EP.15 Neil Patel | MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR

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EPISODE 15
NEIL PATEL: QUICKSPROUT / CRAZY EGG / HELLO BAR

Neil Patel is the co-founder of several prominent marketing tools and blogs: Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and Quicksprout to name a few. He helps companies such as Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom — as well as small businesses and entrepreneurs — beef up their marketing and grow their revenue. Forbes declared Neil one of the top 10 online marketers while Entrepreneur magazine acknowledged him as creator of one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Additionally, Neil was awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives.

IN THIS EPISODE

Perfectionists make the worst marketers. In a landscape where speed is everything, splitting hairs stops businesses in their tracks. Neil Patel vehemently believes that executing quickly, iterating fast and perfecting later is the key to growing your business — something that is far removed in too many small business today. The more you create, the greater accumulation of quantitative data you'll have at your disposal to ramp up your marketing efforts. Tune in as the king of online marketing divulges the game-changing strategies he's currently using in his businesses with ONTRAPORT CEO Landon Ray.

TOPIC TIMELINE

1:12 - Execute Fast, Iterate Later
Neil attributes his success to rejecting perfectionism and getting the message out there.

3:47 - Marketing Funnels Work: Use Them
Neil discloses the best-converting way to make sales online.

6:21 - Pull Focus When You Plateau
This is why most companies lose focus when they start gaining traction.

8:52 - Marketing Automation and Phone Sales
This new frontier of Neil’s business now generates 15 to 20% of his collective revenue.

10:54 - Always Rely on the Numbers
Neil explains why data-driven results consistently trump intuition.

12:33 - Qualitative Research
Learn how Neil determines his praiseworthy content calendar.

13:57 - Targeting Was Sh*t, Segmentation Was Sh*t
Hear how we’ve evolved as marketers to better serve our leads and customers.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

LR Today we have Neil Patel who is the co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP, and Viacom, grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web. Forbes says he's one of the top 10 online marketers. Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the hundred most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. He's also been awarded the Congregational Recognition from the United States of the House of Representatives. Thanks so much for being here Neil.

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NEIL PATEL

It's really easy. The issue is people aren't executing; they're perfectionists, and then once things start working out, go perfect it later on. Just execute. Figure out how to make something work at the beginning.

NP Thank you for having me.

LR That's quite a list of accomplishments.

NP Thank you.

LR President Obama, huh?

NP I never met him.

LR No? Damn. Let's just jump right in. What do you think is your unique skill set, and how has that contributed to your success?

NP I'm really good at executing fast.

LR Interesting, that's not what I thought you'd say

NP Because I execute so fast, I can go through so many different marketing techniques, strategies, business concepts, and figure out what works really quickly or what doesn't work.

LR So interesting. I would have guessed that you were going to say, "That I've got a mind for marketing, or copy, or I know what."

NP I do, but a lot of people have that, right?

LR Yeah.

NP What I've found is no matter what you're doing, if you can't just get shit done, like execute really fast, and learn from it, and have a decent version of whatever you're executing, nothing ever gets done.

LR Yeah, that's so interesting. We’ve just kind of been ramping up our own marketing team in the last year, and we've found the same thing, that the difference between success and failure is just being able to move quickly, and iterate fast, and try a bunch of things. Most of what we do fails, but as long as we are doing a lot of it, we find the things that work.

NP That's right. It was funny, when I was talking to the audience earlier today, and they're talking about the biggest mistake people make, I'm like, "You guys are using emails, marketing automation, et cetera," but a lot of them are worrying about copy. I'm like, "Just get the sequence right. Just execute on it. Throw something out there. You'll be better off doing that, than trying to make it perfect and then taking it three months.”

LR Yeah.

NP If someone signs up for ONTRAPORT, why should it take them more than 30 days to get up and running, and sending out emails. It's not that hard to use.

LR No.

NP It's really easy. The issue is people aren't executing; they're perfectionists, and then once things start working out, go perfect it later on. Just execute. Figure out how to make something work at the beginning.

