SaaS Backwards Episode 117 - How to convert 30% more web traffic in 90 days - with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze

Our guest today is Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze, an AB testing company that helps its clients grow by providing data-driven performance conversion rate optimization services.

Sahil, welcome to the podcast.

Sahil Patel:
Thank you, Ken. Really glad to be there. Boy, that was a mouthful on that script and you totally described my company accurately. Thank you for having me. We'll try and unpack some things to make it real clear of what we do and kind of why it's interesting.

Ken Lempit:
Cool. But before we dig into our conversation, let's have you give some of your background about the company and then we'll dig deep.

Sahil Patel:
Yeah, happy to do that. So I'm the CEO. Live in Atlanta, Georgia. I've been running Spiralyze for two years. And prior to Spiralyze I was the CEO and founder of a healthcare tech business. Ran that for 10 years and sold it to a large vertical software business. Along the way, I was actually an early client of Spiralyze. That's how I found out what they do, and I liked it so much, it had such a profound impact on my business I stayed in touch with the founder. And then after we had an exit event with ER Express, my former company, the founder here at Spiralyze was looking for a partner to help him take the company to the next level. He had done an incredible job building it, and that's how I came in as CEO.

Ken Lempit:
That's awesome. It's like for us old dudes, the old Remington commercials.

Sahil Patel:
I liked it so much I bought the company.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. Such a classic marketing line, but in this case.

Sahil Patel:
It's true, and you couldn't plan this. If I had set out to say, you know what I'm going to do? Somewhere I'm going to find a company, I'm going to become a customer, and then if I like it, I'm going to talk the founder into letting me become the CEO. You couldn't plan it. It just happened really organically, but it helped a lot. That Spiralyze is based in Atlanta, so it was easy for me over the course of many years to stay in touch with its founder. And then when I was looking for my next chapter after ER Express I was open to companies the world of remote work had opened up. But I had a strong preference if I could find a company that was right here in Atlanta.

Ken Lempit:
Makes sense. I think it's really interesting for the aspiring CEOs or C-suite execs, there is some lesson to be learned even though you might not be able to recreate this career path, especially in executive decision-making I think there's a lot about the emotional side, the qualitative side to relationships that kind of determines where you end up in life. And it's a little beyond the scope of our podcast, but I think making real connections with people and seeking to share the win with the people you do business with always seems to come back and pay some dividends. You can't draw a straight line to it, but I think it's a really important skill, it's like a soft skill to definitely master. I know in my life I spend 5 to 10% my time trying to help other people find a job or a resource, which would probably have nothing to do with my future. It's an interesting way to get to the job. Let's talk about before Spiralyze, just for a moment, I want to help people understand that. That was something of a long ride. You were probably an eight or nine year overnight success.

Sahil Patel:
I was there for 11 years in total, 10 years as an independent company, and then I stuck around for a year after the acquisition.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, I mean, it just takes some time. I think people from the outside who haven't done it don't realize that it can take some time to get to that exit, get to the success that you're searching for. And I just can't tell you how many companies we've done the official launch for that we're at it five, six, seven, eight years before they were ready to go. So good for you. And you had mentioned that there were ups and downs in the history of that business, but you ultimately got an exit with a sale. And I'm curious, what are some of the key takeaways as you look back on that time? What are the key learnings and how did you get to that exit based on stuff you learned running that business?

Sahil Patel:
Well, I think the first learning... Thanks for asking and I share a couple learnings and then the meta headline on all of this now that I've had some distance to reflect on. I think the first thing is the reality is you're going to spend more time in the valleys than in the peaks, and you can get there through experience. It took me a while to just get comfortable living in the valleys, and I think I would tell the 30-year-old version of Sahil, I was think 32 when I started the ER Express, I'm 45 today, if you think you're going to live in the peaks, you're fooling yourself and you're setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and heartache.

