[00:00:00] Jess: Hey Jess. Hey Josh.
[00:00:01] Josh: I think something's going on with the website. The book, a demo button is gone.
[00:00:06] Jess: Oh, no, it's still there. It's, it's just smaller.
[00:00:09] Josh: Okay, cool. But why?
[00:00:12] Jess: Well, I think we should. Push free trials more than book a demo. You know, I think we need to get more people into our universe with the free trial, get 'em to love the data, like play around with it so that eventually down the road, you know, after they've like used it for a while and they like really are addicted to seeing the contacts, then they buy the product.
[00:00:31] Josh: Hmm. Cool. I can't wait to tell the board that.
[00:00:40] Remember that time that you basically decided to like ruin the entire business and like change the website and the demo button went away and like all of a sudden sales started yelling at us. 'cause the demo submissions just dropped outta nowhere.
[00:00:51] Jess: Oh, you mean like marketing? Yeah.
[00:00:54] Josh: That was fun.
[00:00:58] Jess: Yeah, there was a day when I came to [00:01:00] you and I said, Hey, I really think we should like prioritize free trials over book a demo.
[00:01:05] Josh: Yeah, but you didn't tell me that we would just not have demo submissions anymore. Well, no, we did. Yeah, but they're just like less and more quality now. Who cares about that?
[00:01:16] Jess: They're not all over the place anymore.
[00:01:19] Josh: Our sales reps only count the number of demos, not the quality of them. Just kidding. Mark, we love you. Why? Why did you do this?
[00:01:28] Jess: Okay. This was a fun conversation to have. Yeah. Uh, so. I think one, we have a great free product. We do. Um, we, just to set some context here, we give away a very big portion of our product for free, which is site de anonymization.
[00:01:43] So essentially you would know who comes to your site, you'd get kinda their contact information. You could push it to Slack so you can actually see who's visiting. Yep. Um, and when, and. It's free. And I think, you know, that feels like something we would, as a new category, want [00:02:00] people to play around with a bit and really understand.
[00:02:03] Yep. Right. It's kind of like a built in interactive demo. Mm-hmm. Without having a demo. Right. And so, you know, why not push people there first? Uh, to get them to kind of play around with it, try it, get interested in it, see how it works, see how it could fit into their workflow, see what they could do with this data.
[00:02:21] Start to imagine themselves using this information in a different way. Yeah. And that felt really, really exciting. But what it meant was we were gonna have to swap the priority of the call to action on the website. Yes. So where we had the big shiny. Pink book a demo button. Yep. We are now gonna have a big shiny pink get started for free button.
[00:02:40] Josh: Yeah.
[00:02:40] Jess: And we were gonna kind of relegate book a demo to like a smaller secondary call to action. Right? Yeah. And that was scary.
[00:02:46] Josh: It was super scary. I, when you brought it to me, I didn't quite understand that like. Switching these little buttons kind of has a big impact. I was like, ah, fine, whatever. It'll all stay the same.
[00:02:55] Like she doesn't know that it'll, it doesn't matter. That wasn't the [00:03:00] case. Yeah. Right. Like we actually saw a meaningful impact when, when we swapped those and there was like a moment of like panic of, I remember sales coming to us being like. Why, why'd you do that? Right. Is that gonna impact us? And like you, you held strong in your belief, so like, this is the right thing we should do.
[00:03:15] Jess: Yeah. I got nervous too, to be fair. Like, when that first happened, I was like, oh man. And what, what happened was, you know, we saw a fewer demos booked.
[00:03:22] Josh: Yep.
[00:03:23] Jess: Um, we have a, a, a sales rep. Who, you know, works. His, his comp is commission based. Yeah. And he has a family to feed and like that scared him too. Yeah. And luckily, um, you know, I think he trusted in us enough to know like, it's okay.
