Creating Quality A/B Tests with Khalid Saleh

Overview: In this episode of Digital Conversations, Billy Bateman discusses how to create quality A/B tests with Khalid Saleh of Invesp. They discuss test strategy and how customer research is essential to a successful A/B test.

Guest: Khalid Saleh is the CEO and co-founder of Invesp, one of the first companies to focus on experimentation and conversion rate optimization in North America.

Transcript

All right, everyone. Welcome to Digital Conversations. I am your host, Billy Bateman. Today I am joined by the original Khalid Saleh, how you doing man?

Doing well doing well. Glad to be with you.

Yeah, glad you could join us should be a really interesting conversation going to talk a lot about A/B testing and optimizing for conversion. One of my favorite topics. But before we get into that, will you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I started my professional life as a software developer, I figured like, you know, you can make some good money in it. It was either a doctor or software engineer. I tried actually med school for a semester and dead bodies are not my thing.

I go into software development, and I moved up the ranks up to the point I was a software architect working on large websites. American Express, Motorola, goto meeting. And I saw one problem that they’ve consistently struggled with, which is they’ve spent millions of dollars on these sites, they get a ton of visitors to their sites, but they don’t have the conversions. People are simply not converting. Your average ecommerce website converts about 1% of its visitors into actual customers, which is horrendous.

For every 10,000 people that come you get 100 orders. You would hope that you get better. If you compare that to the offline stores, usually about 20-25% of the people walk in, if not even higher, depends on the type of store are actually buying an item.

I told my wife this. This makes sense. And she started actually our agency. And then two years later, I remember I’m working with a client that she walks into me, she’s like, what are you doing?

I’m like, working on a problem with a JavaScript. She’s like, why don’t you just quit and join me. And I’m like really joining you. I mean, that’s what’s supposed to be a side business side hustle, go figure. The rest is history.

So, we’ve started the company back in 2006. And for the first eight months of having the company alive, we’re doing conversion optimization. That wasn’t even called conversion optimization. It was simply helping companies increase conversion rates. Eight months into it, the Eisenberg Brothers, called it conversion optimization. And we’re like, oh, so that’s what you call, the thing that we do is conversion optimization.

The big clients are really nice, because they pay good money. The clients are more interesting, because they tend to be willing to adventure. It’s looking to be more adventurous, correct? Yeah, we’re like, hey, let’s test this thing. And let’s see how people actually react to this messaging or this design.

So, you know, kind of an interesting mix between the two. Over the years, we’ve ran 22,000 av tests until now, which I think is more than any other company that does conversion optimization world worldwide. We’re very proud of that. And the average is sort of interesting.

So, the average conversion optimization company has a success rate of about 12-15%. For every 100 A/B tests that they run, about 12 of them, or 15 of them will actually produce results. Hey, we have a design over here that actually increases conversions. we’re averaging close to 60% success rate. We’ve smashed that number.

It also came as a result of a lot of work, a lot of mistakes, a lot of painful mistakes, sleepless nights at times, up to the point where you’re like, Okay, so I think I’ve figured this one out, and then we can actually increase conversions. So amazing. Let me ask you this. You run over 60,000 A/B test 2020. Between 2000 I’m sorry, yeah.

So, what are your main, you know, anyone who’s getting into testing whether they’re going to try to specialize it, or they’ve just been given the responsibility of I own the website is hard to beat on the marketing team? What are like the three things you would say to anybody getting started?

Like, here’s what you need to be thinking about when you’re creating an AV test?

Sure. I would start the very first elements, whenever you’re doing any type of A/B testing is you want to think about, there’s endless number of things that you can test on a website. I can test headlines, I can test images, I can test user flow and help you are navigating around my website.

But before you and people, you know, become trigger happy whenever they discover A/B testing, and they probably have read a case study here that says, oh, we’ve changed this color on a button and now our conversions increase by 500%. People get excited, they come in they say, Okay, I can change colors on a button. I can change an image I can change a headline and they tested them.

Nothing’s happening, no increase in conversions, no decreasing convergence, this was useless. You’re like, okay, well, this may be a different headline, try it out, nothing happens. Less test, different call to action, nothing happens. Because these are surface level solutions, correct. You’re trying something very surface and you probably get very surface results.

The success for doing conversion optimization starts with quality research. And this is funny, because we always talk about research and marketers always talk about research is just as much as like, you know, everybody says, customer first. And I tell marketers, I’m like, you hear that? We say that so much to the point that it becomes meaningless.

