How is your website converting potential customers or franchise buyers for your business? When is the last time you checked? Our guest today is Sahil Patel, who is a landing page expert who shares with us the secrets he’s learned on how to optimize a landing page.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Create a great landing page that makes it easy for your customer to understand what you do and then test it.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Schedule your free franchise consultation with Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
- You can visit our guest’s website at:
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:
- https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- Connect with our guest on social:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahilanamipatel/
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Meet Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze. He reveals the secrets from optimizing hundreds of landing pages leveraging data from 130k A/B tests, and working with SaaS leaders such as BambooHR, Crowdstrike, Unbounce, and hundreds more.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply your Success Podcast, where, each week, we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open today, I’m wondering how your website is converting potential customers or franchise buyers. Maybe another question might be when is the last time you even checked? Our guest today is Sahil Patel, who’s a landing page expert. He shares with us the secrets he’s learned on how to optimize a landing page. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralyze, and he reveals during our interview, secrets that he’s learned from optimizing landing pages and leveraging data on over 130,000 A/B tests. He’s worked with SaaS leaders such as BambooHR, CrowdStrike, Unbounce, and hundreds more. You’re going to love this interview. It’s super practical with great tips you can implement in your business right away. Let’s go ahead and jump right into our interview.
[00:01:06] Sahil Patel: My name is Sahil Patel. I’m the CEO of Spiralyze. I’m really glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Tom.
[00:01:13] Tom: Thank you so much for being here today, really grateful for it. One of the things that stood out and why I was interested and excited to have you on the show is you are really a landing page expert. It’s a piece of marketing and, by the way, guilty as charged, where it’s something for my own business that has suffered and struggled, and other marketing that we’ve spent, probably would have been more successful with better landing pages. I’d love for you, just from a basic level, as you’re an expert in this area, just to talk a little bit about why landing pages even matter. What one is. Just some of these basic fundamentals there.
[00:01:52] Sahil: Why do landing pages matter? I’m going to just, for our audience listening to this, let’s define landing pages super broadly. If you want to geek out in digital marketing, you can talk about paid landing pages and organic. Let’s just put that over here for the moment and just say working definition. Landing pages is just anything where someone finds you online on some kind of web property that you own or control.
I’m also going to put over here, if your brand has a presence on Facebook or on LinkedIn, or on Instagram, that’s wonderful. Let’s just put that over here, because that’s a different kind of game, that is its own art form, because Facebook controls that environment and there’s just very limited things you can do, and there’s pros and cons to that. In the middle is the big, wide world of your own and of however you show up on the internet. For most people, that’s a website and they might spin up some additional landing pages on separate domains or subdomains that are purpose-built. Just broadly, all of that.
Great way to think of it. This is the front door to your restaurant. Now you can choose how to show up. If you are McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A, I think you’re an Atlanta guy, I’m an Atlanta guy, big, important place in Atlanta in Georgia, you show up a certain way. What is the front door? There’s a drive-thru which is a wonderful drive-thru experience. It’s a signature Chick-fil-A experience. They’ve nailed it and it’s very specific. You’re on the other end. If you’re a fancy white tablecloth steakhouse, people expect something. If you give a Chick-fil-A experience, and I love Chick-fil-A, by the way, to a $70 steakhouse experience, something is wrong. Vice versa.
Your landing page, it’s the first thing they see. It’s the front door. They’re going to stay or leave based on a couple quick, in the first five seconds takeaways of just, am I in the right place? I’m bringing a date to a fancy dinner. If it feels like fast food, something’s wrong. If I’m taking the kids for a quick bite before soccer practice and it’s white tablecloth and someone with a French accent asking me if I’d like to talk to the sommelier, also something is wrong. That’s what your landing page is. That’s why it matters. Hugely important. You’re not going to even stay to order the number four meal or have that fancy steak if just in the first few seconds, the front door is wrong.
[00:04:21] Tom: It’s the difference between someone showing up in dirty jeans and a ripped up shirt and a beat up pickup truck with no branding, or someone showing up in a pressed uniform, a clean logoed polo and a wrapped van or a wrapped truck.