[00:03:37] Like yes, initially we're gonna see demo bookings drop. Yeah. Because now we're pushing free trials as the main call to action. Yeah. Uh, we even at the same time started running some ads and the call to action was get started for free. Yeah. Um, but here's the thing. 97% of our market, they're not ready to buy right now anyway.
[00:03:55] Yeah. So at the very least we can pull them into a free product, even if they're not [00:04:00] gonna be ready to buy. Yep. Six months from now. Right. Yeah. They had the option to do that before we made that button switch.
[00:04:05] Josh: Yeah.
[00:04:06] Jess: But the likelihood of them doing was a little bit less. Right? They couldn't, it wasn't as visible.
[00:04:11] It wasn't as obvious. We even had customers tell us when I would do interviews with them, like I had no idea you even had a free product.
[00:04:18] Josh: Yeah. Yeah. That was
[00:04:18] Jess: a big push for me to be like, oh, we should really consider this. Yeah.
[00:04:22] Josh: But we had to take that like leap of faith that that was the right decision for the company.
[00:04:25] And I think the other thing that's forced us to do. Is totally think about like, okay, if more people are going in through the free door, like what do we actually need to do Yes. To take care of these folks. Right. And you've got like Alex on your team, right? Yep. Amazing. PMM. And so like we've really had to make the investments into, okay, you know, sales isn't immediately gonna get their hands on these the moment that comes to the website, but we're gonna have this period where we.
[00:04:48] Nurture them, make them super successful, and then over time we're gonna take the best of the best and raise those up to sales.
[00:04:54] Jess: Totally. Yeah.
[00:04:54] Josh: Did you have all of that figured out? Like the, when you said we're gonna switch, like did you know switching the button was gonna have to [00:05:00] come with all of that as well?
[00:05:01] Jess: There's a big, that's a big catalyst. Yeah. Yes. I knew that there was gonna be a lot of work that needed to be done even after that little button switch. Yeah. So. I think we wanted to make that change very quickly. Mm-hmm. But there's a long tail effect to that. So product, I had to get product bought in on that and engineering.
[00:05:17] Right. Because now we need to build mechanisms into the product that get people from free to paid. Yep. And we had some, but not enough to make that the pri to make free trials the priority. Yeah.
[00:05:28] Josh: So
[00:05:28] Jess: now that is kind of, um. That's a thought process we have to go to every time, every time we have a new feature.
[00:05:33] Yeah. Is this gonna be part of free? If not, what's gonna be the nudge in the product Yeah. To get someone to upgrade for it. Yeah. So that was a really big thing. Yeah. Um, another one was the actual form that we have people fill out. Yeah. Uh, we had to, we had to rearrange that a bit. Right. Because it just that we have this really adorable little ghost on the website that's like, do you wanna book a.
[00:05:55] Josh: Said just like that.
[00:05:57] Jess: Just like that. If you go there, you'll
[00:05:58] Josh: know what I mean. Yep.
[00:05:59] Jess: But [00:06:00] like when you go in there, right. It was just like start booking your demo. Yeah. And we had to kind of build in the, Hey, do you really wanna see everything Vector does?
[00:06:08] Josh: Yeah.
[00:06:08] Jess: Or do you wanna just give it a try for free first?
[00:06:11] Josh: Yeah. Well, and I feel like there's, there's always this like lifelong discussion of like revenue alignment and marketing and sales alignment. And I think this was such a great example of it. It's like. The action you took was swapping a button in web flow. Yeah. Right. But the reality is, is like you had to get so much alignment internally Yes.
[00:06:28] To make that work. Whether that was from hey sales, understanding how it's gonna impact them, Hey, short term or sorry, long term bet you're gonna see some short term, um, you know, downside in your, your book of demo. But long term, we're gonna bring you folks that are qualified, intimate with the product.
[00:06:43] Already you had to get product in there. Right. We redid our entire. Onboarding flow. Yeah. Right. So that we can have people understand the differences in our plans. Like it took a lot of alignment when you think about like the companies you've been at that are a little bit bigger than Vector. Yeah. That alignment's kind of hard to get.
