2153 - Optimizing Your B2B Website Through A/B Testing with Spiralyze’s Sahil Patel

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1:05with us right now it's sahil patel sahil you are the ceo of spiralize spiralize is found on the web at spiralize.com we have the exact spelling of that uh for our friend that's listening in the podcast app just click around uh so you can follow along uh but it's great to have you sahil well thank you josh it's great to be here yeah well before we get going uh tell us about what you do in your free time, or if you're watching anything, reading anything, listening to anything that you're kind of geeking out on lately. Yeah. So in my free time, I'm an amateur musician. I've been playing guitar kind of my whole life.

1:45And I play in a few cover bands on the weekends. No kidding. And we play around Atlanta. Yeah. Well, I just interviewed someone. I don't have her name at the ready. she plays bass in a cover band in atlanta yeah in atlanta too very nice yeah atlanta's a great music town oh oh my gosh it truly truly is um yeah in fact i just picked up um i picked up the bass guitar about a year and a half ago it is i'm telling you not only is it just so enjoyable um but it's therapy you know it's like it's like a form of meditation when you're performing and you're playing is you know i'm not thinking about anything else i'm just totally engrossed um tell me what what kind of music you play or what would like in in the bands like what what do you usually cover so the bands i play in one is i play in a rush cover band which is like the nerdiest thing ever get out of here that's musically that is that's very challenging my friend it's a lot of fun um and then i also do a parent uh yeah neil pair awesome incredible drummer yeah so you so who's the guy that does the drums for neil we have an incredible drummer his name is dan de cricio and yeah he's great oh my gosh and then i also play in a classic rock cover band that plays songs that people actually have heard of yeah um and we do 70s and 80s classic rock like um black sabbath judas priest uh aria all the way up in the more a little more like uh 80s kind of rem talking heads yeah yeah um so for the rush tribute band when did that start um started about four years ago yeah um and it was the the drummer and the bassist were already kind of doing it they knew each other um and i was playing in a different band with that bass player and just he heard me hear me just like you know between songs you just kind of riff around while you're killing time and he heard me play the riff to limelight and he's like oh you're rush guy i was like oh yeah you know but it's like when are you gonna play that like no band there's no i didn't know of any rush cover bands and it's not the kind of thinking casually just be like oh yeah let's add a rush song to our next set list and he's like i play with i play with a we've been looking for someone to add do you want to play in a rush cover band that exists oh my gosh well listen um so in orlando orlando tends to orlando is one of the major hubs for tribute bands for whatever reason um and florida but definitely central florida we have internationally touring bands for the cure nirvana um the smiths a lot of those type of kind of like gen x bands uh but And I was just talking with one guy who has the Cars tribute band.

4:43Which one is it? Because I just saw a Cars cover band. Oh, no kidding. Not Touch and Go, was it? No, they're called Carpool. So they actually, just last weekend, my wife and I went to see an REM tribute band called, what are they called? They called Replay? I think they're called Replay. And then opening for them was a Cars cover band called Carpool. Oh my gosh, what a night that would be. You know, that's what I'm dying for down here. Surprisingly, we don't have an REM tribute band. Now you're in Atlanta, so I would hope that there would be some, you know, at least one good REM tribute band. But here's the thing with a musician.

5:21So I was, you know, talking to the guy who was heading the Cars tribute band. He goes, I was about ready to hang it up in music because we just could not get gigs. I couldn't get gigs. It was so hard to get paid. Like it's fine if you want to go out and lose money. There's plenty of opportunity for that. But he said with a tribute band, it's like I can support my hobby and we can actually get paid decent money. Oh, yeah. If you're willing to commit to it, there is a pretty good sized market for tribute bands on the regional tour circuit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the Rush cover band thing, there's actually two or three other Rush cover bands in Atlanta, and they're really good.

