Christian Klepp, Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  00:00

The third thing I would do is take your homepage, and then take your three competitors’ homepages, put them next to each other, like in a browser, like, or you know, paste them into, like, a document, 1234, just blur all the logos, okay? Or cover them up, and then just show it to some people and ask them, hey, can you guess which one is which, or what, what makes them different, and if, if, if they can’t instantly say what makes yours different, and that they won’t know that it’s yours. Probably says if your headline, your messaging is just interchangeable with your three competitors, what will your audience think?

Christian Klepp  00:33

Many marketing leaders still measure website success by traffic, engagement, or surface level conversion metrics. What they should do is view the website as a revenue engine, where everything from messaging, page structure, and UX (User Experience) decisions directly influence sales-qualified leads, demo quality, and pipeline velocity. So, how can SaaS companies engineer websites that actually create revenue? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Sahil Patel, who will be answering this question. He’s the CEO of Spiralyze, a leading company specializing in predictive CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) in data-driven landing page optimization. Let’s dive in. Okay, Mr. Sahil Patel, welcome to the show, sir.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  01:15

Glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Christian.

Christian Klepp  01:18

Great to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because man, I am really hoping that people are paying attention, taking notes, and walking away with this with something actionable, right? Because that’s what the show is about.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  01:30

All those things would be good.

Christian Klepp  01:32

All right, man, let’s, let’s dive right in. So, so he’ll, you’re on a mission to deliver predictive CRO and data driven landing page optimization for SaaS brands, so for this conversation, why don’t we focus on the topic of getting high-growth companies to turn their websites into revenue engines, and you know, doing that through messaging alignment, UX, and conversion paths. So, jumping straight into the first question, What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity when it comes to websites?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  02:02

Biggest missed opportunity, number one. And let me say, we’re talking about B2B websites here. So, let’s put aside nike.com Dolce and Cabana. These are all

Christian Klepp  02:12

Absolutely

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  02:13

A different world, and just focus on B2B, and really kind of B2B software.

Christian Klepp  02:17

Sure,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  02:18

B2B SaaS. The number one missed opportunity is show the product and show it right away. Think about this. Imagine Christian, can you think of the last car ad you saw?

Christian Klepp  02:29

Yeah, Ford, I think. Okay, Ford

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  02:33

Was it? Was it the truck, the f1 50, something else? Yes. Okay, so let’s picture for those who are listening. It describe the ad. What was happening?

Christian Klepp  02:41

It was a dark trail somewhere in the Rocky Mountains with the sunlight and all that, right. So,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  02:48

and they’re using the car, maybe they’re getting to a campsite, maybe they’re hauling wood. Reality is, most people are driving the kids to soccer practice, and put that aside for the moment.

 

Christian Klepp  02:58

Yeah.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  03:00

Now imagine the same ad, and just take like a magic eraser and just erase the truck, the f1 50 from the ad. What would you have left?

Christian Klepp  03:09

Dirt road,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  03:09

dirt road. Okay, maybe, maybe the people at the end are sitting around a campfire looking happy.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  03:15

No one would run that ad.

Christian Klepp  03:16

Nope.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  03:17

And yet every day B2B SaaS homepages show stock photos of happy people in a conference room. First of all, what’s happening in these conference rooms? I’ve been in a lot of them. No one is that happy, even me,

Christian Klepp  03:32

and nobody’s high fiving each other.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  03:34

Nobody’s high fiving, or what is so interesting on their mobile devices? You see them like everyone’s looking at it, like, or they’re holding a laptop in the worst possible with one hand and typing with the other. It’s like they didn’t, no one showed them, like, how to do two-handed typing.

Christian Klepp  03:53

Yeah,

Christian Klepp  03:55

Like, my carpal tunnel hurts on their behalf, because you could type like this for about one minute. Why, what our data shows is an A/B test, where you test showing the product against stock photos, getting 19% higher conversion rate on people proceeding to go fill in and submit the highest value conversion, which most B2B companies is a demo request, talk to sales, start a free trial. Those are the top three. This is about the second everyone’s was the top three, and the data’s so clear cut this comes from running tests across millions of data points, plus we crawl the internet, we find everybody else’s A/B tests. So, even if you’re not a spiralized customer, if you’re running A/B tests, we have some ways of at least seeing kind of what you’re testing and what tends to win.