[00:06:57] Jess: It's hard to get and free me like a [00:07:00] free offer like that doesn't always make sense. Yes. So, you know, I think our price point, there's a couple things that made it work for us. Yeah. One is we already had a great free product. We didn't have to build that in. It was already done. Yeah. We just weren't, uh, capitalizing on the opportunity.
[00:07:13] Yeah. So that's one. Two is our price point. Allows it.
[00:07:16] Josh: Yep.
[00:07:16] Jess: So there are certain companies where like, you know, an oracle Yeah. One the, the price point is enormous.
[00:07:25] Josh: Yep.
[00:07:25] Jess: The integrations are so far reaching.
[00:07:28] Josh: Yep.
[00:07:29] Jess: It touches so many different. Parts of an organization, part of a, and parts of a company that like, it's nearly impossible to do a free trial that would actually add any value.
[00:07:38] Yes. It doesn't make any sense. Right? Yeah. So I think you have to look at the business and understand like, does this actually make sense for the business? Can we build kind of triggers into the product? Um, is it, is our sales cycle? Yeah. Like. Is it a pretty quick sales cycle where like free to paid will be relatively quick?
[00:07:56] Yeah. Um, or is it gonna take us six months anyway? Because [00:08:00] again, the price tag is so big. Yes. And the integrations are so huge, right? A hundred percent.
[00:08:04] Josh: Yeah.
[00:08:04] Jess: Josh?
[00:08:05] Josh: Yeah.
[00:08:05] Jess: Josh,
[00:08:06] Josh: what?
[00:08:06] Jess: It's that time.
[00:08:07] Josh: What time is it
[00:08:08] Jess: in the show? Okay. Where you and I
[00:08:10] Josh: uhhuh
[00:08:11] Jess: both look into the camera.
[00:08:12] Josh: Mm.
[00:08:12] Jess: Staring.
[00:08:13] Josh: Okay. Longingly. Mm.
[00:08:15] Jess: And we deliver
[00:08:16] Josh: yes.
[00:08:17] Jess: Positive affirmations to the marketers. Because they need it.
[00:08:22] Josh: They need it. They deserve it. This world sucks. Let's say some nice shit about you. Dear Marketer, you can smell an untapped market segment from 17 miles away.
[00:08:32] Jess: Dear marketer, when you post on LinkedIn, the algorithm creates a special category just for your content called.
[00:08:39] Whatever this person wants
[00:08:42] Josh: you. And I discovered that there was like a chasm between our customer base. Mm-hmm. There were these folks that were using our free product that we couldn't really foresee ever becoming our ICP. Right. They were solopreneurs or really small businesses. And factor ultimately goes after mid-market enterprise [00:09:00] marketers.
[00:09:00] Yeah. And so we're like. These people are never gonna make the jump over to our products. We don't want them wasting our resources or talking to sales when they're never gonna buy that other plan. Yeah. But you also recognize that like, uh, 'cause you do all the things right now. You have Alex now finally, but you were, I mean, you do everything from managing like our corporate LinkedIn, right?
[00:09:18] And so you were seeing us like every day, 10 times a day, get tagged by these non ICP folks where they're saying, Hey, here's how I'm using Vector. And so you recognize. We're never gonna convert these folks, but they're also a massive part of why our brand is getting out there. Yes. And so you had this like deep strategy in like, hey, go give that, make it very obvious that there's a free product there so they can continue sort of that evangelism for us.
[00:09:40] Jess: Yeah, absolutely. We're never gonna stop somebody from talking about us, even if they're not quite our ICP. Yeah. Like absolutely amazing. Yeah, let's bring those folks in. But I don't think we're, they're ever going to be able to see the kind of. Success and the use, the use cases. Yeah. Um, just at the scale that I think we're trying to drive with [00:10:00] like, you know, mid-market to enterprise marketing teams Yeah.
