Full Transcript for Cracking the Conversion Code for your Product, with Chris Smith

lot of these one minute, two-minute, three minute, it's almost like that's the boiler room of the past, if you do the first part of the book, right. Which is the marketing that attracts high quality leads. Laurier: Yeah. And the balance of power is totally different when the buyer wants the product more than the product wants to sell to the buyer and the Bentley. One's a good example. when branding has done its job, Selling is so much easier because it's not Bentley versus Lexus or Bentley versus any other brand you've deliberately gone there. You're looking for Bentley, you're into it. You don't need to told why a Bentley is the right car for you. You kind of already know. Chris: You know what a lot of the leads that I call say at the beginning of our call, they say, "I've really been looking forward to our call." They say, that's me because I have actually planted it in their brain that I'm legit. I know my stuff. I'm approachable. I'm relatable. I'm a regular dude. That's just a dynamic that I know is possible. I know it's not the reality for everyone yet, but it's sort of a good reason to be willing to get pushed into the future. Laurier: Yeah, absolutely. The Conversion Code covers so much ground, but everything in it comes down to that one word in the title of the book: conversions. And that's a word in our listeners know a lot about it's something Many of us spent too much time trying to chase down and not " attract" the clients as you say in the subtitle of the book. A lot of your life's work has been around sales, most recently largely in the real estate industry. How has selling houses and real estate properties, which you talk about a lot in the book as well, different, and how is it the same as selling a physical product or a SaaS subscription? Chris: Well, it's interesting because my company Curaytor, we are a SaaS platform, you know, Software as a Service with add-ons. We think about things like our net retention rate, you know, MRR, which, a real estate agent wouldn't even know what that meant. They'd never think about it. We think about CAC. We think about MRR. We think about churn. Those are terms I'm in the trenches with weekly. Real estate agents, they don't use any of those terms. It's a different world. It's a different vernacular because they're selling services. You have software as a service, they're selling service as a service. They're selling expertise as a service. They're selling, caring as a service, negotiating as a service. By the way, driving people around is a service, being a therapist is a service. When you're looking for a service person, doctor, lawyer, accountant, it's nice that there's some rapport because it ends up being a relationship that's a lot longer term than maybe somebody that just is signing up for a CRM or, trying out a new landing page tool. Because buying a piece of software is not the most important financial decision of your life. Buying a house is. It's a different relationship by nature than a vendor selling software B2B. And the other thing that's really different is the sales cycle. 97% of people, 98, 99 are not buying or selling a home this year. it's sorta like how do you market your business and advertise your business, knowing that most people don't need what you sell anytime soon? The average person buys or sells a home every five to seven years. Those are the things that create challenges. The other thing I would say is you make a lot more money when you sell a house. So the expectation of your real estate agent is much higher than of the inside sales guy that sells you the Slack enterprise solution. I hope I've explained the difference. It's very different. Laurier: Yeah, you have. I love that the book, despite that there's a lot of talk that is directed to real estate industry workers, it still is so relevant to everybody else. You've done a great job of recognizing that you have that big audience, that is going to be reading the book and rereading in the case of they read the first edition, now they're reading the second one, being relevant to a variety of different types of readers. And a lot of that is just, you've made it broken down into nice bite sized pieces, and you've also made it really actionable. I especially love all the “Do This Right Now” call-outs in the book, these little calls to action that a reader can literally put the book down and learn by doing right away. To me, those alone, make the book more useful than most business books. I haven't read the first edition, but I understand that's a new thing to the second edition. Chris: Yeah, what happened is my co-founder, Jimmy at Curaytor, he said, what I love the most about the book is that you can do the book while you read the book. And people love that. When I'm at a conference, I try to incorporate a lot of that stuff into my keynotes, where you download this right now, pull this up right now. And I think that interactivity just makes it much more exciting. The difference is I did it sort of just by nature with the first book. And so Jimmy's advice was like, lean into that. And I said, you know what I'm going to, because there are parts of what I'm teaching that you can do immediately. Not all of it. Some of it would take honestly months or years to actually roll out all the way, but there's things that you can do right away. What happens in the way I think about it is if you get a little bit of dopamine, if you win a couple of battles, you can win the war. That's the way I think about those little quick hitters. You want them to take my big advice, but they're not gonna want to put the real work into the big advice if I can't show them a couple of magic tricks. Laurier: It changes the way that people read. If you're taking action and doing things and you're seeing they work now, now you're, recognizing this book is extra special. You're not just going to skim, read it and put it aside, tick it off the list of the books you wanted to

