[89] Making the Most of Outbound Sales Tools
Hey. This is Bootstrap Web episode 89, and we're back for another episode here. As always, I'm Brian.
Jordan Gal:And I'm Jordan. Nice to speak with you again.
Brian Casel:Cool. So we're gonna get right into a topic for this this week. Last week, you you had our updates, and we'll give you the next update next week. But for now, we're gonna get right into a couple of listener questions. We've got about two that we're gonna tackle today.
Brian Casel:Yes. The first one we put out on Twitter today that came from ConradoMaggi. I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. He said, you know, lately, a lot of SaaS are focusing on outbound sales. How is that working out for Karthoek?
Brian Casel:And what about the inbound long term play? How does Yeah. How does that balance out? And this is a good question. I mean, I definitely, you know, wanna hear how it's happening in in Cardhook.
Brian Casel:I mentioned last week that I've just recently put this stuff in place in terms of, like, cold outbound sales for for audience ops. So I've I've got a I can kinda talk through the systems and tools that I put in place. And actually, I wanna I wanna get your take on what I put in place because I know you have much more experience in in this sort of thing than I do. So
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And I I always have plenty plenty to learn from what other people are doing too. Yeah. So so when I first read that question, I I what I thought he meant was I'm seeing a lot of SaaS companies come out that enable outbound sales because that's true. You see you just see a lot of tools coming out.
Jordan Gal:Outreach.io, Leadfuse came out with their own software, Salesloft, Quickmail, just Sendbloom, all these tools that enable it because it's getting more and more popular.
Brian Casel:That's Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I don't think that's what he meant, but it's interesting to see the ecosystem grow around around a strategy.
Brian Casel:It is. And and I think I think that that goes to show how much of of it is a strategy that's growing. Because I you know, you think of a SaaS, traditionally, I think what what has made it so attractive to to so many people is, like, hey. You build this SaaS, customers will naturally come find it and magically just become customers and stay subscribed month after month, recurring revenue, all that. And you don't have to do any work to get the customer.
Jordan Gal:And Right. You build a nice looking site, and maybe you you get some leads, that sort of thing, but you don't have to push outward. Yeah. Right? And content marketing went along with that and the popularity of it.
Jordan Gal:And then I think what happened was the the dirty secret kinda came out that a lot of these unbelievably successful SaaS companies in Silicon Valley are all doing outbound sales. From Salesforce to Zenefits to all these incredibly successful companies that all they all have in house sales teams doing outbound sales. Yeah. And so I think what happened is it started to become more popular. Aaron Ross wrote his book on predictable revenue, and Brian Kreutzberger gets popular with his breakthrough email, and you hear some interviews and you're like, Oh shit, this works.
Jordan Gal:Now the challenge is that you can make this work. You can make the math work for outbound sales if you're selling a high priced enterprise software. If your average contract value per year is $20,000 and up, you can hire high quality salespeople to run this process and be profitable while paying them a $100,000 a year. The the challenge comes in with how the hell do you make the math work if you're selling something for 50 or $100 a month? And and and that's what everyone has been trying to figure out, and that's what all these tools are coming in, and you have to make it more scalable, and
Brian Casel:Yeah. You can make more automated. I mean, I I've also noticed just in my email inbox getting way more cold emails from companies than than I used to.
Jordan Gal:I I love it. I love
Brian Casel:it. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I have a a Google a Gmail tag where I'm like cold email templates. I always respond. And I'm like, not interested, but I I like this part or I don't like this part of your template. You know? Keep up the good work.
Jordan Gal:Right. I love it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Definitely. I mean, sometimes I don't and and I know that, like, if I if I reply, like, not interested or whatever, then I know that that's gonna, like, shut off the the cold email sequence because that's how these tools work. They they track the replies, and then they won't so so sometimes I just I'll look at the emails, and I won't reply because I wanna see what all three of them look like. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. But they'll know that it was opened, and and sometimes you'll get a phone call because it was opened, which is that's part of what we do as a process. Yeah. It's very, it's very cool.