Now the second thing is, what that allows you to do once you accept that is to be kind to yourself. Most CEOs, they understand why you should be kind to your team members, to your customers, to your investors, and they tend to be much harder on themselves, and some of that is healthy. Thank you for the kind of person that wants to run a business. You're driven. You're achievement oriented. You have that push inside of you right here that never stops. But I would tell everyone to balance that or temper that with just like you would balance if you were giving an employee a particularly hard piece of feedback, you wouldn't give them 90% vitriol and 10%, here's how we can make it better or here's what we learned. You would churn through your people very quickly if you did that. I would say do the same thing with yourself is, hey, if you mess up, if the results aren't were you wanted them to be, and I think often they won't be, I would tell everyone, be hard on yourself, push yourself, but also balance that with some ratio that works for you on also be constructive.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, I mean I think that you're right. Most people that lead businesses have some motivation to do so beyond purely chasing the money. It's how they're built. You have to gravitate toward it, it won't just happen to you by accident to be a leader. And I think you're right. I think that's general life skill there. Being kind to yourself. It's really hard to be good for others if not good for yourself, and you may even practice that in your private life and not bring it to work.

Sahil Patel:
Well, and I think the opposite is true, the flip side of that coin is true. If you're not doing that to yourself, I think it's hard to be a good partner at home, whether you're talking about to your kids, to your spouse, to your parents, those of us who are at that stage of life where we're helping to take care of our parents and that has a real effect on your home life.

Ken Lempit:
Were there any things about driving growth for a SaaS firm that you take with you going forward that you learned on the back of ER Express? As you look back at what finally led you to get the growth you needed to be able to make a good exit, what was the problem, solution space that you had to work through to be able to do that?

Sahil Patel:
To give context to the answer, ER Express is a patient scheduling and digital registration company in the acute care, and it has three sets of customers: hospital-based emergency departments, urgent care, both like retail-type, urgent care, and those connected to a hospital, and then veterinary emergency care. And the business is roughly a third, a third, a third. So just for everyone listening, that just gives you a picture of what that company does.

I'll give you the big picture lesson, which is so much of the outcome is factors out of your control. And I know that's not super satisfying, but I look back and I look at some of the things that didn't go well. There were things I would say maybe perhaps within my influence and I could have done better, but out of my direct control. And the same is true on the success side because what happened was the pandemic hit, originally was really bad for the business, and then it propelled a bunch of demand for our product because suddenly checking in from your phone, uploading your insurance card, signing those very lengthy documents, you couldn't go into the waiting room to do it.

And if you think that's bad, if you're a person and you're feeling sick, imagine doing it when your dog is in the car with you because can't go into the waiting room to do it. You've got a sick pet with you. And imagine waiting two, three, four, five, six hours or more while you're sick, your child's sick or your dog is sick. So it propelled a ton of demand. It was totally out of our control. Now we did some things and we were very nimble in adapting what we already did pretty well for that situation. So that was number one.

Number two, we had an unsolicited approach. Company came to us and said, we're interested in what you're doing, we're interested in acquisition, and it worked out. We can talk about all the things that when opportunity presents itself, are you prepared to take advantage of it and you still have to execute on it, and those are the things that are under your control and influence. So success or failure is never guaranteed, the opportunity there, couldn't have generated those. There was no strategy that could have catalyzed that. It was some degree of just being in the right place at the right time.

Ken Lempit:
Well, yeah, I think it's sort of a yes and kind of situation. Yes, it was out of your control in many respects, but we've seen with other guests going way back with this podcast, we had the CEO of an events management software company, Eventree here on the podcast, and it was right after... I mean, the pandemic was still happening, I guess. They likewise had to reorient their business to online events and then hybrid events. So they had to keep modifying what they viewed their business to be and ended up benefiting handsomely as a result and also sold the business.

So I think the lesson there is to take your punches and then figure out how are you going to make that external event work for you, right? I think you have to figure that out and good for you that you did. So maybe there's the learning, right, willing to keep sticking your head up even when the situation externally is powerfully disruptive.

Sahil Patel:
Absolutely. And I think the thing I would build on what you said Ken, great comment there is the story as a founder and a CEO, the story that we tell ourselves shapes how we see ourselves in the mirror, and I think you make a choice every morning on what narrative you choose. So if you look at me on paper, you could choose a narrative that says, Sahil, there's no such thing as an overnight success, it's success 10 years in the making. But you could look at it and say on paper, oh wow, what an incredibly successful person, founded a business, got an exit, had a degree along the way from a well-known school, boy, that guy's got it made. You could also look at a narrative or write a narrative about me that says, this guy had a bunch of things in his favor and had a pretty mediocre outcome. What a doofus. And the truth is somewhere in between. And many mornings I feel like one and many mornings I feel like the other.

