Christian Klepp, Apryl Syed

Apryl Syed  00:00

Brand for instance, doesn’t work itself into any metric, but it makes every metric better across the board. Sometimes we’re chasing these metrics and like the attribution of where a particular deal came from, or how did they find out about us, and we’re not thinking about all of the things that are outside in the flywheel that are, you know, causing that person to, yes, eventually convert. But were there seven or eight other things that kind of they interacted with.

Christian Klepp  00:26

In the world of B2B SaaS speed is the name of the game. Get to market, quickly collect feedback, quickly iterate quickly and close deals quickly. But what happens if your sales and marketing teams get stuck with underperforming funnels that don’t generate the results you need? How can teams turn these funnels into growth machines without massive spend or long timelines? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today, I’ll be talking with Apryl Syed, who will be answering this question. She’s the CEO of ApertureCodex who gives founders the strategy and the psychology needed to jump into fast revenue gains. Let’s dive in. Okay, and away we go. Apryl Syed, welcome to the show.

Apryl Syed  01:12

Thank you so much, Christian. I’m so excited to be here.

Christian Klepp  01:15

Glad to have you on the show. I think we had such a great pre interview conversation. I kept telling myself I should have hit record, and I talked to you the first time, right? But, you know, two times is a charm or three times. But anyways, this is the second time we’re talking. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation Apryl, because we’re going to touch on a topic today that I think is not just relevant to sales teams. It’s really important to marketing teams as well. So I’m going to keep the audience in suspense just a little while longer while I set up this first question. Right? So you’re on a mission to help B2B SaaS teams turn underperforming funnels into growth machines without massive spend or lengthy timelines, and for people that didn’t hear that the first time, I think everybody wants something like that, right, quick results without spending massively, right? So for this conversation, I’d like to focus on the following topic and just unpack it from there, right? So how can SaaS teams leverage a quick win revenue approach for better and more predictable growth. And I mean, come on Apryl, who the heck doesn’t want that, right? Who doesn’t want predictable growth, right? So I want to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So first one is, where do you see many SaaS teams struggle with revenue growth? And the second question is, what are some of the key causes of this?

Apryl Syed  02:44

It’s really great, by the way. As a side note, I got turned down for a podcast this week because they said I talked too much about quick wins, and they felt that it conflicted with their policy. I won’t mention the name, they’re an agency out there, but they were all about big spend, and they felt that I conflicted with that. And this exactly ties in. This is probably why the subject that I talk about so.

Christian Klepp  03:13

Well, I’m sorry for them.

Apryl Syed  03:15

Yeah, that’s okay. That’s okay. We don’t, we don’t match. You know, I’m not for everyone. Well, I think that, like SaaS teams don’t realize that they’ve got data. And within their data really, really lies some of the tweaks, opportunities and things like that that can make them extra revenue that they might not be looking at today. And I think, you know, perhaps it’s in tweaking their sales process. Maybe they don’t have a sales process misalignment between sales and marketing. Marketing is talking about one thing, sales is selling another thing, or could be marketing is marketing to one type of industry and user, and sales is saying that’s not the right user. It’s something completely different, that misalignment in itself causes revenue conflict, revenue opportunities. And you know, sometimes it’s spending on expensive tools before you’ve actually broken down some of those points in the funnel. Or could be tools that you’re getting a lot of data from, or they’re not doing anything with the data on a regular basis. So I think, you know, those are where I see some of those, like, struggle with revenue because of some of those issues and and then I think your second question was kind of like, well, how to, how do they kind of avoid some of those scenarios? Right?

Christian Klepp  04:40

It was more about the the key causes, but you but, but you did talk about that already, right?