Jordan Gal:Interesting.
Brian Casel:So Well, the other part of his question here was, you know, what about inbound as more of a long term play? And I think that's right. You know, the thing the thing about outbound sales is I I feel like they they can't work just alone on their own. Like, you you shouldn't necessarily only do cold cold outreach as a sales process and not do anything else, like build up content marketing assets over the long term. Advertising.
Brian Casel:Right? Email marketing. I mean, inbound, like, automation kind of stuff.
Jordan Gal:Right. It needs to contribute, but it does shorten the the response time. It's the quickest quickest time to a a response.
Brian Casel:Exactly. And and the thing with doing the the inbound stuff, he's right. It is more long term. So you can you should start doing that stuff from day one, but you're not gonna get, results as as fast as you as you need them to be, especially if you're bootstrapping the startup from from day one. So that's where the combination of cold email outreach with And it with the content stuff, comes into play because, you know, that's why this whole idea of of cold outreach, I think, has has become so popular lately.
Brian Casel:It's because all these startups or these SaaS, they're they're growing. You know, you can use organic search and content and inbound things and and and even, like, ads to get a couple of customers in every month, but it's not enough to sustain. It's not enough to either pay the founder what they need to live, or get a team in place so that you can move faster. You don't reach that that velocity that you need to to really grow the SaaS. And that's why SaaS burn burns out.
Brian Casel:So that's that's when, you know, becoming more proactive comes into play to kinda get to that point where where it all starts really working together.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It contributes. And I think it's it's something that's worth a try because if it does work for you, you have found a channel that can kinda keep running and keep contributing over time. So organic, paid, and and out and outbound, it's just one it's just another channel that might be able to contribute, and if you can get it to contribute profitably, then you should you should have it running.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Absolutely.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And yeah. And that's that's what our mix looks like now. It's it's a piece. When we first started Cardhook, the only channel we had was outbound cold email because it was the fastest way to just talk to people and see if anyone cares at all about what we built.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And then as soon as that started to work, we tried to double down on it, and then we tried to experiment with it, and then and then it it it didn't work as well as it did in the beginning, and that's when we start diversifying. Like, now let's do paid advertising, now let's do Facebook ads, and now let's do partnerships and new integrations, and it then it becomes one part of the whole as opposed to the only strategy. Look. There are companies that use it as their 90% strategy, and hallelujah.
Jordan Gal:I I would love to have a company like that because that sounds very attractive. People just put money into a machine that turns out more money than you put in, but it's not not an easy thing to do.
Brian Casel:And this is this gets to a question that I actually asked you last week about cold email outreach because I, you know, I was putting my systems together. What I what I learned as I started researching all these different tools and services, there are basically two strategies to to get at this. If if you if you know that you want to do cold email outreach to some prospects for your business, There are two ways to do go about it. One way is to be like kind of like a blanket approach, thousands of names in a list and and just, you know, put them into a system where you're called email outreach. And the other way is a little bit more targeted where you're kinda more manually building prospect lists
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And sending that out. And and so when I was going through this for audience ops, I kinda landed on on the latter where I I I feel like I need to get a more targeted list, almost handpicked list, because I like, I can't just necessarily go to something like builtwith.com and get all sites that use Kissmetrics Mhmm. Or all sites that have Google Analytics installed or or whatever because, you know, there's just so many different types of websites and and businesses, and you can look at different different tools and things that that might relate to a characteristic of your customer. But, like, for us, we we work best with, b to b online businesses, like software products that are serving businesses. You know?
Brian Casel:So if if you do one of these, like, prospecting lists, either buying a big list or or doing one of these, like, scrapers where you just let it go out on the Internet and and get tons and tons of names, you know, it's gonna send a lot of kind of cold emails to people that I I wouldn't necessarily even accept them as a client because they wouldn't really fit for us.