We're all susceptible to social comparison. Be careful about engaging and that are doing that based on what you see on the surface. Because if you know me, you probably have reach one conclusion, and if you just look at me on paper, it looks differently. But I think that's true for everyone.

Ken Lempit:
I think what you're knocking on the door of here is, again, soft skills. As a leader, we have to have some pretty strong soft skills to help succeed and to help others understand us and engage with us in a meaningful way. So I think that's kind of a cool thing. I want to kind of shift gears. I want to get away from the zen and into the...

Sahil Patel:
Yeah, let's go from zen to some more concrete stuff.

Ken Lempit:
I think in the life of this podcast, 115 episodes in, we haven't spent enough time maybe on soft skills, so maybe that'll start weaving its way into some of the future episodes as well. So, thank you.

Sahil Patel:
Well, first of all, congrats on 115 episodes. That's amazing in of itself.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, well, you just have to look yourself in the mirror and say, yeah, I'm going to do that episode today. So there you go. It's just a matter of being willing. I have two adult kids and just a little bit more zen. I talk to them about manifesting the world they want to live in and obviously a range of influence, the amount of footprint you have as an individual varies along what you're doing and how far you are in your career and stuff. But all of us can manifest our own reality, and that's what I have my kids doing. It's a conversation we have ongoing. I think it's a really powerful thing to do to try and drive yourself in a way that's going to give you the experiences and opportunities that are meaningful. So it's good stuff.

Let's talk about Spiralyze a little bit. You're not the founder, as you said. It's not so unusual to be recruited in to help drive another company, maybe the way you got there is, and I think you should elaborate a little bit on that. I think people should try and understand from you what attracted you to the business. And them, why did they want to have you? Why did this founder want you to come in and replace him? And what was the mission that you've been recruited to do here? You waved at it saying bring it to the next level, but I think there's more to it than that.

Sahil Patel:
So let's start with why the founder, his name is Gajan Retnasaba, why he did that. And I want to maybe adjust one thing, Ken is he didn't bring me into replace him. He's still in the business. In fact, while we're talking right now, he's sitting about eight feet from me. And I think that's the first thing that's unusual. I interviewed for a bunch of jobs as I was leaving ER Express, and the prototypical thing is if someone's coming in, whether the founder is doing it willingly or unwillingly, they're bringing a CEO because the founder is leaving on good terms or on bad terms, and now there's a new sheriff in town. This was a very different situation.

Gajan, first of all, we had a reservoir of rapport and trust and we'd known each other. We met because our oldest daughters went to school together at an early age. Literally we met on the first day of school walking... Our kids were three years old. You're bringing them into that first day of preschool. Just to give you the visual.

Ken Lempit:
How great is that?

Sahil Patel:
It's amazing. And so as a result, we knew some things that I was good at and we knew some things that he was good at and we had complimentary strengths, and so I think I would be hesitant to prescribe to anyone to try and find this much less do it. Usually if you're a CEO, you don't want the last person sticking around because then it's not clear who's in charge. We have this really productive, and I'm lucky, very fortunate, we have this dynamic of we're working on different things in the business. I would generally say my job is to propel the growth of the business to where we want to be two to three years from today. And Gajan found is he could either work on that or he could work on making sure the trains were running on time, but not both.

It was clear the trajectory, they could keep going like this or he could bring in a partner to help him get it like this. Now, what excited me about the business? What continues to excite me about the business?

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, you seem to like it.

Sahil Patel:
I do. I absolutely love it. And here's the thing. Our mission is to turn everyone's website into a lead generation machine. We focus on B2B SaaS companies and we do this thing called conversion rate optimization. By the way, e-commerce started working on this more than a decade ago and they started doing AB testing. It's like a clinical trial for your website. You change a couple things, maybe one thing, and you say, can you get more people to put the shoes in the cart if the button is blue versus if the button is green? It's a really simple example, but it gives everyone a visual. You can picture that. Imagine just two versions of that add to shopping cart page on Zappos, for example. Simple idea.