Apryl Syed  04:44

So, right, right? That definitely is there. Well, I think, you know, it’s also could be, you know, where they’re chasing certain metrics and focused in, and we had this conversation earlier. It’s like brand, for instance, doesn’t work at. Yourself into any metric, but it makes every metric better across the board. So sometimes we’re chasing these metrics and like the attribution of where a particular deal came from, or how did they find out about us, and we’re not thinking about all of the things that are outside in the flywheel that are, you know, causing that person to, yes, eventually convert. But were there seven or eight other things that kind of they interacted with before they got to that point? And we had to get them ready? So, you know, can definitely be about just chasing those metrics too much, which means you avoid doing things that don’t give you that instant metric. And I think that is a big challenge and pitfall that that teams can can certainly fall into. I think also the the challenge of treating marketing as a cost center and not letting them be in charge of all of those metrics down to the sale that happen. And that might sound weird to some folks, but I’ve certainly been in enough teams and enough experiences across you know my background that I’ve seen that sometimes you can make a change in marketing. It produces a lot of leads, but those leads aren’t qualifying and they’re not turning into revenue, and yet, if the metric is producing leads, well then marketing can walk away the end of the day and meet their metrics and jobs, but if the metric is revenue, then they’ve got to go all the way to that end cycle and see that it’s a qualified opportunity. That, of course, goes back to my original point that if sales and marketing aren’t in lock sync with each other, and they don’t have a good relationship and dynamic, then it ends up in finger pointing when things aren’t going wrong, instead of both teams coming together, being on the same page and figuring out what’s going to work. And that’s that’s really the key.

Christian Klepp  07:03

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think you might have brought it up, and maybe I didn’t catch it, and if not, I apologize. But like, one of the things that I didn’t notice, too, is, like, this misalignment of who, who the who the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is, like the assumptions that both sides have and then somehow they just cannot meet in the middle.

Apryl Syed  07:24

Well, I kind of brought it up just slight when I said that marketing might be marketing to one person, and sales is selling to another, but if we just want to double click, you know, on on that, that agreement around the ICP, the reason why it’s so important, and I think it’s hard for some SaaS companies, because there’s, there could be a lot of ICPs. And I kind of have this philosophy that with an ICP, people usually maybe do these personas, as I call them, one time, maybe at a, you know, a planning session or whatever, where they’re kicking off, you know, and kind of like planning who those are, and then they leave them. They sit in a deck somewhere. They’re never looked at again. They’re never revised. I like a more fluid method with personas. I like personas to kind of be active, living and breathing in something that’s reviewed on a quarterly basis, I think is a better cadence. And the reason being is, like, we want to see how many deals we’ve closed in that particular area, how many so we should be looking at the metrics right by persona. We should also look at the messaging by persona to see how that’s working. And we should, you know, look at our team and how that flow has gone through into the sales process by persona. And kind of looking at this lens, we may figure out that one persona is working really, really well, or two or three might be working really well. And maybe there’s two or three that aren’t working really well. We might want to flush those out or put them in, what I would say is like a vault or a holding pattern. They might come back later if something’s happened, and we might want to add different ones. And the reason why quarterly is important is because, if you are selling business to business, for instance, in that business environment, there are different things that might be happening in the world, you know, geographically, politically, that might be impacting a certain persona. And it’s important to also look at that lens on a quarterly basis and say, Okay, what’s the mindset of this particular persona? What are they dealing with? What are some of their issues? What are their pressures? What is their emotional state, and then how do we want to message into that emotional state during this time? How do we want to change and revise our messaging for what’s going on in their world right now, this quarter, right you can’t keep you can’t keep messaging the same and messaging constant needs to be looked at. I would say, on a regular basis, one to check and make sure it’s working. If it’s working, keep it working at some time. At some point, though, it might stop working, and it’s important to catch that as you see those numbers trailing off, as you see that change, and not wait until too long has passed and just double down on the same persona for the sake of really work, working with it, because it was the original plan.

Christian Klepp  10:27

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely these, um, these personas are, and I believe that too, they it’s not something that that’s written in stone, and then you, you to use that archaic expression, just keep it on the shelf, and then it collects dust, right?

Apryl Syed  10:40

Yeah

Christian Klepp  10:41

It’s something that should be monitored, as you said, because certain certain companies are working in industries where, for example, government regulation impacts them.

Apryl Syed  10:51

Yes.

Christian Klepp  10:52

If government regulation changes, then that perhaps also influences the way they make decisions, or decide to work with external vendors and partners and so forth, right?

Apryl Syed  11:05

Absolutely.

Christian Klepp  11:07

You brought you brought up a few already in the past couple of minutes. I’m just, I just want to go back to pitfall. So one of them, I think, was chasing this, chasing metrics. Right? This, this habit of constantly chasing metrics. What are some of these other pitfalls that you’d say marketing teams should avoid them. What should they be doing instead?

