Drive and Convert

Announcer: [00:00:00] You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan Garrow: Jon, you, without much of an argument or debate, do know quite a bit more about sales. SaaS products than I do. Your team has done phenomenally well at helping SaaS companies scale over the last few years. A ton about ecomm, we know that, but SaaS is a, it's a unique area for me because I don't lean into it nearly as much as I should probably, especially hearing some of the things you talked about leading into this podcast recording, you have some great insights on what you need to be doing from a SaaS company when you're building the website. And there isn't necessarily, and maybe you'll correct me through this podcast, but it's not as simple as Oh, there's like a Shopify for SaaS. You just put it up and then it automatically converts at this range.

And it's yeah, you're done now. You just collect money and it's awesome. There probably needs to be, maybe we need to go [00:01:00] on another tangent and solve for that and create a Shopify for SaaS because when you're going B2B, I feel like there's a really high expectation of what you're going to get on the marketing site.

There's so many ways to do it wrong because you can go so many different directions and you're applying probably to a vast spectrum of clients on that first marketing page, not knowing what you're going to hit. So you've got a lot of data here. So I'm excited to hear about this. You're going to talk to us about how to, I assume, remove some friction on these sites and make it super simple SaaS product.

Is that right?

Jon MacDonald: That's right. Yeah, I think begin and maintain as well.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay. And so when you're setting up your SaaS website, you've outlined in the notes here, 11 fundamentals for a marketing website that you want to cover today. And there's different pieces of SaaS, right? There's the front end marketing site, and then there's the actual product that you can optimize as well.

So we're focusing on Marketing, which I like, but it's how you're acquiring customers. Customer acquisition websites, essentially.

Jon MacDonald: [00:02:00] Exactly. Yeah. This is for the marketing website. Let's just say pre conversion to becoming a trialist or a paid user of your SaaS tool.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. So there's 11 things we need to be paying attention to when we're looking at the design on these that are going to make sure that we don't do something dumb and create a bunch of friction.

We don't need to.

Jon MacDonald: There you go. Before we jump in, I just want to be clear about one quick thing, and that's that. You called it out, right? The SaaS digital journey does not always begin or end with your website. For instance, your user's journey might start when they read a recommendation on another site.

And in SaaS, there's several of these, right? You got G2, you've got all of these other top whatever sites that are out there for apps, right? You got Product Hunt, you got all these. Great resources for small, especially small and medium businesses that are looking to purchase a new tool, right? And solve a pain point that they have.

Usually, it starts with them doing some research. Okay? And then it [00:03:00] ends when they have a conversation with enterprise, with a salesperson, or with them converting into that trial user.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. It's obviously imperative to have a seamless experience that connects with the customers. Answers questions and then basically tells them how to take the next step because it's, we're multi step.

It's, I joked about click funnels. It's all about click funnels to a degree. It's you're just moving people down a process and it's not where to. And you

Jon MacDonald: mentioned earlier that there's not like a Shopify for SaaS brands, and I would say that there's several tools out there that are trying to do that.

So there are tools that can help you now for the front end marketing side, right? Not necessarily for the app itself, although AI is coming a long way. And maybe that's a whole nother show about how you can, as a single person, tell AI what you want and have it generate the entire app for you now. The code may or may not be usable, but it's there, right?

It's the one thing to debate, but I think, creating that well designed SaaS website does require a strategic approach. And that's the thing [00:04:00] that I want to break down and talk about of these fundamentals, because it's important to focus on these several key fundamentals. There's not just one, there's actually 11 that we'll talk about quickly today.

If you're listening to this, 11 sounds like a lot. I promise you we'll move through them pretty quickly, but they're all important and things that we've seen come up time and time again. And these all enhance that user engagement and customer satisfaction. What we're aiming to do with these fundamentals is to help you to create a SaaS website that not only attracts and engages users, but also will convert them into customers.

Ryan Garrow: I like it. Okay. Look, let's dive in then. I want to start getting through this list. Yeah, sure. I'm going to learn some cool things here. Okay. So step one where do you start in this journey? Like I'm based on your car conversations, I guess I could hypothesize, but

Jon MacDonald: yeah, the first one is starting by understanding your user.

So you begin by identifying your target audiences, needs, behaviors, and pain points. These are all things that would be key to good product design [00:05:00] anyways. If you have a great product design team, getting them involved in the marketing side can be helpful here. But this understanding also guides the design and the content strategy of your site and really helps you to ensure that your website serves your users well.