The B2B SaaS world, now, if you're going to buy a cybersecurity solution, no one is putting that into a shopping cart and pulling out their corporate card to pay six figures for it. Typically doing a couple things. They're clicking that talk to sales or get a demo button. They might be, if it's a self-serve type of product, they're clicking start your free trial. They might be signing up for a webinar. They might be downloading a white paper. These are all the most common things. And B2B SaaS companies because these solutions are very valuable, often six figures and more, they spend a lot on customer acquisition. So they're investing a ton in traffic to the website. And what we do is take the traffic they're already getting and get more of it to convert into a sales lead. That lead could be a free trial, it could be a demo request, it could be a contact sales, it could be a webinar signup. But it's the traffic you're already getting, how do you get more of it to convert?

And you can do it a couple ways. You can sit in a room with a whiteboard and say, well, what should we test next? You could chase, hey, we saw this company do it, we should do it too. If you're lucky, you might have someone in your company that's done some AB testing in a prior life, maybe they worked at one of those big, like booking.com, one of the pioneers of the AB testing movement. But again, they're probably testing largely based on their own personal experience.

Ken Lempit:
Most people do that, right?

Sahil Patel:
Yeah. That's what most people do. Now, think about this. If you went to the doctor and the doctor said, well, last time I had a sore throat, this is what helped me get better. Okay. I mean, it might work for you. If the doctor said, "Hey, I treated five patients last week with sore throats. This is what worked for most of them," it's probably a little bit better. If the doctor said, "I looked at the clinical trial evidence for 5,000 people with your symptoms and this is what worked for them. I also then looked at people in your age range and your demographic and background, and I can adjust my advice a little bit better. I'm going to give you a slightly different dose because men in 45 of your body composition they need a little bit different dose of it." Now, which of those solutions would you want? I'm asking rhetorically, but I think the answer's obvious.

Ken Lempit:
It's clear. Yeah, it's really clear.

Sahil Patel:
That's what we are doing, so while most people are doing the first thing, hey, last time I had a sore throat I did this, so I'm going to do it. It turns out there are 34,000 websites that AB test, we crawl and scrape all of them to find the repeat winners, and when we find a repeat winner, we then analyze one, and then we run those tests for our clients and those are the tests that produce those big swing. Most front clients get double digit gains in their conversion rates. If you go to a chief marketing officer and you say, hey, I can get you a 20 to 30% increase from the traffic you're already getting, that tends to get them very excited.

Ken Lempit:
Some of the KPIs they're reporting on that numerator swing makes a big difference.

Sahil Patel:
Yeah. Change the numerator.

Ken Lempit:
All of a sudden the KPIs look a lot different and like it or not, somebody's going to ask you for how many people did certain things on your website. It's really interesting. In our business, we're leaning in toward trying to help sales create more meaningful conversations, we're not so much looking to the specificity of a download being attribution point, but you got to get it somewhere. You have to generate the conversation somehow, so ultimately it's going to be the salespeople are going to call based on some amount of activity on the website. I think it's really important.

Let's dig in on some of the lessons learned. You have more than 30,000 sites that you've evaluated for what they did and what made a winner. Can you give some of the specifics? I mean, you shared with me when we did our prep that there are certain things that definitely drive difference. For example, I think we shared with you that we had a bad technique that we felt was important, the homepage hero video, right?

Sahil Patel:
The video, yeah,

Ken Lempit:
Homepage hero video, so let's kill the video, but let's kill it with data not kindness.

Sahil Patel:
Correct. By the way, video can be very powerful, but it is often cannibalistic, especially if you lead with video. We often tell our clients, and when I say tell our clients, we will say, we should run an experiment. Let half your traffic have the video. If you love the video, put it right on the homepage right where it is. And then half the people just see a really beautiful static picture of your product, and then put the video below the fold. And so let's talk about why this works. Your high intent audience, what you want them to is quickly say, I'm in the right place now, I'm going to take an action. The challenge when you put the video in the spotlight is that YouTube has trained everyone to see that little play button and you hit play, and when you finish watching the video, your reservoir of attention is lower than when you started and you're off track, distracted. Your brain craves images because it can process images faster than words. That's why it wants to watch that video.