6:03And one of them tours regionally. And, you know, they pull a big draw. They're called the Spirit of Rush. They're incredible. I'm friends with their singer. um and yeah they tour regionally and they you know they they charge real ticket prices oh yeah um we're we're the one i play in is i i love it i think we're pretty good we're not in that kind of echelon of yeah well we i'm we're at a different stage like everyone is i mean i'm 46 i still have kids in school and yeah right you know you know playing a show once a month is about these guys and gals are semi-retired yeah or just maybe kids out of the house you know i mean for me it's like, you know, my, when I'm not working and I work, I mean, I'm a CEO, I work a lot, but when I'm not, you know, it's, it's, it's taking the kids to ballet and it's family time.

6:50So, you know, carving out, I'm, I consider myself lucky that I even get to do this kind of cool hobby. I also, you know, my seven-year-old knows who Russia is like, who's, that's great. From a fan perspective, it is such a fun experience to our friend that's been listening to, to a podcast all about tribute bands uh welcome to the tribute band podcast i i promise uh we'll get we're gonna get to uh what you do but i'll just say from a fan experience um i like it uh in some cases better than watching the original artist uh because you know again if you're a tribute band you're you're playing the part you're looking the part and of course musically you know you need to try to emulate this sound you do and you're not like a cheap yeah well absolutely you nailed it and you often go first like the one i plan we do rush 74 to 82 we think of that as like the golden era of rush not everyone agrees with that but that's our that's the rush that we love and so those and there's so much music to draw from um the rem band we went to see really good i i would say they focused up more they didn't they went all the way up through um they stopped before automatic for the people okay if you think about the big hits in the catalog they came from automatic and onward right and they didn't do any of that they said now there's obviously great hits in the but i love that i'll admit and my wife and her huge r.m.

8:19the first eight songs we knew like one song and we're big rem fans but i was wow wow they are really going deep deep cut here and it was fun and they were great but i was like you know i was hoping for at least a couple like of the of the the early hits um but they were great because they played those and they said okay everyone thank you for indulging us some songs that most of you've heard um and sure enough by the end they were playing you know some of some of the big REM hits and they closed out with Orange Crush, which I think everyone had been waiting. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, in some ways, if you love early era REM, like REM's not touring, but they were, that's not what REM, I saw that.

9:03That's right. That's not what they're playing. And you shouldn't expect them to. But you see that you see the tribute band and you're getting like a specific era and they, those guys nail it. They're incredible. You know, last thing, And I promise we're going to get to this. I just saw Hank Azaria is leading a Bruce Springsteen tribute band. And he played one song from Born in the USA. Everything else is an early Bruce. And it's kind of the same situation. But it's so much fun. Okay. We need to talk about Spiral Eyes. Okay. Can you give us an overview, Sahil, of the work that you do? What is Spiral Eyes, please?

9:43Spiral Eyes is a tribute band that tours the... Spiral Eyes is an A-B testing company. Spiral Gyro Jazz tribute band. It's a prog rock tribute band. Okay, so there are 34 ,000 websites that run A-B tests somewhere on their site. We scrape all of them. We find everyone else's A-B tests, and then we run the best ones for our clients. Wow. Wow. Well, that sounds very powerful. Can I just ask how you find A-B tests? Yeah. So we have built up our own product. It crawls the web and it looks for anyone who's doing what's called in-browser testing. I know, Josh, you've got a pretty sophisticated audience.

10:31Yeah, variations. Some people call that client-side testing. We're going back to the old days of the internet, client-side, server-side. And if you're running client-side testing, it's all in the public domain. And we have trained our product on how to detect. There's certain signals that websites give off when they're running a test. And our product is pretty good at knowing how to do that. By the way, Josh, you could do that yourself. You could open up a website right now, open up a couple browser windows, an incognito window. And if you saw two versions of their landing page, you'd know they're probably running a test.

11:05Now, that by itself is mildly interesting. What's really interesting is, well, which one did they pick as the winner? Okay. Now, again, you could do that. If you were patient enough and you just opened someone's homepage every morning, and you did that for 20 mornings in a row, and you saw two versions, the 21st morning, they only had one version. They're like, oh, well, they must have picked that as a winner. A little bit more interesting, but still not super predictive that that means it would work for anyone else. What we're doing is because we're crawling the entire internet, we're finding the winners and the losers.

