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00:00 - Chris (Host)
What's up, founders? Welcome back to the Startup Founder Roadmap. I'm your host, coach Chris, super excited to have Matt Wolak here on the podcast. He is a SaaS expert, a startup guy, one of the people I couldn't wait to have on because, as somebody who's building my startup, I always like to have conversations to kind of gauge my progress against the information expertise they have. It's been helping me a lot. So, matt, welcome to the show.
00:25 - Matt (Host)
Thanks, chris, super happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:27 - Chris (Host)
So, when it comes to you and SaaS companies, what made you want to work with software? You know, because I think I always get a different answer, for this is one of my favorite questions to ask. Some people say it's because of money. Some people say it's just easy, like what made you get into SaaS in the first place?
00:45 - Matt (Host)
Yeah, that's a good question. I actually fell into it. So it was back in the mid 2000s, before SaaS was really a big thing. There were only a couple other SaaS companies and one of my buddies said hey, I'm starting this new company, my wife has an idea and I'm going to build it. I'm going to be the tech guy, she's going to be the kind of expert in the space and I'm going to. We want you to be the marketing and sales guy, and so I'm like okay, I'll try it, let's see what happens. Never done software came from the hospitality space and it was really interesting to really kind of dive in really with no idea of what I was doing. No guidelines, no mentor, nothing and really the first several months and years were a struggle. It was really really difficult to try and figure out what to do because you know it was in the early SaaS days. There was no LinkedIn to go look at everybody else talking about their.
01:37
SaaS company. Nobody had had a SaaS company.
01:39 - Chris (Host)
So nobody didn't have an expert or anything. Yeah, no building in public.
01:44 - Matt (Host)
That was not a thing. No blogs or anything. Yeah, no building in public.
01:46 - Chris (Host)
That was not a thing. No blogs or anything. Twitter wasn't popping yet Nothing. You just were out there figuring it out.
01:51 - Matt (Host)
It's so true, so true, exactly. And figuring it out was not happening. It was rough. We were not selling anything for a while, and then a couple sales here and there and it wasn't happening. So I figured, hey, I've got to solve this. We can't let this thing go. We put a lot of effort into building this product and and launching it. We can't just, you know, make it a, make it something that dies on the vine, and so really worked at trying to figure out how to get this process just right and attended seminars on sales and looked at all kinds of different articles and pulled things from here and there and realized software is just different and trying to incorporate old sales skills from other industries into software doesn't work. I have a lot of clients who come to me and they say, hey, I used to be able to sell in this other industry, but I get into software. I have no idea how to do this.
02:42
I don't know why my tactics aren't working here in the SaaS world and it's so true, and so I had to kind of figure it out the hard way, which is frustrating.
02:52 - Chris (Host)
Point of it's different Cause that is one thing I have noticed is like it's just so much different from selling, consulting or selling digital products. Like I've been making money online for years and not I won't say all of them were super easy, but I could kind of fairly figure it out. With SAS it's been like a year run of like trying this and trying that little progress. Like nothing can compare to this in terms of difficulty. It's just a different beast.
03:24 - Matt (Host)
So true, so true. And I was going through that same exact process, trying to figure it out myself, chris, and it's really frustrating because you think, oh, this is definitely going to work. Nope, that didn't work. And then you do something and you think it's the right thing, it's not. But then you realize later, like two or three years later, that that was the right thing and you just stopped too early. And so how do you know when? Oh, should I keep going even though I'm getting no results, because I don't want to stop too early, or should I pivot and do something totally different? It was so frustrating for me to try and work through this process. Fortunately I did. It took several years to actually figure it out. Fortunate that we were able to keep the company afloat and that company actually took off.
04:05
What I did was I put my process in place, kind of took all the ideas from all the different sources, blended it together From my experience as well, I kind of added some tidbits and a dash of this, dash of that and came out with my process that made it so that we could actually sell, we could grow, we could scale and we took off. We hit Inc 500 multiple years in a row that's the fastest growing companies in America and eventually exited that company. I did it again, started a new company with a new product, a new market, new team and had the same experience Great process that I now had. I was able to plug in. So, instead of all of that struggle period, I skipped over the struggle and just went right to the growth. We sold that company in just two years. So when you have the right thing.