[00:10:04] Who have an A BM function already and have already been trying a BM, but like are having some struggles with the tools. Right? Yeah. And I think what we noticed really early on was like, yes. Demos dropped. It was scary. Yep. But when demos were booked, it was not the looky-loos. Right. It was not, you know, we had people who would come to Mark, who's our, you know, our, um, sales rep
[00:10:28] Josh: Yep.
[00:10:29] Jess: And would basically ask for a demo of the free product. Yep. And of course, Mark's going to give it to them. He's not gonna be like, no, go sign up for the free product. That's just not what we want the brand to be about. No. But it wasted his time. Yeah. To un, you know, he could have been talking to someone who's, who wants the paid.
[00:10:43] Yeah. Product, right? Yeah. And so that was something that he really felt, he was like, I'm not getting Yeah. The, the people who just wanna see site de anonymization anymore. Yeah. I'm seeing the people who want the bigger features Yeah. That are more in line with our ICP. Yeah. In fact, I looked it up. [00:11:00]
[00:11:00] Josh: Hold on.
[00:11:00] Oh, she's got the stats.
[00:11:02] Jess: She checks. She checks notes.
[00:11:06] Josh: For those of you who listening to audio only Justice pulled out like a fucking notepad of a bunch of shit. There it is. There go. Now you can hear it. There's the paper.
[00:11:12] Jess: I have it in my hands. My note says,
[00:11:15] Josh: yeah,
[00:11:16] Jess: saw a big bump. Uh, saw drop in demos, parentheses. Sales got nervous. Next bullet, but slide big bump in signups, parentheses, month over month, free signups, approximately quadrupled.
[00:11:28] Josh: Damn.
[00:11:29] Jess: So again, now we have all these new marketable contacts. Yeah. In our database. And that's exciting. Yes. Because again, go back to that like 97% of people are not ready to buy. Yeah. But let's say in three months they are. Yeah. And now we have them in our universe.
[00:11:42] Josh: Well, you know what's interesting? We've talked a lot on this podcast about like how.
[00:11:47] Marketing should spend their time, um, justifying or vying for their position. Right. How to convince the CEO Yeah. To like that they're worth it, sort of stuff. This is the opposite. What happened here [00:12:00] was I believed in what you were doing. I. And it was my job to go represent marketing to the rest of the org.
[00:12:06] Yes. Right. So I remember calling Nick, who's our COO and Mark, who's the rep that we were talking out here and basically saying like, I believe in what justice is doing here. You guys might not see the forest through the trees. And ultimately they did. They were, yes, they were great. But for, you know, most reps, most COOs, most sales leaders, they're gonna be like, what the hell are you doing?
[00:12:25] Yeah. And so that's my job, right, is to go make sure that like those longer term. Bets that other people might not understand are supported so that you didn't catch a bunch of flack from them.
[00:12:35] Jess: Yeah, totally.
[00:12:35] Josh: But if you did, you can punch 'em in the face, like give
[00:12:38] Jess: you permission. I, I mean, I gave them the middle finger of their slack, so it's fine.
[00:12:42] That's awesome. But guess what, now they're believers too, right? Yeah. Because they can see the quality in the leads.
[00:12:47] Josh: It's so good.
[00:12:48] Jess: And, and the demos is so much better. Yeah. Um, they're fewer, but they're better.
[00:12:53] Josh: Yeah. Well, they're not fewer anymore. You're right. So like they were fewer when they first dropped.
[00:12:57] When we first started. Yeah. Like they first started, but [00:13:00] like the thing, and this is why I went to them basically saying like, you have to believe in this is because I could see sort of around the corner. Yeah. And I knew in addition to this change all the other investments that marketing was making Yes.
[00:13:10] Into stuff like this. Right. Into our events. And so, um, I think not only has the quality massively gone up, but I was just checking HubSpot, our dashboard the other day. It's like doubled. It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane.