[00:04:39] Sahil: You nailed it. In fact, we know the space a little bit. We have a customer, it’s a franchised home services business. By the way, that was one of the takeaways in all of the optimization we did, that their best performing pages was when you showed the truck and re-uniformed service people in uniform that looked like they were happy to be there. It outperformed almost everything else.
[00:05:02] Tom: That’s a little nugget here for anyone in the home services business. They didn’t even know.
[00:05:06] Sahil: Here, let’s just jump right in some tactics. A great tactic to try out. If you’re in home services, and I want to generalize this for everyone listening is show your product, show your product, show your product. Showing your product almost always beats what I call happy people. Happy people hurt conversions. Particularly, but this is true even for service businesses, stock photos of happy people. You look, whether it’s direct-to-consumer, it’s business-to-business, B2B-type services or software, they’re full of these stock photos.
They went to Adobe or whatever and said, oh, we’ll get one out, we’ll talk about home service. Their homepage showed happy mom with two kids. It’s great. It’s indirectly saying if you call One Hour, you’ll have a happy household. It still doesn’t tell you anything about the product. What is the product of One Hour? It’s uniformed, professional service people in a good truck, they look good and they have the expertise. They’re credible to fix your problem. That’s the product on a service business.
Now, you shouldn’t take my word on it. You should run some tests. We could talk about what that means in a website context. We did what is the gold standard A/B testing. That’s what our company does, and the data proves that more people actually buy when you show them the product. In the context of a home service business, that’s the uniformed people next to a wrap truck.
[00:06:31] Tom: You talk a little bit about A/B testing. Let’s dive into that a little bit.
[00:06:35] Sahil: Let’s talk about how most people, how many companies go about making a website. Stage one, it’s called the prehistoric area. They just put some stuff on the web. The CEO’s nephew made the website in his basement. Prehistoric era. We fast forward a little bit. There’s a little bit of what people call best practice, but in fact there’s thinly disguised anecdotes. Someone said, oh, this worked for me, my last company, or I read a blog that said you should do this, or maybe even worse, our competitor’s doing it, so why don’t we copy it? By the way, none of these are terrible ideas, but they don’t actually tell you does anything work or not.
What this is like, and where I’m leading to, is modern website which, if done well, uses A/B testing data to make decisions. I’ll give you the answer. Let’s use an analogy. You go to the doctor and she says, “Hey, Tom, I’ve got this medicine for your stomach pains.” You said, “Oh okay, I’ve never heard of it. What is it?” The doc goes, “Oh, yes. I put this together at home.” You might say, “Has anyone else tried it?” “My neighbor tried it. It worked great for him.” Do they have the same symptoms? Is he a old guy? Is he a young guy? By the way, how do you know I’m getting the right dose? Is he my size? Is he smaller? I want to know something before I pop this thing in my mouth.
That is basically how a lot of websites get made. You say, “I gave this medicine to my neighbor, I conjured it up. They didn’t die. It’s good enough.” Imagine the doctor said, “Tom, we put this thing through an FDA clinical trial. Half the people got a placebo, half the people got the drug. We made sure there was men and women, old people, young people, healthy people, sick people in both groups. We measured how much better did the people that got the drug compare to the people who got placebo. We did this a few different times. By the way, we did it for a couple months. We made sure you didn’t get better and then two weeks later, keel over and die,” which medicine do you want to sign up to take?
[00:08:47] Tom: [laughs] When you put it that way, I think the answer is pretty clear.
[00:08:52] Sahil: That’s what A/B testing is. You have a homepage. You’re selling home services. You got a franchise operation It’s not the only way you get business, but it’s an important way. You’ve probably got thousands of people a month coming to look at your site, what you should do. There’s tons of software. By the way, some of this is free software. You don’t spend a lot of money on this. You can set it up so half your audience, randomly selected, will see the original version of your homepage. Half the audience will see something different.
Maybe it’s a different message. Maybe it’s a different image. That image of the professional looking, your professionals, your home, your service professionals in a uniform. They look incredible, they’ve got the truck, it’s branded. Use that image versus something else. Maybe you show social proof. You show, we’ve got a 4 1/2 star rating on Yelp and we’ve had 5,000 people review us. Social proof can be, not always, but can be very powerful.
