#119: How to build offers that convert at every stage of the funnel

Hey, this is Ryan from Rocket SaaS, and you're listening to the SaaS Marketing Weekly Podcast. The show that gives you actionable marketing strategies and campaign ideas to rocket your SaaS business. And if you want even more SaaS marketing ideas, go to SaaSMarketingWeakly.com to join my free newsletter. Hello, and welcome back to the SaaS Marketing Weekly Podcast. With me, your host Ryan, the founder of Rocket SaaS, and I'm back in the studio with Jamie, hello, welcome back. It is good to be back. It's been a while. It has been a while. Where have you been? I've been supplanted. You've been bringing in the fresh blood from the agency. I've been screwing it away. I've been very busy doing months in the agency. Lots of new clients coming on, lots happening, so I've been kind of at hard work with the clients recently. It's good to be back on. Well, I hope you've been learning something. I have definitely. Have you been learning anything about offers? Lots, lots, big discussion in the agency at the moment, just in general, the way we're talking about campaigns, the way we're talking about what we go to with clients, particularly when we onboard and how we think about what clients need, particularly when we're entering to channels or we're putting money into our channels, so I think that's going to be a big discussion. Good, yeah. That is what we are talking about today. Offers. Since I met Jamie, a couple of years ago, he's always talking about offers. Offers, offers, offers. They are more important than the channels and arguably one of the most important things. If you don't have a good offer for your business, then you're not going to get very far, are you? Get in the water. Yes, and there is a big difference between businesses that have a very good offer and businesses that have a bad offer and businesses that have a mediocre offer. The same offer as every other competitor. It's like Booker Demo is the offer for a lot of businesses or start a free trial. There isn't really the offer, that certainly doesn't make you stand apart from your competitors. Jamie, yeah, talk to us. What do you mean by the offer? What is the offer? Let's start there. Cool. Perfect. I think for the purposes of the day's discussion, what I kind of want to talk about with you is offers, not just in frame of bottom and funnel, although that's incredibly important, just talking about Booker Demo and free trial, we're going to get into that. What I want to talk about is the importance of offers through the funnel and the importance of what you offer and no matter what stage you're kind of buyer is at and what you're trying to meet them, what you offer is often the biggest predictor of success in what you're doing, particularly if we're talking about page channels for example, but like cold emails and have a really good example, the offer is everything. I think what I want to get into is going through different stages of the funnel, what does a good offer look like? How do you actually create one and how do you create offers that actually stand apart from the crowd because everyone seems to go out with the same offers and this is one of the biggest levers you can pull before you get into the channel. So would you define an offer as me as the prospect, what am I going to get out of this? Yeah, I think an offer, trying to boil it down simply, is like I am offering something to a prospect or the audience of value in exchange for something from them, whether that's their time or whether that's their contact details or whether that's their money, like we're actually selling them something. I'm making an offer in exchange for something and that applies through the funnel at different stages of kind of the buyer journey and I think it's really important that we think about offers first and foremost before we get into doing stuff, which is like this is super important, we want to execute on those offers and we're putting together as fast as possible, but I want to get into building the right offer is what is probably going to be one of the biggest determinations for your success. So I think that's a really important thing we can kind of share today. All right, so how are we going to structure this? We're going to talk about offers at the top of the funnel in the middle of the bottom? Sounds good. Yeah, we can walk through that. All right, so let's talk about the top of the funnel. I presume the top of the funnel, there is no money. It's not you give me money and I give you this because it's the top of the funnel. It's you give me time and I give you this. Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say. So I think when we're at the top of the funnel, like if we're looking at what we're trying to achieve at the top of the funnel, like you just mentioned, we're not trying to forget them to buy our product. We're actually just trying to get on their radar. We're trying to have that kind of first interactions with like the largest group of buyers that we can, the ones who literally aren't looking to buy right now. So I think primarily, primarily what we're normally offering as a B2B SaaS product is content. That's how we get attention. That's how we exchange value to get people's attention. And I so think there's like a number of like very typical offers that we can walk through now at the top of the funnel, so I can get in a few of them if that sounds good. Cool. So let's actually just like pick one of the most obvious examples from B2B and B2B SaaS generally. So the webinar, the webinar is an offer. Right? It's a bit of content like I get that, but it's also an offer. We're offering a webinar, a something of value in exchange for their time. And often