Jordan Gal:Right. And that that's a dangerous thing in in an environment where time is a valuable resource because we've done that before. We started sent sending and getting good responses, and we got all excited. And then when we get people on a demo or in a conversation, we realized these are this is a bad prospect. Now now we're we're spending time emailing with them, scheduling, doing a demo, and then worst of all, if they create a free trial, we're we're wasting time with onboarding and working and answering questions, and then they don't convert to a customer.
Jordan Gal:It's a complete disaster all the way around.
Brian Casel:Right. Right. So, I mean, if if if you want, like, I can go through the system that I just finished putting together for Audience Ops. It's now running for us, and maybe you can kinda help me tear it apart and, see where see see what I did wrong.
Jordan Gal:Sure. I mean, what you're talking about right now is the first piece. Need you need some raw material. You need people to contact. And and like you said, you can go a mass approach, you can go a handpicked approach, you know, or you can experiment with both.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We we experiment with both. We have, like, a high value version that we handpick, and we have, like, a giant list that we blast.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, I I guess now we're doing I I think in the bee in the very beginning when I did it as a as a test, I just manually did the cold email myself from my own Gmail account. I picked, I think, something like 10 or 20 companies, like software companies that sell to businesses. And I I personally sent, you know, a canned email to all 20 of them, and I got a a good response from from one who who's turning into a pretty good lead for us. But but then I I kinda went the the next step to get it all put into a system, and this is where it gets a little bit less targeted, but it's still not that massive blanket approach.
Brian Casel:So basically, what we're doing now is I'm using either a combination of Wikipedia or the site Capterra. Are you familiar with that? Which kinda gives you lists it helps you compare different software tools for your Oh, okay. Business. So you can literally just write in, like, project management tools, and it'll spit out, like, 200 project management
Jordan Gal:tools. I have seen that.
Brian Casel:And it's, like, perfect. I can just give my my VA that category page on Capterra for project management tools or help desk tools or, you know, something like that. The tools that I know serve businesses. Then I have him put get all those names, and he puts them into a spreadsheet, and he he basically visits the website for each of those companies, finds out who the CEO, who the founder is of each company. You know, he'll he'll manually go look at their about page or something.
Brian Casel:If you can't find it, then he'll look them up on, like, Crunchbase. Usually, that that works or he'll just Google them. Put them in the spreadsheet, first name, last name, company name, and then I'm using our friend Justin's, LeadFuse tool. Now LeadFuse has been a done for you service, but now they're they've actually released a a software tool that lets you do your own prospecting. And their tool is good for if you wanna go out on, like, on a Google search or go into LinkedIn and you can find the contact info for for people off of a search results page.
Brian Casel:But what you can also do, I I use it a little bit differently than what most of their clients do. I actually load in our spreadsheet of names. They they allow you to load in your own names into LeadFuse. So Mhmm. I I load in a CSV or, well, my my VA is doing this now.
Brian Casel:He loads in a a CSV that has company name, first name, and last name, and then LeadFuse does the work of digging out that person's personal email address.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's that's nice.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And now granted, if you put in a 100 names, it's really only only gonna come back with about 30 good email addresses. The rest will be kind of not found or, you know, unverified email addresses or whatever. Yep. So, you know, for every 100 names, we get we get 30 good email addresses, and and that's fine.
Brian Casel:So Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's as good as you can expect.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so if if if I have the VA do a couple 100 of these companies every week or two, then then then we built a then we built a list of, you know, enough cold emails to fill up our our emailing systems. So the next step after that is he takes the names that we've found email addresses for. He takes them out of LeadFuse, puts them into another spreadsheet, a Google spreadsheet, which then syncs with, we're using quick mail .I o.
Jordan Gal:Right. And I know Justin eventually with LeadFuse will have an emailing component. So we'll cut that that out. But right now, right right, you have to you have to email it in a different way. So you're using QuickMail, which which I I like.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So we're using QuickMail, and and what I like about it is that it actually pulls all the names. It syncs up with the Google spreadsheet. So all my VA has to do is update a spreadsheet, and those get synced into Google into, QuickMail. And then what QuickMail does is yeah.