Christian Klepp  04:51

Right?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  04:52

This one is a slam dunk.

Christian Klepp  04:54

Wow, it sounds so simple now that you’ve laid it out like that, right? But it’s. Amazing, like, now that you mentioned it, it’s amazing how many SaaS companies don’t do that.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  05:04

Yeah,

Christian Klepp  05:04

and they keep you guessing till the end, or not show the price.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  05:09

Now, there’s a lot of reasons I think why it doesn’t happen. So, let’s start with the first one. Yeah, my, my boss is afraid that our competitors are going to steal our ideas. First, let me say they probably already know what your product looks like. It’s on YouTube, it’s on Trustpilot, it’s probably on Reddit, they probably have training guides. Okay. Number two, do you really think at your main rival, they’re sitting around waiting, like, oh, if we could only see a single screenshot now, we could steal their market share. I wish it were that easy.

Christian Klepp  05:54

I know, right.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  05:56

Okay, second one they get is the product doesn’t look good, you know. We are due for a refresh. I hate to admit it, we’re a little bit behind. In six months, it’s gonna look modern.

Christian Klepp  06:10

It’s a dashboard,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  06:11

it’s a dashboard. Guess what is even less interesting to your audience? Stock photos of people in a conference room,

Christian Klepp  06:20

yep.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  06:22

In the power post,

Christian Klepp  06:23

you might even know, like, where they got it from, to like, oh, that’s from Unsplash, right?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  06:29

Oh, yeah. And because I see a lot of them, I actually have.. I can see, I was like, “Oh, I saw that one the other day, and now I saw that same person. It’s amazing,

Christian Klepp  06:36

yeah. Absolutely,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  06:39

I hope they’re getting some good royalties on that, on that photo. These are real objectives. I’m delivering it in a funny way.

Christian Klepp  06:48

Sure,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  06:48

these are real objectives, and the best way to answer them is, say, first, do we think our rivals are waiting around for a screenshot? Secondly, they probably already know them, and do we really think we have such little competitive advantage? Our moat is so thin that if they see one screenshot from the product,

Christian Klepp  07:12

absolutely,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  07:12

they’re going to – we’re going to lose our shirt. The third, and then the fourth thing is, sure, maybe the product doesn’t look exactly. we don’t have the Ferrari interface that instantly gets oohs and ahs when people look by, but what is the alternative? Show nothing, show stock photos. Now, I’ll tell you, the second thing is, let’s just stay on the homepage for a moment, but I’m staying there because it gets a lot of traffic. It’s like the front door to your business. The copywriting is doing all the lifting,

Christian Klepp  07:50

yeah, maybe,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  07:52

maybe, and the imaging is poor. And there’s a really great way to test this. Take your homepage, I call this the one second test. Right click, and in your Chrome browser, just do Google Translate. Pick a language that none of your colleagues or your friends speak, could be Arabic, could be Urdu, doesn’t really matter, just something that you know they don’t speak or read.

Christian Klepp  08:12

Malayalam,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  08:14

yes. And then show it to five people who don’t know you that well, and just asking you to guess what. Do you think this company does

Christian Klepp  08:26

if they can’t understand the copy? Right. Yeah.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  08:29

Yes. Just, just from.. and the reason it works, and the reason it’s an interesting test is that your brain processes images faster than words. So, when your audience lands on your homepage. This is subconsciously what they’re doing. Their brain is first looking at the imagery and just, how am I in the right place? You don’t need fancy software, you don’t need to hire an expensive agency, you don’t need to look on Upwork for some UX guru. Everyone can do this themselves, and I think the answers will be eye opening, and if you do, and if you really want to, maybe get some intention, do it with your leadership team now. If you want to test it ahead of time, make sure they’re prepared for it.