LR Why do you think people get stuck on perfection?

NP It's because they're afraid of what others will think.

LR Yeah.

NP Right? For example, if they're are like, "Oh, I put something out there and it's not perfect; people are going to judge me." Well you know what? People forgive and forget. You're judging yourself. You're your worst critic, right? Most people don't care about those little errors, or mistakes, they forgive and forget. If you say sorry when you make a mistake, everyone is like, "Cool. Thank you, no worries."

LR Yeah, so just let it go.

NP Yep.

LR Yeah. Like a little bit of thick skin as an entrepreneur. If you're going to be out there, you’ve got to be able to take the heat.

NP Thick skin is one, but the biggest issue is people are afraid of what's going to happen when others judge them. Most people are kind; they're not going to say anything bad. They forgive and forget. Right? You don't have to have a thick skin. It's just, if you do something, the worst that can happen is usually you're going to be in the same position you were before, so might as well go out there and try something.

LR Yeah. Good. How long have you been in business? You have so many businesses it doesn't even make sense to ask you how long you're in your current business.

NP I started when I was 16, so 31, 15 years.

LR 15 years. What is working best right now to bring customers to your primary businesses?

NP Capture emails, right? You can do popups, sliders, et cetera. Put it into marketing solutions like automation, ONTRAPORT et cetera. Then from there, send them to a landing page where they watch a webinar. The webinar educates the prospect on the major issues that they're having within their business. For example, if...let's keep it simple. If someone is selling accounting services right.

LR Yeah.

NP They have a website that's on accounting or a blog. They collect emails, pass them through ONTRAPORT. From there you nurture them. Send them a few educational pieces of information. Then you ask them to register for a webinar. The webinar teaches them basic accounting principles, how most people are making mistakes, when they're paying too much in taxes, how they can save money, how their books could be more efficient, and then after 30, 40 minutes of education, it pitches them on the product or service that they offer. Then it shows them a buy button where they can purchase or sign up. That is the number one way and best converting way, that we are seeing people making sales online right now.

LR You're working. This is interesting because we actually talked about this off line last week and you said pretty much exactly the same thing, in that exact same way that makes it sound so simple. Our experience is that it's actually harder than that. We've tried webinars, and they just haven't worked for us. What was sort of enlightening to me is that as we were on the phone, you said everything you just said and then at the end you said kind of off-handedly, "by the way this is going to take you three or four or five months to figure out how to get this right." I was like, whoa, wait a minute. Four or five months?

NP Yeah.

LR That's where we're going wrong is that we're trying like once or twice and it's like not working.

NP No.

LR We're like oh webinars don't work.

NP Yeah that's where execution comes into play. Right? Think of it this way. You do a webinar. There's chat in the webinar. People give you feedback. You take the feedback you're getting, because when you blast out your email list you'll get people to sign up, or customers existing. You can just ask them for feedback. Even your current customers, "Hey. What do you think about this webinar? What's wrong? What would you like to see changed?"

LR Yeah.

NP It takes months because if you do one new variation a month, it takes four to five months before it's streamlined and it's working well.

LR Right. You’ve just got to keep trying, keep at it. It will work.

NP Yep.

LR Awesome. Okay so as entrepreneurs, we learn so much through our experiences, not just split testing but just growing businesses and being people in charge of these organizations. For me anyway, I think a lot about how different things would have been if I kind of knew then what I know now. What advice would you give yourself if you could like whisper into your ear 15 years ago that would have made the biggest difference?

NP Focus. I have too much ADD and I have created too many companies. If I created one or two, let's say three max over my years, I would have had a much bigger business.

LR Interesting. Most of us don't start business after business after business, but do you think that that advice, just like focusing, applies to those of us who are like, actually only doing one business?

NP Well, if you're even doing one business, it still applies. The reason being, if you look at most businesses, when things start working, what do they do? They try to expand. They try to add new product lines, features, upsells, downsells.

LR Yeah.