Brian Casel:Basically, like, you set up email templates. So I've set up, like, a a sequence of three email templates that gets sent out to these prospects. There's, a three day period in between each one. And what QuickMail does and just like a lot of these other tools, like SalesLoft and, you know, some of these other ones, if the person it it basically tracks if the person has replied or if they open it or if they click a link inside the email. And if they have replied, then it would stop the follow-up email sequence.
Brian Casel:And then there's an automation in place so that, you know, I've we're constantly refreshing our list of prospects, Thanks to the the the work that my VA does from week to week. And then the automation that happens is, like, every day, take 10 new prospects from the list and send the cold email. So we're basically just sending 10 a day.
Jordan Gal:Right. You want you want your your resource of emails to be infinite. You don't ever want the sending to catch up with your research. So you just that just stays ahead of things, and you could just keep blasting your ten, twenty, 50 a day, and just that basically goes on forever. So research is like inexhaustible, and then you have a consistent flow going out of of new initial contacts.
Jordan Gal:And of course, there's always the follow ups going out every day, but that's automated.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The other thing and and these are kind of tips that I picked up from from Justin. It's it's kinda handy being in a mastermind with with someone who does, cold email outreach for for a living.
Brian Casel:So so I'm not using my main email address. I actually opened up a second, domain email address. It's it's pretty similar to to audienceops.com, but it's not quite. So I set up that email address just for cold email outreach, and then I forward incoming emails to that email address to my main one.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And so that, you know, allows my my main domain to avoid being, like, dinged by the male gods, I guess.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Like the googlers.
Brian Casel:Yep. The other tip that I that I got from Justin is that you have to, include this is at least in The US. This might not apply in other countries. But in The US, you have to include your mailing address and I think your phone number in the content of the email that you send out. I think in order for it to not be marked as spam.
Jordan Gal:I'm not sure about that, but Jess knows more about that than I do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I don't know. That's that's what I heard from him. I I think he has an article on his blog. Maybe we can dig that up and put it the show notes.
Jordan Gal:Right. It it might be. That might just be the the safer, smarter way to go. Yeah. And and we we included we included in our signature block as a as a trust builder.
Jordan Gal:So, like, the signature block isn't just like a name, that it looks like a more established company with innovation and address and all that.
Brian Casel:And that's exactly how I did it. And I actually, you know, I I got my my signature altogether. It looks pretty good, I think, because it it is very personal. It it says, you know, Brian Castle. I even put, like, a small avatar of my face in the signature.
Brian Casel:It says, like, Brian Castle, founder of Audience Ops. So you're getting an email from a founder, not some sales rep. It's got office address, and then I put cell phone and my my it's my actual cell phone number, and then a link to my LinkedIn page, and a link to my personal Twitter account. And so that's the signature, and I I think that that helps it, you know, look kinda more personal because it is.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I think it's worth testing. You know, a great cold email that I received myself recently, was just had no links whatsoever. No links. No links to the company, no links to the person, just the signature block and phone number.
Jordan Gal:So you could call them or reply to the email, and that's it. And I was like, that's interesting. That's worth that's worth testing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. And then and, know, the other tip that I got, you know, when I ran these email templates by my mastermind, as I went through and kinda edited edited the different versions of the email templates is I'm not in the in the email I'm sending, I'm not saying like, hey, let's hop on a consultation call so I can sell you audience ops. I'm I'm basically freezing it more as a question like, how how are you handling your blogging right now?
Brian Casel:Or do you feel like you're, you're publishing enough content on your blog? Or is that a big burden for you? Because that's what I found for my clients is that, like, we're easing it. That's the pain that we're solving. Right?