Half the people see that version, half the people see the other version. You run it long enough to make sure you get a representative sample of data and then you measure the difference. If you do that once, by the way, you’re already better off than most companies. If you really want to do it, you do it over and over and over to find what is the optimal version, because if you haven’t updated your website in four years, almost anything will probably be better. The answer is which of those is actually optimal and gets you more? That’s A/B testing.
[00:10:15] Tom: From what I understand, as you’ve described this, you can run some A/B tests and once you find a winner, this is like one of these TV shows, vote them off or on right. The remaining competitors still have to compete again, and then again, and again, and again and again. This is what it reminds me of.
[00:10:32] Sahil: Not to mix our metaphors, but a great analogy like that is think about the NCAA basketball tournament, March Madness.
[00:10:40] Tom: That’s a better example.
[00:10:40] Sahil: We start with a bunch of teams. They face off. The winner keeps going. Now here’s an interesting thing. We love the Cinderella story, that number eight seed that knocks off the number two seed. In reality, most of the time what happens to the number eight seed in the second round?
[00:10:57] Tom: They lose.
[00:10:58] Sahil: They lose. Why?
[00:10:59] Tom: The other team’s better.
[00:11:00] Sahil: Yes. They got lucky. The beauty of sports in general is that on any given day, especially once you get to things like a postseason tournament, everyone’s really good. If you’re just looking for the best, everyone’s really good. It’s the same thing as trying to A/B testing. If you run a test and you only run one test, the cost of being wrong is very high. If we crown the winner based on one game, you just don’t know, were they lucky or were they good? Maybe the other team, someone was injured or just some other exogenous factor that’s out of control.
When you run a bracket, by the time you get to the grade eight, certainly by the time you get to the final four, you are pretty confident you’ve got some of the best teams in the country. Every now and then someone will sneak in there, but certainly over time, you’ve got the best teams. In the final game, is the team that wins necessarily statistically the best team? It’s a hard call, but what you know is they had to defend their win and they’d start over every game in the bracket, just like that A/B testing.
The cost of being wrong goes way down if you continuously test. You run a test, you find a winner, you make that your new control and you put something else against it. We call that the challenger and you just keep challenging it. The best companies, in fact, may go through four homepages in a year because every quarter they’re testing new homepages.
[00:12:19] Tom: That is very interesting. Now, I would think, because this popped into my head, as you said, four homepages in a year sounds like a lot.
[00:12:27] Sahil: Sounds outlandish, but not abnormal.
[00:12:30] Tom: How do these changes impact current customers that might be coming back to buy new things or revisit what you’re doing?
[00:12:37] Sahil: Great question. What I’m hearing is, do you give different experiences to your existing customers versus your new customers? In marketing speak, we call that new customer acquisition versus land and expand or upsell. The first thing is I think you got to make sure you know. If you’re starting with a homepage where everyone comes, you got to decide who you’re for. What I’ve seen done well is that you have multiple paths, like on a website, and you might just ask people to identify, are you here for the first time or are you an existing or returning customer?
If they say yes, I’m a returning customer, then you show them different content or you take them to a different place. Say, here’s a page for our returning customers. By the way, it turns out, just actually ask– There’s a lot of people that, oh, we should try and guess and we should try and know. Most people are not offended if you ask them, are you a returning customer or not? Especially if you put a little tag and it says, we’re asking so we can give you a tailored experience. It’s not intrusive. Don’t hit them with seven questions when they first get there.
I would say it’s not unlike, we’ll go back to the restaurant analogy, “Hi, Tom. Do you have a reservation today?” When you walk into a restaurant. You’re not offended. They’re not asking about all your dietary preferences and if you have allergies and if you want carbonated water or still water. They’re just saying, do you have a reservation? If you do, I’m going to take you right to your table. If you don’t, we’ll talk about how many people you– you need a table for four or two, and what are you looking for today? Maybe we can get you in.
[00:14:04] Tom: Same thing on a website. You’ve done A/B testing on over 130,000 sites and iterations of this. I would imagine, and you shared a couple of these, are there a few kind of best practices or things that stick out, or maybe one or two nuggets that you’ve gleaned from that as a starting point?