their contact details as well, so we can follow up with them and have a relationship with them moving forward. The webinar, right, when we think about like that as an offer, a webinar alone, right, isn't that valuable if you don't position it in the right way. If we just go out to an audience and we say like we're doing a webinar on, let's say, the five best ways to do LinkedIn ads, nothing inherently wrong with that, like there's nothing like inherently wrong with that. But it's not going to be getting the juices blown in to make people care, like that's not going to be the sort of webinar where people are going to go, I need to attend that webinar. Yeah. I think I see where you're going with this. You're basically saying that me as the prospect, I don't necessarily feel that I'm going to walk away with something amazingly valuable. Like, I see a lot of webinars that it's like, it's a nice conversation between a couple of people that talk about, you know, LinkedIn ads or this particular problem or whatever it is. And you walk away from the webinar and maybe you feel a bit inspired and you think, oh, that was a really interesting chat, but I haven't actually got much to take away from it. I actually know what to do. Whereas all of our webinars that we do, like extremely actionable. So like all of our landing pages, when we promote webinars, all of our ads when we promote webinars is like, you're going to attend this webinar and you're going to walk away with this. Like, you're going to walk away with the playbook, you're going to get the step-by-step guide that you can implement into your business today on how you can, you know, double the effectiveness of your LinkedIn ads. Sometimes there's like a double offer and if you attend the webinar, you'll also get the work, but which will send to you afterwards. So is that the difference you're trying to describe? Yeah. I think there's an important kind of point to raise now that applies through offers through the funnel and I'll apply it to the webinar as like an example. So like, when we talk about the offer and how we go from something like that five ways to do LinkedIn ads to something much more valuable and something actually gets people to care about the offer, essentially, the way that I would look at it and there's lots of like frameworks to approach this, but I think a really simple way to approach it, is what will make people care is leaning into like psychological principles that actually trigger people to take action and there's lots of different ways to think about this, but I'll simplify it. So like, for an example, the easiest way that I find to infuse something like a webinar as an offer and make it more valuable and infuse it with something that makes it people care is to look at things like social proof and results. That is just like a psychological principle, like that something like a lot of social scientists look into, people follow a social proof from peers, results, tangible outcomes, that persuades people, it's a, it's a printable persuasion. So if we apply it to a webinar, let's take that five ways to do LinkedIn ads, right? It's fine itself, it's fine, but it's not that convincing of like I need to attend this. Let's apply that to, we did a LinkedIn ads webinar, it would have been about I think four months ago, now five months ago, something like that. The way that we positioned that webinar was we looked at all of the best results that we had gone and our own case study from inside the agency of how we do LinkedIn ads for ourselves. And I think the title for that webinar, we positioned it around how we generated two million pounds in pipeline with a five K a month LinkedIn ads budget, right? So all of a sudden, we move from like just a generic kind of offer to a very specific offer of people who would be in that ad range kind of budget, it's a small budget to get that amount of pipeline in that amount of time that we got it. And it's a massive outcome, not a lot of our prospects, like we work with founders and marketers. That's what they want, they want pipe, they want opportunities, they want revenue. All of a sudden, we can then just like lead on from there, that's kind of the overall positioning. We can obviously what we kind of, when we promoted, we talked about all of the tactics they'll learn, et cetera, and bundling that stuff in. But we all of a sudden had a really compelling offer because it was rooted in social proof in results and tangible outcomes, and that hooks people. And I think that's a really like important thing to remember is when you're creating a great offer, think about the psychology behind the offer, social proof from results is one thing, and I'll find that's probably one of the easiest ones in a B2B SaaS organization to go and find. What have you done? The founder, people in the organization, the business that's compelling. But there's loads of ways that you can do this, like, and we can talk about this in more depth as we go through the funnel. But there's things like the labor illusion. So the idea that if you spend a lot of time on something, people find it inherently more valuable. That is also something to you. So for example, if you spend six months building a report, leaning into that, or like like, analysed like five thousand email sequences to build this report, like, that is something that is of value because it's hard to do. Make that part of like the way you position the offer, say, for example, it's a bit of content, for example, there's also things like authority. And I think this is a really important one. We'll get on to later, like, this is really relevant for what we do, like as you a fault leader. If you tie someone of authority to the offer, naturally people are more