Ryan Garrow: What happens if you're not necessarily sure about who your user is going to be? Do you have to have multiple instances you test at the same time for that or do you have to pick one and go?

Jon MacDonald: Normally, if you have product market fit, But you should have a good understanding of who your consumer is going to be.

Where in ecomm, that could be much wider. In SaaS, you typically have somebody who's approaching with a very specific problem that you're solving for them. So you're able to talk to that problem. That's where I think, it varies from e com, but also it is something that is actually helpful because that's really going to be able to guide talking to consumers because you'll be able to find the right people.

And guide actually writing [00:06:00] content for them, where you're going to be able to address that specific pain point at each step.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay, that is much simpler, actually, because you go into e com thinking you know where you're going to be, and then all of a sudden you're like, Oh, we, these people found us and liked us even more.

Jon MacDonald: Honestly, that may happen SaaS, and it does quite often. You think about Slack is a great example of this. Slack did not start out as a company that made a chat, right? SaaS, I believe that Slack was a gaming company at one point, and they had built this tool to have internal conversations.

And then that became the thing that everybody wanted and was like, this, we have something here. This is pretty cool. We should sell this. And so that's how they ended up down the line. There are now a billion dollar companies sold to Salesforce.

Ryan Garrow: Taking lots of my money every month. Okay. So we know who our user is.

And you mentioned the content, so I guess we're informing our content creation on the site to make it, to put it there, right? But is there more about the content we need?

Jon MacDonald: [00:07:00] Yeah. So the second thing is keeping that content compelling. Because it's very easy if you feel like you know the audience to not make it compelling.

Make it as engaging as it could be. You really want to make sure your content is engaging. And it, that really, I keep saying that word because it's crucial. It is crucial for capturing and retaining interest, right? You really want somebody to be reading down the page and say, yes, that's me. Yes. I have that problem.

Yes. Great. This sounds like the solution for me. And as they continue down that journey, so using clear, concise, and persuasive language here, that's going to speak directly to that audience's needs and highlight the benefits of how you solve that for them. So you can do things like using imagery. People love actual product shots, not just illustrations, right?

They love videos. Anytime you do a video walkthrough or click snippets of things being used, it really helps visitors to learn. about the product.

Ryan Garrow: Don't just give me a marketing video on the marketing page. I think [00:08:00] that's where people will often confuse Oh, I've used your video that we used to run an ad one time.

We should put that on there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. No, you definitely, it goes back to the same thing as ecommerce. I say all the time that marketing's won once somebody's gotten to your site. Time to actually help them solve their pain or need.

Ryan Garrow: And number three is use directional guidance to help users find what they need.

Thanks again. And directing them down the page further or to contact forms?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Directional guidance is this kind of umbrella term that really encompasses anything that puts the user on a path to help them find what they want. That can be navigation, calls to action, strategic use of white space, right?

Nothing at all could be helpful. I think, you start, working in that direction. on how you're going to guide people along that journey and help them find the necessary information and tools that's important for them. It's a very kind of umbrella term, but it really is something that needs to be considered.

Where are you telling these people to go next? Where are you influencing [00:09:00] their journey on your site?

Ryan Garrow: That helps quite a bit there. Your next point might be one of my most frustrating in the business B2B world. As I search for apps and things that help my business, but it's a seamless customer experience.

The website on the desktop complements what I'm seeing on the, on my mobile device. Cause I often am jumping devices throughout days, weeks, even, and not everybody does this very

Jon MacDonald: well. No, but I think, the key here is to have a smooth user experience that optimizes the website's performance.

You can make it responsive, but. Ensuring usability across all devices, as you mentioned, you really just need to fix anything that's broken or introduces friction into that experience and consider each step what devices they might be on all the way from that initial conversion and beyond. How many times have you have fired up an asset, a SaaS app and tried to use it on your iPhone in a mobile browser, and it just doesn't even work, right?

You're just like, Oh, what am I doing here? I can't, [00:10:00] it's way too big, and it's not responsive. There are tools that are just meant to be used on desktop, and I understand that, but not delivering a seamless user experience across all devices is a huge issue for a lot of SaaS brands, and you really want to make sure that's touched on your marketing site.

You're setting the tone for the rest of what it's going to be like. And if your marketing site doesn't work across different platforms, then people sure aren't going to think that your app is either.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there was even just, I think, I forget which one it was. It was a competitor to DocuSign. But I had to execute something on a mobile device, and it was the worst.