NP They expand into different businesses. The guy who taught me this was Brian Lee, the co-founder of Shoedazzle, Honest Company, and Legal Zoom. I interviewed him while he as at Legal Zoom. This was a long time ago. I don't know him as just over email. What he was saying is, most companies when they start doing well and get traction, they lose focus on the core product or service that got them there. Legal Zoom was creating the corporations for you, the docs, legal entities, in mass quantity. Then he said, we were trying to do like business in a box. They tried these other things. I could be butchering his words because it was many years ago when he told me this. They tried other experiments. When things are going good, why would you try doing that when you could double down on your core business, and be the biggest in that category? Then what he taught me is, once your growth chart is plateauing, and slowing down and it's flat and you can't figure out how to grow more, that's when you expand and introduce other product lines and upsells and downsells, et cetera. That's what's going to give you more growth again.

LR That's like the opposite of the way that most people do it.

NP That's correct.

LR Interesting.

NP He's done well, right? Legal Zoom is probably half a billion to a billion dollar company. Honest Company is a billion. Shoedazzle he raised a few hundred million. It did really well, and then it slowed down. He doesn't have 100% batting average, but he does way better than almost every entrepreneur out there.

LR Yeah. Listen to him.

NP Exactly.

LR That's kind of like one of the things you've learned over the course of history. What's next for you? What do you want to learn next?

NP Just how to fine-tune marketing. My big thing right now is marketing automation. I'm trying to figure out how to plug in marketing automation with phone sales. It started to work well, not like you send people an email and you get them on the phone. We're doing really interesting stuff where someone watches a webinar because to watch a webinar, we collect your phone number.

LR Yeah.

NP Then if you've seen the product, you've gone almost all the way through the webinar, but you didn't buy, we get the phone number and then the next day we'll text you like, Mike, question mark. Then we'll start engaging with them and start texting back and forth and closing sales over the phone and engaging based on how far they've gone through throughout the funnel, due to the fact that we're not just collecting emails, we're also collecting phones.

LR Cell phones as well. You're literally getting your sales team texting back and forth with these clients.

NP Yeah. Potential customers.

LR Sorry, prospects. Then drive them to a live phone conversation?

NP Yes, and then close them over the phone.

LR Then close them over the phone. Is that working?

NP It's working out really well.

LR Interesting.

NP Like 15, 20% of the revenue is coming from that.

LR Whoa. Interesting that somebody who is known as one of the world's greatest marketers next thing to learn is marketing.

NP Yeah. It's never stopping. I believe there's always more techniques. I can believe someone's been doing marketing for one month and they can teach me a new tactic that I've never thought about or even tried

LR Yeah.

NP You can learn from anyone. It doesn't matter who they are or what their experience is.

LR How many people are in your company right now?

NP Between all of them, I don't know, maybe like 150.

LR 150, and how many marketing tests do you feel like you run a month?

NP Maybe like 30, 40.

LR 30 or 40, like every day somebody is trying something else.

NP Yeah.

LR Yeah.

NP We have so many sites and properties and ad campaigns. We're just testing so many things.

LR Constantly. Yeah. How do you train your people to be effective testers?

NP We tell everyone, gut feeling is awesome and it's one thing, and if you have intuition, you have a lot of experience within the space, you should use your gut feeling. You should always consistently rely on the numbers. Make sure the numbers quantitative and qualitative are going up and to the right. Quantitative more, so up and to the right. Qualitative you're getting feedback.

LR Good.

NP Like surveying, et cetera. Everyone is data driven.

LR Yeah.

NP You can say, "Oh I want to do this ad image because it looks better and the image of you is way better," or "Hey, when we're doing Facebook video ads, I want to do professional quality because it looks the best and shows we're professional," but you know what? People may resonate with the person who is pulling out their phone and just snapping a selfie video. I don't know what it's called, and shooting on their iPhone like a five minute clip.

LR Yep.

NP People have different opinions, but why not test it and see where the data goes?

LR That's just built into your culture.

NP Yes.

LR Yeah. Awesome. You've been a it for 15 years. You've obviously had a ton of financial success. Do you think about your legacy and what you'd like to have that be as you kind of like, 30 years from now?