Brian Casel:So I'm trying to just start a conversation about that. And then and then I'll say something like, hey, I I'd love to share a few ideas for for what you can do at your company, you know. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We do something similar, and and then in the second email second email, we just share the idea.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yep. But everything's worth testing, like the like, just reply with a yes or no. That's worth testing. Open ended question. That's worth testing.
Jordan Gal:Here's my calendar, a link directly. It's all kind of experimentation. It's it's like ad copy. Like, you're not gonna get it right on the first try. You you you have to experiment.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So what
Brian Casel:are you guys doing now in in terms of cold email outreach? I mean, know you you did a lot early on, and how has how has it like evolved now that you're, you know, like over a year into it?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it's been it's been tricky because there are a few different variables, and the biggest variable for us is who we're sending to. So what we found was that we got great response rate from a from lower quality ecommerce platform users. So it felt amazing to get a response. And then we said to ourselves, oh, man, if we get the same type of response for this other platform, it's gonna be amazing.
Jordan Gal:We started sending to them and got no response. So all of a sudden you start to realize, okay, this is a bigger challenge than just like, just blast out emails. So we've been tweaking all the different elements, who we send to, what we say to them. So now at this point, we have several things going. We use Justin at LeadFuse for the Dunfuse service, and we're we're I try not to be a control freak about, like, the copy because I just say, you know what?
Jordan Gal:Let me just let them run the experiment. It because we have another experiment going internally. So LeadFuse is sending out their version of our copy, which is different from what I would do, but I'm I'm happy that some someone else is trying something different, and they're going out to one one platform. And then internally, we have our salesperson using SalesLoft, which is semi automated. It's like, oh, here are today's 50 emails.
Jordan Gal:Do you wanna send them? And then you click a button and it gets sent to those 50. But it takes a person saying, yes, I'm ready to send those 50. So it's it's the semi automated thing. And the reason for that is because it helps you inject phone calls into the process.
Jordan Gal:We used to email and call everyone. Now we only call people who open the email to try to reduce just the amount of work that needs to be done.
Brian Casel:So you're digging up their phone number too?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. That's So it take it takes a little more research.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So we're we're you we're using that process to a different ecommerce platform. Then
Brian Casel:it's So that's other nice thing about like, it goes back to that question of, like, do you wanna go broad and use a service like like LeadFuse or or go a little bit more targeted. I think that this is kind of like the difference between a pure SaaS software, especially one like yours, which specifically caters to certain e commerce platforms. Right. You you can literally say, like, find me a list of all people who use Shopify or people who use whatever.
Jordan Gal:Right.
Brian Casel:In my case, with a and like with a productized service, I I would say in general, you do kinda wanna go a little bit more targeted because productized services are so focused on a certain profile. And usually, are a number of different characteristics and some variables that make them not such a good fit. Yes.
Jordan Gal:And I think you have it right. And and the truth is I think that's also right for us. It's just that I think the goal, both for your situation and for mine, is to identify what those perfect characteristics are. So then you can narrow and narrow and narrow to the right prospects. Because if you're sending to the wrong prospects, you might be discouraged by the response, but it might not actually be your the the fault of, like, what you're saying and what you're offering.
Jordan Gal:It might just be the fault of sending it to the wrong people. So so those two have to line up.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So what we always look for, and now that we have more of a sense of, you know what? Our perfect customer isn't what we initially thought. The person that responds most is on this type of platform and spending this much money on AdWords and making this much money in revenue. And now how do we find more like that? And now we're getting into the next phase where now I'm starting to be willing to pay more money for better information.
Jordan Gal:So there's there's a service out of Denmark called Pipetop, and they're they're pretty focused on ecommerce, and they just have great data. So they have that data. How much is the estimated AdWords spent? What ecommerce platform are they on? How many employees do they have?