read. And that's something you're really good at is taking the psychology of the person you're working with and for, and using it to help them succeed. that's something you've done really well in putting this book together. Chris: Thank you. Laurier: And the book covers different tools for acquiring customers. You have social, search, email, text messaging. Each of those has a specific job, in addition to the marketing tools we talk about. Tell me about the different jobs that social, search, email and text have in selling. Chris: If you just isolate those four buckets: social search, email, texts, and just throw in phone calls, if you don't mind, that's sort of the whole game. You get the leads through social and search. You nurture the leads through email. And you convert the leads through text and calls. It can feel really overwhelming when all the advice is that you gotta be on TikTok and you got to post three times a day and you gotta use trending music. And then, oh, don't forget reels. They're cool too. Oh yeah, YouTube. They've got shorts. Regular people's heads are spinning with this stuff. Not everybody geeks out on it the way that somebody like myself does, or obviously have a podcast like this, you're on Team Technology. You sort of enjoy it. But not everybody's that way. when I try to teach things, I try to say, don't overthink it. People search Google. Those are high quality leads that are showing a high level of intent. Whether they're looking for your brand or the things that you sell. Social media, that's where you can proactively get in front of people. That's going to be 98% of digital ad spend. That's going to be the internet. And then there's only so many ways to follow up. We've mentioned them text, email, and calls. I think of that as almost like land, sea and air, you know, it's sort of a smart game plan. It's attacking from all angles. Uh, and th they call that bursting. And when you look at it that way, when you look at it like a team, the conversion rate is much better, but you don't really need more than that. If I were starting out with a whiteboard and trying to keep it simple, I would say, okay, let's go through. What's our strategy for search? Well, that's going to be pay-per-click and SEO. What's our strategy for social? Well, most likely Facebook and Instagram, and then making some choices on some other things based on what you do. Don't overthink it. What I would think of, as you say, is, those are the bricks. Those are the hammer, the nails, the boards, that's sort of the foundation of everything else that you'll do are those five things. Laurier: Well, one side is don't overthink it. And I think the other really important one is don't get too lazy and tried to over-automate it. We're so conditioned to think that we should use marketing automation because it's so powerful to just make everything happen in the background, set it and forget it. And to believe that we can scale everything just by using automation tools. And don't oversimplify it, but also don't think you can build a business on automation alone. Chris: Yeah, nobody ever set it and forget that their way to the top. Laurier: And yet so many business people, that's what they want to do. They want to find ways to kind of break through, have the magic ad formula, the magic drip sequences that are gonna take every lead straight to being a customer and, use your chat bots to, uh, to automate all your client troubles. And that's the way the customers want it. But customers really don't want you to automate their entire journey. Chris: No very few of them do. Some people are okay with a little bit of a hybrid between a chat bot and a person. But the impact of a human on live chat versus AI, the impact of, you know, when you just ask people, when you want to talk to a business, what do you prefer? 74% of people prefer a person. Three percent of people prefer a chat bot. And I try to do this. There's a lot of visuals in the book, you know, like any good textbook, there would be a lot of graphics and data so I've really tried to convey that this is something where, when you see a piece of data that is so clear what to do because of it. That's sort of what I'm looking for when I'm mining all this research. If somebody just looked at this one chart, would they know what to do? Well, if you look at the chart that says only 3% of people want a chat bot, that would be a pretty clear indicator that you shouldn't only use a chat bot. Very, very clear. If 74% of people want to talk to a person, we need to make sure that that's still an easy option. That's what people should think of when they look at this data and you can apply that to emails. What time should you