Apryl Syed  11:24

Well, I think, you know, another pitfall that I’ve seen is kind of launching a big rebrand and expecting, you know, or that could also be a plot, a platform overhaul, software overhaul, and expecting that that’s going to move the needle faster when you could test that type of messaging out in really small ways before you go and do that big rebrand. And I’m a big fan of those, like small tests, verify and then go big. Like I’m not I’m not saying don’t ever go big. What I’m saying is like, test and measure before you go into a big cut, a big, fresh rebrand, because it’s expensive, and you want those big, expensive expenditures to be a little bit more of a sure thing than a risky thing. So de risk the big spends, riskier moves. Do small, incremental tests and say, how could we test this out on a small scale. How could we test or rebrand out? How could we test a platform change out before we do that in a small way? So I think that’s another one. I talked about a cost center. Treating marketing as a cost center is another one. So I think those are, like my big, my big three, I would say, in terms of pitfalls.

Christian Klepp  12:41

Yeah, fantastic, fantastic. You, you hit on something there with your with your third point. And I want to go to that, because that’s a topic that, um, that as a marketer, personally, it riles me up a little bit, but, like, you know, but, but we have to look at this as professionals too, and say, okay, you know what? In the world of B2B, that type of pushback is almost expected, right? Because I’m not sure what your experience has been. But I also work with a lot of companies that have done either little or no marketing before, so it’s, it’s to a certain extent, it’s like Terra Australis incognita. It’s uncharted territory. They are not sure what to expect. So it’s only, it’s only normal that they, that they view it with some kind of, I wouldn’t go so far as to say, suspicion, but yeah. Like, how do you know it’s gonna work, right? So over to you. Like, what’s your experience been? How do you deal with companies that view marketing with that kind of suspicion or or have these doubts, like, Is this even going to work for us? Right? How do you deal with that?

Apryl Syed  13:53

Well, I mean, from my perspective, I think again, I go back to the small tests, small wins in those beginning, like, let’s get our sea legs before we go and launch some big strategy. And I think that’s, you know, a big divide between, you know, maybe myself and yourself and some other you know, marketing agencies and firms out there is, I would rather get small, incremental wins to start. I’m not against big strategies and big spends. I think they’re both needed, but when you’re kind of coming into a team that’s either had little to no success with marketing, because maybe they’ve had some bad experiences with agencies that haven’t delivered, or they’ve tried ads, or they’ve tried this thing and they kind of have that bad taste in their mouth, right? Or they just have not done anything at all, and perhaps they’ve, they’ve grown despite that. So they’re kind of like, Hey, I’ve seen success without doing this. So why? Why do I need this? So I think an educational approach is important, kind of giving the here’s the industry benchmarks, here’s what we should. See, here’s how we are going to test. Here’s a recommended way that we do small, incremental tests. And then I also think a really, really important piece is, if it’s a company that’s been around long enough is to dive into that data I have. I have a customer that I would say sits in this category. They’ve grown tremendously. They’ve had a very successful business, and they’ve never marketed before. And if I were to come in there with some big rebrand strategy, big moves, look at me like you’re crazy. We don’t need that. I mean, in all honesty, what are they looking for? They’re looking for incremental revenue gains. So how am I going to produce incremental revenue gains? I’m going to look at their data and see where there’s holes in gaps today, where, yes, marketing, but marketing is a very, very broad term. Marketing can be brands, marketing could be emails, marketing can be social media. Marketing can be customer advocacy, customer emails churn, you know, upgrading customers into other models. So when I say I look at data, I look at what their customers are doing, and what I get from that is, where is my ideal customer, because it’s going to show me in their base. So who might I want to go after and experiment with? First, those are going to be my biggest areas for opportunity of wins, where, with their existing customer base, can I sell something more or different for them to increase revenue in that way? I think that’s another big and then I look at where there may be failures across the process in their data. If it’s a SaaS company, let’s look at their free the trial, trial, you know, to paid, paid to churn, and look at those numbers and say, are they hitting industry standard for their industry? Can I improve any of these metrics? Let me go look at all of the various different things that are going to change these metrics. Where can I start to experiment to get incremental change? That’s how you give success to a team. And they start feeling like, Okay, we should invest more here. We should do more here, because it’s working. Now, let’s double down. Let’s triple down. Let’s do more, then you can go after those bigger strategies.