Christian Klepp  09:12

Yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  09:15

and I think it’ll be eye opening for them, and it just cuts through the noise so quickly.

Christian Klepp  09:21

Absolutely, well, absolutely, that’s that’s such a great way to approach this, right? Because I find people tend to over complicate it.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  09:30

The third thing I would do is take your homepage, and then take your three competitors’ home pages, put them next to each other, like in a browser, like, or you know, paste them into like a document, 1234, just blur all the logos, okay? Or cover them up, and then just show it to some people and ask them, hey, can you guess which one is which, or what? What makes them different, and if, if, if they can’t instantly say what makes yours different? And but that they won’t know that it’s yours,

Christian Klepp  10:02

yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  10:03

probably says if you’re, if your headline, your messaging is just interchangeable with your three competitors, what will your audience think? You should assume that they have looked at your competitors either right before they came to your website or they came after, and if you say something like AI powered revenue orchestration all in one, sure, all of those things could be factually true about your software. It’s powered by AI. It does revenue orchestration. I actually don’t know what that means, but I see those two words next to each other all the time. It’s some kind of, hey, we, we have a big feature set that’s usually what all in one means, big feature set, all those things can be true, but if your three competitors can make that claim, even if it’s stretching the truth a little bit,

Christian Klepp  10:51

yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  10:53

why would anyone stay

Christian Klepp  10:54

sure,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  10:56

like, okay, well, this does what all the others do, because, and at that point it then quickly becomes like a race to the bottom, not your high-intent people, because they know your brand, maybe they’ve used you elsewhere, you’re going to get them anyway, but a lot of the game is won and lost for the people in the middle, maybe they go to you, maybe they go somewhere else,

Christian Klepp  11:14

you know,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  11:15

and when you say no different than anyone else, they, if you’re lucky, maybe they read a little bit more, but I think likely they bounce pretty quickly.

Christian Klepp  11:24

They’ll bounce pretty quickly. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. Wow, what a way to kick off this show, man.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  11:33

I hope that we’re giving the audience something to everyone that’s listening today that they can actually use right away, and they don’t need fancy tools or to spend a lot of money to put into practice.

Christian Klepp  11:46

Absolutely, absolutely. And on that note, I’m going to ask you another question. So, what is it about conversion paths on a website or landing page that you think a lot of teams get wrong, and what can they do to improve this and guide users instead of confusing them,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  12:02

I think there’s a couple things. One is maybe just a really simple way to understand your audience, and I’m going to oversimplify here, is to divide the world into high intent and low intent. For example, high intent, if someone types in the name of your company and clicks on a link, but I don’t think it even matters so much whether it’s paid, a paid sponsored link, or an organic, but they put in let’s choose a payroll company like Workday, and they say Workday software, and they go to the Workday page, that’s pretty high intent traffic. They were looking, they already had you in mind. Boy, we wish the world was this was what we got every day. Sadly, it’s not. Now, let’s take someone that says, “I’m looking for payroll software. It’s lower in 10. The third is, maybe they saw an ad somewhere, maybe they were scrolling Instagram, they saw an ad. Think, if you try and treat all those people the same, that’s not news. I think everyone’s figured out you shouldn’t do that. I think the mistake I see a lot of people make is they go to the lowest common denominator, which is they say, oh, when we did, we did some research, we talked to some of our audience. No one likes to be, you know, pitch slapped or hit over the head. We know our low intense audience certainly doesn’t want to, because they’re still researching, and so they optimize for the lowest common denominator, the lowest intent audience. By the way, I think that’s a mistake, not because the insights the wrong, but because now you’re ignoring your high antenna traffic.

Christian Klepp  13:45

Yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  13:46

these are the thirsty runners. Hey, thirsty runner, you show up with like a warm pail of water in a rusty bucket, and they’re going to drink it.