Jordan Gal:So now that we have a better sense of who our target customers, and I imagine, then we can basically stop sending out 50 or 100 a day because we we know out of those 100 that we're sending, we don't actually wanna talk to 80 of them. So it's that it's that process, and I think you'll find the same thing. I like the way you're going about it by saying, you know what? No. Let let's actually start smaller and send to 10 people a day, but have a better fix on who we're trying to go after.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And once you really find out, you know what? SaaS, b two b in this particular market, that's our bread and butter. That's who we wanna go after. And then and then you have your much better target list.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. The other thing that I I'd add in here is that in our third email, I'm actually linking to a blog post that I wrote.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:So I'm saying, like, oh, and by the way, you know, here's a blog post about building a a blogging strategy or or something like that. You know, hope it hope it helps. Yeah. You know, so, like, even if, like, again, like, the goal is just to kinda touch base and and let them know that what that we exist. You know, they they may not be the the thing about cold email outreach is that and the difference between this versus inbound, is inbound, the great thing is that they are in a mode of looking for a solution to a certain problem right now.
Jordan Gal:Right. That's ideal.
Brian Casel:It's it's ideal. Like, they're they're they they set some kind of priority internally, like, okay, we need a marketing service, or we need a, card abandonment service.
Jordan Gal:Right. Or I'm looking for a blog writer, and then they come across your thing and like, oh, I don't just want a blog writer. I want someone to handle the whole thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and, you know, with cold email, it's something they might be an a perfectly ideal client, and they might even know that this is a need, and and we're probably a good fit, but they're busy rewriting their software this month, or they're busy doing some other thing, and it's, you know, so Right.
Jordan Gal:So it's it's a different mindset.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly.
Jordan Gal:In that in that scenario, what do you need to do then with cold email? You need to you need to flick the pain.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:You can't when someone's inbound, you they're gonna compare you and other competitors, and you're gonna say, here's why we are better. When you're outbound, it's different. When you're outbound is, isn't this bothering you right here? Because it sucks, and we've solved it. So it's it's a very different mindset.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And that's like the first question that I ask in the first email is like something to the effect of, you know, do you feel like you're publishing enough blog content right now for your company blog?
Jordan Gal:Right. There you go. Perfect. Kick kick the knee, man.
Brian Casel:But still, like, even if I've already had a reply to to one of these cold email outreach, today, and and he was like, you know, looks looks like an interesting service. I'll I'll keep it in mind. You know? And I've I mean, from there, I do a little bit of follow-up and try to get on the call, but it's you know, now he knows we exist. He's probably not That's good.
Brian Casel:That's good. Gonna buy today, but it's he knows we exist. And that's, you know Right. That's kind of the point of all this.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And I and I I love the strategy. We do the same thing of of putting in links. So we have we do in the PS. We do PS.
Jordan Gal:Our our founder recently did an interview about optimizing your ecommerce store. Think you might find it valuable. So we we do both. We link out to a different site, not our own site, as almost like, well, see, we're not being self serving. This is just value.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:But it's an interview it's an interview of me on video with with the person interviewing me, And if I can get them to watch my face and listen to my voice, think about how much more likely they are to wanna talk. Right? That's so that's that's that part of the strategy. And then the last part, the the part I love about this blog post, you can then retarget. They hit your blog post, and then bang, they're on your retargeting list.
Jordan Gal:All of sudden, you have a bigger, you know, bigger audience to to serve ads to. Yeah. I I love this shit. The the thing that drives me nuts is I love the position you're in because I you want ideally, you wanna sell a higher value, higher cost product or service because it makes the math easier. Right now, I can't hire an experienced salesperson, pay them a $100,000 a year because our our average contract value is just not enough to justify it to pay them.
Jordan Gal:If you're selling a service that costs a thousand or $2,000 a month, so your average lifetime value is somewhere closer to $15,000 to $20,000, all of a sudden, you can you can give that guy, you know, or or gal a lot more money, a lot more incentive, and then, you know, to have a smart, energetic person running this process, it's not that it's foolproof. It's that it's much more likely to succeed.