send them? How many images should they have? You can apply that to tweets. How long should they be? How does the thread perform? That's at the heart of it is, when you look at data in my book, at least, you should be looking at it and immediately being able to figure out like, okay, 95% of the leads don't close in the first 30 days. Okay, well, that would make it pretty clear to my sales team, that they shouldn't get frustrated when a new lead doesn't close, because that's not even how it works. That is kind of my big thing on data is like data that creates decisions. Laurier: Welcome back to Product: Knowledge, the podcast about creating and marketing products people truly need. Today I'm talking with Chris Smith, co-founder of Curaytor and author of "The Conversion Code." Data and analytics. There's an interesting thing you say in the bonus chapter at the end of the book, you say that a hundred percent of the marketing you never do has a 0% conversion rate, and I see that as the marketer's equivalent of Wayne Gretzky's line, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you never take. Tell me about two things that matter more than any analytics. Chris: I call it G squared. You're right. That quote very much as you say, feels

like a homage to that quote by Gretzky. Your conversion rate on campaigns that never happen is 0%. That is a fact that is provable. So when I think about like, when you do this stuff and you try this stuff and you put it out there... you're doing your podcast, right? Podcasts, audio, these things are incredibly difficult to quantify when it comes to the ROI, but it's sort of possible because of analytics and data and tracking and all this kind of modern stuff. What I think is more important than analytics is, number one, is your business growing? If you're running a business that is growing tremendously, you don't want to get too deep into the analytics because what you're doing is clearly working. Could it work better? Sure. Should you eliminate some stuff? Yes. But you shouldn't mess with, like, my dad would always say, don't fix what ain't broken. Number two is your gut. I'll just tell you for me personally, I can grow faster financially by doing things that I didn't enjoy or quite frankly want to sell. So my growth could be higher than it is, but what that would do is that will cause my gut to not feel good. I wouldn't be proud of the work I was doing. I wouldn't be excited about the work I was doing. To me, it's your growth and your gut. When you kind of take the blend of those two, do you feel like the work you're doing is great? Cool. Is your business growing quickly? Yes. Keep pushing. Keep sending emails, keep doing videos. Keep doing podcasts. Should you keep getting better at them? Absolutely. Should you keep trying to better quantify the return on investment? Yeah. Because when you can, when you can directly push that line, like we were able to with our podcasts, The Water Cooler, like 20% of our leads that closed came from our podcasts. They would say it, "Hey, I watched the water cooler. " Or we would put it in a form as a dropdown, "Hey, the Water Cooler. That's why I'm here." And by the way, sometimes the people that are saying that came from a Facebook ad. So now my Facebook ad, does that get credit or does my podcast get credit? Laurier: Yeah. Often, it's what they remember, right? They'll remember that maybe the Facebook ad brought them in, in the first place, but where they really started paying attention was the podcast. Chris: Yeah. And so the reason it's important to understand, like, is it working again in your gut? Is your business. Well, if it's working and things are going well, then you can reinvest. Then you can take it to the next level and feel good about it. So when I look at the professional lights that I have right now shining on me, when I look at a thousand dollar microphone, when I look at, the Canon 80 D that I have vertical with a RODE mic catching the side angle too; when I look at the Sony A7 III that I use as an SDR high definition webcam. I like investing in that stuff because I know it's working, but what most people do is they start with this stuff. They start and they think it's the lights or

which platform or should I use Restream, how do I syndicate it? How do I pull the audio out? Where do I host it? That is the wires. You know what I mean? Like the wires are under the hood for a reason. You know, the inside of the iPhone is ugly. The outside is beautiful. So people just get too caught up on the inside. If you're growing and it's working, double down, keep pushing. And then I would just sort of alter that and say, if you're growing super-fast, triple down. If you're kind of growing, but your profit margins aren't great, slow down before you double down. That stuff matters too, but I just sum it all up as G squared. Laurier: That really resonated with me because to me, for most of my clients, the reason that I'm in business is so much those two things. My clients and I both, we share that we want to grow and we want it to feel right in our gut. We want what we're doing to fit with our reason, for doing it and to feel that we're on the right track and for it to make us excited about doing it again tomorrow. All other metrics aside, without those things, nothing else matters. You might as well go get a job if you don't like