I was dropping my son to school today. Like I have this, I have NPR playing. And there is this law office in Chicago says like, we put clients first. Oh, my gosh, man, even the law office puts clients first. I don’t even know what that means. They charge you less. Or What does it mean to put clients first, same thing with research gets a bad rap. And research has been the same research, by the way that most marketers do nowadays, or salespeople is the same research that was done 5060 years ago. Just ask yourself, so why did you buy the product.

And when you ask people top of mind questions, you get top of mind answers. You know, this is sort of interesting. Let me ask you this, Billy, why do you brush your teeth every day?

That my wife will hang out around me. There you go. That’s the right answer. Most people would say dental hygiene. It’s not because of dental hygiene. It has actually, like know very little to do with dental hygiene. If you want to apply logic to the answers like Well, that’s why people do it.

If that was the case, because of dental hygiene, then we all would be brushing our teeth probably four or five times a day, especially as we eat candy. Yet research shows that people don’t brush their teeth after they eat a candy bar late at nights.

People are more likely to brush their teeth if they’re about to go out on a date. Because they don’t want to have that stinky breath. Oh, yeah, nothing to do with dental hygiene. The top-of-mind answer is like, oh, you know, I want to keep my teeth healthy. The reality there’s a lot more that goes into human actions more than humans will tell you why they take a certain action.

So, I think increasing conversion rates starts by doing that type of research, whether it’s customer research, so talking to people. We spent quite a bit of time talking to actual customers, I think they can, if you know what type of questions to ask. It can reveal tremendous amounts of insights that you can use and might be interested in clicking on maybe a little later in the show that will do some like in a live interview. We’ll draw a bit deeper.

You want to look at data as well as part of the research? You want to look at your analytics you want to see, okay, where are people clicking? How are they navigating from one page to the next? What pages are people exiting my site on? Where are people struggling? Correct on the site? Yeah, something else?

There’s plenty of solutions out there that heat map solutions that show you actually for a page that has about 2000 visitors. Where are people clicking? You know, what buttons are people clicking? I was just looking at the heat map for our site. We have our own conversion optimization software. And when you first log in smack dab in the middle of the dashboard, we have four icons: A/B testing, heat maps, session recording, opt-in forms, and I’m thinking like this occupies 95% of the design.

And on the side, we have the small navigation that says the same things. A/B testing, heat maps, session recording polls.

People were ignoring that. You might have those humongous icons that we have in the middle. And we’re clicking on the small icons we have on the side, and I’m like, so you’re telling me you’re completely ignoring this, like no major real estate that we have on the page, and then clicking on the site navigation, guess what? Remove those huge icons. Let’s figure something out with the design of the dashboard because people are ignoring it’s basically. People are telling you through their clicks, they’re voting with their clicks correctly. People vote with money and they vote with their wallets. And they vote with their clicks. Look at the LMS that people are interested in.

Ask people questions. We have those pop ups that appear correct on the side of land, and you see them all the time. What why are you visiting our site today?

People come to our websites and my assumption was to higher conversion optimization company. I’m like, okay, guys, we only have a 2% conversion rates. We got to do something about this. Before we do anything more like, let’s ask people, why are you coming to our website, and let’s see what people say. 95% of our visitors weren’t coming to our site to learn about conversion optimization, they were not there to h conversion optimization agency.

Even I was telling them like, no matter what you do, 95% of your visitors out there to learn about conversion optimization. You’re not going to improve conversion rates before beyond 5%. Because that’s 5% are not there to do, they’re there to learn.

And even more interesting to say is like, hey, guys, so if we know that our audience is coming to learn about conversion optimization, what do we need to present them with? On the homepage, to tell them you’re at the right place, we actually have quite a bit of educational material, but conversion optimization.

That’s the kind of research that can really help educate you and to make the right decisions. Correct. As you go through this process of doing customer research, looking at your data, looking at session replays, looking at analytics, doing the surveys on the website, you end up identifying problems, and you can give me probably a site and we can easily identify 30, 50, sometimes 150 problems on the website. Yeah.

If you have unlimited time, and unlimited budgets, habits, fix them all. Now, as far as I know, most of us are not in that amazing situation.

No, limited time, limited resources. All we say is like, hey, let’s figure out from those 150 problems, which ones we think will have the most impact on our bottom line. And at the same time, it would require the least number of efforts in terms of fixing.

