Referral Rock

All the changes we put in place in the previous 6 months continue to bear fruit.

The main items are:

• reduce customer churn
• increase the efficiency of sales
• increase conversion rates to a lead
• increase site traffic and awareness

It's all about process and scaling the things that work.

Personalized on-boarding and dedicated customer success per account have helped us cut our churn in 1/2. We took the time and build a process around helping customers reach their goals.

We've always had a consultative inside sale, but in the early days just let them loose on the product after the sale and was reactive with support. Our on-boarding process is now a pro-active approach where we have a kick-off meeting and complete a profile on the customer.

You have to make it very clear to the customers and set the proper expectations. For example, we make it extremely clear to the customers throughout the whole process that "we help you" not "do for you".

Every SaaS business wants low/no touch these days, but customers do want personalized help. It may not work for every SaaS business as its very dependent on their pricing and type of customers they are attracting, but it's something you may want to do in the early days.

As an added benefit, our CSMs are exceptional contributors with product and customer feedback for both qualitative and quantitative information so we can build-in high impact features and functionality.

"The passion and insights you provide as a founder can go a long way when your product is not entirely proven."

How Talking to Customers Grew My Business to $70K/Month: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-talking-to-customers-grew-my-business-to-70k-month-b46a87fe2a

Lesson for me: Being a bit more aggressive vs what I am comfortable with. Be willing to double down on what is working even if you don't feel ready.

The source of this uptick was for us to hire a second sale-person. I was reluctant for a few months because I didn't think we had enough leads to feed 2 inside sales reps.

By pushing early to bring on an additional rep it actually put more pressure on me to get resourceful on generating more leads. By updating website copy, landing pages, and CTAs I was able to increase our lead volume.

Then with another rep and an increased number of leads -> increased revenue.

We needed to scale out sales! July came and the first salesperson was hired. At this point, all I knew was what I was doing in sales but never considered myself an actual salesperson. I thought a salesperson was supposed to be “salesy” and what I was doing was a hack. So the first person I hired fit that mold and as you probably can guess… I failed miserably...

Overall these were some mistakes with my first sales hire that hopefully others don't have to repeat.

1. We had ZERO onboarding and training for sales.

I didn’t realize how much of a learning curve a new product and new customer profile mattered. I thought hiring a salesperson was just going to spin up and do what they do as a “real salesperson” in a matter of weeks. I think I even gave the new salesperson all the demos within about 2 weeks. Here's what I learned...

Build out at least the framework of some training, record more of my own demos, and come up with a basic level script that someone could pick up rather quickly.

2. We didn’t have the right type of salesperson

There are different types of salespeople? My first hire had experience selling to SMBs which was great but didn’t have much marketing experience which led to some challenges on picking up on the product and understanding the customer. Here's what I learned...

Get rid of the picture in your head of what a sales person looks like, it will cloud your hiring judgement. Find someone who is coachable, understands at least the basics of digital marketing, is consultative and helpful vs salesy and pushy.

This was a hard lesson to learn as it killed 2 months of revenue and I was pulled back into sales and lost valuable time and energy that could have gone to other areas of the business.

(Also note this was all 2.5 years ago. I added this milestone retroactively when filling out the product profile. I didn't know it would all show up here like it was current)

I started out doing all product support through chat but then frustration sets in and you have those moments where you realize you’re going to either spend the next 20 minutes on chat trying to explain something, or you could pick up the phone/screen share and talk to them to have the problem solved in 5 min. Path of least resistance? I picked up the phone.

Within a week I found that talking to people in person resulted in more sales. In fact, the conversion rate practically tripled.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized this was inside sales and founder selling at it’s finest. It was the birth of our consultative sales practices and laid the groundwork for what would truly get Referral Rock off the ground.