Christian Klepp  13:57

Oh,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  13:57

okay. And instead you’re saying, hey, I know you’re thirsty, but let me go get a chilled pitcher from the fridge and a beautiful carafe, pour it out, and I’ll give you a back rub, and I’m not gonna let you have a sip until you do that, okay? It’s just, it’s a mismatch.

Christian Klepp  14:15

Yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  14:16

so let’s, what that means is, in practical life, if you have high intent traffic, give them a high intent experience, and what that usually means is don’t give them a ton of distractions. Have a clear CTA (Call to Action) lot of those times you can actually put your conversion form right up there on the page, maybe even above the hero. I know everyone thinks that’s a little cringe. Oh, respect my audience, no one wants to be sold to your high intent audience, why the hell else are they coming there? Now that’s not your whole audience. If you’re lucky, I don’t know, maybe that’s 10 or 20% of your traffic. Now, in the middle, that audience needs more persuading. Give them an experience. You probably don’t want to hit them with the form right away.

Christian Klepp  14:58

No,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  14:59

you first, you want to. Start with making sure they know they’re in the right place, and a really good place to start is lead with a bold claim, a hook, and then before you make any new claims, make the first original claim believable. It’s a huge mistake, I see. I think everyone has heard the best practice: start with a hook, have a bold claim, get your audience in great, but the reason that works, or when it works, it only works when two things are true, the copywriting and imagery that the audience sees immediately adjacent to, either right below or right immediately to the right, because we generally read in an F shape pattern, has to make the original claim more believable before it makes any new claims. Number two, it has to be easy to skim, and I see both of those violated. Great, bold hook. Get your new payroll system up in a week. Wow, I would love that. Then it starts. The subhead tells me how I can pay my employees in their local currency. Whoa, hang on, Hannah, that’s nice. I’m still not convinced that I could really get a payroll switch out in a week. Make that part believable. And then don’t give me a wall of text, make it easy to skim. Give me some bullets, make the keywords start with the keywords turn into bullets. I think that audience, you try and hit them with the form right away. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Worth testing if you, if you have the ability and you’re set up to do some AB tests. Great, if you’re not getting the copywriting right, is is worthwhile. I think for your lowest intent audience, it’s sometimes hard to know what they are. I’d say the first thing I would focus on is just make sure you deliver on whatever promise brought them to the page,

Christian Klepp  16:48

right?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  16:49

So, if you have a dog food ad, you can’t have a cat food landing page.

Christian Klepp  16:54

You make it sound so simple, I know.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  16:56

Everything is, yeah, yeah, the applications, everything says easy, does hard,

Christian Klepp  17:01

well, and I think it’s also, and you know, correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of these SaaS companies, um, they get on their own way a lot, right? Like, let’s, let’s just cram everything about our product into the website, because everybody has to know this, right?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  17:14

More is more,

Christian Klepp  17:15

yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  17:16

more is more is really hard to resist,

Christian Klepp  17:19

yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  17:20

everyone is guilty of it. I’m guilty of it.

Christian Klepp  17:22

Yeah, we all are. We all are. Absolutely.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  17:25

Here’s the reality. For most B2B websites, less than half of your traffic will scroll past what we call the hero marketing speak for that top section, the hero image hero section. So spending a lot of energy on like what’s the copywriting to put like three scroll clicks down, I’m not saying pay no attention to it,

Christian Klepp  17:51

yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  17:52

but a lot of the game is won and lost in the hero, like get that right first,

Christian Klepp  17:56

right, right, exactly, exactly, so as we’re wrapping up this interview, Sahil, if there are three things you’d want people that are listening to this to walk away with that they can take action on, like right now, like right after they listen to the interview, what are those? What will those three things be?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  18:16

Number one, find all the stock photos on your website and replace them with, if you’re B2B SaaS, it’s easy, just a picture of your product. If you’re some kind of service or tech-enabled service, or you’re selling an API, it’s a little bit harder.