You might show me a problem like, Oh, great, I can fix it, well take me six months to fix, and lots of resources. And I’m like, I don’t have the time or the energy to do that. Let’s find the things that we think will have the most impact, and will require the least amount of effort, those are the ones that I tackle first.

Research helps us identify the problems, and then all the intellectual exercise to identify the power like which ones will have the most impact on our bottom line. That’s the first element to successful A/B testing.

The second elements to successful A/B testing kind of goes with the first one as well, which is being able to run quality testing.

And by quality testing. I’ve identified the elements. I said to myself, if there’s a problem on the page, and lots of times when people say, well, yeah, I see a problem. But the least effort will be to changing the color of the button.

I’m like so you really think by changing the color of the button. And this was, by the way, it debates between like no green to red, you think you’re going to actually get a lot more sales? People say yes, I’m like, really?

Like, let’s take a look at the webinar. And I love to do this, I like to take a look at my website. They navigate around it. And then I close it and tell them hey, by the way, what color was my button? Like? I don’t remember, I’m like, yes, most likely you don’t remember the color of the button.

Guess what, when you’re motivated enough, you will find that button. Now don’t do something silly like hiding the button or like chasing is like people can find it. But at the same time, make it very simple, very straightforward. Quality testing means that I need to think about this test and think about the human mind. Yeah, if you’re thinking that’s changing colors will impact, no, but maybe changing the messaging around the website.

You want to come up with, for example, with messaging where your visitor will think to themselves Oh, man, it is stupid of me not to buy from the site today. Now, how often does that happen? Where you see something and you think to yourself, I got this today?

Lots of times people come in, look at the site and go Okay, well, I guess that’s another website bookmark, it’s, and then they never remember to come back to it. Yeah. How do you change that where somebody sees your website, they’re like this, I got to contact them?

Well, I got to subscribe, I got to place an order. And there’s a big difference in the mindset of a visitor who thinks themselves I can buy from this website versus the visitor who thinks himself, I must buy from this website. Let me ask you, because I think a lot of it comes down to emotion if you can trigger some type of emotion in people, even if you’re selling like a b2b product.

But being able to trigger emotion, not an easy thing to do. But when done well, it’s going to make a world of difference to your sales and your marketing. What do you see is like the quality things. How do you get to that state where you’re like, I have to buy? So I completely agree with you, Billy. It’s all about figuring out the emotion, correct? Kind of peeling the onion.

So, the Japanese say asked the five why’s correct? Why, why, why, why until you get to the real reason why somebody wants to buy something. Well, it’s tough if you’re doing a customer interview, and you’re asking them why because the person is going to get really annoyed. Yeah, I like to give the example of buying a drill. Every marketer knows the famous saying by professor of love, it’s no one buys a quarter inch drill. Everybody buys a quarter inch hole. Yeah, you know the benefits of you know of mine.

The drill. We moved to this house in Chicago, we have a whole bunch of wall art that we want to hang on the wall, or whatnot. And my wife just is constantly bugging me. And when are you going to hang it on the wall? And it’s like, almost every other weekend. It’s like, you know, I’m like, Dude it’s freezing outside. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to hang it. Yeah, totally. I invite my friends over. I’m like, okay, have to buy the drill. Because begs the question, Why don’t I have a drill, long story. I don’t have a drill.

So, I go to Home Depot, I buy the drill, and like, pick the fanciest drill, and I’m walking outside of Home Depot. And I think to myself, I’m like, okay, so I did buy the drill. I did buy that hold that I’m going to put some tools to hang the pictures.

But the reality of it, I bought two other things. One, I bought the piece at the house where my wife is going to stop nagging me completely. And there’s not this weekly questioning and inquisition from my kids. When are you going to hand over the wall of the art on the wall? And that’s priceless. Oh, my God. Definitely.

Something else I bought, though. I actually because my friends were coming over, I really want to show all this art that we bought. And I know there is a social element to my to my decision. Yeah. There’s always a functional aspect to every decision that we make. Not you bought the drill done. But then there’s the emotional and the social side of things. I think I was thinking to myself, now, you know, me and my wife because we lived overseas, and then we moved over here.