likely to take up the offer because they find the person an authority persuasive. They want like even meet with that person or get resources from that person, etc. And then there's what you touched on a minute ago, bundling where we have some, maybe we have something that is of value, but of, in and of itself, it's not quite like a juicy enough to get the attention. So we bundle other things into it to make it one big offer. And I think that applies through the funnel. And we can kind of get into it. Yeah, I like a lot of those things. So yeah, one of the most successful webinars that we've done for a number of our clients is we tell our clients to pick their most successful customer, like, or sometimes even their biggest customer, like the highest number of revenue or head count. And basically do a webinar to say, this is how this company grew from X to Y. Because if that's your biggest customer, most of your other prospects, probably 95% of your prospects want to get where the big customer is. And a lot of our clients, they kind of start by doing bottom of the funnel webinars. It's just like a product demo, which is just, you're not just getting enough value from it. The office is not good enough. Whereas the offer on these webinars is here are the five steps that this company did to get to 25 million in revenue. And then our product was like one of the things that helped them get there. And so you're going to walk away with a bit of a blueprint on how do I scale the business, which is particularly attractive to CEOs, founders, co-founders, CFOs, CROs that want to see that kind of growth journey. So that's quite a good offer of like, we're going to give you the story and the playbook of how this company scale. And again, it's just rooted in results. All these things that make people care. Basically, that's a big takeaway for people is like, how do you make people care? Think about the psychology of it. Yeah, yeah. I definitely always try and avoid webinars that just don't have a very good offer that don't make me think I'm going to walk away from this. And I'm really excited to get back to my desk and get stuck into this rather than just a nice conversation with a couple of people who talk about whatever. Anything else at the top of the funnel? So I think it's probably just worth mentioning again, this just applies to like all other top of funnel formats. So like even if we think about that classic B2B format, it's like the e-book or the white paper, cheat, cheat, checklists, calculators, whatever you kind of want to look at. Like all I would say is like, try it before you get into just building something that like solves a problem. That is a good thing to do building an asset that solves a problem that is fundamental. But also really think about like, how do I layer on perceived value from things like social proof or like, maybe we've got like someone in house who is just an expert in the space and he's done some really cool stuff frame around his story rather than just the topic. Like do the things that are going to make people care because like ultimately people like take action on things because psychologically they're triggered to do this by like social proof results. That labor illusion, I'll just talk about scarsties and the big one. Scarsties are hard one to do I think in B2B sometimes because you obviously get like the only 10 spots left or whatever and people don't believe it. But if you can use scarcity well, it's incredibly effective. What am I most effective offers at the top of the funnel? I don't know if I'm skipping a head here, but it was a cold outbound play. We still do it actually, which is basically we used to have, this is a, it started to seem before AI, but we used to have, you know, Google Alerts? Yes, that's the thing. So you can set up a Google Alert which I think how it works is it scans Google News and then you could use keywords. So I set up a Google Alert that basically set a trigger if there was ever a news article published on Google News that used the word sass and funded, which is basically an article saying this sass company has just got funding. And then it was, and then there would be a task out for one of my virtual assistants to then find that article and then put the company name into a spreadsheet along with the article name, along with the link to the article and how much funding that they raised. And then a cold email would get spun up to basically say, oh, then obviously we'd have to use like a polo or whatever to find their email address of like the founder, the marketer, etc. And then we would send them an email to say hi first name. I've just read article name about your company name. Congratulations on raising funding. So the opening line was really like hyper specific. It's really annoying that AI has come out and just like blown like a thing out of water. Everyone's doing it now. But I was ahead of the curve. And it would say, you know, thanks for the congratulations on raising funding. I've just been on your website and I've noticed some issues on it, like conversion rate optimization issues. Would you be okay for me to send you a loom video where I walk you through the website and I can tell you the improvements that I recommend you make, which will result in your website getting more leads. Just say yes or no. And I'll send you the loom video. Now what's brilliant, what was brilliant about that offer you talked about earlier is about time commitment. So one, I'm asking you for no money and two, I'm offering you like zero. All you have to do is press reply and type YES send. That's what I'm asking you to do in an exchange for your five seconds of work. I will give you a loom video which tells you how to improve your website which could