04:52
It works really really well.
04:54 - Chris (Host)
Yeah, I can see that man. I think that's kind of where I get caught up in this, where I think a lot of founders should invest in learning and just being around other people who've done that Cause even I think you can even learn from the people who have exited businesses, even if you yourself don't want to exit, because building a business that you can exit from means you have a company where it can run without you essentially and I think that's the real goal that everybody has under the make all the money or the popularity and fame and attention what most of us really want is a company that can run and we just show up a couple of days out of the week, a couple hours here and there for the big stuff, and they can just run, it can just flow. I think that's what most people actually want.
05:41 - Matt (Host)
Yeah, that's so true when you get to that scale and that repeatability and something that's actually happening. And yeah, with software it's pretty cool because you can get to that scenario where, hey, you kind of step back, maybe you're the chairman of the board, you've got somebody else running it and doing all the things, but you're collecting big time paychecks every month Great. But software is also unique in that the multiples on an exit are tremendous. So I've had a lot of people who said, yeah, I was going to do that and just kind of collect, but then these people came in and offered me a hundred million dollars. What was I supposed to say? And if you get I mean if you get your company to a good revenue number, that can absolutely happen and have a have a nice exit. But you know you could also just hold onto it. So it's. It's kind of cool how you have multiple options when you get things right.
06:24 - Chris (Host)
Yeah, I agree, man. So let's get into some of these tactics. Man, I love the video on your website of attract, engage, close and scale. I went and watched. It was super interesting, because something I've used for all of my brands online is simply attract people, nurture them with some kind of content and then have a conversion mechanism Super, super simple. It's worked for me for years. How does something like that translate into SaaS? What's that process? Let's break this down.
06:55 - Matt (Host)
Yeah, good question. So that's exactly one of my models and that's one of the things that really helped us take off is just kind of breaking down each piece of what we do with a prospect and then a customer so that we really understand it fully and so attract. That's where we're generating the lead, that's where we're getting people to be interested in us, see that this is a product that can solve their problems. So, with marketing, obviously step number one is you have to know your market, and one of the things I love that you said right as we started was you've been having lots of conversations with people in your market.
07:26
I have a podcast myself and people that I bring on are SaaS CEOs who've had success and I ask them hey, how'd you get started? What was it that did it? They said, hey, we just went and talked with a whole ton of people who would be ideal prospects with us. But really more of asking them about what problems are you going through, what are some of the key pains, what are your goals, all that kind of stuff led them to really fully understand what they needed to build so you could make your development happen the right way. It got them to realize exactly how to market to those people using the right lingo and the right voice, got them to realize exactly how to sell to them with the right process.
08:00
And that is kind of the catalyst to everything. Have those conversations with people in your market and that's really going to accelerate the companies that I see struggle. I'll ask him, cause I have a bunch of clients come to me to say, hey, we're struggling, how do we improve our sales, how do we grow? And I ask them right away Well, have you identified your ICP, who your ideal customer profiles? And if you had 50 conversations with people in that exact fit?
08:25 - Chris (Host)
and they'll say, no, we haven't done that yet Okay.
08:27 - Matt (Host)
Well, start there, because you're going to uncover a whole bunch of stuff that you had no idea. Uh, is is happening and people are thinking about that. You're going to be able to market to and start closing deals.
08:39 - Chris (Host)
What I do for my attraction strategy and this this, this helps me a is I just interview the people on the podcast. Like you said, it's one of the ways my bigger agency that I have that's my most profitable business is with podcasting, and part of what I think most founders should do is have a podcast, because if you can sit down and talk to your ICP two or three times a week, different people continuously and build an audience at the same time, it's just. It's such an easy way to build a brand Like it's easy to build a brand and it's like you're doing market research at the same time.
09:20
I don't think there's an easier way to do this, because reaching out on Facebook or LinkedIn is fine, but that just gets kind of tiresome. Versus hey, let's do a 30-minute interview. You tell me your story.
09:32 - Matt (Host)
And then after the interview.
09:33 - Chris (Host)
we ask questions. We had a call at the green room and we just talked for 10 minutes about what they're currently working on, what they're struggling with Like that little tidbit of time. Oh man, it's completely changed my life.