Brian Casel:Exactly. Exactly. And actually, I don't know if you wanna still wanna talk about affiliates because this this actually ties right into something that that's kinda been on my mind lately. And like like you said, like, with with Audience Ops, we have a pretty high price point now, especially compared to my last business. And so we can pay out a pretty nice commission if we were to have some sort of affiliate program for audience ops.
Brian Casel:You know, we can or even, you know, hire a salesperson to to do to just do sales all the time and and be fully commission based. That can really work well for us. And it's something that I might explore, you know, sometime down the road. In my last business, I definitely ran into that as a challenge with with salespeople, you know, because it was a much lower price point. And with with the SaaS, it's, you know, if you're if it's gonna be commission based, then, you know, you you've gotta be able to pay that pay a decent commission for it to be worth their time.
Brian Casel:And then same deal with the affiliate program on that on that SaaS. Like, we had one, but, you know, it it people ask for, like, a recurring commission, but when you're charging 49 to $99 a month, even, like, 20% commission is, like, not anything special. Yep. So so how how are you facing that with with affiliate programs right now?
Jordan Gal:So so the affiliate thing is is look. I don't expect it to transform the business. At least that that that's not my expectations going in. It's not like, oh, I'm gonna sign up a million affiliates and everyone's gonna promote for me, and I'm not going with that mindset or that approach. I just think it's time for us to everything I do in this business is based on making people money.
Jordan Gal:Right? Like, the whole thing you wanna you wanna recover abandoned carts so that you make more money, and then I wanna charge you based on how much money I'm making you, and it's all kind of this very win win win scenario.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:I've had other people ask me, do you have an affiliate program before? And I just am starting to see the light where it might be it might be easier to push if it came along with an affiliate commission. So I have people reach out from time to time saying, this looks awesome. I would love to, you know, show it to my customers, my audience, my clients. What do you think?
Jordan Gal:So my thinking on the affiliate thing isn't, you know, there are a bunch of affiliate networks, and you can go on there and then hope that affiliates sign up for your program, and then you help them promote it. I don't think that that's gonna work. I think the much more likely thing is like, right now I have a partnership going with a woman in The UK. She has a pretty big ecommerce audience, and I wanna do a joint webinar where she emails out her list, and then I do all the work for the webinar, and then she makes a recurring commission based on the number of people that sign up for Cardo through the webinar. So I see that as like, that's more realistic.
Jordan Gal:Personal relationships with individual people and then say, this is awesome, and I'm very appreciative, and I want you to do well off of it. And I will do all the work, and you provide the audience, and and we'll both make money.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So I I see that as a much more realistic path for affiliates as opposed to just I'll create a program, and then everyone will sign up, and everyone's gonna put a banner ad on 5,000,000 sites, and then all of a sudden magically I'm gonna get people and I'll never talk to the affiliate and I don't think that's realistic. Yeah. So I signed up for a software called LeadDino and the reason for that is because they allow you to do the two things that I wanna do. The first thing, what we just talked about, someone signs up, they get 30% of recurring revenue for anyone that signs up for Cardhook, and I think that's a good healthy attractive place to start. I don't know if I'm gonna stick with that, but that's my thinking.
Jordan Gal:And then the second part is that they allow your existing customers to refer people and then get credit.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. That's Right? So right now when I looked for different services for this a couple years ago, I found it very like, the options were pretty limited, especially those that integrate with Stripe. Does that integrate with your Stripe subscriptions?
Jordan Gal:It does. Nice. It does. So so for both purposes. Right?
Jordan Gal:It it it tracks this email that came in through this affiliate has is now an email in Stripe, and therefore, how much money got charged in Stripe, therefore, how much money is owed to this person. So it does that. And also does this person is a customer of yours in Stripe, and you just gave them a credit of $20, so give them a credit of $20 in Stripe. Of course, I'm just starting this. I just started this week, so I might be talking out of my ass a little bit, but this is my understanding as of now, and I can definitely report back.