have so much value because you could get more leads from it. It can literally give you millions of dollars worth of value. And that was an incredible campaign. So we used to fire that email out like every time a business got funding globally. So we were sending out like five emails a day and we would go insane response rate. The highest response rate I've ever seen on any cold thing I've ever done. It's like 25% response rate or anything. People are saying yes and then we quickly qualify them and then if they qualify them we would send the loom video. Lots of people would respond and say this is really great. Can we talk about how you can improve our website and be our marketing partner. So that was a really strong offer because we were giving them something of value and the balance of minimal time commitment from them. If the offer was hey, I've been on your website, congrats on raising funding, can we jump on a call and I'll walk you through how we can improve your website. The response rate probably would have been less than 1%, I imagine, because I'm asking you for lots more time. And you can't ask for time when they don't know who you are. So this we're kind of verging into the pros and cons of cold email now. When you cold email people they probably don't know who you are. So you can't really be asking for their time. Hello, you never heard from us. Would you like to have a demo? It doesn't work. So that just makes me think that was such a strong offer and it was only strong because of the balance between how much time commitment and zero money we were asking from the prospect because it was at the top of the funnel. If it was an offer like towards the bottom of the funnel, IE, they know who we are. They've heard of us. They like us. I can then ask you for time. I can ask you for a 30 minute meeting. But when it's people haven't heard of you, it's got to be like minimal time. Yeah, that actually is interesting because I think it's a really good example of like something that Alex Hermose talks about. He's got a whole book on offers, 100 million offers. I know he divides opinion with some people. I love it. Yeah, I like him to be fair. He doesn't love Alex. I think some people find him a bit broy but I think he, like if you look at what he talks about, like a lot of it's just really foundation stuff, really like good advice. Particularly around offers, like it's a very good book in my view. But he talks about, I think that's a good example. Like when he talks about how to structure an offer, his framework I think is a really strong way to help think about it. But he talks about like there's kind of four dimensions that you should like try and meet to create a good offer. And it's like time to value. So how long is it actually going to take me to get there? How likely am I going to be to succeed? I think that played into that social proof thing we're talking about a minute ago. How likely am I to succeed with this offer? The effort required. And then I think it's like a dream outcome box as well. But like essentially there's four dimensions to think about. And I think that kind of meets it where it's like you're going to take no time to watch a live video. There's no time really involved. Like you've got like, am I going to get like anything from this video? Well, you've got all you got to do is watch it and you're going to you've already said I found them and like it's very likely you're going to get some like good advice from it, particularly as you're kind of a a marketer. And I mean it's just essentially if you can think through those lenses, like it can help you kind of just create an offer that makes people pay attention. So yeah, I think it's a good takeaway. Okay. Middle of funnel and in middle of funnel offers. Yes, definitely yes. I think this is a really important stage to think about that often kind of gets ignored because everyone's thinking about kind of top funnel assets and bottom of funnel offers. And then the middle of funnel kind of just exists and doesn't really get worked on often. So when we say middle of funnel, so are we talking like buy a journey in terms of people have they know who we are basically? Yeah, I'd say like a middle of funnel offer. Like obviously, like we talked about in the past, like people do jump into these stages. It's not like the fine thing. It's just the way to think about it. But the middle of the funnel offer, like the way I would think about it is like people ideally who have heard of us and we want to give them a chance to like experience value from us in a more kind of a more a higher intent way, I would say. But it's not at the very bottom of the funnel. It probably not ready to buy in that very moment. So we're putting on like different offers to like move them forward in their journey trying to accelerate that by a journey. And I think there's a few good examples. Like I think from us, like our event is probably our key middle of funnel offer. I think that's a really, really good one. So why is an event middle the funnel, but a webinar is top of the funnel. - So I would say that the event is, again, this is how people define things very differently. I would say it's a middle of the funnel offer because often those people are third of us. Like when you only speak to people at those events, they often come up and they go, "I've been bothering you for ages, "wanna love you, I love your content." And they come up and they talk to you. - No, that's what they love me, yeah. - Yeah, no, no, no, no. Am I allowed to name drop a client? - I don't think I am. But there is someone who came from, all the way from the North East, basically said that. So I'm stupid to do that. - Jail or shout out to Jail, I love Jail. So that's sort of thing