We had one car and I’m like, Oh, this will do, and I’ve been thinking about buying a car. I think of myself, I’m like, okay, well, I can like I guess I’m going to go buy a car and I start thinking, like, a Camry will do actually like, you know, I’m point A to point B. And this is funny because of COVID. Our cars been parked there for months. Yeah, rarely do we move it?

come on. I’m the CEO of a company. I can just buy a Camry I’ve been like working really hard. I must buy my slicking myself something a little bit nicer. I’m like, Okay, well, maybe I’m going to go with an SUV. I’m somebody who loves SUV. I’m like, Okay, I need SUV. And then I start thinking, I’m like, wow, I see videos looking since college days, like, you know, every time you buy a car, it’s an SUV, and the Camry now is out of question.

If I’m looking at functionality to the Camry SUV, I’m like, No, and we already have looking at another SUV. I’m like, I need something to show off in front of my peers. I’m like, Alexis, I need to get me Alexis, watch, you know, that’s emotional element, correct. And the mindset from purely functional.

And in all honesty, if I want to just something purely functional, I was central would have done that not to offend anybody who drives a central, but that functionality. But then there’s other considerations. People always whenever you start buying, thinking about buying something, you put a criteria in your mind. It’s all based on functionality. But when you make a decision, correct that criteria, almost most of it goes out the door.

It’s the emotional side of things, right, better. Sure. And that changes you. And that doesn’t matter whether it’s b2b or b2c. There’s always an emotional side, drilling a bit deeper, and being able to collect those emotions and using them. And the sales process and marketing material makes a huge difference in your ability to convert somebody. I agree. I agree.

Oh, hey, man. Let me let me ask you this. We started out talking a lot about customer research. And really, throughout the whole thing, it’s like, how do you understand your customers, and why they made that decision to sign up so that you can help more people make that decision? Exactly. When you’re doing customer research? You shared with me that you’ve got a great exercise you like to go through? I think it would be awesome to go through that. And we can learn you know, how do you do it?

Awesome. So you bought something recently?

Yeah, yeah. I recently bought a rooftop tent that goes on top of my four runner. Oh, that’s when we go when we go camping. My wife didn’t grow up camping. I grew up actually spent seven summers in high school in college living in a tent and working in the outdoors. But she was like to sleep on the ground. And I don’t like setting up tents that much either. It’s like five minutes. You know, like the whole thing set up and she’s happy. Awesome.

Let’s do an interview. When did you buy it? The roof. I bought it last fall. Okay, last fall. So usually, by the way, whenever we’re doing interviews, we ask a couple of things.

One, we want to talk to customers who bought within the last, we say a month to six months. So that’s one yeah. If somebody had bought something over a year, they forgot the emotions you can still bring back the emotions, but it’s a bit of it’s hotter. Yeah, that’s number one. We want to make sure that they bought the item themselves.

They didn’t receive it as a gift. Because if you receive that item as a gift, well, you know, you’re not as invested. And usually, the items are really good to do interviews for our items where you spend more than $50, which I assume you did.

Yeah, I did.

There you go. There you go. Here’s how I would start an interview, let’s say like another manufacturer, or in commerce website that sells those rooftop tents hired. And they selected you for the interview.

Hey, Billy, thank you for doing the intro for agreeing to do the interview. Let me give you a little bit of background. We are going to be conducting a much larger research project about how people buy roof tents. And due to COVID. This project probably going to happen sometime either later this year or next year. Until then, we decided to talk to customers who have purchased the rooftop tents. And actually, just hear your story.

There are no right, or wrong answers is your story. Going through the best example that I can give think of me shooting a documentary. You’re the star of that documentary. I’m the director of some moments, we will have the camera man standing behind my shoulder zooming in on your face, just like how you see it in documentaries asking you some silly questions. It’s a bit different, but it should be it should be interesting. How does that sound?

Sounds good.

Excellent. So when did you buy that roof tense?

So we got it last September.

You got it last September. Perfect. What was going on that day? Where’d you buy it from? By the way?

Yeah, so we actually bought a used one. Just went online, found somebody selling them used. We were trying to get a new one. But you know, due to COVID? Finding a new one. It’s tough.

I like that. What was the motivation behind like, you know, why did you think that day like, you know what, I’m going to go ahead and buy me that the sense of kind of walk me through that. What were you thinking?

Yeah, so it was probably about a month leading up to it. I’d actually been interested in buying one back when I was in grad school, because when I first started grad school, I did not have a place to live. I was living out of my Forerunner, wow, for about a month, until I found a place to live. And at the time, my wife will she was my girlfriend at the time was like, hey, she found these she’s like, you should get one of these, you know, it’d be more comfortable.