NP I just want to be the guy who helps other people succeed with their marketing online. I suck at offline marketing. I just want to help people succeed with marketing. I don't care if they pay me. I don't care if they hate me. If people just read stuff from me, because there's so much free stuff, and they learn and they implement it in their business, and they're better off, I'm happy.

LR Yeah. Awesome. I have to ask you one other question that I wanted to ask in there. You talked a little bit about it but, I think you more than any other email that shows up in my inbox, feels like you have a some kind of mind reading capability because literally every email that comes through is exactly the thing that I want to be reading right now. I don't even read them all myself, but they're like what my company needs, and so I'll forward them to the right person in my company. It happens like 30% of the emails you send me, I'm like, "You need to read this." Somebody consume this information. How the hell do you do that?

NP Qualitative. We do a ton of qualitative research, data gathering, surveying and asking people what do they want to read? Feedback from emails, conferences. Just talking to potential customers and that'll help us determine our content calendar and what we should be writing about.

LR You just like email out with questions like, a text field, like tell me what you want to read?

NP We pop up surveys on our website, like a Survey Monkey. Then just getting people to be like, we want you to blog about this. Then you look at the Cloud because clouds based on words and they tell you what's the most common thing that people are typing in.

LR Yeah. That's it?

NP That's it.

LR That makes me feel so non-unique.

NP When you get the email it's personalized so it makes you feel unique. Just imagine you never heard this.

LR We call this series MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR. What do you think it means to you to be a modern entrepreneur?

NP I think it's all about being more efficient and streamlined.

LR Efficient and streamlined.

NP Yeah. If you look at a lot of the old ways that people were doing things, it was just so inefficient.

LR Yeah.

NP For example, how people communicated with their customers. It was done so poorly like five years ago, six years ago.

LR In what way?

NP Just how when you send messages, who you're supposed to be sending messages to? Think about you guys. You guys have been around for how many years?

LR Ten. This is our tenth year.

NP Okay tenth year. I bet you the product, if you look at your product five years ago, just being blunt, I bet you internally look at your product five years ago and be like, that was shit compared to what it is today.

LR Oh yeah. Two years ago.

NP Exactly, right? Probably even a year ago. You keep seeing major changes. Right?

LR Oh yeah.

NP Think about how people would communicate with their customers. I remember when we used to send emails four or five years ago, and if someone took action on that email, we would still send everything to the list with the same email again or a different version of it. There was no segmentation. There was no sending unique messages if someone clicked and they were more engaged versus people who weren't engaged. Right? Nothing was segmented.

LR Yeah.

NP Everything is streamlined these days.

LR That just to you today looks ridiculous

NP It's crazy because what you guys are doing, and if you look at the whole space in general, the amount of customers you guys have, your ink numbers are public. Your revenue numbers, and you guys are doing an amazing job, but think about how many more companies out there aren't using any solution in your space. Not just you guys.

LR Like 99% of them.

NP Exactly.

LR Yeah.

NP It's still the old school way of thinking. It's more inefficient. They're making less money because of it. Their customers are getting a worse experience because of it. Right? It's all done wrong, not just on the business end, but even on the customer end. They don't want it that way. I don't want to be continually getting messages that aren't relevant for me. Why? That's just silly. You're clouding up my inbox. You're wasting my space. Eventually I'm going to put those emails into spam.

LR Yeah. For you it's about really being conscious of the customer's experience and getting really super relevant and creating experiences that matter to individuals rather than what kind of message you want to just be blasting out as an organization.

NP That's correct because if you look at times now versus five years ago, people are getting so many more emails, so many more communications, messages. Not just in their inbox, but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. How many places are there for people to get messages and communication? It's so many. It's overwhelming.

LR Yeah.

NP Why should people be getting all the messages out there that aren't relevant for them?

LR Yep. That's what it's all about.

NP Yeah.

LR Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Where's our pen. Here it is. Will you sign our wall?

NP Yes I will sign your wall.

LR Thank you.

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