I actually stopped and had to wait till later in the day to get back to my computer because it was like, I just, I couldn't get the fields to work. It was embarrassingly bad. I'm sorry to hear that. I can't blast them, but I hope it wasn't Panda Doc. DocuSign does a great job at that. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: DocuSign does a great one.

That's one of the benefits of pretty much owning the realtor and real estate, because those folks are setting those things up on [00:11:00] the go all the time. If you've ever had to sign a real estate contract, 99 percent chance it came from DocuSign. There's a lot of them out there now, and they're all competing on very similar functionality.

So if you don't have a seamless journey, you might as well just stop.

Ryan Garrow: If that ever happened again, I'd be like no, I'll send you a docu sign. Let's do it this way.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, exactly. Download the document, resend it to them.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. All right. Number five is design with product verbs in mind. This is not something I would have thought of.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, we actually have a whole article about product verbs up on the good. com. Just go search verbs or whatever you feel comfortable with on the good. But the reality here is that you really want to focus on action oriented language that emphasizes the core functionalities of your product. Okay. So that's why it's called verbs, product verbs, because you're really trying to convey actions that users can take, such as create, manage, track, analyze, right?

These are all things that make the [00:12:00] benefits of the product clear to the end users.

Ryan Garrow: And I would imagine this is not one where you're going to be like, Oh, let's think of some cool synonyms to maybe sound different. This is just keep it simple, stupid almost. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: You don't want to get cute with this by any means.

But you definitely want to communicate in a manner that is going to help people understand what it's like. You hear this all the time about resumes. If you've ever read a resume filled with these type of verbs, it feels like that person's way more qualified, right? They're like, I curated, I influenced, I managed, I did these things, right?

Where if you just say I was part of a team. That doesn't sound as good. If you say, I led the team, or I did, had some action with the team. I was an integral part of the team. You really want to influence with the verbs. And it's the same thing here. You're trying to sell your product through.

You really want people to understand how it's going to benefit them.

Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. Your [00:13:00] hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague.

Thank you.

Ryan Garrow: Oh man, this one is probably, I mentioned the non seamless experience. But being clear about pricing and plans, Oh man, maybe I'm young enough. I don't like it. Maybe I'm too old. I just don't like, I don't know. There's something in there that I do not want to talk to sales. What does it cost? Okay, great.

Does it make sense? Let me make that determination, but don't force me to talk to somebody before you tell me how much things cost.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan is a hundred percent of get off my lawn guy.

Transparency [00:14:00] and pricing and subscription plans builds trust, okay? So that's what you're talking about. Like you say, Hey, I want to know what I'm getting into, right? You want to aid that decision making process. And that is what's key here, clearly presenting all the options available. Including the features and costs and then helping consumers choose the plan that best fits them.

All of that can be done without a salesperson. And in fact, so many SaaS brands try to integrate salespeople, they think that's the route they need to go. When in reality, they're probably any gains they have by. inserting a person who's really just there to convince often, unfortunately, they lose by people who just give up and go to a competitor who makes it real easy in that research phase to understand what they're getting into.

Ryan Garrow: I feel like if you need a sales people or sales person to get it across, your product probably isn't developed well enough. So that's just the way my perception is. When I'm looking at it, if you can't tell me how much it costs, you have to get somebody [00:15:00] on the phone to sell me because it's not good enough on its own.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And that's how I

Jon MacDonald: personally approach it. There are benefits from the SaaS perspective, right? Of saying, Hey, I'm going to have a salesperson on my team and really what they're doing is not there to sell and convince. They're there to understand what are the common questions? What are the key pain points?

Why are people calling? What did they think our app does? When I give them a demo, where do they go? Oh, I like that. Or, Ooh, that's a problem. Or I, does it also do X, Y, and Z? That's very similar to what customer service role plays at Ecom. And I say consistently. Get customer service involved and optimizing your e com website.

It's the same thing here. If you have salespeople, they should be contributing content back to the site. And ideally, as a SaaS brand, a salesperson gets on the call, and they should just be confirming. If you've done the right job, that person should just be saying, yeah, so you need this customization.

We can work out a [00:16:00] custom plan for you. Or saying, yeah, our feature does that you do you want a demo? Let me give you the demo answering questions you have. That's great. But they shouldn't be there to do cold calls and outbound calls and then say, I got to convince you of X, Y, and Z. They should be more of a consultative sale at that point.