Christian Klepp  17:26

Yep, yep, no, absolutely, absolutely, no. I’m glad, I’m glad you brought those up, because that’s a great segue into the next question, which I think you’re all too familiar with, right? So I think when we first talked, right in our previous conversation you were talking, you mentioned something called a five point conversion diagnostic, which uncovers, I think you refer to them as conversion killers, right? You can cover these conversion killers without expensive tools or massive product like changes or revamps, right? So if you could please walk us through this five point approach and how teams can leverage that.

Apryl Syed  18:05

Now this is particularly for SaaS, that trial to onboarding experience and the time that I the thing that I look for the most in there is time to value. How long does it take for the customer to experience value is going to be indicative of how long their trial has to be with that onboarding experience, and are they legitimately going to get into the point of buying early, even because they can’t wait to utilize this tool or buying, of course, the moment that the trial, the trial the trial ends. That is all about time to value. The second is about messaging alignment. So does the promise that we give, if it’s a landing page, whatever that experience is that someone comes through to then get to that product, does the promise of what we’re giving them match what the experience is going to be in the software, and how long does it take again, from that time to value, for them to get to that matched experience of what we promised that will also be a predictor of so if we were, you know, on a scale from zero to 10, 10 being like matched, it perfectly, zero being not matching at all, we’d want to rate our company on that scale, and kind of see for the time to value and for the misalignment, where are we? Then I would kind of go after like behavioral triggers, and I would try to figure out what actions correlate with conversion. So I would look at everybody that’s converted, and I would say, what parts of the software did they touch right? Are they looking at, are they experiencing, which then would predict, like, if people do these five things and the solution, then we know that they’re going to convert. And you can use either, like a Pender or you know, products like that that give you some of that analysis and data. Or maybe it’s, you know, sitting in your CRM, but that would tell you and inform you about your messaging as well. Like, what should we be messaging about? These are the key things that people want out of this solution, and that’s going to inform your next piece, which is, I would look at the follow up timing, the sequencing. How frequently do we talk? I often, I’m a big superhuman fan, and I talk about superhumans onboarding experience, which I think is awesome. And of course, they get a little bit of a leg up because they are an email solution, so they see when you’re in the tool. But I have found that, like the timely messages and the trickling of features that they give you right when you’re ready to use that feature has been so well thought out. And if you have, if you have not experienced it, and you’re a SaaS product owner, Founder, CEO, I highly encourage you to go through their onboarding experience, because that, to me, is like the pinnacle, or one of the pinnacles of what you should want your users to experience, like these just great aha moments right when they’re ready to receive them as part of that trial period before conversion. That make sure that we’re just touching them at the right moments. And then the last piece that I look at is pricing and packaging friction. And here’s, this is, you know, this is something that’s changing an awful lot right now. SaaS is under pressure to maybe look at not seeds, but maybe it’s volume, but then volume is not great, because people can’t predict it, and certainly can’t budget appropriately for it. So there is all kinds of pricing friction happening right now that needs to be figured out, but understanding where people are dropping off and where in that you know, how many clicks do they need to do before they buy? What is that whole buying process like? What is the upgrading process like? Put it through the pressure test. See how many steps it is. Challenge yourself. If you can reduce the steps, make it easier. I’ll give you an example. I was a big, big user of the motion app for a really long time. I probably sold, let’s say, 10 to 20 of these to other people, because I was such a promoter and such a fan of motion, they changed something in their solution related to how many credits, and what happened is it stopped recording my meetings for me automatically, which meant didn’t go into my notes anymore. Didn’t automatically create my tasks for me. That’s a pretty big feature, and obviously I so I went to upgrade, and the upgrade didn’t allow for me to choose a monthly it only allowed me to upgrade to choose an annual.

Christian Klepp  23:06

Why?