what you're doing right now, if you don't like the way you're growing your business. To me, those were some of the most important words in a book that's so much about tactical things to do, that comes back to the Why of what you're doing and reminds readers to make sure that whatever it is that they're going to go do when they put down the book still fits with those most important metrics. I also want to talk a little bit about some of what's probably new to the new edition. You have some fantastic, fresh advice for using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for selling. And I've been using those platforms, all of them, since each of them began. And I still find myself taking notes as I was reading through them. And you have a little tiny section on TikTok for selling, but that's packed with some really good insights. Wondering if you could tell a little bit about why product makers, who aren't using TikTok yet should think about doing it. Chris: Well, it's time for TikTok, It's TikTok time. TikTok blew up. It's no longer a debate. There was a time where people would say iPhone or Blackberry. You know, there was a time when people would say Internet Explorer or Chrome. Those times come to an end. Laurier: I still have clients though telling me, " Our audience isn't Tik ToK, we're grownups." To me, that's really interesting because, especially with a guy who works with a lot of real estate people, everybody buying real estate as a grownup. Chris: Well, what makes you think grownups aren't using TikTok? Laurier: Yeah, it's a perception. Chris: Right. It was true. Laurier: Because people see their kids using it. And they assume that must be the audience. Chris: It was true that having a keyboard was better. It was true that it was nice to go down to the video store and read the back of the DVDs. Those things were true. They're just not true anymore. Sometimes it takes some people longer to let that click. I was just like the people you're talking about; I see my daughter using it. It seems really gimmicky. It used to be called Musically. All the people that are blowing up, you know, the Charli D'Amelios of the world, they're very young, it very much felt like a gen Z platform and it was, but what got missed in all of that is that they have the best algorithm that's ever been invented. And that they also have the number one most preferred type of content. So they are basically the ones that pioneered short, looping vertical videos. Vine did some stuff with it a while back that was like seven seconds. But that vertical format is the best format for a phone. Short is the best format for a phone. And that was all they have in most cases, that is all they have. People don't listen to TikTok with the sound off. They listen with the sound on. Across every generation, every industry, every type of business, people are using TikTok galore. And if they're not using TikTok, they're using reels. And if they're not using TikTok or reels, if they're not creating TikTok or reels, they're not content creators because they don't understand the power of creating a piece of content and having it get seen by way more people than know who you are yet. The organic reach. I did a video this week that got 56,000 views on TikTok. I have 3,100 followers. That doesn't happen anywhere else. That's a huge deal. It will go away. This is literally like 2008 and 2009 Facebook ads. Laurier: I was going to go there next and say, the message isn't necessarily use TikTok. It's pay attention to what is coming online and recognize there's a life cycle for these platforms. And right now is, as you said, TikTok time. Next year or the year after that might not be. And you'll have to be looking out to see what is the new player? What is the new TikTok? But right now that's the most compelling reason is that it's the time. Don't wait. If you wait another year, you might miss that window of being able to get lower-cost conversions that you can get right now. Chris: Yes, that's a big part of it too, but the format, a new content type was invented. That's a big deal. You have written, podcast, short, long, horizontal, vertical. And it's kind of like, oh ding, ding, ding, vertical, short and video. We've got a winner. Right. And it is everywhere now. One of the things I want people to think about too is it's actually a really cool thing because I can be dialed in and having a conversation with you. And typically, you would record that a wider format. It would be a webcam kind of a view, like a Zoom. Well, what I'm doing now is I've got a high-def camera shooting me at an angle with its own little mic and it's in tight. And I take snippets from these recordings and I put captions on them and they all do better than the recording itself. What I want people to understand about