[00:14:22] Sahil: Absolutely. Let’s start with three things that I think everyone at home listening to this can use without spending a lot of money or doing something very elaborate or sophisticated. I mentioned one of them earlier, but we’ll go into them. One is show the product. Show the product. Show the product. Someone comes to your website, whether you’re a service business or a widget business, show the product. We’ll expand on that. That’s number one. Number two is start with a great hook. It can be a visual hook, it can be a written hook. Let’s start with a great hook. Number three is that the web rewards skimmability.
If we build landing pages for a living, we imagine ourselves painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and every pixel is going to be perfect, and it’s put together with great care. The reality is the average person might be reading it on their phone. They’ve got a kid that they’re trying to get to eat, they’ve got their grocery list up in another browser window and they’re texting with their spouse. They’re in a highly distracted state with many things competing for their attention. If you can get through to them in the simplest, easiest possible way, you’re going to be much better off. They’ll be much more likely to buy. Whatever buy means right.
If you’re a service company, probably they’re not pulling out the credit card to spend six figures on some kind of service. They might be just wanting to say, I’d like to talk to a sales rep, get a quote. If you’re more in the widget business, maybe they’re buying there. If you’re in the software business, certainly they’re not. Most people are going to do some kind of free trial or talk to a sales rep. Those three things: show the product, start with the hook, be easy to skim. Let’s back up. Let’s talk about what these– show the product. Let me ask get this. Tom, can you think of the last time you saw a car advertisement? Can you picture that in your head? What was happening in the ad? [crosstalk]
[00:16:28] Tom: The car was driving on mountains, on a plateau or something.
[00:16:33] Sahil: Now take that same ad. Now subtract the car. What would you be left with?
[00:16:37] Tom: I’d be left with some beautiful scenery, maybe some great B-roll footage.
[00:16:42] Sahil: Whether you have a service business, you have a widget business, you have software like an intangible product, show the product, show the product, show the product. A great way to do this, I call this the one-second test, it’s something everyone listening can do with zero cost, is take your homepage on your computer, open up your browser, right click and choose Google Translate. If you’re running a Chrome browser, it’s built in. Just choose a language that none of your friends speak, Just like Arabic or Urdu, or Hindi. Just something that’s just your friends are unlikely to speak. I’m picking some languages that are spoken in my home.
Google Translate. It’ll turn every piece of copywriting on your homepage into a language that’s non-recognizable. What it does is it forces your audience to rely on the imagery. If you’re a car ad, if you’re selling a pickup truck, it doesn’t matter what language it’s in, you’re going to see pickup truck and go pickup truck. Great. You may not know what they’re saying, but you know it’s for a pickup truck. You know the value prop of a pickup truck, say, different from a luxury sedan.
Take your homepage, show it to five people. Just ask them, what do you think this company does? You’re not looking for something specific. They might not be able to tell you that this is a HVAC for commercial high-rises, but they might say something like oh, this looks like some kind of repair business or this looks like some kind of home service or something. If you can do that, great. If you haven’t picked your imagery carefully, you’re going to fail the test.
If you’re using stock photos of people sitting wearing a blazer, crossing their arms in a conference room having fun, first of all, where are all these people? What job do they work at that sitting in a conference room is so much fun? Like all this stock imagery is like they’re looking at a laptop, oh, my God, that’s awesome. It’s like, what are you doing at work? I love my job, but I’m not having that much fun. The one second, and it’s a ton of fun, because you show it and people are something, you go okay, something’s wrong.
Number two, start with a great hook. Landing page, homepage, any kind of pages. Your first job is not to get people to buy. It’s not even to get people to understand why you’re better than whatever, your competitor. First job is just to get them to stop scrolling. It’s harder than it sounds.
[00:19:08] Tom: It’s like you said, that one-second test. If you don’t see what it is in almost an instant that you think this webpage you’re on is going to be able to solve your problem, whatever you’re looking for, you’re gone. It’s like, out of there.
[00:19:22] Sahil: It’s because even, what is it? Sometimes I go to these websites and I’m like, I don’t know what you do, because they have these broad aspirations. The best AI-powered solution for marketers. Okay. That feels like half of the products under the sun could fit. It’s just so big. To give everyone listening something tangible, here’s what I like to do. If I’m working with a customer, maybe even my own homepage or landing page, I’ll take it. I’ll then go find three competitors. They don’t have to be exact, just similar. I’ll put them next to each other. Just take a little screenshot, put it in a Word doc or a slide deck and then just, again, show it to some people and just ask them which one of these jumps out at you.