Apryl Syed  23:07

Yeah, which did what to me as the user. I then went into the shopping mode, essentially, and I said, Now I’m going to go shop and look at, well, what other tools are out there that can do the same functionality. Because now, if I have to commit to an annual plan, so much changing in AI this year, I’m not sure if I can commit to an annual plan. It had nothing to do with the amount of dollar spent. It had everything to do with commitment. And here I was a promoter of their solution. I ended up canceling and I went with notion, because I realized that notion had added a significant number of AI features at a much lower price, which I know a lot of people complain about notion being expensive, and it isn’t as good of a user experience now that I’m using motion and yet notion. Yet, I’m still on notion, and I left motion app, which is probably better, because they put me through this experience. And I say that as an example not to and I don’t know if they fix that, but we make these decisions all the time, sitting from our lens, looking at what we want the outcome to be, and we don’t think through what that user experience is going to be, and we’re killing conversions, in some cases, by these little levers and moves that we make, and sometimes we don’t even realize that. So I really encourage, encourage founders, encourage, you know, everyone at the company go back through and look at these tiny little things that each one of them on the loan alone could be costing you revenue, costing you conversions along the pathway.

Christian Klepp  24:53

Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re working with a client that’s that’s an that’s in tech right now, and the thing that we keep. Talking about is you gotta, you know, yes, of course you’re excited if you start developing more features and what have you right? But look at this through the lens of the user, right? I mean, I can totally relate to your to your situation. I mean, even things like for example, and this is probably like oversimplifying it. But the last update that Instagram did is driving me absolutely crazy. Like, why would you update something your interface that has already been working for the users, and now? Why do you update it so and completely change where the buttons are on the layout so people have to waste time looking for worse, the send button. I mean, you know, it’s just beyond me, right?

Apryl Syed  25:45

Yeah, and it’s funny, and they actually, Instagram, for a long while, did a lot of user testing before they would roll out features, and did these limited, I didn’t see any of that necessarily. With this last rollout.

Christian Klepp  25:58

No.

Apryl Syed  25:59

Apple did a very similar, like their latest update introduced many phone changes in terms of prioritization of, you know, messaging and all that sort of stuff. And it’s like a common we’re finding commonality saying, like, Oh man, I hate this latest I don’t know how many people have said I hate this latest update, and it’s because it’s created too much friction in the process. We need enough friction, but not too much friction. And that balance, in itself, unfortunately, is like the most difficult thing to figure out. And if you’re not talking to your customers, if you’re not talking to people, you will never figure it out, because you’ll be making an assumption.

Christian Klepp  26:38

Exactly, exactly. Okay, so we talked about this at the beginning of the conversation, but you mentioned something called a quick win revenue framework. And I know from what you were telling me that that was a little bit controversial to somebody else you spoke to.

Apryl Syed  26:55

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  26:56

But you know what we are, we are all embracing in the show. You know.

Apryl Syed  27:00

Thank you.

Christian Klepp  27:00

Not not judgmental. But in fact, the focus here is to help B2B Marketers. In your case, B2B SaaS Marketers to become better and to improve. So if we’re going to focus on this quick win revenue framework, where would you identify low hanging revenue opportunities in under 30 days. So talk to us about that.

Apryl Syed  27:24

Yes, well, it sits at this crossroads between marketing and sales, right? And that’s why you’ve got to have such a tight friendship relationship with you know, your sales leaders and your customer success leaders. I think it has to be like such a great ecosystem. So first thing I would do is pull CRM data. I would look at where deals are stalling, you know, I would map the current funnel with actual numbers of where you have people. I would overlay that with like the industry and kind of like the marketing messaging that is created those those types of deals. And kind of look at that from the lens of, okay, here’s what we’re creating, and here’s what sales is able to close easily. Here’s what’s really lagging and taking a long time in the funnel. And it’s not to say that, like, longer is better than shorter, because, like, an enterprise deal takes longer to close than a SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) deal. So the answer isn’t always that the SMB deal is better, but looking at that and saying, Is there anything here that is that is giving me an indicator of something I can improve on? Can improve on. So that would be, you know, number one, go through that audit, take a look at the data, see what you’ve been producing from a marketing standpoint so far, and then say, is there anything that we should be testing to do differently better? You know, what are your hypotheses that you want to go out and you want to prove with some AB testing, two look at conversion killers, right? That’s either messaging, follow up, timing or onboarding friction, some sort of friction in the process. Friction could be a form fill too it could be, you know, too heavy, too long of landing page, I would look at every single detail and way that people are coming in through the funnel and say, are we doing anything to kill conversion and sometimes, and I’ve experienced this with one brand that I’m working with, and we have an agency that’s also in there that’s doing some ad performance, and they’re getting industry well above industry standard rates. And I asked the agency, because I’m sitting in kind of like my fractional executive role, and I said, Tell me out of your entire client, raw. Stair. Where does this client sit? And they said, Oh, at the top, best performing client we have, you know what that signaled to me? They’re comfortable. They’re getting great results. They’re not trying to improve anything. They’re just trying to hold the fort down and just keep getting these great results because they think that’s a place of safety.