09:46 - Matt (Host)
It's so true. I mean, when you have a podcast, you open yourself up to so many opportunities and I've had my show for several years now and I've met so many incredible people across the industry. I mean top CEOs and people who are movers and shakers and it's amazing that I've been able to have these conversations with them. And you're right, I'm soaking up so much learning. I've got people who've come to me with marketing and sales and product development and team growth and HR and all kinds of different things that I've learned about the industry from these experts. But more than that, like you said, once you have a podcast with somebody, you kind of become buddies, like they trust you, they've had a good conversation with you, they believe in you, and so if they are perfect for your product, it's easy to kind of invite them to take a look at it and it really becomes very simple from that point forward and it's so cool kind of this community that you can create through podcasting. I've definitely seen that and one thing that I actually recommend with my clients is also go out and get yourself on some shows. Go out and be a guest on some of the great shows in your industry.
10:51
Identify which shows are good shows with good hosts in your industry. And go be a guest Because, let's say, you're just starting a company and nobody really knows you, and then all of a sudden you're a guest on some great show, like I am right now with Chris. People identify with that person. People see chris as this awesome, amazing guy that they trust. But now here's this new guy, matt. Well, guess what? They're on the same level. They're having a side-by-side conversation. They must be on the same level, which means matt is elevated to chris's level, which is awesome. So if you can do that host your own show and have great guests then people will identify with you though people from their audience. And same thing go get on other shows and all of a sudden you're everywhere and people see you as one of the subject matter experts yeah, and you could just build on that.
11:33 - Chris (Host)
Like the reputation you build, it just continues to just grow and I I think that's part of kind of the nurture strategy for me too, because I think that next step after you attract people is to build that trust, get them to like you, show proof of what you've done For me. I use content to do that as well. But how do I do this and integrate my SaaS product into it, like if I'm doing an attraction with the podcast, guesting in my own show, and I'm building a platform, making connections? What does the nurture strategy look like when you're a SaaS founder?
12:06 - Matt (Host)
Yeah, I think it's still important. You can absolutely do that and I've had several SaaS founders on my show who've been able to build their audience because of it. One of the things we think about is I have to push the product, I have to push the product. But really, if you push your own personal brand and talk about how you can help and the stuff that you've gone through and the results you've helped people achieve, how that happened is kind of secondary. They just know that, hey, if I work with Chris, I'm going to be able to get this result. How it happens, nobody really wants to know that or needs to know that at the initial stage, but they can say, hey, I better talk to Chris, because all these people talk to Chris and all of a sudden, they're getting great results. Well, let me talk to Chris. Boom, I realized, oh, this is cool tool that they use and they implement this and they're good to go Awesome. So the personal brand is so powerful. But so many times we think, oh, I need to push the product and you push the company and we put out stuff about our company brand.
12:57
Two bad things with that. Number one is the algorithms of all the different social accounts Twitter, linkedin, all of them. They don't care about the company brand. They will actually throttle back. Like, if you go onto LinkedIn and you post one post from your company brand and one post from your personal brand, your personal brand is going to get three, four, five times the engagement, not just because of people, but because of the algorithm itself doesn't push it.
13:21
But the second biggest reason is people buy from people. People trust people, people trust people, people believe in people and they can come to understand you and get you and connect with you. You know, tesla has like 15 million followers on Twitter. Elon Musk has like almost 200 million followers on Twitter. People connect with people, not with brands, and so we think we need to push the brand. And yes, obviously you're going to have some marketing for the brand, but if you can go out and build your own personal brand, talking about these challenges that you faced or the people in the market are facing, and then talk about results that people have gotten, how they've overcome those challenges, well, just a very natural introduction of the product is going to get people wanting it and needing it.
14:02 - Chris (Host)
So, in terms of tactics, would you say it's good to have more of a cadence for posting on social and focus on that with your personal brand? Or is it like hey, set up a two month email sequence that you send out to people as they subscribe to your list?
14:18 - Matt (Host)
I think it all works together.
14:19
So you can absolutely post on your personal brand, build that account up and I love lead magnets, so a lead magnet would be some sort of value that you're sharing and once you've built an audience, that becomes pretty straightforward.