But I was like, No, I have to spend all this money on tuition. I can’t afford 1200 bucks for a tent right now, because I’m going to get a place to live like it’s not a long term solution. I can’t spend the winter in Boise living in a tent. And then kind of forgot about it for a couple years. And my wife and I, we do a lot of camping. Although we weren’t doing as much as I wanted to, because she doesn’t like sleeping on the ground. Okay. And so then I was reminded of Oh, we got these rooftop tents. I saw somebody driving around that had one and I was like, Okay, let’s look at it and see, but maybe I can find something within a you know, 1000 bucks or less.

So you said $1,000 you’re seeing something. Okay, I like that.

Yeah, and then we just started looking around and watching YouTube videos. You know, the different bottles, seeing what would fit on my Forerunner, tried to find videos of other people that had the same tent on similar form for another model that I had. And it found a couple of videos actually, with the one we ended up buying with people with the same car and talking about how Hey, this one will work. This is what we like this is what we don’t like the things they didn’t like weren’t a huge deal but I actually disliked the same things now after using the 10 a few times but yeah, you know and then we couldn’t find one knew that wasn’t it they were just evaluated price gouging.

Yeah, everybody’s suffering through that.

Yeah, yeah, I was like this thing was 900 bucks at the beginning of the year and now people want 1400 bucks for it. I was like okay, we’ll look around we found one used for 750 I believe was what we ended up paying. So like a couple years old but no problems with it.

And so I just call them up and let me ask you this question. You’re thinking about using it because you go you guys go camping. How often do you guys go camping? Talk to me about that?

In the summer? Twice a month at least on the week twice a month. And who’s more into camping you’re your wife.

Oh me for sure.

You when was last time you guys before buying this rooftop tent when was the last time you guys like know how far before then that you guys had gone camping.

Probably a month before we bought it, we’d gone and done like a legit camp out where we set up a tent.

Okay. It was on your wife, anybody else or just the two of you.  No, my brother and his wife came as well. Nice, nice. documentary style. We’re going to zoom in, you know, a month before so we’re talking about the August timeframe. Something like Yeah, okay. It was a weekend, I’m assuming. Yeah, just quick, you know, went down, camped out Friday and Saturday nights.

Okay. Do you recall looking all this talk about like, you know, when how far in advance Do you guys usually plan those, those camping?

Is all depends. Sometimes we’ll plan a month in advance. And other times, I will just be like talking Wednesday or Thursday and like, Hey, we don’t have anything for the weekend. Let’s you know, let’s go down to Boulder and camper or go up here. You know?

So for this particular camping trip, that was the last one. Do you recall who initiated that conversation? Your brother?

I think my brother did. Yeah, Jacob, him and his wife were already planning to go and they just called he called me. It’s like, hey, Melody and I are going.

Awesome. And do you recall how many days in advance? He called you?

Oh, three or four? Tuesday?

Tuesday, he calls you Tuesday morning or night? Do you recall?

Probably Tuesday morning.

Tuesday morning. Where are you at home? I’m assuming or you’re at work or?

I think it was on the way to work.

You’re on the way to work. calls you he calls you up. And let’s say you’re on your way. So you’re in your car, maybe like you know going to work? Yeah. Okay, so you’re on your way. Jacob calls you Hey, when Where was he planning to go by the way?

Like we’re down to? It’s a boulder Utah. Okay.

middle of nowhere.

middle of nowhere. Have you been there before?

We go all the time.

Okay. calls you we’re going to do this. And did you tell him? Yes. Or do you usually check with your wife by the way?

I usually trip with my wife at this point.

A wise man wise man, you know, we eventually learned you know, so Okay, so what do you tell him? Like, you know, when he tells you hey, we’re going down?

Yeah, I’m just like, dude, as long as Chelsea doesn’t have some plans that I don’t know about. We’re in.

Okay, awesome. Walk me again. documentary style. When do you call your wife?

Uh, I think it probably texted her.

Oh, okay. You opted for the text route. Okay. Yeah, I probably who she works as well. And she gets to the office a little before me. But yeah, texted her and just said, Hey, they’re going down. You want to go? And she was like, yeah, we’ll go. Awesome. Awesome. So this is Tuesday. When do you guys head down?

Friday after work just right after work. You know? Now, you said that she’s looking at your wife Chelsea, correct. Yep. Okay. She likes to sleep on the ground.She does not like on the ground. He does not like to sleep on the ground. Okay, so you must have been aware of that because you’ve gone camping before. Yeah. What are you thinking as you’re heading down there? How long is the drive by the way?