Christian Klepp  30:23

Stop rocking the boat Apryl.

Apryl Syed  30:26

I know, I know, but I look at that and say, You’re not trying hard enough. You’re not examining right and going through the funnel and looking for all the tweaks and looking for.

Christian Klepp  30:36

What can it improve?

Apryl Syed  30:37

Can it be improved? You’re not trying to do any of that. And in fact, I’m adding that to you. I’m adding those things. I’m asking for those things, just because I come from that space and saying, like, Hey, we should be pushing here. We should be pushing here. We should be they don’t want to push. And they’re slow, slow, slow to react. And what’s going to happen is it’s going to earn them a change out in agency, right? Because they’re not pushing. Now, unfortunately, what I think is, if that was happening, obviously was happening before I was involved this customer, they thought they’re getting, they’re getting, like, six to one on their spend. That’s fantastic. We should be happy, right? And I’m like, no, no, no, I’ve pushed, I have pushed that envelope before. I’ve seen, you know, 14% conversion on landing pages. I’ve seen 49% conversion on landing pages. When you get it really right, you should always be pushing and pushing and pushing that envelope. So really diagnose and look, are there friction killers in those processes, and where can you be improved? And it is not like, I’m getting results good enough, so let me stop. It’s not stop because that might be one of your levers to really, really get quick wins, because you could tweak something and then even tip the scale further. And who doesn’t want a big win like that? The other thing is, like, I think there’s I look at I look at email sequences and messaging. I look at every single message that we’re sending a customer through the process, through their buying journey. You know, for one client, I basically call it a customer journey map, which a lot of people don’t do anymore, but my journey map is from the moment that they hear about you, all the way through buying, how do we touch them? What do we touch? And then from buying through that sales cycle, what is that like? And the reason why I map that out is because when you do and you put the different sections, you can kind of say, well, this is the process today. What would we like that process to be? And you will find in every single one of these customer journey maps that I’ve done, five to 10 areas where you’re like, instantly know, you instantly know the experience you could be providing better. I did this for one client, and we uncovered, like, the review process for their terms and conditions. On average took like, 10 days with an average back and forth between their lawyers and our lawyers, maybe 15 times that is that a desired customer experience? No, that’s a friction creator, which could be a deal killer, could be a deal staller. So what does that desired experience look like? What should we aim to get to? How are we going to do that? What should we test first? That’s just an example of one that might be in there. So look at everything. Then it becomes, you know, build exactly what you think you’re going to test, go and launch and measure those tests. And you don’t need this to be six months, right? Depending on how much data you’re getting through, it might only take you two weeks of data. It might take you a week of data on these experiments and levers that you’re going through so figure out how long you need to run the experiment for. Run that experiment, measure those changes, and then either permanently implement the change or make changes right and refresh and do another test.

Christian Klepp  34:24

Wow, that was quite the list. And I’m sure you’ve, you’ve had, like, as you, as you’ve mentioned, you’ve had pushback for, you know, some of this, for this process, because it’s it. It makes teams uncomfortable, right? But I think the point is, you know, everybody says, right, change is uncomfortable. Improvement is uncomfortable. Uncovering ways to make things better should make you feel uncomfortable, right?

Apryl Syed  34:53

So true, so true. And I always, I always think like, if you’re uncomfortable and you’re feeling like. A maybe, I don’t know all the answers here. It’s a really good place to be, and that’s where real growth happens. That’s where real change happens.

Christian Klepp  35:06

Yeah. So I did have one follow up question for you, Apryl, like, you know, based on this framework that you’ve just proposed, like, How often would you recommend? And I know it depends, but how often would you recommend teams to continuously monitor some of these, some of these attributes and these factors that you’ve that you’ve brought up in the past couple of minutes.

