Lines are blurring between Sales & Marketing
It’s hard to separate them now than ever before
The lines between Sales and Marketing are blurring in 2020.
Sales is 1-to-1 persuasion. Marketing is 1-to-Many persuasion.
The common aspect between both at its core, is persuasion.
What is persuasion? It’s often misunderstood as following up with someone until they buy your product. That’s not your mistake. The movies painted the wrong picture by showing a salesperson on the phone being increasingly pushy until the other person is persuaded to make a purchase. That’s not persuasion or a compelling sales tactic, that is just plain pushy. That isn't respecting the other person’s ability to judge your product/service by its own merits. That isn't understanding the other person’s problem. That is acting with a selfish motive.
Persuasion is the art of moving people through reasoning. Rockstar Sales reps and Marketers are those who have mastered this down to a science. Not just in sales or marketing, persuasion is a key skill in other aspects of life as well. When you were younger, you might have persuaded your parents to buy you a new toy, a new bicycle or the new Harry Potter book. You might have persuaded your friends to gang up and play a prank back in school. I can go on with the list, but I will stop here.
How do you develop these persuasion skills? Although I do not know how to teach you to develop persuasion skills in other aspects of life, I can definitely share my learnings in the context of Sales and Marketing.
In the age of low attention spans, both Sales reps and Marketers have less than 60 seconds of buyer's attention.
All the action needs to happen in those 60 seconds for the buyer to decide to explore your product further. If you are unable to persuade someone in that time, then you may have lost business from that buyer.
There are only a few means by which you can persuade people in Sales and Marketing. In Sales, you can persuade people via email, phone calls, in-person meetings, and product demos. In Marketing you get to do this through - Website copy, Ad copy, Video Ads, Image Ads, and other modes of communicating with your ideal customer. The low hanging fruit and the most common way to persuade is by writing a good copy. Sales reps persuade using email copy. Marketers persuade through website copy. The medium might be different but the method to write a good copy is the same. Email copy can be similar to website copy in some ways, because they have the same underlying approach.
Here are four basic rules to keep in mind while writing good sales/marketing copy:
Who are you writing for? Eg: Is it for an investor, new user, economic buyer, etc.,
What problem are you solving for them? Eg: Eliminating the need to manage customer messaging on multiple platforms by aggregating all the messaging tools on one platform
What is the impact it will have on their business? Eg: Using the aggregating platform will help their reps resolve 50% more customer tickets in a day
Why should they act now and buy? Eg: Customers no longer trust a business that takes more than 1 hour to respond to support requests
If you write keeping these four aspects in mind, you will improve your email reply rates as well as the lead conversion rates on your website. Of course, there are always other factors at play, but if you get these basics right you are in the right place.
HEY Marketing Case Study
On June 15th, Basecamp, the poster boy for bootstrapped tech companies launched a new email service. You might think really? An email service? We already have Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and many others. Why do we need another email service? I made the same mistake on my first reaction. But as I thought about it more, I recognized that there is something cardinally wrong with all these email services. I often get overwhelmed by managing my Gmail inbox. I get stressed out and feel like I’m always lagging in responding to emails in my Gmail inbox. Understandably, that’s a massive pain point to solve for anyone and there were quite a few new email services that launched in the last two years, such as, YourTempo, Twobird, and Superhuman. But none of them received as much hype as HEY.com received.
Hey.com is a $10million ARR business in the first month of launch. $10million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in the first month! Unbelievable right? Check out this tweet by Basecamp’s co-founder DHH
They opened the waitlist on February 6th and received 10,000 requests. That was when word about HEY’s launch had not yet spread like wildfire. Both founders have a cult following on Twitter and in sum have around ~700,000 followers. Let’s assume half of their followers had put in a request (I’m one of them) which means they had 350,000 people on the waitlist. These people are just waiting to jump right in and try the new email service. Even if 30% of people become paid customers after the 14-day free trial period paying $99 a year for the service their revenue would be ~$10million ARR. I won’t be surprised if it becomes a $100million ARR business in 2 years (this is my bet). Usually, Basecamp’s products are good and their marketing is great.
Let’s talk about the marketing behind Hey.com.
I’ve been following Jason Fried and DHH on Twitter for about 8 months now. Like their other followers, I’ve also been watching the build up to HEY’s launch since February. It has been a masterclass in marketing, here are a few lessons that I’ve distilled for you:
Lesson 1: Spoke about solving a user problem from all angles
They started by naming and shaming their enemy in their manifesto — free email solutions like Gmail. More specifically, they addressed the trade-off we were making by using a free service like Gmail by giving away our privacy. If you read their manifesto it ticks all the basic rules of writing good copy.
Lesson 2: Leverage controversy in creating awareness and engaging with the community
DHH occasionally starts debates on privacy as it relates to email. I’m now assuming this was all completely intentional because these are smart people and they don’t just pick a fight without a reason. By starting these debates they let the world know their point of view, took a stand, strengthened their manifesto, and created tension. They created the Us vs Them faction.
Lesson 3: Built a high intent waitlist
They collected email addresses using a simple landing page with their point of view and why current email services suck. Many companies would leave it at this step but not Basecamp. They went a step further and asked everyone to email them about their personal love/hate relationship with email. So not only have they built a waitlist, but also a high intent waitlist at that. Because it’s easy to just drop your email id, but it requires a whole lot more intent to write a story about your relationship with email. And with that one smart move, they have accumulated enough raw material for sales/marketing copy to last them a very long time. Even more importantly, this direct feedback from their audience will help them build new features or finetune what they already have.
There are more lessons but these were my big takeaways.
HEY Sales Demo
While everyone is waiting to get their invite, Jason Fried took the opportunity to give a demo of the product. They did not do webinars or have a view demo video. Jason, the founder, and CEO gave a demo as if he is speaking to you, sitting right beside you. He made sure that there were enough WOW moments in the demo. He shows the most important pieces of the product that inspire you to abandon Gmail. While there are a few glitches in his demo because he recorded in a single take, he still hits the point home by focusing on how HEY is solving customer problems.
Here’s the link to the recorded demo -
In summary
If you take away just one thing away from this post, let it be that copywriting is the key skill for both sales and marketing. No other skill is as important as writing in the age of internet businesses.
Please ping me if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post. And don’t forget to go read Sai’s Three rules for a good copywriting.