It’s a two and a half hour drive. Yeah, not too bad. You know, I’ve got a bunch of, you know, the inflatable pads and they have some foam pads. So you know, we’ve brought all that stuff. So like she’s alright, she’s, I think it’s the bugs that bug her more than anything.

Okay, so let’s talk about looking at that Friday night. Finally. You’re settled. You get there. What do you guys sleeping on? By the way at that point? Is that like another inflatable?

Yeah, we’re sleeping on. We each have an inflatable pad. Yeah. Okay. little tent, an old fence. And you’re okay with it. You’ve done it? Yeah. Several times that she complained about it.

And now she doesn’t complain. Really? On the way back she did let me know like, man, I love to camp, but I wish we had camped next to people that had, you know, a nice camper trailer. Like that would be really nice. And I’m sorry, I did not want to buy a camper trailer. Did I do I don’t it’s a whole lifestyle commitment.

Oh, definitely. So that she’s telling Hey, I love it. But you have to make some upgrades. nicely. Yes. Nice way. So she suggests that. And then at some point you said like, you know, you saw somebody with that. Yeah.

Just driving around town the next week.

Okay. Talk to me about that. What day was it by the way? was just like a regular workday or weekend.

Yeah, I don’t remember. I think it was just during the week. Driving.

What’s she with you in the car.

I don’t think so. I think it was just me heading to work and saw somebody coming the other way. That had one. I was like, okay, that’s, that’s a cheaper option than getting the camper.

Okay. And do you tell your wife about it at that point or you go research?

I think when I went home, I did tell her about it. And then we started, you know, to see what she would think. And then she was like, Yeah, I think it would be fun.

And we started both researching at that point. Okay, now you’re researching online, and you’d like and tell me what as you’re doing this research, like, you know, sounds like YouTube, Google, what are you doing to research? Yeah, YouTube and Google for the most part. I tried to think of any I knew any of my friends that had one of these and none of them. None of even a few people. I call them like, I think Adam might have one didn’t. But I asked them if they’d stayed in some and a few of them had slept in them. Not, you know, they don’t want that. They slept in one. And they gave me their feedback on it. And how was it? What did they tell you?

You know, they all liked it. They did have some feedback along the lines of yellow, the mattresses that come in, those things are not always as comfortable as you think they’re going to be. So having a pad or just making sure the mattress is really thick. Is something you should definitely look at, you know.

But they all they all liked it. The only complaint other than that was something that I became acquainted with really quickly is if it’s really windy, and you’re up high. You hear that wind on your Oh, yeah, I can I can imagine I can imagine. You’ve done the research assault like okay, we’re going to we’re going to do this. Yeah. Did you was what budget do you set for yourself at that point?

How about 1000 bucks? We were like, let’s try to keep it under $1,000.

Do you have Did you have any points of reference to set that 1000? Or no? Yeah, we looked at pricing on a few and, and just kind of figured, okay, it’s not the cheapest, but we’re not ready to spend more than that for something that we’re not convinced we’re going to like. Okay.

Okay. So 1000. And we got to try it out and see, now you’re looking for a new one. And what did you start seeing?

The prices were mostly over 1000 on the new ones. Even for ones that I’d known from just you know, seen prices in the past, were typically less than that. And then watching YouTube videos that were a year or two old, they’re like, yep, I bought this for this price. I’m like, Oh, that’s a good price. Yeah, go and try to find it at that price. I’m like, yeah, that price is not being offered anymore.

Yeah. Go figure. Everybody wants to buy them. And then they’re trying to make Okay, so who suggested the used option, by the way?

Uh, I think my wife did. I don’t remember exactly. But she said, Let’s check KSL, which is like the local version of Craigslist. And we started looking, and there’s not a lot on there. But there were a few. And so I would just check it every day and see what was up. Okay, awesome.

Awesome. Let’s stop the interview over here. Because we can continue by the way and drill. Notice how I didn’t ask you a lot about your experience posts using the item correct with a bit deeper. Notice how, and this is sort of very, very interesting, because the idea first came to you in grad school, but you didn’t entertain it, but there’s still kind of the seed there in the back of the driver for you, is you there’s an activity that you enjoy, but your wife is with you during the activity, correct? Exactly.