Apryl Syed  35:27

Gosh, I think it is very dependent on the data that’s coming through. If you were experiencing problem in an area, deep dive in there and uncover it. Kind of do that audit and analysis and create some tests that you could run to improve it. But as a measure, the customer journey map, for example, for existence, I think that’s a living, breathing document. I think we should look at it quarterly. We should update it with the experiments and the learnings and the new things that we’ve implemented permanently so that we can track how that experience is going and make sure that it’s our desired experience that we’re putting out there. Because I think a lot of times stuff just happens and it’s not our desired experience, but we kind of think like, oh, well, this is the process, the way it has to be, or, you know, so and so said that it has to be three days. So it’s three days, and it’s like giving you a moment to step back and be like, Why could we do it different? Could we do it better? Could we do it in two days? I don’t know. Could we do it in one and, you know, so I think as often as that customer journey, when updates happen, put those updates in their document. It, look at it, say, like, what’s next on the list should always be improving. When you get to the point where you don’t have any more insights in there, and you think it’s oiled up in the best that you could possibly do it, bring some customers in, bring some customers in to look at it and get their opinion. Ask them about it. It’s a great point to now be in survey mode and ask some questions about where you might have conflicts internally, or where you just aren’t sure where to go. So I think that when it comes to like email sequences, and remind you know like those provide provides, messaging, emails, one thing landing pages, like, I think your landing page just should be in a constant AB turnaround. Every time you have five to 10,000 people hitting a landing page, you should be trying to tweak that message to see if you can make it better. Message, layout, colors, all of the kind of industry standards there, you should be constantly trying to tweak that. If you’re not using landing pages and you’re sending stuff to a page, you should try landing pages so it’s just the constant improvement of those email sequences kind of, kind of, I feel, I feel they should be similar. I feel like you’ve got to examine those on a pretty regular basis, maybe it’s monthly, and kind of determine which messages are you going to trade out. I’m doing a pretty big switch out right now for, you know, an SMB app that’s, you know, selling to other businesses. So it’s a B2B, SaaS company, and we are revising all of their messaging, going through every single one, but trying to create, like a very purposeful journey now where there hasn’t been necessarily one before. And what I just said to one of the leaders yesterday is like, this is version one of what will be probably 10 before we’re done with this iteration. Because every single time we see the data and see how people are moving through the flow, we’re going to we’re going to see that those things that we didn’t consider, there’s going to be broken pieces. Like, don’t be in a position of thinking that any of your marketing is final ever. That’s a good position to be in. It’s never final. I think about this for websites as well. Like people like, oh, we go through our big website refresh, we get the website done, and then now we don’t have to touch the website. Oh, you should be, like, touching the website all the time. Experiment with the messaging on the homepage. Like to think that you got the messaging right the first time. I wish, I wish, and I’ve been in this industry for more than 25 years, I wish, and I’m considered, considering, considered a messaging, you know, wizard. Sometimes, it sometimes takes five or six tries before you get that like, nailed one, and that’s because persona, you know, it’s like how the person is feeling. It’s the emotional draw, and it’s the features, the problem of the pain and all of that coming into one like, I wish, I wish there was an AI tool that could get that right. But it’s not, they’re not.

Christian Klepp  40:00

I haven’t found one yet.

Apryl Syed  40:01

Yeah. You know, it’s only through really, really overworking that message and seeing the data come in that you kind of like, finally get to maybe a place that’s good, and then guess what? Your persona changes or something happens to so. So don’t ever think of it as, oh, to set it and forget it, it. It should be like it. And there’s also, like, Don’t tweak it too fast that you don’t have enough data coming through. Like, that’s also, I can, I can see that being a message, but have enough data, review that data on a regular basis, make some changes, test it. It’s like little incremental tests and learn. So that’s going to be kind of like it’s either in that category, which is like, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn constantly tweaking, or a quarterly or an annual kind of review.

Christian Klepp  40:54

Fantastic, fantastic. Apryl. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Um, please. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Apryl Syed  41:07

Well, my company is Apeture Codex. Best way to get in touch with me is just Apryl Syed at LinkedIn. That’s where I’m most active, is on LinkedIn, and you can book an appointment with me right off of my LinkedIn. And so that’s like the best, best way to find me out there.

Christian Klepp  41:27

Fantastic, fantastic. And we’ll be sure to drop those links in the show notes once the episode goes live. So Apryl, once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Apryl Syed  41:38

All right. Thank you so much, Christian.

Christian Klepp  41:40

Okay, Bye, for now.

Apryl Syed  41:41

Bye.