when I'm talking about a middle of funnel offer. Like for me, like when I look at an event, - It probably goes back to the thing we talked about earlier, which is time commitment. - Yeah. - So webinar is like, I need 45 minutes of your time. A live event, I need you to commute to the event and back again, and the event's gonna be longer. It's gonna be like 90 minutes. And it's just more of a commitment, isn't it? - Yeah. - So you're probably, you know, not gonna pick up the kids from school because it's an evening event. There's a big commitment. - Yeah, obviously the type of event matters. Like, for example. - I'm sure someone else will pick up the kids, by the way. (laughs) - Yeah. - They're like the type of event matters, but I think the type of events that we do, and like for example, like, you know, a lot of SaaS companies do like dinners with like prospective clients and stuff. Those are very kind of, they're not necessarily like, like ready to buy in that moment. They're quite high intent conversations. They're talking about their challenges, pain points, stuff like that. It's a chance for them to kind of dip their toe in. So that's why I've classifiers middle of the funnel. I'm sure they'll be pretty good. - Yeah, no, I hear you. And I agree with that. Okay, so live events, so, yeah, so networking, bringing people together. The events that we do are basically live webinars. I would say it's just me standing on stage with a presentation screen. Again, going through something where people are going to walk away with an action plan of what they need to do. So, not being a people, we said about the webinar, but it's the same concept there. But it's also networking, you know, people go through these events to meet other people. They certainly don't go to events if they feel that they're just going to be sold to. Unless they, but that would be, I mean, they do, but that would be a bottom of the funnel activity because they are ready to go. We're talking about more people who are kind of really in the problem-solving stage. - Yeah, I mean, that's a fair way. - So you've got events as one of them, any other ones at the middle of the funnel, a good offer? - So, I think, again, this would be an event of a sort, but I think it's a different type. So, like, another example from Helix or Bozy, I'll just kind of raise it. But like, he offers like a one-day workshop in Vegas, right? So you'll see a lot of this on Meta in particular, promotes the hell out of it. I think it's one of his kind of like core offers to kind of start getting people more involved. - Is this the one where he's on stage and then you often see someone in the audience stand up and ask a question. - Oh, yeah. - They say, "I'm in a business and I'm struggling to get to five million revenue." - Yeah, so give me some advice. - As I understand it, the way that they run, and like I said, I've not done them, but like, the way that they run is that typically, I think he does maybe a talk and he has that kind of aspect to it. But then also, he has all of his best, like, the way they picture it. All of his best team basically run for like this, they even like a one or two-day workshop. They actually sit down with the people who are at it, run through their business, and basically try and kind of work out what's the constraints within the business, what's the plan to move it forward? How do we get from like this like revenue goal to up to here where you need to go? And they basically do like a whole workshop on how they move it forward. And so like that's a really good example of me, like a middle fun offer. We haven't committed to trying to say sell, although they probably do sell it that event. - Sure they do. - But it's like, that is a really good example of like experiencing the value of. - Okay. So I call that like consultation, audit, strategy session. I mean, that's something that we've done at Rocket SAS. We've talked about it for many times. And that was one of the best offer changes that we did. Like our offer on our website used to be request the quotation. The offer is you fill out a form, you get a call, a sales call out of it, and then I send you a quote, that's a really crap offer. The same is every other agency. And then we change the offer to be like, request a free SAS marketing strategy call with me, the founder. And we'll work through your marketing plan. If you have one, we'll work through your, I'll have a look at your website. I'll have a little dabble, the share screen go through your LinkedIn ads. And you'll walk away from this strategy call with free advice, free consultation about how you can implement changes and improve your business. And if you want to work with us, then we can chat about that as well, but there's no obligation. And there's scarcity, so we only do five of these per month. So that was an amazing offer for us. It's still our number one offer today, and that's where all of our leads come in through to start with. And because it's the offer is basically moving higher, a little bit higher up the funnel, where the funnel is wider. So it's means that you have calls with people who are in the problem solving stage, as opposed to, I'm looking for a supplier. Right. Because the funnel's wider, the higher up it is, that means there's more people in it. So if you have an offer that's really strong, that means you get more calls. I think all those examples we just talked about, like I think it's good to touch base on this again, just in case there's that people listen in. And like, like it's not just like doing a strategy call, doing an event, or doing a workshop, or all these things, these are all good ideas to do, but the reasons they work in these contexts, so like for example, like yours and like