14:30
I've done this on Twitter, I've done it on LinkedIn, but basically you come up with some sort of document or spreadsheet, something that gives you the capability to I don't know get people more value, get people to understand what you're about and how you can help.
14:46
And if you're able to share something that like like say, the five biggest mistakes new founders make, like something that you might share with your audience, the five biggest marketing mistakes podcasters make, and if you have something like that that you can share with your audience, that you give away for free, for the cost of an email, now you're able to start to get them some value, get them some help. And once they see that you've helped them with that little bit, once they've kind of put their themselves out and trusted you and you delivered, you gave them some good value, now they're willing to trust you further. What else do you have? Oh well, I have this product that, if you want to go to the next level. This thing is super cool. You just plug it in, you're good to go, and so you can take that personal brand, build that audience even further, build the trust and lead them right into the product I have.
15:33 - Chris (Host)
I have kind of an idea, something I've been working on for a couple of months. I can't wait to get your feedback on this. I was thinking because online courses and workshops and all of that stuff it's just so prevalent right now. Like everybody knows what it is, people love them. I'm wondering what that would look like as a good nurture strategy, Right. So, instead of the lead magnet being just one simple thing, what if it was like a full on course, like three hours of content? You know you get access to this community or whatever it is, and obviously throughout the course, in every module, most of a lot of the lessons you're using the SAS right now in time, people get to see, wow, he's using this software over and over again in this course. Maybe I should check that out. I was just thinking that could be really really huge in that space.
16:27 - Matt (Host)
Oh so huge Having a mini course. I've had several of my clients set this up and it works brilliantly. So you can actually have that lead magnet. You kind of build the whole funnel right. They get to know you, they get that lead magnet, the free guide or whatever that leads them to the next step of needing a mini course. They do that two or three hour course and in that course it's a, it's a, it's automated videos that you're giving. By the way, when you do this, they download, it's automatically delivered to them. They're watching you that you recorded months ago and in that you're going through the tool, say, okay, if you're going to solve this, you need this thing.
17:00 - Chris (Host)
But watch how I do this.
17:01 - Matt (Host)
Boom, boom, boom of people I know are doing oh, by the way, if you want that tool, here's a link. Go grab it and it just becomes part of the process. It's not like you're pushing a thing, You're helping them. And this is one of the biggest things that I tell my clients help, don't sell, help don't sell. And if you help and help people pass their challenges and help them to their goals, then you're not really selling, You're just getting them to a better point.
17:22 - Chris (Host)
So you advise your clients to make the mini course free as well. So it's like the free lead magnet and then a free mini course, and then go and get the product. Wow, it's paid.
17:31 - Matt (Host)
So here's why. So make it a very low amount paid. So free lead magnet. Make it low amount. So, for example, my mini course is paid. It's $37, right, but they get the free thing. Then the next step is small amount. And the cool thing is there's a psychology that once somebody pays you once, even for a little amount, they're much more willing to pay you for a big amount. Once they've opened their wallet to you one time, and it's just a little bit, if you deliver, if you give them good value, they're willing to go a lot more. So, for example, within my coaching funnel, same thing. We have a lead magnet that leads to a mini course. I told you 37 bucks. Then after that, the coaching is thousands of dollars. But so many people have done that and gone through each step. That it's. It works so well and it works great for products as well.
18:17 - Chris (Host)
Wow, yeah, see, I think for a lot of people that would help. A lot of SaaS founders need something like a mini course, because you can just deliver so much more information than like always trying to get on demo calls or trying to do webinars when you're not really good at them. I just think that we have to kind of think outside of the box now with the SaaS companies, with all these brands, because it's just so much stuff out there. True, I'm thinking, and now we have to just do things differently.
18:46 - Matt (Host)
It's so true. I saw a mini course delivered beautifully by an AI writer basically this tool that writes articles for you and stuff and basically they had a lead magnet. That kind of was talking about AI. So people always download that because AI is hot right now. It led into a mini course where you could learn about how to use AI effectively and what prompts to use, and in that, they used their AI writer and so you're saying, okay, well, I need this. And they showed results of hey, here's someone who used this and did this same prompt and put it into this writer and got these articles. And now they're making zillions of dollars, whatever it is. So you can absolutely set up that same type of funnel and it works great.