[00:13:23] Jess: I actually remember, I think it was like a week and a half after I started. Mm-hmm. We had an offsite in Nashville, the whole company.
[00:13:29] Yep. And you shared with me at that time that it was your goal to quadruple
[00:13:34] Josh: mm-hmm.
[00:13:34] Jess: Demo signups month over month.
[00:13:36] Josh: Yep.
[00:13:36] Jess: And I was like. Oh my God.
[00:13:39] Josh: And it wasn't like, oh, in 180 days woke, quadruple. It was like next month. Yeah. I'd love you two. Quadruple. It was like dumbest missions. Yeah. Next quarter
[00:13:47] Jess: I wanna start doing this.
[00:13:47] Yes. And we were like halfway into the quarter already and I was like, okay. Sure. Mm-hmm. Thanks boss. Yep. Um. But it was a really exciting challenge. And that was, um, that actually just really reaffirmed for me that we had to do this [00:14:00] Yes. That we had to. It's totally like against logic to be like, if we wanna quadruple demos, we need to make free sign up the thing.
[00:14:07] Yeah. It doesn't
[00:14:08] Josh: make sense. Right? Yeah.
[00:14:09] Jess: Totally backwards. But it worked for us. Yeah. And I think we're, we're now seeing that. Yeah. And that, that's really exciting. Yeah. Um.
[00:14:16] Josh: To close out that story. Yeah, you did it. Yeah. Did it. You quadruple it. Now we're gonna 10 x it, right? Uhhuh? Yep. Cool. Oh my God. Oh my God.
[00:14:26] Have you seen trolls before? Is that what you're doing? Uh, I forget like what the context is.
[00:14:32] Jess: But there's a little troll. A little troll, and he just goes, oh my God. Oh my God. He's like the, he's like the tiny ones. You expected to have like this tiny little voice and he has this weird, creepy, oh my God.
[00:14:42] Josh: Oh my God.
[00:14:43] Jess: Anyway, great movie. Go see it.
[00:14:44] Josh: Yep, go see it.
[00:14:45] Jess: Something related to this that I love that we do, that I think a lot of companies are afraid of is just showing product, right? Like. On the website. Yeah. So not only do we allow you to go in and have a free trial Yeah. But if you're not quite even ready to do that, we have, [00:15:00] you know, product screenshots, um, or darn near close.
[00:15:04] Yeah. Right. Very, very nice looking product screenshots. Yeah. That make sense for the context around, you know, the, the spot on the website that you're reading.
[00:15:12] Josh: Yeah.
[00:15:12] Jess: A lot of companies are really afraid to do that. So I'd love to hear from you as CEO, like what makes you really confident about, like, oh, like, it just feels like it's second nature to you to be like, we need to show the product.
[00:15:23] Why wouldn't we?
[00:15:23] Josh: Yeah. I mean, so my background, I was a solution engineer for Drift. I was the first one like demoing the product there, and so I, I'm always the guy on sales calls just like, shut up and show me the product. Yeah, right. Yeah. Just like you can. You can market me to death, but like if the product doesn't do what you're saying, I don't care.
[00:15:38] Yes. And so I feel like it's really funny, you can actually look at a company's website and figure out like at what. Era did they get stuck in digital transformation? Right? Yeah. Like the more hidden the pricing, the more complicated the demo form, the less product imagery on the website. Like the worst they are.
[00:15:55] Yeah. And so like, yeah, I, that's a huge part of like, just show me [00:16:00] it, right? Yeah. And so I love that people can just go in, sign up and especially we're a data product, right? Yeah. Like we, we sit in this sort of like. Old school a BM legacy space. We're trying to make it modern with CBM, but like we understand that our buyers have basically been like lied to.