Ryan Garrow: Love it. Okay. I knew this one was coming because it's Jon MacDonald, but we're going to test and validate with our audiences.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Are you surprised this is more than halfway down the list? I would say regularly test your website with real users. I, we could probably almost skip this because it's a broken record with me.

A/B testing, user surveys, analytics, validate your design choices to ensure they're meeting that user expectations and produce a user friendly design before you do anything. And I'll just say here, I understand if you need an agency to help you with this. Might we might know somebody

Ryan Garrow: a little hint there.

Jon. There you go. It's not the first thing [00:17:00] you do though it's are these kind of in order of a process you would have somebody go through like this is Generally best after you've been already clear about your pricing and plans and before we get to the next step

Jon MacDonald: I would say You know, you can pick and choose from this list.

They're not in any specific order, but I do think that they are in the order of, I would say, to me, anyways, importance. You're going to start with one and work your way down to the bottom of the list because they start building off of each other, right? You can't really test and validate until you have some idea of who your audience is, right?

So you have to have that understanding first,

Ryan Garrow: right? Once you have some traffic, you're testing and validating. Getting some feedback and then you're going to use that feedback, I assume. And you're going to iterate on your website design and feed that loop back almost. So like the seven and eight points probably are almost circular constantly.

If you're really trying to grow your SaaS product.

Jon MacDonald: And that's really why they're lower on this list because they're going to continually. cycle through making sure [00:18:00] that you're validating and testing, but then you're iterating on your website design. So you're putting that test and validation back into your site and, every website, including SaaS, should evolve based on user feedback.

There's always technological advancements, there's changing market trends. The reality here is, Just continually update and refine, right? Same thing you might do with ecommerce, but I think you have a lot more leeway with SaaS to do this because you're not stuck to having to find a template that works across hundreds of SKUs.

You're really trying to hammer home one key solving point that you have. That's really something that's going to enhance that user experience and stay ahead of the competitors.

Ryan Garrow: Now, one thing this doesn't mention in your notes is landing squeeze pages on your website, you should have lots of them.

Jon MacDonald: It's

Ryan Garrow: It's not here.

Yeah, it's not here.

Jon MacDonald: And I think that's a great point. Almost what's not on these lists as much as what is, right? I think that having a hundred [00:19:00] different landing pages is a sign that you still don't have great product market fit. Now, if you have a handful that are around specific pain points and you know you can solve a couple of pain points or maybe there's a couple of industries like we talked about DocuSign and Realtors or maybe DocuSign and legal like lawyer teams or, there's a whole bunch of different ways you could use a tool like that at that point, you can have a landing page for each of those that talks to the specific page.

angle on that same pain point for them, right? You got to get documents signed in an efficient manner. What does that look like for them? It's different. I guarantee you a lawyer, not guarantee, but I will say high likelihood your legal team is not sending a docu sign from their phone. Just probably not.

But a realtor on the road, ready to get that offer in a hundred percent, probably doing that. They would approach that a little differently.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I like that. Okay, that leads right into your ninth point, ensuring mobile optimization.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So with an increasing number of users accessing websites on [00:20:00] mobile, you need to make sure it's optimized for mobile.

I almost feel like I shouldn't have to say this one, but unfortunately we do. And for as much as people have pushed it in ecommerce, SaaS is still behind on this. They really are. They often aren't using responsive design. The loading times are slower because they just expect you're on a corporate network or that, you're okay with it being a little slower.

And in a lot of cases, consumers are, so that's fine, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to optimize, especially for smaller screens, right? You want that smooth experience across all devices.

Ryan Garrow: And Google's ranking those first time from an SEO standpoint. Yeah. So if you're going to compete, you got to go to that Google site and see what Google thinks of it.

Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: That's a great idea.

Ryan Garrow: Mobile first. Not desktop. Love it. Even if that's what your users will do.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And you can understand too. There are plenty of SaaS tools that are really desktop first and I get that. I wouldn't want to be doing QuickBooks on my phone. I just wouldn't. There are some functions of QuickBooks that I would want to do, but I [00:21:00] would not want to be maintaining a P& L and running reports and doing that type of stuff on my phone.

But, it doesn't mean that there aren't functionalities that I would want on my phone. And it doesn't mean I'm not going to do research about the tool itself on the marketing website on my phone. That is something that is very likely. Regardless of whether or not your app is Desktop first or mobile first, you should be making sure your website is mobile first.

