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There's a great quote from a 2020 Hacker News thread:
Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible, or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost twenty years, and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
I keep coming back to this quote.
In software, it's so easy to over-engineer things, to ask "what if?", to try to prepare for every eventuality.
But more and more, I'm realizing, for most things, you just need to walk up and hit the ball.
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Hi, I'm Justin Jackson. Here, I'm sharing brief thoughts on building a better life, bootstrapping, improving society, growing older in tech, being a dad...
There's this great quote from a 2020 Hacker News thread. Goes like this. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible, or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost twenty years, and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
Justin Jackson:I've been thinking about this quote a lot lately, and I think it's so relevant now in the age of AI, but I think it's just always been true. And that is in software companies especially, but I think in every kind of organization, it's possible to over engineer things, to ask what if, oh, we got to prepare for this eventuality. We got to prepare for this. Maybe there's a way for us to orchestrate this or tool this in the right way, or, you know, create the perfect automated context for this. And increasingly, I'm noticing that just going up and hitting the ball is the best approach for so many things.
Justin Jackson:Not everything, but so many things. Let me give you an example. So I send out a welcome email to every transistor customer. And after a while, Michael, who's on our customer success team said, hey, you know, I'm willing to do Zoom calls with whoever signs up and wants one. And we decided to run it as an experiment.
Justin Jackson:Now, we could have, you know, over orchestrated this. We could have been like, well, let's just make sure there's a request form and like everybody's going has to get vetted and, you know, maybe we need to figure out the perfect way for Michael to do these walk throughs and all we did was we set up a Zoom account, and we set up a SavvyCal link for Michael. And I just put it in the PS of every welcome email. So at the end of the email, I said, cheers, Justin Jackson. And then I said, PS, Michael on our customer success team is happy to do a Zoom call with you if you'd like.
Justin Jackson:That's it. And we just ran it as an experiment. What what would happen? You know? And, yeah, there was some questions, like maybe he would get inundated with calls, and it would be overwhelming for him.
Justin Jackson:Maybe, you know, nobody would sign up. Maybe there's all sorts of maybes, but we just decided to walk up and hit the ball. And we did it for three months, and then six months. I think we've been doing it for over six months now. Well, it's been one of the best experiments we've ever run.
Justin Jackson:Even with a $19 a month customer, we've seen upgrades increase, we've seen LTV increase. We've seen referrals increase. Even potential customers that don't end up signing up for Transistor still refer Transistor and say they had an incredible experience. Lots of folks have started mentioning these onboarding calls with Michael in their reviews of us on Trustpilot, and on LinkedIn, and anywhere they're referring people publicly. And now we're just like, oh, well, maybe the next iteration of this is Michael does a follow-up call six months after somebody has been running their account for a while.
Justin Jackson:And we might put a few variables on that, know, if they're on the $49 plan or up, the $99 plan or up. If, you know, they don't have a Gmail address, we might add a few filters. But the idea is that he's just gonna do these calls with them, and he's going to just invite them with a simple line. Hey, wondering if I can show you what's new in Transistor. And what we've learned is so many people, even though we're sending email updates, and we're sending email newsletters, and we're sending updates in the change log, and updates on the in the dashboard, people don't realize that there's new features.
Justin Jackson:People don't realize that we can do what we can do. And a lot of folks, when you get them on a phone call, are willing to upgrade. They're excited to upgrade. You show them the new features and go, hey, I don't know if you knew this, but Transistor does video podcast hosting and distribution. Oh, I didn't know that.
Justin Jackson:I don't know if you knew this, but Transistor does automatic transcription for all your episodes. Oh, I didn't know you did that. And Michael's been able to get folks on the phone and get them to upgrade. And the old thinking on this, and again, this is why this is such a perfect example, is the old thinking is like, it's just like golf. It's just like, people go, oh, well, you can't do it that way because, know, this this and this, and and, you know, okay, but sure, but what's when you just walk up and hit the ball, you learn some things.
Justin Jackson:You stop dealing with what ifs, and you don't over orchestrate anything, you just do the work, and see what the results are. And what we've learned is a, Michael has capacity for this. So we're already paying him to do a job, and he has capacity for this. So okay, he has capacity. Michael is basically able to gay give a Zoom call to anybody that wants one.
Justin Jackson:So he has enough availability in his schedule that he's able to do this for anybody who wants one. And three, even for a $19 a month customer, even for a, you know, $49 a month customer. These are profitable because they don't take that long. They don't cost us that much more. And we've seen all of these other benefits.
Justin Jackson:By doing things that don't scale, and not overthinking it, we're getting immediate benefits that actually do scale. If you have three to five phone calls with customers every week, they start referring you more. So one phone call might result in five referrals. One phone call might result in them upgrading and increase LTV by $2,000. One phone call might result in them changing jobs down the road and recommending transistor, and we get a bigger contract.
Justin Jackson:One phone call might mean people posting on social media that they had an incredible experience with us, and then us getting a bunch of customers from it. And I'm noticing this, you know, in my own life, especially with AI. It's like, oh, wow, we could build this and automate this and build this whole machine that automatically tests this and does this and whatever. And there's just so many things where I've noticed where it just it just makes sense to just walk up and do the work. Walk up and hit the ball.
Justin Jackson:One more example before I go is, you know, right now, an enormous amount of our trials are coming from AI. They're coming from people asking chat GPT, AI overviews on Google, Gemini, Claude, all those. And the way that I've learned to augment that, and to actually get recommended by LLMs, is to just manually go to all of those places, and ask questions like, what is the best podcast hosting platform you would recommend? And then the LM's answer. And then I also get my friends to do that and for and have them take screenshots and send it to me.
Justin Jackson:This is very manual work. Once I get those results, I start to see the places that it looks like ChatGPT and Gemini are pulling from, and I go and update those things. So I might ask a customer to go and leave a good review in a Reddit thread. I might ask a customer to leave us a review on Trustpilot if it's pulling from there. I might update a blog post on our site.
Justin Jackson:I might go and do a YouTube video, which is a lot of LLMs are pulling from there about that particular query. Right? That's podcast hosting for video, for example. Well, this is just very manual work. And, yeah, maybe I could come up with an automated process for it.
Justin Jackson:But actually, in practice, the best solution is just to walk up and hit the ball.