[00:16:14] Yeah. About intent data. Like what is intent, what does it even mean? Who's this company on my website? Yeah. And so. Like, again, everything being super intentional and embodying what our, you actually said something the other day, like, uh, I did. He did. You said, you said words and they were beautiful. Um, we, uh, I think at some point we'll talk about like how you helped me with my content writing, but one of the pieces you helped me with was this piece about like, brand should be a mega, or sorry, it should be a mirror.
[00:16:39] Yeah. Not a megaphone. Yeah. And like, so you've done a great job of understanding that the mirror that we wanna hold up to marketers is like, Hey. You don't trust these products. Like you don't know what intent means. Yeah. You've been like really hurt by these like, you know, a hundred thousand dollars tools and so the best way to do it is just show them it.
[00:16:55] Right? Yeah. If they don't wanna see it by logging in and trying it for free, at least make it very clear on the [00:17:00] website what we do.
[00:17:00] Jess: Yes. I love that. Um, Taz Bober, one of my marketing buddies. Yes. She is like a landing page genius. Yeah. And. She always says like the goal of a landing page, or even if you know, you could assume your homepage is a landing page.
[00:17:15] Yeah. Goal of a landing page is to get people to scroll, not to convert. Right. Yeah. So I love that. Like I think we do that very well where we're like, okay, we just, we want people to come to the homepage and see like. First instantly. We're a brand that that you gets you right? Yes. Okay. Done. Check. Okay. Now like we're showing you product, we're transparent.
[00:17:35] Yeah. The product looks really like friendly and easy to use. Yeah. Okay. But they're actually a data product. Yes. So how good's the data, let's see that right. Free sign up. Yes. Right. So there's like, yes. Like we need them to scroll, we need them to trust, we need them to understand, but ultimately we need them to like get into the product.
[00:17:51] Yeah. And then again, scroll, understand, trust, right? Yeah. So I think that that we've built like a really nice mechanism for that.
[00:17:58] Josh: One of the things when you and I were like [00:18:00] setting up this podcast, we had like some fight club rules of like things we would and wouldn't do on this. And I've always been such an evangelist of like.
[00:18:07] Uh, don't name the competition, punch up all these sorts of things. Yeah. And so, uh, like, I love, like apple's forbidden words. Right? They don't talk about, you know, comparing themselves to others. Yeah. The one thing that we have to talk about, 'cause it was so important for us establishing our brand, is when we first came into market.
[00:18:24] There was a company called R B2B. Yep. Uh, Adam Robinson's the founder over there, got a great personal brand. Yep. Ton of followers and uh, I think he's a really great marketer and he is probably cash flowing, a ton of ton of money. But the thing that we heard the most was what you and I called, like adult marketers would come to us and say like.
[00:18:42] There's just something I don't trust about it. Right. Something about the data, something about the brand. And so that was a huge part of like how we set up the company, right? Whether it was transparency about GDPR, transparency about data, how it actually works. Yeah. We explain it to folks and so yeah, that product imagery and that ability to go like put your hands on a product is super [00:19:00] important, especially when people don't have trust towards a particular industry.
[00:19:02] Jess: Yes. Yeah. When they've seen something that they're like, that's all they have to compare you to, and they're not. Feeling something right about it. Yeah. Like we have to overcome that as well.
[00:19:12] Josh: Yep. Exactly.
[00:19:13] Jess: So, Josh, knowing that, you know. I've single handedly quadruple demo bookings. Like we can just talk about my promotion, like next meeting.
[00:19:22] Josh: Mm.
[00:19:23] Jess: But this meeting was really good.
[00:19:24] Josh: Yeah, we'll talk about that. This meeting was good though. This, this meeting could have been a podcast.
[00:19:29] Jess: It could have.
[00:19:30] Josh: It could have. It was, it was
[00:19:33] Jess: This meeting could have been a podcast as a vector. Production Vector is a contact based marketing tool that reveals your best buyers on and off your site, and lets you target them with plays tailored to their exact spot in the funnel.
[00:19:46] Our site de anonymization tool is free forever. Go give it a whirl@vector.co. See you next time.