FULL SHOW NOTES

00:05 Aaron Weiche: Episode 7. Sales, inbound, outbound, and all around.

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00:11 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

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00:40 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:43 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:44 AW: And this week we are talking sales, but beforehand, let's kinda catch up on the last couple of weeks. We went from a month in between almost our last episodes to now, just a matter of less than two weeks, so that's good that we're getting back to our tighter cycle. But what's new from your side of the Canada border this week?

01:10 DS: Yeah, it feels like I just talked to you. I saw this on my calendar today, and I was like, wow, [chuckle] look at us, talking again so soon. Let's see, what's new in the world of Whitespark and Darren Shaw. Well, we launched a new service, I think I mentioned it in the last podcast, called our Local Search service, which I was so pumped about. And now we're gonna trash that service [chuckle] and make a completely different service. The whole point of this service was, I was excited to build something around Google My Business Management. 

So the whole local search ranking factor survey really pumped a lot of these new features in Google My Business and how these are great ways to drive conversion, this whole concept of Google as your new home page. And so I was really excited, we need a good service for this, and so we built it, and then I, like I always do, kept bolting things onto it, "Well, what if it did this? And it could also do this." And so it just really expanded into a full SEO service, which is Google My Business Management plus your citations, your reviews, your website, even some link recommendations, and now we're not differentiated at all. We're just like another SEO service.

02:22 DS: And so I've decided to strip it back to what its core message was supposed to be. I wanna reposition it as specifically around Google My Business, and that's all we do. So we will find duplicates, fix duplicates, make sure your GMB listing is perfected, and regularly keep it up to date, adding new photos, adding posts, managing your Q&A, helping you with reviews, just that whole concept of Google as your new home page, we're completely focused on that. And we're focused more on conversions from GMB, improving your views and conversions rather than rankings by the whole local search picture. So I think it's a much better pivot, and it will be better for the service and better for scaling it, too. It's just much simpler offering, right?

03:09 AW: Yeah.

03:09 DS: You launch an SEO service and you get a million questions about, "What should I do with schema on my website?" The service becomes so much more complicated, whereas when we scale it back to strictly these things, we can become subject matter experts on that, and it really makes it easier to scale and manage. So I'm excited about it; I think it's gonna be a good move.

03:31 AW: There's so many variables when you get into the full-blown service side of things.

03:36 DS: Yeah, definitely.

03:38 AW: What from how your customers were interacting with it or lack of interaction gave you a signal, this isn't perfect, what do we need to do?

03:45 DS: Yeah, so a lot of questions about rankings like, "How soon will I be ranking?" all that stuff. And every time those questions come in, we're just like... We shake our heads, and we're like, "Oh boy, I don't know, [chuckle] is this the right direction?" And then pricing as well, we didn't get a huge pick-up from it, we definitely got a decent amount of clients that... After we promoted it. But I think it's a bit expensive, people are like, "$399, and it's not a full agency service, why would I choose this over the million other things?" Whereas when I scale it back, it's gonna be at a much nicer price point, plus the "Why would I choose this?" we can answer that so obviously, and so I think it'll be much better that way. So it's simpler, it's a better price, and we don't have to worry about rankings, which I really like.

04:35 AW: I also extract from what you shared with this the local search ranking factors report helped influence a product idea for you, and then you put that... You saw that, hey, this is growing in importance and carrying a lot of weight, and so you put something out for it, and then you realized you went too heavy into it in one side, and now you're scaling back. It's just kind of an interesting cycle for me on where ideas come from, and then how you meet them, and then how do you quickly adjust and pivot if you know it's not the right fit is really interesting.

05:14 DS: Yeah, and so I think we're adjusting and pivoting quick enough. And if you talk to my software development team, they will say that I do this all the time, [chuckle] I get excited about something, and I just keep adding, it's like, "It could do this, and it can also do this, and it's gonna be the ultimate magical, amazing thing," and I make it too big, [chuckle] and I make it too complicated. And so I'm really working on scaling things back to the core offering, what is the core offering, what is the core differentiator, and why would someone pick this specific thing? So really trying to dial in on that.

05:50 AW: I don't think you're alone in that, Darren, we struggle with that, too, with features, a lot of times. I have gotten better at it. I actually will push our product team a lot of times and just say, "What is... In the world of good, better, best, how do we have a better version instead of this immaculate conception of the feature that has everything you'd ever need, and every way to customize it, and all of those pieces that then takes you forever to roll it out, and so many other things that complicate it.

06:23 DS: For sure, and there's a place for that in the industry. If you look at software like Salesforce or HubSpot, these things are massive, and they do try to do everything, and they're very successful, but I think for a smaller industry, you're not gonna go and compete with them, you're better off to try and build something that has a very clear differentiating factor, this is the one thing we do better for this specific use case, and that's what you can sell.

06:48 AW: Yeah. So important.

06:49 DS: Yep, so yeah, well, how about you? What's up with you? You've been traveling for a long time.

06:54 AW: Yeah. I've been living out of a suitcase. I am about ready to at least get a little bit of a reprieve next week. I have a speaking engagement that's just a two-day, two-night away. But I have basically been on planes for six straight weeks, sometimes just for a day trip. Last week it was three different cities over seven days, so it is a lot, it's been really hard to find desk time to get other things accomplished and keep things moving. 

But on the plus side, a couple were speaking events, but then others were face-to-face meetings with customers. One of the things that was really important to me when I took over as CEO was getting out from behind the desk and going to meet some of our great customers in person that we don't have a deep relationship with and trying to make that deeper, and...

07:51 DS: Yep. That's interesting, yeah, that really rolls into sales too, right?

07:56 AW: Yeah, yeah. And it's been really fun to do that, to see how they operate, to give them a peek at our road map and what we have coming up, and just to build rapport and be more of a partner instead of just a business relationship with it. So ...