Hamosi's stuff, right. They have authority. We promote the hell out of you. Like we spend a lot of money getting your expertise in the market, and spend a lot on the content that we promote. They already know you. You've been like demonstrating your expertise, and you're in front of those people all the time, you have authority in their minds, because you're constantly surfacing with them. So things something like a strategy call with you becomes a lot more valuable, because of that. Same with like that workshop in Vegas. If a random company did that, who like had no kind of like tangible results, or back, like record, or anything like that, probably wouldn't get the same take up, but they've got Hamosi, and he's got his team, we're all gonna be like A-Players, all this stuff, right. That is the important thing to infuse into it. So if you don't have things like a big track record, or like social proof that you can lean into, you need to get creative and think about how you can do that. And there's definitely other things you can do. You can pay people to come and like co-host things with you. That's like one option, lean into their credibility, so you can get time with the prospect, and there's other ways you can approach it as well. You can like move that offer up the funnel to like content, so you've got like more scope to like create something of value, it all depends, this is strategic conversations now. But the point remains, you have to root it in something to make it attractive, and I think that's the important point. - Right, so you talk about, so tying, when an offer is tied to a strong personal brand, it can carry a better way. - Yeah, and I think that's got like, that's what I'm talking about when I'll go back to those psychological principles that like persuade people, and make them care about the offer, but you have authority, or you have social proof of results tied into the offer, or you bundle loads of stuff into the offer, so they feel like they're gonna get value no matter what if they turn up. Like maybe you've spent ages on a bit of content like, and that's just naturally like, that's probably worth taking up, just 'cause they've like done stuff that I wouldn't be able to do on my own time. - Trying to do that is really important. - Yeah, I mean, the consultation offer is really interesting. I mean, you've actually just given me an idea of a campaign that we don't do at Rockets House, is like a group consultation, it's not something, we've only ever done it one-to-one, and I have a lot of clients where I recommend that as a campaign 'cause it's been so successful for my business, and it's a challenge because there's very few people in the business that can actually do a decent consultation call and be able to sell as well. So you need to be like a subject matter expert to consult, and you also need to be able to kind of lead the dance into a sales conversation. So not everybody's kind of got that skill. So that's one kind of issue with it. And then the other issue is on the surface, certainly one-to-one is not very scalable. So a lot of B-to-B SaaS clients of ours, like if the customer lifetime value is like less than 10K, for example, like doing one-to-one consultation calls, it's just not very scalable. So however, the Alex Hormosi methods of getting lots of people in a room together and consulting, I wouldn't say, I mean, it obviously can work on a webinar, like a live event, there's no reason why you can't do that. But a physical event, getting lots of people in a room like round-tabling, and also other people in the room kind of sharing business growth tips. I guess you need to be kind of careful you don't want to load a competitor's in the same room 'cause then it's not really gonna work, but there's a way that you can offer guidance to people. Like, for example, if you're a, I don't know, let's say in industry like charities, like if you're an AI provider to help charities improve their workflows, you could probably do a big event where you get, you invite a load of leaders of charities into a room and you do a presentation, and you do the Alex Hormosi kind of Q&A session of, oh, I've got this one particular workflow, this customer onboarding, it's just taking us ages, and you're just gonna talk through how you would advise them and other people in the room learn. And then, you know, you wouldn't be surprised if you walk away from that event and at least 10% of that group of people want to have a sales conversation with you. So that like consultation, I think is a very strong offer. So yeah, yeah, I agree with that one. So then, if that's the middle of the funnel, what about the bottom of the funnel? - The bottom of the funnel, the hardest one in B2B SaaS is getting harder to be honest. - So there's the demo. - Yeah, there's the demo. - There's a free trial. - The classic demo. - The free trial. - Probably don't need to cover those two. - No, I think everyone knows what they are, but I think the important thing to reference here, particularly for B2B SaaS startups, is like it especially when you're like high ACV as well. it is hard to get people to take a straight demo offer. It is, unless your product is like very, very, very good like need to have, and you have a big market, it can be difficult to get people to take a straight demo. - One thing I will say about how to improve the offer of the demo is the landing page. Like there's so many B2B SaaS websites where when you click on the Book of Demo button, a form pops up, and it's just a header at the top says Book of Demo, then there's the form. Whereas there's brilliant Book of Demo landing pages that tell you exactly how long the call's gonna be. There's a nice, friendly, smiley photo of the person that's