Christian Klepp  18:31

Yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  18:32

You’re gonna have to think a little bit harder, like what is the outcome that your customer wants. Okay, it’s number one. Number two, do the one second test, right click, put your put your homepage into Arabic, go show it to five people, see if they can guess what you do. I think you’ll be surprised, not necessarily in a good way. By the way, I want to caveat that no one is going to look at it and say this is payroll tech for mid market restaurants with five or more locations, they say something like it looks like software, maybe some kind of business software, some kind of tech. If they’re doing that, I think you’re in a good place. If they say something like, I don’t know, they sell cardigans because you’ve got stock photo of someone in the power pose wearing a cardigan, you may want to work on your imagery,

Christian Klepp  19:21

Office furniture,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  19:25

Weirdly held carpal tunnel syndrome, because everyone’s holding up like this.

Christian Klepp  19:29

Yeah, yeah, commercial space for rent,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  19:33

yeah, they got this great workspace. Oh, this is for WeWork number three, take your homepage, put it up against your three competitors, hide the logo, just ask which one would you pick. Everyone can do this in about five minutes or less. No fancy salt, no fancy software, no expensive agency. You, you now, if you do all three of those things, then call the agency before you do that. You can probably.. I think I like what you said about kind of.. it’s sometimes we all.. we kind of get in our own way. The reason companies get there, I think, are with good intentions, you know they’ve they’ve grown, they’ve evolved, they’ve accumulated, they’ve built more products. It’s a lot easier when you’ve got one product, it’s a lot harder when you’ve got a suite of products. So let me say, I’m fully cognitive, this is this is a lot easier to say than it is to do.

Christian Klepp  20:36

Absolutely, and if you get there and you go looking, go, okay? I just did this. Our homepage reads pretty darn similar in tone and value proposition as our three competitors. Now I got to fix it. Okay, that’s where the hard work starts. You got to make some real trade-offs. None of that is easy, but first solve for the right problem,

Christian Klepp  20:58

right? So, just to quickly recap, so the first one is getting rid of those stock images, and where possible, putting pictures of the product. Number two is right clicking and changing the copy into a different language and showing it to people, so to see if they can guess what it is you do. And the third one is getting the competitors and just blurring out those logos and showing everyone and seeing if they can tell which company it does.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  21:24

Yeah, put it next to yours.

Christian Klepp  21:26

Yeah,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  21:26

and you could just say, I don’t know if they get it. I don’t think you have to say which company is mine. I just want to clarify that. Yeah, I might even say, like, which one of these gets your attention the best,

Christian Klepp  21:35

right?

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  21:36

Or

Christian Klepp  21:37

or doesn’t,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  21:39

or what are the differences among these companies, you want to be open-ended, you don’t want to like put words in, want to guide in their mouth, you don’t want to lead the witness too much.

Christian Klepp  21:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  21:49

And it’s just such an easy place to start. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there.

Christian Klepp  21:53

Absolutely, absolutely. Wow, Sahil, that was dynamite, man. Thanks so much for coming on

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  22:00

kind words. This is a great show. Really enjoyed it.

Christian Klepp  22:02

Thank you so much. Quick intro yourself, and how folks can get in touch with you, especially if they need help with their websites.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  22:09

Yes, so my name is Sahil. I’m the CEO of Spiralyze. Check us out at spiralyze.com If you enjoyed these little kind of how-to moments, I post them every morning at 7:30 Eastern on LinkedIn, always in quick little something that you can digest in 60 seconds or less.

Christian Klepp  22:26

Yeah, some little nibbles,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  22:28

some little nibbles. And if any find it interesting, I also have a game show. It’s on YouTube, it’s on LinkedIn. Me versus the guests come and try and challenge me. We play seven lightning rounds.

Christian Klepp  22:40

Wow,

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  22:40

we look at B2B websites, the winner gets $100 for their charity.

Christian Klepp  22:44

Wow. Okay, okay. Fantastic. And we’ll be sure to like link that in the show notes.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  22:50

That’d be great. Christian, thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp  22:52

Thank you so much. Take care, and talk soon.

Sahil Patel (“sah-hill”)  22:55

Talk soon.