19:23 - Chris (Host)
I love that man. I love how we're going through the whole process. Guys, now we'll get to the actual selling part. So, out of all the conversion mechanisms that you've used to get those customers from that free tier where they don't know you yet, now they're at the end of the road and they're ready to buy, what's your go-to conversion strategy?
19:43 - Matt (Host)
So it depends on your price point. But if your price point is 75 to 100 bucks a month or more in most cases you're going to have a much better conversion rate if you talk to them, if you actually have a conversation. I know the dream is if you're a SaaS founder, oh man, I can just sit back and I don't have to do anything. People just start buying. That sounds amazing. Having it be self-serve Guess what? That doesn't really happen easily in the real world. Even companies that are self-serve now and you hear of big ones like Asana or something like that well, they started as actually talking to their prospects and their customers and they were able to get it to a self-serve, a PLG model, and so I'm really big on.
20:21
If you have a price point that's a hundred bucks a month or Demos have been shown to be the number one most powerful way to convert your prospects, and if you don't have a good demo, that's the number one way to kick them out of your funnel and get them to hate you and not realize they need you. So we want to make a demo that's really, really powerful, that takes people from. Hey, I just kind of want to see what this product can do. That's how they enter the call, but they leave the call saying whoa, I had no idea I was so far behind and that this thing is going to accelerate me. I need this now, and the best sellers doing demos are doing that and they're getting buyers to that level of emotion so that they can close a deal really fast. If people don't have emotion, if they don't feel like they need something, they're not going to take action on it. We've got to get them emotional.
21:08 - Chris (Host)
Yeah, man, that's interesting. I didn't think demos were so well. I guess it does their price point. That makes sense. It actually makes a lot of sense because if people are going to pay more, they'll have more questions, they'll be more engaged and they have to think about it more. Versus if it's 20, 30, even 50 bucks, it's like oh, here you go. But when it's a hundred plus, it's like now we have to think this out. If it's a B2B SaaS, then I got to talk to the team about this. If we're adding a $300 a month subscription, wow, that makes a lot of sense. So can we go into what makes a demo?
21:42 - Matt (Host)
good If you take it to the extreme. Yeah, so if you take it to the extreme, you think about that. Are you sure it's a hundred? Well, we've done a lot of studies on this. But actually take it to the extreme.
21:53
Nobody's clicking around buying a $5,000 a month product. They're not like, ooh, this looks neat, click, I'm going to buy that for $5,000 a month. Nobody's doing that and nobody's really spending time on demos for a $5 a month product. You're not going to want to spend any time on somebody who's just going to pay five bucks. And so we have to find what that break point is, and it's usually around a hundred dollars, depending on the industry and such. But once you're above that, you absolutely have to do a demo. And to give you an idea, let's say you have a free trial and there's no demo process.
22:24
Free trials convert across SaaS at about one to 2% of the number of people who enter your free trials. If you put a hundred people into the free trial, one or two of them's eventually going to sign up for your product, which feels weird, and everybody's like, well, we've got a great product, I'm sure they'll love it. Yes, it would be amazing if it converted higher, but it's very rare to convert more than that. Some people do get four to 5%. One to 2% is average. However, demos just the minimum close rate.
22:49
On a demo when you talk to somebody, the absolute minimum meaning you're not really growing, but at least you're not dying is 20%. So it's literally 10 times the conversion when you talk to them versus when you just try and push them through automatically. And if you think about it, it makes sense. They can look in your eyes, they can trust you, they can believe in you, they can hear it in the tone of your voice. You can explain things specifically about them instead of just here's some videos. Maybe one of these matches what you need. You can say, hey, what's your need? Oh, I need this. Cool, let's talk exactly about that thing, and it becomes much more powerful to the buyer. So demos are impactful.
23:23 - Chris (Host)
Wow. So let me ask you this If somebody is a new founder, they're starting off, they're building their company, they're excited, they got the MVP ready and they're ready to try to go to market, essentially, how many demos should this person be doing to measure right, because you said 20% conversion rate is great. So what's that demo amount that you feel comfortable with in terms of conversions to where you can say, okay, we have product market fit at this point?