Jordan Gal:So now we're we're trying to incentivize our customers also to refer other people. So we send out a monthly email basically saying, here are your results from Kart Hook for the past month. Like, here's how many abandoned carts you had, recovered carts, how much money you recovered. And so along with each of those emails, we're gonna include, like, an easy social share thing that says, I recovered $19,000 with Cardhook last month. Sign up today, and then give them an incentive for for promoting that.
Brian Casel:Nice. It's kinda viral. It's it's there's also an incentive there. It's awesome.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's capitalizing off of goodwill at the right time. So we're whatever it is, it's worth the experiment.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Totally.
Jordan Gal:Right? If if it nudges things up and contributes another few customers a month, then it's worth it. The the real thing that's been bothering me lately is linear growth, that we're basically growing at the same rate and there is no exponential factor. There's no building on top and rolling on top of itself. It started to bother me where I feel like if I do a webinar with this with this woman in The UK and I do a webinar to 30 or 40 people, I can get five to 10 people sign up at once.
Jordan Gal:And I can do that once a week forever. And those are just bigger pops than than the, you know, few trials a day, few trials a day, few trials a day.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But if those webinars are completely based on on biz dev relationships, then that's not quite as scalable. Right? Like, you can only have a good a good partner a couple times a year for that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I think it depends. There are a lot of people out there.
Brian Casel:I mean, you can you you can certainly put a a webinar into the sequence of your email subscribers. So all email subscribers get on your monthly webinar, you know, or get pitched to your monthly webinar, and and that might convert really well. But then you go you go to the big names to do these partnerships, and there are a couple big names which which you can do, you know, once or twice and maybe do a repeating, you know Yeah. A few times a year, which which would be great. I mean, there it's it's certainly worth the the investment and time and effort, but it's not exactly, like, do it every week.
Jordan Gal:I don't know yet. I know the guy from Leadpages does, like, 10 webinars a week. And and and most of those are not for the Leadpages audience, that for other people's audience that they're paying an affiliate fee for.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Right? So, I mean so look. There there are a lot of different people with a lot of different lists.
Brian Casel:I guess you are working you are working in a in a world like, the ecommerce world is so big that
Jordan Gal:It's really big.
Brian Casel:There are, you know
Jordan Gal:yeah. What it's it's worth sharing.
Brian Casel:The other the other thing on on affiliates, the the other quick note on affiliates is, like, if you're using if you're selling a info product, using Gumroad, Gumroad finally released an affiliate system within within their system about a month or two ago. So people have been asking me for, you know, for affiliate links for for the productized course, since the beginning. And I've just been way too lazy to set up some third party affiliate system and I just never got around to it. And then finally, Gumroad sends me an email says we now have an affiliate program.
Jordan Gal:So nice.
Brian Casel:So I have offered existing product ties members to become affiliates and recommended to other students, and a bunch have done that. And now I'm kind of personally handing out affiliate invites to to people who get in touch with me and want to kind of, you know, promote the product ties course. And and that's just so easy because it's, like, all built into Gumroad, and I don't have to think about any of it. Gumroad just sends the commission, and it just works.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cool. So should we wrap it up for this one? And we'll we'll get back to it next week.
Jordan Gal:I think so. Yeah. Well, yeah. Busy day today. Our first, our first experiment in recording multiple episodes.
Brian Casel:Exactly. Cool,
Jordan Gal:man. Well, look, it's great talking with you. Everyone listening out there, thank you very much for listening. Send in your reader questions. We're gonna do more of these, like, topical episodes, I guess.
Jordan Gal:And Yeah. When they're driven by questions, from from people in the audience, that's that's the best.
Brian Casel:Totally. So send them in. Can go to bootstrapweb.com/ask to send us kind of a longer email if you want or just just tweet at us, you know, cash jam or jordan gal on Twitter and we'll, we'll monitor those and get these, get these topics out there on the show.
Jordan Gal:Sounds good, man. Have a great weekend.
Brian Casel:Alright. You too, man. See you.
Jordan Gal:See you.
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