that little technique is that the unlock there is that it's me talking to you. Most people suck if it's just them and a camera and they just hit record. "Hi. Today I'm going to talk about the five best reasons to move to Boston." Like that is hard. Very, very few people are good at that. A lot of people are good at having conversations with other people. So if you take the concept of Zoom, which is face-to-face real conversations with real humans, which gets different juices flowing than just filming a video. And then you say, okay, where would I put a video that I wanted to get the most views? Of course I would make it a reel, of course I would make it a TikTok. And you're right. There's data. Look, people in the eye, if possible, when you do a TikTok ad, if I was selling software, if I was listening to this right now, I would be figuring out who uses my software that loves it and is already killing it on TikTok. I wouldn't necessarily be trying to figure out my own TikTok strategy. I would be trying to figure out my UGC. Which is what is, what is my User Generated Content strategy for TikTok? Who are the influencers that have an audience that love our stuff? Them creating a video, the way they would create it is better than you telling them what to do. So this is sort of another kind of weird moment, and it started happening on Facebook. And a lot of the internet marketers started stumbling on this idea. When things are actually native to the platform and they look like they belong there, they drastically outperform anything that's sort of professionally shot. So that's another piece of this in my opinion. It's belly to belly, it's video, it's vertical, but anyone can do it. And so I'm just going and grabbing, like, I love TikTok's slogan. Don't make ads… Laurier: Make TikToks. Yeah. Chris: That is really the mindset people should have on that platform. And then it's like, okay, well, what do the TikToks have? They have dances, they have music, they have trends. They have what you would call expected look and feel. Right. I think people should be excited about it and pumped about it, but the quick takeaway would be, get really good at making short vertical videos. Laurier: Again, that was a little short chapter in the book, but it was packed with good stuff. That's you recognizing something becoming really important and there's possibly a whole other book on TikTok that you could write based on how to utilize it properly and how to create TikToks that win. Chris: Yeah, the book is being written right now, That's why I'm not going to go super deep. Like it did just get traction. It did just kind of go mainstream, in the last 24 months, there are still millions of people not using it. Millions of brands that haven't even touched it. yeah, this is a good time to be over there, man. And I know I'm going to be right about this. So I'm choosing a side here and historically I've been pretty good at kind of betting on the right horses. I was begging people to use Instagram in 2011 and 2012. I was begging people to use Facebook in '09. You know, I was begging people to do stories. You know, even with the last book six years ago, I was just like, stories are going to be it. Stories are amazing. I have a good, instinct for what's going to stick and I was wrong about TikTok. But now other people are wrong and I'm right. Laurier: A hundred percent. And to me, that's the gem marketers are looking for right now Facebook has led everybody down. Privacy restrictions have been the scapegoat on that, but it's due to a lot of other reasons as well. Marketers are really looking for something that can work for them.  And to me, you've answered that question. The call is there for using TikTok and for dropping preconceived notions you might have from watching your kids on it all the time and recognize there's conversions to be had there. That's kind of that next frontier for marketers. Do you have anything that you'd want to add for product people that, should absolutely read the conversion code? Chris: What I would say to the product people specifically is it's enticing to think about product-led growth. It is. It's enticing to think about product marketing. That is more fun. I completely understand, because that's the closest thing to the cash register. But I think that's actually the easy stuff. Of course you have to do that. That's your job. And then it's sort of like the stuff that like Intercom does with their podcast and the books, the stuff that Stripe does with their publishing division, the stuff that HubSpot does with their reports and research, like that's the good stuff, right? That's the fun stuff. That's the cool stuff. And so I think that's what I would be looking at with product. There's a product called Descript. Laurier: Yep. Use it. Chris: The best product video I've ever seen in my life. And it really doesn't have a lot of screenshots of the actual product. It's amazing. So I would just say, you know, content marketing matters too. When you add a layer of content marketing above product-led growth, above product marketing. When you're able to add a layer above that, way, more people will see your stuff that you really want to be working on. So that's a big unlock and hopefully my book can help them with that component, which is where I think they probably need the most help. Laurier: That's it for this episode of Product: Knowledge and my conversation with Chris Smith, co-founder of Curaytor and author of "The Conversion Code." Find out more about Curaytor at Curaytor.com. That's C U R A Y T O R dot com, and buy the book on Amazon. You'll find links in the show notes. Be sure to also visit GraphosProduct.com, where you'll find all the podcast episodes with transcripts and get insights from our blog. Reach out to us on twitter @graphosproduct or email us through the form at graphosproduct.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Laurier Mandin.