gonna be taking the call with you. There's three to five bullet points of exactly what you're gonna learn and take away from this demo. There's, it's seen some of the best ones. There's like, you get a gift as well. It's like bundling offers that we talked about earlier. You're gonna get the demo, and we're gonna send you the PDF playbook of how you can implement some of the shots out of whatever. There's social proof on there. So there's selling the demo as well. - Sailing the demo is super fun. - And it doesn't know you're wrong. It's still very, very possible to just go out with a straight like, for example, let's just say we're running ads or cold email, let's just say we're doing that. You can go out with a demo offer, right? And if you frame it, well, in the way you're talking about and sell the demo, well, then yeah, you can definitely get demos. There's nothing like, again, against that. What I'm alluding at though is particularly in channels like that, for example, it's getting harder to get people to take straight demo offers. Particularly high ACV products where like, for someone to take a demo, when you're buying an enterprise software, it's always gonna be tricky because like, for example, if they take the demo, they're committing to like getting in the sales process, but like getting that sort of tech unborded in a big enterprise, it's incredibly complicated. There's a lot of inherent risks. So why would I take a demo? So in saying that, like how do you like go out with other offers to complement your demo offer, to get people into bottom of final conversations? And there are other options that I think a lot of SaaS businesses should be exploring. There's lots of things where you can go out and again, it goes back to psychological principles of like, how do I make people feel like they're getting value and make them care? So that's a really good example that I was looking at today actually, and something that I'm seeing increasingly is basically B2B SaaS businesses creating offers around like building a fund. So they position basically, like we created, we've opened up a fund of 500 million pounds to say, and this fund is available until like January 2027. This fund is available for any prospective customers tap into to be able to migrate from their current software into ours, and that covers the cost of that migration, et cetera, it's that kind of vibe. One really good example, practical example you can check out is default to the software SaaS product. They just opened up, I think they could it their Rest in Peace fund, this is the RIP fund. So they open up at 1.5 million again, it's tied into this kind of idea of like, we built a fund that's available for you to tap into, and it will help you migrate paying free and get out of your existing contract, basically. That, when you think about like the actual practicalities of serving an ad at the bottom of the funnel or serving a cold email, if you serve that, I would argue that it's more likely someone's going to take it up than just please book a demo of us. And so that's kind of the sort of stuff that I think B2B SaaS products need to be thinking about the bottom of the funnel. It's like, yes, the demo offer exists, and it should be there, it's got a place. How do we come out with other offers to get people in touch with us? Cognizant, I've mentioned on the pod a lot, one of the biggest things that we had was 25 free leads. So rather than just a demo, you would have a meeting with the sales team, but at the end of that, you would get 25 free leads from the sales team. Just makes people more likely to respond in that moment, because they feel like they're getting someone of value, there's like tangible something there. And I think there's lots of other kind of product offers that I've seen, a previous client of ours, one thing that they was like a financial forecast in software, one thing they were looking to do was essentially an offer that took a prospective customer could take their data, upload it into the tool, and get benchmarks on how they're kind of financial forecast to look in compared to others in the space, essentially. And that was built into the offer. So there's still like a meeting involved with that, but it's not just asking for a meeting where you're going to get sold to, they get something of value as well. So I think that's kind of again, going back to what we're talking about, like the offer is super important, because that's what's going to get people to take action. As soon as you get them into a conversation, that opens up all sorts of possibilities, particularly when we're working with more complex products, where it's hard to explain what the product does in a really short ad, like something like that. If you get them in front of the sales team, the chances of them moving forward quickly, dramatically increases compared to when I work before. - So some of what I'm hearing there is like a foot in the door, a foot in the door offer. So the cognizant example that you mentioned where you give 25 free leads, that you're not asking them to sign up to the whole platform and learn all of the features, and get rid of your existing supplier and move on to ask this big thing. It's just like, here's some free lead. It's like almost like, would they have to log in to the platform at all, or would you just. - They would get a data sample. - So they would be sent the leads as part of a commonly exact process, if it was like, what format it took, and they would send the leads. - Basically, it was like an ideal set like, a number of 25 customers they could reach out to. - Yeah, or my example earlier is the charity company, the AI company that built AI workflows for charities. You could carve off some of your offer