Ryan Garrow: Your next point, 10, I would say is probably an area that SaaS is ahead of a lot of the ecomm potentially, but it's focusing on accessibility and those with certain abilities or lack of ability to read and engage with your site. ecommerce has struggled at scale for sure to label their images and.

Jon MacDonald: Which is interesting to me. I often wonder why ecomm struggles with this as much as they do. And I think that you're seeing over the past five or six years, a lot of those lawsuits from lawyers who do nothing but chase down these e com sites. [00:22:00] And, I think that's because they've already, those same lawyers have already run their way through every SaaS site.

And so they made their way to ecomm next. Because SaaS has all the money in the world to, to pay them off, right? And settle. But ecomm typically doesn't. So they knew the margins were thin there. They're not gonna, go after where the margins are thin. It's just not as big of a return. I think they've worked through most of SaaS now.

SaaS is really good about accessibility. But I think, number 10 on this list is focus on accessibility. You have to design your website to be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. It's just, you need to do it. You're leaving out. A large segment of the population. If you're not doing that, all texts for images you mentioned, that's great.

Keyboard navigation is huge color contrast. If you even go to HubSpot's blog, now HubSpot's blog. I'll let you do a high contrast mode and they have a on every single page, they have a toggle. It's like high [00:23:00] contrast or not. It really is something that you can tell if HubSpot's doing it. It has really worked its way into SaaS.

If you're not focusing on this and haven't came this far, you're behind

Ryan Garrow: for sure. So focus on that accessibility. And then final point, number 11 is leveraging social proof, which in e comm comes naturally you gotta have that, but

Jon MacDonald: Exactly. It does come naturally, and you see there's so many tools out there asking for reviews.

There's really only one that I ever hear about from B2B, and that's G2. It's the only one that ever emails me and says, Hey, leave a review for this product. And you're just like, Okay, I don't know. But here's the reality is that if you incorporate customer testimonials, case studies, even reviews build credibility and trust.

You're going to be ahead of the game. You can't forget to do that. And I promise you, just putting a star rating, et cetera, is not going to get the job done. Same thing that you have on e com. You really need to make sure that you are showcasing world [00:24:00] success stories here. And you really want to make sure positive feedback is from existing users.

You'll see a lot that will have influencers in SaaS world. That's happening more and more now, and not just in e com.

Ryan Garrow: There's more money. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: yeah.

Ryan Garrow: You can pay those influencers more.

Jon MacDonald: This is where the whole cottage industry now of LinkedIn influencers, right? They're all going on there and getting paid quite a bit by B2B companies to, to influence around their products.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. No, I agree. I think it's definitely valuable there. We've gotten through 11 and the punchline feels that designing a SaaS website is about more than just making it look pretty. Yeah. And have high contrasting covers.

Jon MacDonald: A hundred percent, right? How did you know that was coming? Because the reality is it's very similar to what I've talked about with e comm and I think the play here is a lot more similar than not.

The fundamentals don't change. Your visual appeal of your website, it's important, but it's important to remember that websites are made to be used, and that goes for e com or [00:25:00] SaaS. SaaS website design is about creating a user experience that clicks with your target audience. See what I did there.

But there's this wireframe in design should be validated with real feedback before you launch anything and test it with your ideal audience before you start building. Why waste the money? Your development team has better things to do inside the app. I promise you that's where they want to focus.

And if you validate everything, you say, Hey this has already been proven out. We've already refined and iterated. Now I just need you to build this version. I promise you the relationship with your development team. Between marketing and development is going to be that much better and I hear this all the time from product design and product development folks.

If you are a product manager design development, you often have a rift between you and internal implementation teams, the technical teams that are actually building something because They are getting pulled in so many different directions and marketing is [00:26:00] unfortunately not usually a priority for them.

They're solving bugs, looking to retain customers, add new functionality. So you really need to be able to speak to them appropriately.

Ryan Garrow: I love it. That was helpful for sure. I think we're all going to be doing a lot more SaaS marketing and growing of those brands in the near future. I'm excited for it.

Jon MacDonald: It is where it's headed for sure, especially as I mentioned earlier with AI being able to build SaaS apps. You're going to see a lot of these. Small creator sites popping up the time and again, so

Ryan Garrow: excited. Thanks, Jon. I appreciate the insights.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, thanks for hanging with me today through my head cold.

Appreciate it.

Ryan Garrow: Anytime.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at drive and convert com.