23:48 - Matt (Host)
So when you're getting started, the conversion rate is going to be really tough. There's a lot of reasons for that. One is you may not fully know your market yet. You may not know exactly what they want to hear. There's some you know, trial and error in terms of should I say that, Should I say that, and likely if you haven't been trained on how exactly to give a demo. There's exact processes.
24:07
We deliver this and it takes several weeks to get this implemented with our clients, but there are exact ways of getting clients to feel really emotional, getting those prospects to say, holy cow, we need this now. Versus hey, this was nice, Thanks a lot, Really appreciate it. No, we don't want that. We want emotion. We want people to say yes. If you don't know that and you don't know exactly what to do, then it's going to be really tough in the early days. In fact, we've done studies on this. We have a process called the perfect deal process. It's a demo specific process and basically it outlines 40 things that you need to do in your demos that help get the buyer emotional enough to close. The problem is across software, and this doesn't include just the founders, but even experienced sales reps in software are only doing 16 out of 40, which means if you're not fully trained on this, you are missing most of what will get your buyer emotional enough to say, yes, I want this.
25:02 - Chris (Host)
Wow, that's impactful, man. That's making me think like demo training, cause that's something that I never see talked about in like the SaaS community. Well, people will say it it's important, but nobody talks about what makes a good demo good when it comes to SaaS, and I think part of the problem is the demo trainings I've seen and I didn't like them, and it always felt like they would use the same webinar strategy that people use to sell courses and stuff, which I guess is understandable, but it like if I'm selling a SaaS product with a subscription, the price point is different. Selling the SaaS is way different from selling a course. It's not the same thing. So I don't think we can use the same exact process. It doesn't make sense to me.
25:44 - Matt (Host)
No, no, and if you actually do this right, it works really well. One of my clients, robbie, came to me with an 18% close rate. He was really frustrated about that. He knew he was below the 20% minimum threshold. It was a real struggle for them. We identified some things that he was missing that he just didn't know about and, of course, nobody knows about it. These are not intuitive, you have no idea and we implemented those. He updated that process and his demos and now he converts at 67%. Two out of every three person he talks to signs up and they do not have a cheap product. It's tens of thousands of dollars and he's converting two out of three. So if you have the right process and understand how to do a demo, I mean, it works. It's like gold.
26:24 - Chris (Host)
Wow, okay, okay, this is making a lot of sense. So we went through the attracting, the nurturing and even conversions. So what do you think are kind of the key elements to keeping those customers around? I got them signed up. They're paying users. Now I can kind of understand why churn is such a big deal in SaaS, because you almost feel like you've accomplished a goal. When you get them to buy and say yes especially if it's on a demo you get excited too. What are the things that you kind of tell your clients that help them keep their users on the platform?
26:55 - Matt (Host)
Yeah, great question and there's a lot of things around that. So churn is actually impacted by so many different parts of the company and that's why it's a big deal. Obviously your product, because people say, well, you have to have a great product to sell. That's wrong. I can teach you to sell a very mediocre product and you can sell great if you have the right process. But once they're in, if they don't like the product, they're going to leave. So we don't want to sell a bad product, we want a good product. So you got to have a good product. You got to have a good service around the product. You want to make sure that you're taking care of people's needs. But actually what I like to do is because I'm very, but my clients understand that churn can actually be impacted by your sales process. For example, if you sell to the wrong person, even if they finally agree to buy, which that'll be a tough deal because they will feel like it's not right for them and they may not buy. But even if they do buy, then once they get in, they're going to think, oh man, this product's not good, it doesn't help me here, it doesn't help me there and the team doesn't know what I'm talking about. So not good, it doesn't help me here, it doesn't help me there, and the team doesn't know what I'm talking about. So they'll think it's a terrible company, a terrible product, but actually they're the wrong person for it. So they're going to tell the world hey, this thing sucks, it's terrible, but actually you sold the wrong buyer and because of that now they're shouting to the world how bad things are. So do not sell to the wrong person. That is a very bad negative.