and be like, we created this one customer on boarding, AI agent, would you like it for free, or would you like it for, you know, a hundred pounds, or something like that, just to kind of get the foot in the door. Is that a good example of an offer at the bottom of the funnel? Would you talk about it? - Yeah, I think so. - Trying to carve something off. - Yeah, I think like, again, going back to, like I think this is really important, even though it sounds very like marketing-y, psychological principles behind it. So a lot of that stuff is just like reciprocity. So like, I'm giving you something to get something back, and it does work, it triggers something in people's minds. It makes them more, they're not guaranteed, say, actually, but it makes them more likely, which improves the results of your campaigns, of your channels, all the things you're running. The offer is one of the biggest levers because it psychologically can trigger something to make people more likely to take action. So something like that, a foot in the door, is super important, 'cause we're giving you something without you needing to do anything in return, really. You just got to give us a little bit of your time. - Yeah, like we recently signed up to a tech supplier, we recently went through our ISO audit, and we were thinking about doing ISO, and thinking about it for a while, we were in the kind of, nearly at the end of the buying journey, we weren't at the end of the buying journey, 'cause we weren't actually looking for supply, but we were certainly talking about it internally with the COO here. And then we, I can't remember how it came to us, whether it was an ad or a cold out, which message or something that was like, would you, we'll do a free high-level ISO audit. So, and again, it was minimal time commitment. They were like, we're not gonna do a deep, live ISO audit, 'cause that requires us to really get in your systems, but we can do some analysis of like the website and the cookies and what we can see from a kind of public level, and we'll give you a report and a score of like how well your business looks at from a surface level and ISO. And obviously we were like, yeah, great. It's free, it's minimal time, and then we ended up working with them and paying them a lot of money to help us do that. So, they kind of, yeah, again, it comes back to the similar talk we talked about before, like audit consultation, that kind of offer, just carving off a bit of what you do and proving your expertise. So, yeah, I think he's really hard about how you can prove that before getting them onto a core. I think a lot of today comes back to like, yeah, what can you give people that's gonna require minimal time from them and they're gonna receive value? - Minimum time, and the value is inherent. The value is obvious. I think that's a really important thing. Value is obvious because like, again, going back to example of like the webinar, if I say five ways to do LinkedIn ads, there are millions of webinars like that. So, how do you make the value obvious? But I'm making it really specific and tying it to something that actually happened and it's a positive result that someone actually cares about. A lot of, I see a lot of B2B SaaS companies who just default to, we'll just put together like a box standard, like a bit of content and we'll just push it out. And if we're persuasive enough in the copy and the ad, then it'll work. Sometimes that can work, but it's much easier just to create a really good thing off the bat and make the offer really appealing off the bat. Rather than trying to like be like artistically brilliant with like this amazing copy and this amazing ad, like sometimes, like yes, that can move the needle, but I would argue that that like the creative and the copy is actually a harder lever to pull repeatedly than just creating one great offer that just works and repeat all the time. Yeah, I mean, goes back to the example of that cold email about that loom video that I sent to people to analyze their website. That didn't have any ads behind it or much creativity. That was just a simple like too line email and it just worked, we just fired it out. So yeah, well, I think that pretty much summarizes what we want to talk about today. So I hope that's given you inspiration on your offers. Have a little think about the top middle and bottom of the funnel offers that you can come up with rather than just the box standard trying to get people onto a demo. Think about an offer that you can create for someone that is minimal time commitment from them but offers them maximum value. That could often be carving off a little bit of your product and giving it away for free. Or it could be some kind of a consultation, some kind of an audit, a group consultation. I think live events work particularly well. That's a really good offer that pushes them towards the bottom of the funnel. So have a little think about all of those things and get to work on applying them. But thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the SaaS marketing weekly podcast. Good to have you back, Jamie. See you soon. Thank you for listening to the SaaS marketing weekly podcast. Now, if you are a founder or a marketer of a B2B SaaS business and you are struggling to generate leads, you should check out my demand generation agency rocket SaaS. But roughly the same price as hiring one in-house marketer, you will get a full team of marketing experts to create you a demand generation strategy and execute on content ads, leave magnets and website optimization, all designed to scale your SaaS business and generate you inbound leads. To find out more, please go to rockethyphen SaaS.io where you can apply for a free SaaS marketing strategy call with me.