It’s a wonderful test, because that is what many of your potential customers, your audience, are doing. They’ll have navigated. Look, what do we all do? We check out a couple things. You go to a restaurant, you look at three restaurants. You’re picking a hotel, you probably look at a couple hotels. You’re looking for HVAC prepare, you probably don’t just buy from the first one. Probably look at a couple. Look at three or four competitors. By the way, you don’t have to prove that you’re better, just prove that you’re different.
If all the HVAC repairs say we’re the cheapest, maybe your thing is saying, we’ll get someone to your house in the first hour. If all of them say we’ll get someone to your house in the first hour, maybe you should say, we have the most experience or we’re the best at multifamily units or something. That’s an example of a hook. It doesn’t have to be, madman era copywriting.
[00:20:57] Tom: You’ve been talking through this, give us a little background on the company, what you guys do. How can someone reach out to you or the company if they’re interested in learning more?
[00:21:06] Sahil: Thank you. The name of the company is called Spiralyze, spiralyze.com. We help companies optimize their websites. Most of what we do is business to business, B2B, using marketing jargon, and about 30% of what we do is direct-to-consumer brands. We have this unique thing, we crawl the internet to find everyone else’s A/B tests. Our customers get to run the best ones. They only pay if it gives them lift. Lift here means a higher conversion rate.
If that sounds interesting, check out spiralyze.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. I post four mornings a week, 7:30 am Eastern, always in short one-minute snippets, sometimes video, sometimes not. Always something fun. Try and sneak a little bit of the Eat your Veggies content into edutainment.
[00:21:52] Tom: This is a great time in the show we make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
[00:22:05] Sahil: Oh my God, I’ve had so many misses. How much time you got? This is my second time being a CEO. My first business, not to say I don’t have misses here as well, but maybe second time around, at least I’m not making the same mistakes, I’m making new mistakes. On my first business, we raised capital outside company. It was great for the first couple years. It was a pure software business. Their expertise, the investor, was really in service businesses. The way you think about deploying capital on a pure service business, very different than a service– or even a service hybrid, software, service hybrid, which is what Spiralyze is.
As a result, we got to a point where they wanted to go left and I wanted to go right. It was super painful and it cost us a bunch of growth. We ended up finding an amicable parting. I bought them out of their equity position. Then we got the company back on track. I’d say I want to give them credit because they recognized that we needed to change them. They actually came to me and said, “We want to make you an offer. Why don’t you buy our position out? We’ll do it in a way that makes it economically attractive for both sides.” Credit to them for finding the high road, because it was both of us– we weren’t at each other’s throats, but it wasn’t working. That was really, really painful.
During that time period, it was enormously stressful. I thought I was going to lose the business. It was a huge distraction. No one was happy. It spilled over. Like many things, you do this job as an owner, operator, CEO, it spilled over into my home life. I was lucky that it didn’t cost me everything. It took a big toll on my home life for sure. We ended up finding an acquirer, I shouldn’t say finding an acquirer. An acquirer found us. We got lucky and we found a path back to growth. In the big scheme of you know the entrepreneur’s dream, you have this big exit, everyone’s happy, and there’s this great fiscal outcome, this one was in the so-so realm.
On the other hand, the business is part of a bigger company now, in perpetuity. They’re doing a good job running it. Permanent home for the employees and the customers. I’d been there for 10 years. I’d taken it as far as I could take it. In that sense, it was a good outcome. On the other hand, you know, I’m working for a living. I’m not in the Caribbean, which is okay also. I think that’s the sober reality is. For most people, if you get to an exit, it’s not always this big home run event.
The investors, I think they would definitely say it was not a great financial return for them. Everyone likes to just play the hits and I think that creates this kind of perception that everyone else is killing it, and me, as a owner, operator, founder, boy, I’m the only one that’s struggling, trudging uphill. That’s why I like to share just the unvarnished reality of what happened there.
