money again because you're so happy with the results that you're getting. So I'm pretty bullish on sponsoring content of some sort. So newsletters, not blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, things like that. This is the influencer model, like the paid influencer model. And I think it can be really effective. So this is what I would suggest if you're like, hey, I need to amplify things right away. I'm going to get on the phone, I'm going to talk to a dozen people, but I need a way to put this in front of hundreds or thousands of people to test messaging or a landing page or an offer, something like that. I probably wouldn't go to Facebook because to me it's just complex. I would go to an industry source and just see what paying dollar 500 for a placement or newsletter would be. That's it for this week. Just a few questions and things that are coming across my desk, things that I'm thinking about things we're working on within our business. The one kind of tease I have is I'll be working on a paid acquisition funnel for our castos production services. I'm going to do a deep dive into that after we get it set up and get a couple of data points around, like how it's working and everything. I look forward to sharing that with you because it's just interesting and I think it is something that a lot of us could utilize, especially if we're selling like a little bit higher ticket type product like we are at Casdos productions, where you can justify and afford the paid acquisition cost. So more on that to come. For those of you who signed up for the my founder Pal waiting list, thank you very much. Emails are going out here shortly to update you as to next steps. If you are interested in accountability, buddy, for yourself and your business, go to myfounderpal.com sign up. We're shooting out matches and a process for how we're going to keep each other accountable and growing our business while staying sane and happy and healthy along the way. Any questions? Shoot me a message podcast ogstartups.com we'll see you next time.