But if you have a picture, and it needs to be a really great picture, it should be that wow moment in your product or your service, whatever it is, they can look at it and go, hey, I'm in the right place. I'm going to convert. Now, here's the thing, not everyone come to your homepage is ready to do that, they're going to scroll. So maybe below the fold where it's out of the distraction zone for your high intent. You want your medium intent, low intent on, they need to check you out.

Think about the difference between you go to a store... Now, of course, most people buy online, but Ken, you and I are old enough where we probably did a lot of our shopping in our lives by actually going to a physical store. If you go in the store and you know wanted jeans today, you go to the jeans, maybe even know what kind of jeans and you try them on, you buy. But if you're not sure, you're going to browse, you're going to look, you're going to walk around, gee, maybe I want a jacket, maybe I a shirt, maybe I want both. You're that lower intent audience. For them, let them watch a video because they need to educate themselves. It's great. The video's super helpful. That's accretive to your conversion process.

Ken Lempit:
This is taking some of the fundamentals that we learned about landing pages when that became our thing, which is as few distractions as possible.

Sahil Patel:
For high intent traffic, as few distractions as possible.

Ken Lempit:
But don't give them navigation choices you don't want them to make on a landing page.

Sahil Patel:
Yes, those are escape doors and once you walk through that door-

Ken Lempit:
You're gone.

Sahil Patel:
...you might not come back in.

Ken Lempit:
So it makes a lot of sense when you put it in context like that. Also, I think the fact is so much of the go home traffic is pretty high intent. They're searching for you even by name sometimes. I think a lot of our clients, 30, 40, 50% of that traffic is by name, so why make them work too hard to do the thing we want them to do? So that's a great one.

Sahil Patel:
Let's build on that. I want to give everyone who's listening take one more thing they can take home and act on right away. It's an easy thing you can do with your team. Take your company's home page, right click on it and choose Google Translate, it's built into the Chrome browser, and choose a language that no one on your team speaks. Maybe choose Farsi or Hindi or Arabic. I think you probably have a largely English-speaking audience, Ken, so that's why I'm choosing those, and some of those are the languages spoken in my home growing up. Pick that. Then take your website, show it to five people that don't know you, five friends, and just say, what do you think this company does? What do you think they make? Now they're never going to get it exactly, but if they can't at least put you in a category, probably a sign you're relying too much on the copywriting and not enough on the imagery. And just come back to your brain processes images faster than words. You want to give your audience that instantaneous like, okay, I'm remotely in the right place.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, we call that cognitive load here.

Sahil Patel:
Yeah, cognitive load. I was trying to stay away from jargon. I love it. That's the exact term.

Ken Lempit:
But especially when the audience... We do some work that targets elders and we have to be cognizant of that. We have to make sure that our communication is so simple to understand. But that's a great exercise. I love it.

When we did our prep, you had this idea that you talked about of quickly addressing the problem of diminishing returns on marketing. Is this more for new marketing leaders that come in or is this something that we should all be looking at? If you're trying to rethink your marketing effort, this is where when you look at investment over time, definitely things don't always work forever, right?

Sahil Patel:
Correct.

Ken Lempit:
So how do you even recognize diminishing returns, and then what do you do about that? I think people might be pretty terrified that their efforts might be yielding less.

Sahil Patel:
First, let's all just embrace and accept that diminishing returns are part of life. I think the first fallacy to puncture is that as you scale your business and you get big, you can just kind of do more of what you're doing and get more out of it, and it's a dream I think we all aspire to and we all wish were true. I think the reality suggests otherwise. That's number one.

Number two examples in the marketing sphere. So one is let's take paid search advertising, Google pay-per-click as a proxy for paid search. Let's say you're spending $20,000 a month on paid search. I think for most of our audience, if they spent another 20,000, they wouldn't get double the number of conversions or leads. Doubling your spend. That's what we mean by diminishing returns, right? At some point, you're topped out and you've gotten everything you can get out of a particular initiative or a campaign or a channel. So that's just to give everyone a real concrete example because I would guess most CMOs CEOs especially in B2B, SaaS are spending something on paid search or paid social or something to get traffic. So that's the first thing.