[00:25:03] Tom: Thanks for sharing the details and some of the specifics on that. Every success story has failures along the way and missteps-
[00:25:11] Sahil: So many.
[00:25:11] Tom: -or I should have gone left instead of right at that point in time, or whatever. We all have those moments. Let’s take a look at the flip side, a make or a highlight, or a win.
[00:25:23] Sahil: Here’s how I would describe it. I think one of the things I learned from it is when you’re running a business, there’s peaks and valleys, and in reality there’s more valleys than peaks. One of the things as a second-time CEO, I learned, is to learn to live in the valley. You shouldn’t be intent and complacent with living in the valley. You should climb out. Otherwise, you don’t have a business. It was a tough lesson but a valuable lesson to learn. It was, you got to accept that being in the valley, it’s part of the job.
I worked in fast food when I was in high school. I worked at Wendy’s. They used to tell us something, because you had to wear this hat. No one liked to wear the hat. They said, you flip burgers, wear the hat. You want to be a CEO, you want to run it? Whatever your title is, owner, operator, CEO, franchise owner, you flip burgers, you’re an owner operator? You got to live in the valley. That’s part of it.
Certainly, at Spiralyze, we’ve had some nice success with growth, profitability, with delivering results for our clients. Not every day is a perfect day, but I think that’s one of the things I’ve learned is you learn to live in the valley and you accept that that’s part of the job. If you don’t, I think you drive yourself nuts. I think you’re just signing yourself up for a lot of unhappiness.
[00:26:42] Tom: Let’s talk about a multiplier. The name of the shows Multiply your Success. You’re in technology and marketing and all of these things that have multipliers built in. I’d love to find out if you’ve used a multiplier to grow yourself personally or professionally, or organizations you’ve run.
[00:26:59] Sahil: I think there’s three things that have been multipliers. I love the question, I love how you framed it. One is get professional therapy and get it before you need it. If you don’t, get it. Number one. Even better is get it before you need it. I learned that the hard way and I’m lucky because I’m married to someone whose background is in clinical psychology. My wife is trained as a clinical psychologist. She works in public health now, so she’s not seeing patients in private practice. Thankfully, when I was at the lowest of the lows, she recognized, something’s not right, you need help. That was instrumental for me, also for our marriage.
Not everyone. You can do that and still end up in a place that’s not great, but it certainly made a difference, and I think it’s true for most people. If you do get to the place where things are good, I’d say it’s like working out. You work out, you get in shape. You shouldn’t stop, because you’re going to probably fall back on bad– you work out, get in shape, and then you start eating junk food and not running. What’s going to happen? You end up in a bad place. I think the same thing is true for mental health. If you get to a good place, you should keep working. You may want to change your pattern or what type of therapy you’re doing, but you should do it. That’s number one.
Number two, have a peer group of people who are your real peers, not your employees. Also not people that control your paycheck or your investors. Real peers. Really helpful. I have a CEO peer group. We meet every two weeks. It’s great. It’s a form of therapy, but it’s a different thing. Number two, I’d say just tactfully for me I spend lot of my time with customers doing sales. We all do this thing that we’re doing right now, which is in the model, we interact through Zoom windows.
I’m a big fan of in-person stuff. I try to do as much in person, but still, 90% of what I do is through a computer screen. I hired a voice coach. She’s incredible. I didn’t know this when I hired her, but she actually works on the TV show, The Voice. She’s not on camera, but she’s one of the people behind the scenes coaching the contestants. She worked with me on just on my presentation. Voice and pitch, and diction, and speed, and just conveying emotion. Really hard thing to do.
I think those skills, whether you work on a job site, you work on Zoom, you work in digital marketing, you work in HVAC repair, we all communicate. Those skills, it’s just like anything else. If you’re a musician, you would hire a coach to help you be a better musician. If you’re a sing opera, you would hire a professional person to improve your voice. If you’re doing what we do, which is communicating with clients, hiring someone to help you with how you communicate and come across, it was a big multiplier. I reached that pretty late in my career. I’m 47, so I was maybe 42, 43 when I did that. My regret is I didn’t do that sooner.