11:43And what the machines are doing is learning from those patterns and then categorizing, clustering those. So that if you are a B2B SaaS company, you're running a landing page that's getting paid traffic. by the way, branded search, so higher intent traffic, and you have a seven-day free trial, very common, B2B SaaS, that's the kind of thing, and you want people to sign up for it, we know what are the 50 different ways you can run that page, and what are the 10 tests that you should run, because it's not about finding one that worked for one company, it's a portfolio of patterns that you should test all of them.

12:28But if you don't do that, what are you doing? You're just guessing. Or are you going on hunch? That's okay. But I'd rather run, just like if the doctor prescribes medicine, I could follow his or her hunch. But what I would really want is the doctor says, hey, Josh, this medicine, we ran it through an FDA clinical trial. 10 ,000 people got the placebo. 10 ,000 people got the drug. By the way, we made sure there was men and women and young people, old people in both groups. And guess what? 20 % of the time people got better. That's what we're doing for websites. Yeah. And your clients include folks like Netflix, Pepsi, the NBA, the NFL, some pretty - Some brands that people have heard of, yeah.

13:16Yeah, some pretty big brands. And obviously, I mean, you know, you suggest something to a Netflix that increases their conversion rate by, you know, 0.5%. And it's a no-brainer to engage with someone like you. Yeah. And Netflix is a great brand. You know, and to take another example, let's say you're building, like, payroll software. and knowing what are the A-B tests that other payroll software companies have done. And it doesn't mean you should mimic one of them, but if something has worked, that's a great starting point for running your own set of A-B tests. And by the way, Netflix has unbelievably unparalleled scale.

14:06It's great. Most of the world doesn't live in networks out of echelon of what they've been building for the last 20 years, but there's lots of B2B SaaS companies that sell six-figure software. And if you can even get 5 % more people knocking on the door saying, hey, I'd like to try that free trial, or I'd like to talk to one of your sales reps and see a demo, you only got to do a few more of those to have a real impact on the business. Right. I would imagine then that you get great insight into trends and what is working today. Can you speak on maybe some larger trends that you've seen that maybe over the past years, like, yes, we are absolutely seeing much higher performance with X, Y, or Z.

14:52Anything come to mind? And again, I know I'm speaking really broadly. You know, this is across, you know, very clients. But what I'm curious about are things that stand out that you find surprising or interesting in terms of, you know, more immediate trends? Yeah, I mean, there's three things that we've been seeing that work quite well. The first is on a typical B2B website. Somewhere on there, they're going to ask you to say, we call it a hand raiser. Raise your hand and say, I'm ready to buy. Take a bunch of forms. It could be, I'm ready to buy today. It could be, hey, I want to talk to a sales rep.

15:32I want to see a demo. I want to do something. I want to take the next step in the buying process. I think we've seen over and over is that happy people hurt conversions. And what I mean by that is particular in B2B, they rely heavily on stock photos. Because there's some research that shows, oh, the audience responds positively when they see people that look like them. By the way, they're not totally wrong. data from eye tracking shows your eye gaze naturally follows pictures of people it's just your eye you can't wait you see you see you see text you see image you see a person you go oh but the interpretation of that i think is wrong or the conventional wisdom which is oh well that must mean people they like seeing pictures of people let's put pictures of people and you can you know where this goes right every every software company out there has a website of someone crossing their arms or holding a tablet, implying that, well, they're happy because they're using the software here.

16:35So you should - High fives in the boardroom. Yeah, high fives. Oh my God, who's having so much fun in the conference room? In my experience, like, get me the hell out of here. This meeting could have been an email.

16:50So our AV tests show that when you replace the picture of the product with a picture of a single crisp image of your, I'm sorry, you take the image of the person and you run the test, you make the page the same, you just change out the picture of the person, the single crisp image of your software. Especially if it's something that like your audience, it entices them. It's like that kind of that wow moment in the sales demo, kind of visualization of what the tool does. it outperforms by about 20 % happy people. So that's why I say happy people hurt conversions. Wow. I love that. Can you give us one more?