28:07
The next thing that we can do in sales to help churn is don't oversell, don't sell all these amazing things that they're going to be able to do. If they can't do it, sell exactly. So it's called right selling. Sell the right thing. Don't try and exceed their expectations on the sales process and then under deliver on the actual product. And it's basically an old saying that everybody knows undersell, over deliver. The reason that that's an old saying is because it works really well get them to understand what the product can do. So one of the things people do is they sell vaporware.
28:39
Selling vaporware is the process of selling something your product can't do yet. But the development guy just told you that they're building in. It's going to happen. And somebody asked you hey, can you do this? And you're like, well, not yet. I'll just tell them, yes, they'll probably be in by the time they sign up.
28:55
And the reason I'm making fun of this is because I've done this and gotten burned bad. And it's a horrible feeling because they just told you this is coming in two weeks. You're like, well, you're not going to sign up for a couple of weeks, right, okay, yeah, we have it up in development, in QA, and they have to pull it back and it doesn't launch. And they're like, hey, you told me you could do this. Where is that? Uh, yeah, about that. Now that is a very upset customer. They're going to turn, they're going to hate you, they're going to hate the company. Not a good thing, so don't sell vaporware. So what I'm saying is, yes, we can fix churn with service and with product and all those things, but it really starts up front within the sales process. Let's do that right and let's make sure we can make the best possible chance of having a great retention rate.
29:37 - Chris (Host)
Man. This was a very interesting conversation. I've learned so much in this 30 minutes. It's making me think a lot about what I'm building and just my ideas and stuff, because I think if you know a lot of, I think to work in SaaS and to really have a successful company, you should have some baseline understanding of business. But I'm noticing that to be successful, you have to kind of push that to the side and be willing to learn about startups and SaaS specifically, because there are some fundamental elements of like how to sell and how to market, but everything in this space is like done at a different level. It's done in a different way. Like that's really the key thing I'm learning here is it's kind of the same method, but it's just you got to do a slightly different.
30:23 - Matt (Host)
So true, so true, and it was. It was a kind of a slap in the face to me and it took me a while to realize it, but once I did, we took off, sold multiple companies since then, many of my clients. I've had 23 exits from my clients who've been able to sell because they've learned this process, and so that's one thing I do is basically I host mastermind roundtables with software founders so that they can get together and chat about what their challenges are, and then somebody else can say, oh, we had that, here's how we fixed it. And basically I helped them through the problems and it's pretty cool to see somebody who goes from that struggle not understanding exactly what to do phase all the way to amazing success where they're so good that they can even help others. It's really cool.
31:01 - Chris (Host)
I love it, man, I love it. You keep mentioning this program, all your clients and stuff. You got to let the audience know where they can find it, because I'm pretty sure some people want to sign up.
31:08 - Matt (Host)
Yeah for sure. So we call it the SaaS Masterclass and basically what we do is go through exactly how to set up a SaaS marketing and sales process that generates incredible results. One of my clients, for example, paul. He's in the UK. He went from 26% close rate to 87% close rate. Another one of my clients, chris, sold for nine figures his company after they put this process in place.
31:32
So basically what we want to do is get you an understanding even from the very beginning. We have people start right when they start their company, so they make sure they get everything right from the beginning. They don't miss any great customers. So we have a combination. It's a three-prong approach. I give you a core curriculum which is a step-by-step of exactly how to implement your sales and marketing process for your SaaS company. This is only for B2B SaaS companies and then the core curriculum leads you right into the community. We have a community of 250 plus SaaS founders from around the world all B2B SaaS and we get together weekly in a round table so that we can talk about what we can fix, what we can adjust. We also bring in special guest speakers and we do breakdowns of demos live right in front of everybody. And then also coaching, so you'll have opportunities to meet with me one-on-one so I can personally help you through your struggles and get you results.
32:21 - Chris (Host)
I love that man, I love how thorough it is. I think that's perfect for a lot of founders, man. If you're a founder listening to this, you got to take advantage of work with somebody like Matt man. This is clearly somebody that has experience, the skills, the track record that's actually doing it and helping founders get to work, man. So, matt, thank you so much for being on the show. This was a perfect, perfect conversation.
32:44 - Matt (Host)
Thanks, Chris, for having me. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.