[00:29:56] Tom: Excellent. The final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
[00:30:03] Sahil: Look, I think that there’s professional success and personal success. The thing I’ve learned from doing this second time around is not to attach one to the other, because you can have one, you can sometimes have the other. By the way, you could also have neither of those. I don’t think you necessarily have to choose between the other, I think there’s different ways to keep score. You try not to conflate the two.
For me, in my personal life, I’m lucky. I’ve got a wonderful wife, two great kids. Keeping the score there is very intangible. I try not to connect that with my bank account, which is very tempting to do, especially if you get to a point where you’ve had some, whether it’s a modest or moderate amount of success or a lot. I’m lucky I’ve had some success professionally, so I try to disconnect it from that.
On the professional life, look, I have a duty to the shareholders of our company to grow the company at a certain pace, to have a certain amount of profitability and to be delivering results for my clients. Between the hours of the morning and when we stop, those are the three main things I think about. There’s a whole bunch of other things behind it, but I think having clarity on that– that’s separate how I think about my value as a person or what kind of husband I’m going to be, or what kind of dad I’m going to be to my kids.
I try to have some hobby. I think having some hobbies and release valves. They don’t have to be sophisticated. I do a little bit of music on the side just for fun. I tried it the other way and it’s really not a great way to live. I think many of us have been like, if I just quit all my hobbies, I don’t do anything else and all I do is work. The reality is there’s an infinite amount of work you can do. There’s always an email you can answer. There’s always a Slack message you need to respond to. There’s always a client that wants your attention. You got to have those other things to make you your whole you.
[00:31:57] Tom: As we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:32:05] Sahil: Thank you for having me. By the way, what you do is so much harder than what I do. I get to come and talk about some of my favorite things, A/B testing and websites. As a host, you have, and I’m sure you probably might be doing one of these after me. You probably did one before me. You got to speak intelligently about what your guests have. That’s really hard to do, so you’re really good at this.
For anyone who is especially in the B2B marketing space, and you care about websites, Spiralyze, we’re actually holding our first ever conference next February in Fort Lauderdale. It’s a beautiful location, in winter. While the rest of the country is shivering, we’re going to be 76 degrees and sunny. It’s near the beach. It’s going to be on all things websites. It’s going to be hands-on, tactical. No speakers, no keynotes, no slide decks, no one trying to pitch you to buy their book. It’s going to be led by experts in the field on all things website. If that sounds interesting, you can Google it. It’s called Above the Fold. Spiralyze, Above the Fold. I think you’ll get something from it.
[music]
[00:33:06] Tom: Sahil, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when he talked about landing pages and just defining that. I thought it was great. He made it simple. It’s anything where someone finds you online, basically a web property. He said it’s different from a social media or social property. He said think of your landing page as the front door to a restaurant.
Takeaway number two is he talked about how A/B testing impacts your customer experience. He said there’s multiple paths that your customers can take. He talked about a current customer or returning customer versus a prospective customer. I like the analogy when he said when there are buttons that say returning customers, click here. He said compare that to a restaurant asking, do you have a reservation today? I thought that was a great comparison to really help understand that.
Takeaway number three is when he gave the three things to do or that you can do to improve your landing page and conversions. I thought it was great. He said, number one, show the product, show the product, show to the product. I thought that was great. Show the product, show the product, show the product. Number two, he said start with a great hook or a great visual or a written hook. He said use the one-second test. He said, as an example, convert the language on your website to some foreign language you don’t understand. Take a screenshot and ask several people you know to do a one-second test and ask, do you know what this website does or what this company does? I thought that was great.
The third idea or strategy he talked about is the idea about skimability and how easy is it to skim the website. He said the average person is reading on their phone, is likely to be highly distracted. Is it easy to skim, to walk through and to see that? I thought that was a great example.
Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win really comes from the entire episode. It’s pretty simple to me, it’s create a great landing page that makes it easy for your customer or prospective customer to understand what you do, and then test it. I thought that was just a great takeaway that I took out of this. I think if you can do this, it’s going to be a win for your customer, it’s going to be a win for your company, and a win for everyone involved.
That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. Remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us on our website, bigskyfranchiseteam.com, where you can schedule your free, no-obligation consultation to assess and help understand what your needs might be. Thanks for tuning in. We look forward to having you back next week.