17:35Sure, sure. I'll give you one more. Also one that is a little bit counter to conventional wisdom, which is that video kills conversions. Wow. Now let's unpack that. because video is super engaging. Video can work really well. And when you put it in the right place, it absolutely can help the user journey of someone who's moving from, okay, I'm early in my process. I'm not here to buy today, but I'm here to check it out. Okay, I like what I'm seeing. Okay, this is on my shortlist. Okay, I'm ready to raise my hand. Sign up for that free trial or buyer or whatever it is. But here's the thing about video.

18:21it's takes up it eats up people's attention because youtube has trained all of us when we see that little play button gotta press it i just you're like compelled press the play button and let's say you have a two minute video the average person spends maybe three minutes on a website maybe if they're interested they make up their mind in the first seven seconds whether they're going to bounce or not okay so video is a very expensive way to get your audience's attention and it will get their attention, but it eats up that attention, depletes it, and it doesn't replace it with anything else. And it's, by the way, especially in a business-to-business context, but that's the world I know.

19:01We focus on business-to-business. That's not the task someone has when someone has told them, hey, Josh, we need new payroll software. Can you go out and find five vendors? Make a short list, okay? That's not the task they've ensigned is watch, you know, I don't know, of the story of your company's founding or whatever it is. Okay. Now product videos, tutorials, they can work, but I just, I wouldn't lead with that. I wouldn't lead with something just really simple, like a great visual hook as a product image or some kind of social proof of who else uses this. We're just, we actually found really simple three bullet points on what are three great reasons to buy this product.

19:40It doesn't have to be over the top. It doesn't have to be like salesy at the moment. Just be like, Hey, this is you, this is accounting software that lets you close your books 20 % faster at the end of every month. Maybe that's what it is. Now, once they've done that and they've said, okay, I'm not going to bounce. I've spent seven seconds and I'm here and I see something unique when they're moving along that journey and they go, you know what? I want to educate myself on this product. Great. That's a good place to show some video. They're ready to, Hey, I want to, I want to educate myself, education pages, pages, solution overview pages.

20:14And those typically happen on what are called the interior pages of the website or what marketers call below the fold, like two or three scrolls down, which by the way, less than half of your audience is going to scroll more than once below the hero section of your homepage. That's a good place to have a video. But when you put it, because you spent all this money making this beautifully well-produced Hollywood production level, Netflix level video, and you go, hey, we just spent 200 grand in this video. What do you mean you're going to put it on an interior page? Put it on the homepage. Put it on the homepage.

20:43It's probably, I would say you should, everything should run an A-B test, but it's probably hurting your... That's amazing. That's amazing. All right. So spiralize.com is your website. To our friend that's listening, and maybe they've come across this episode because they're researching you right now and they want to know what you're like in real life and what your favorite music is. And now they know. Now they do. But I'm on your website right now. Convert 30 % more in 90 days, guaranteed. You want to explain maybe next steps for somebody? Well, here's the thing. I think if you are in the market for A-B testing and conversion rate, and you come to our website, I think you're going to figure out pretty quickly if this appeals to you.

21:25By the way, our pricing is on our website. We're super transparent. I'm a big fan of don't dilly-dally when it comes to that. If you look at our brands, you know we're working with big companies. That's the segment that we speak to, middle market to what I would call lower enterprise. And we make sure the social proof signals that. So I'd say there's a request demo page. Fill that in. It takes real quick. Now, if you're not there, which is probably most of you, go to LinkedIn. I post four mornings a week at 7.30 a.m. Eastern, always in two to three minute little bursts. It's some of it's kind of edutainment, fun, lighthearted.

22:07At least once a week, it's something more, when I say serious, actually goes into the data behind A-B testing. And check some of that out. And even if Spiralize isn't the right answer, I think you'll learn something about website optimization, about conversion, about how do you move people through the journey. And I think that's a good starting point. Yeah. No, you are a great follow on LinkedIn, Sahil. So Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralize, a website, spiralize.com, S-P-I-R-A-L-Y-Z-E.com. Thank you so much. It's a great conversation. Really, really enjoyed it. Absolutely, Josh. Thanks for having me on.

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