And guess what she lets you know is like, hey, instead of telling you, I’m not going to do it, that like no capper is nice. To do this anymore, honey, you know, we got an upgrade, we have to have a major upgrade. And notice how like, you know, the minutes you saw something else triggered right away, like, Oh, this is a much better option.

If I’m running marketing. These are things that I would play looking at with correct the message about, like, know, the why happy why for the happy partner, I would play a lot with the messaging around living because you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars to enjoy your camping trip. Correct, then I’ll put, you know, play with something with the image of the camper that’s going to cost and, you know, play more on the benefits of the item.

If I’m running that classified ads in a sack, you know, it’s correct. But let’s say you’re running the marketing for it’s, what’s the messaging going to be? Yeah, you come to our site because of all the price gouging. If you think about all these different things, think about like you know, even the roof Top 10 that you bought, most likely, if you see it, there’s just kind of the features correct. Here’s the specs, here’s the size, nothing emotional, nothing about upset, nothing about the comfort of the camping trip, nothing about like not the fact that you’ll enjoy your camping trip without having to spend 1000s of dollars.

So here’s the size, here’s the material, that and then notice how, again, we were going back. We did this, I think in about 10 or 12 minutes, it’s been 45 minutes going through each one of those Now, something else that we did, Billy is the documentary style, and the reason for the documentary style. I was asking what day was it? And how? Because and then if we had drilled a bit deeper, it’s about bringing you back to that emotional state that you were in. You felt how you brother?

Oh, I got something back from her. Does she complain? No, like, you know, but on the way back again, it’s about bringing it back to that emotional state. Yeah. And as you do those interviews, you will see when somebody’s looking at something clicked in their head as they’re back into that emotion.

Correct, then it’s like, you know, now they’re speaking more emotionally as opposed to like, no, very logical, well, yeah, we need just something to cover, you know, to cover ourselves up, feel more comfortable. That’s the style, you know, of customer research. And notice like enough, just from spending 12 minutes, we figured out different messaging for that product a lot better, I’m almost sure than what they use on the, you know, in their marketing material.

Yeah, I love it. Man. This is this has been really good. I think it was great. You brought me right back to the moment, even though it was a few months ago. I was like, Okay, I remember this whole kind of journey. And you know, if anyone can have that information for that, this is why I bought two that’s, that’s a gold if you’re the marketing team, you know, if you’re like,

Okay, and it’s not just this guy, we heard similar things from Carrie, where it’s similar things from Jenny, they this, these are the things we’re seeing for why people actually buy our products.

Exactly. Usually what we do sort of interesting, you bring up a really interesting point. We’ll do about five to seven of those interviews. Yeah, start seeing trends. People don’t buy something because they’re a 40 year old male sitting somewhere, because there’s a certain emotion. You’ll find that there’s some people who are buy because of their wife, by the way, that suggests find the wife, somebody else is buying it because he has some friends, and he wants to show off somebody, you start almost categorizing them that there is looking for something specific a job that you’re hiring this product to you. You’re like, oh, now we’ve heard the same story.

Hello, let me let me mention this story, which is funny. We work with a client that sells dance lessons. And he always thought that he sells dance lessons, you know, so you go to YouTube, and you download those dance lessons. We start interviewing people. And we talked to a pastor who had bought the dance lessons. And he tells us you don’t sell dance lessons. We don’t He’s like, No. He’s like, what do you sell is marriage therapy.

I almost got a divorce from my wife until I bought the dance. And we are practicing dancing together. He’s like, as a matter of fact, it was so powerful that his last Sunday that the sermon that he gave on Sunday in the church was about the dance lessons and about that dance lesson program. And like, really, he’s like, not only really, I actually recorded it, and he says that the sense of like, Wow, so we’re selling something else.

There’s that emotional benefits, drilling a bit deeper. And then actually having listened to the customer and allowing them the space to be able to say, actually, we’re having problems with the marriage, things were stagnant, and it changed our life. Like, okay, we sell something different. Sell the benefits sell the emotions, because then people make decisions based on emotions, and they justify with their mind with logic. Yep.

I love it, man. Oh, this has been this has been enlightening. Thank you so much. Before I let you go, is there anything else you want to you want to talk about?

I think I think we’ve covered quite a bit. I’m on LinkedIn. I hang out at LinkedIn. If anybody wants to connect, you know, just hit me up. And I hope that’s everyone found it useful.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, and we’ll chat later.

Awesome. Thank you.