Now, I'll relate that to maybe what we do or how Spiralyze looks at the world, which is, whatever thing you do, whether it's SEO, SEM, conversion rate optimization, account-based marketing, you first pick the low-hanging fruit... Actually, I take it back. First you do a proof of concept, then if it works, you pick the low-hanging fruit and you want to get as much out of the low-hanging fruit for as long as you can. And for some things that might be years. For some things, it may be quarters. Once you get the low-hanging fruit, then you get those incremental wins, and at some point it peters out and you should lower your investment and say, hey, we're now in maintenance mode. We've tapped out this channel. We don't want to give it up, we need to keep doing something with it, but we need complimentary avenues.

So what I tell most of my clients is... I don't want to turn this into an infomercial for Spiralyze. Our clients in the first 90 days get a 30% lift from their website, and in the next year we'll get them another 30%. And we don't make a lot of promises after the first year. By the way, we have many clients that work with us for multiple years, but we tell them upfront, there is some point where you get diminishing returns and your incremental dollars are spent elsewhere than with us. It's not three months from now, it might be three years from now, it might be six months from now. You be the judge of when that's happening.

Ken Lempit:
I think this is a really important peer management skill for marketing leaders, they have to train and coach the people that are going to judge their success that things don't last forever. Because those KPIs that they're forced to report, kind of going back to an earlier part of the conversation, they're going to change. And if they're being asked to report by tactic or campaign, they're going to have to talk to the fact that, hey, how come Google search isn't doing what it used to do? And it may just very well be, we've got as much share of voice as we should have, there's only so much juice to squeeze from this piece of fruit and got to move on to other things. And I think we've seen where that's not done and it doesn't always work out so well.

I want to ask you one other kind of style question in terms of marketing. You talked about you like to see your clients make bold claims on their website and you make some bold claims, right? Talk about, hey, you're going to get 30% in 90 days. It's going to happen. Can you give some examples of software clients strategy here on bold claims that you think have worked really well?

Sahil Patel:
Happy to do so, and I want to make it specific, easy to digest. I think a great thing in B2B SaaS is to have a quantitative claim because it makes it specific, it makes it credible, and often I see something like this, the best onboarding software for HR professionals, best in class or building remote teams, I'm just picking a software category, rated highly by Gartner. By the way, it's great. If you've got the rating from Gartner, congratulations, but by all means, brag about it. There's no specific benefit to that. Now, if you said something like this, onboard new employees 30% faster. And I'm an HR professional, I now have a very specific thing -- do I want that? Is that meaningful? Does it move the needle for me? Of course, you got to walk the talk. Back it up.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, so sure they have certain business problems that they can see the value in changing the numbers on. So whether it's speed of onboarding, retention, success, retention after a year-

Sahil Patel:
Improve retention by 20%

Ken Lempit:
Sure.

Sahil Patel:
Find new hires in three days.

Ken Lempit:
Hey, did you hear that ZipRecruiter ad? You get qualified candidates the first day. So there, exactly to the point. We can keep going. I hope people who have listened this far felt they got some real value. I think I did. I enjoyed the conversation.

Sahil Patel:
Thank you for the warm words. This has been really fun.

Ken Lempit:
It has. If people want to learn more about your company or get in touch with you, how can they do that?

Sahil Patel:
Two things. One, go to Spiralyze.com. Two, find me on LinkedIn. I post every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7:30 AM Eastern. Always something quick that you can digest in about 10 seconds and often with a video that's two minutes or shorter. It gives you something very tactical and specific that you could use on your website.

Ken Lempit:
That's fabulous. Thanks so much. Thanks for being a great guest. If folks want to reach me, I'm on LinkedIn/in/KenLempit. My SaaS demand generation agency, Austin Lawrence is at AustinLawrence.com. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. And Sahil Patel, thank you so much for being on SaaS Backwards.

Sahil Patel:
Thank you, Ken. Really enjoyed it.