The Vault Unlocked - How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate (3 Free Fixes Anyone Can Make)

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Most businesses run their websites off of a feeling, pure gut instinct. A stock photo here, a red button there, a template because it "looked good." Sahil names that for what it is, then shows exactly what replaces it.   Sahil Patel CEO of Spiralyze, built his career two SaaS companies deep, and by the time he became a customer of Spiralyze, he had already sat through enough failed website redesigns to know the truth nobody wants to hear. Your best guess about what converts is still just a guess. Four years later he now owns the company, and what he found by analyzing other people's live A/B tests changes how you should think about every page on your site.   In this conversation, Sahil breaks down why A/B testing is the same double blind logic that proves a drug works, why B2B websites need bigger, bolder test variations than e-commerce sites pulling in millions of visitors, and why copying a single "winning" test from a competitor is a trap he calls the winner's curse. He explains what predictive CRO actually means: pulling winners and losers from hundreds of similar companies' public tests instead of betting on one anecdote.   Then he hands over three things anyone listening can fix today, for free, before hiring an agency or a data scientist. He names the exact mistake quietly killing conversions on most B2B homepages right now (stock photos of happy people with nothing to do with the product), the fastest way to find out if your imagery is actually working (a translation trick that takes five minutes), and the rule that decides whether your headline is a hook or noise. He closes with a bonus test that shows in about sixty seconds whether your homepage sounds like every competitor you have.   This episode is for founders and operators running B2B SaaS or service businesses who are making website and messaging decisions based on instinct, internal opinion, or "what worked at my last company." It is for marketing leads tired of hearing "best practice" as a justification and looking for an actual method instead. It matters most if your business does over fifty million in revenue and generates leads through your website, because that is exactly where this conversation lives. If your site gets under a hundred form fills a month, Sahil is direct about why testing is not your next move yet, and what is.   The conversation covers conversion rate optimization, A/B testing methodology, homepage design, lead generation, B2B SaaS growth strategy, sales funnel psychology, and the copywriting principles that turn a website into an actual salesperson instead of a digital brochure. Sahil also breaks down the difference between testing for direct to consumer traffic versus B2B traffic, how statistical significance actually works, and why the agency or in house team you already pay still has a data problem you may not know about.   Questions Answered: What is A/B testing and how does it actually work How much website traffic do you need before A/B testing is worth it What is predictive conversion rate optimization and how is it different from standard CRO Why do stock photos hurt website conversions How can you tell if your website's imagery is doing its job What makes a strong homepage headline versus a weak one How do you know if your website messaging is actually different from your competitors   Looking to dive deeper into these conversations and connect with our host and guest? Follow Sahil Patel: LinkedInWebsite Watch CRO Crimes Follow Kayvon: InstagramFacebookLinkedInTikTok     Want to go deeper with Kayvon? Subscribe to the newsletterBook a discovery callGet your Revenue Engine Scorecard™️Hire the right salespeople  

Most founders run their website the way people used to take medicine before medicine was a science. Somebody's neighbor tried it, it worked, so you copy it and hope. My guest today doesn't play that game. Sahil is the CEO spiralize, and he built something called predictive CRO, studying what's already won and lost across hundreds of companies before betting on the pattern. We get into why that happy stock photo on your homepage is probably costing you leads, why your actual product beats any lifestyle shot you've ever paid for, and a two-minute test using nothing but Google Translate

that tells you if a stranger can even figure out what you sell. If you built your site off a template and a feeling, this one's going to sting. This is the vault. Let's unlock it. Sahel, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I've really got to be here. All the way from spiralize the business itself. Now, I know before the show we were talking,

And I'm very excited because this is such in the marketing department of business and A.B. Testing. And I know that what you guys are doing is revolutionary. And it's quite interesting. So I'm excited to get into it. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and how we even got to this point? Yeah. So my name is Sahil.

I'm the CEO. I'm a.B testing company. I'm the CEO. I'm a second time doing the CEO thing. So I've been doing different kind of SaaS tech type companies my whole career. And I live in Atlanta, Georgia. Okay. Well, I mean, how did you get into spiralize?

Where did like tell us like where that came from? Yeah. So it's a fun story. So I am actually not the founder. I was the founder CEO of my previous company, which was at SaaS business. and I was actually an early customer of spiral eyes. So around the time, Sparov was just getting off the ground, I started using the product,

and I saw that it really worked. And it opened my eyes to the power of any, the power of AB testing as a way to improve the efficiency of your app, of your website, of your landing pages. That's how I became a true believer. I sold that business. I was thinking about what's the next thing I want to do. I had stayed in touch with the founder here.

He had kept building the business organically self-funded, was looking for a partner. It was great timing. It also was great because I lived in Atlanta already, and Spiros was based in Atlanta. So it was a good arrangement. And I'd done the solo CEO founder thing wearing both hats. He had been doing it along the way.

We both knew how hard that was. There was this mutual understanding of it. And we also had, there's some things he's really good at. there's a different set of things that I'm really good at. If we did them together, we thought that would work really well. And it's worked out really well. I've been doing it now for four years.

And we are using words like A, B, testing. And I'm just assuming, you know, there might be people listening that, like, what is even A.B. testing. So let's take a step back here and go, okay, let's talk about what is it? What are we even talking about right now? Okay. Let's take this. Let's even step away from like marketing, websites, business. Let's just start with something probably everyone can relate to.

which is when you have a new medicine, how do you make sure the medicine actually works? Maybe you have a cancer drug, cancer treatment. You could just guess. You could give it to a bunch of people and then say, did they get better? But you want to make sure it really works. So what do you do?

You get 100 people. You give half of them what's called a placebo. it's a sugar pill, it's nothing, and you give half the people the actual drug, and you measure how many people got better. And what you want to make sure is that, you know, say you had 100 people, 50 people, you make sure men and women equally distributed, young people, old people, big people, small people, all of those things. Because you want to make sure that the difference wasn't because you put all the men in one

group and all the women in the other, and it turns out the drug works really well for men then not so well for women or some other variable. That's called randomization. That is an AB test, and it's the gold standard for measuring how effective something is doing. It's not the only way to do it. There are other, you can do it before and after. It's not as good. This is the gold standard.

Something we call this double blind controlled experiment. Fancy words, AB test, same thing. So that is, now we, we accept that as the best way, to know if a medicine works. If you went to the doctor today and she said, hey, I've got something for your cold. Here, take this.

And you looked at it and you're like, huh, I've never heard of this. Like, I was going to take some robitussin. But what is this? And the doctor says, oh, it's, it's really good. You might ask, well, how do I know it's good? Like, oh, I gave it to my neighbor. Work great.

Okay. Is your neighbor, they have the same symptoms of me? How much should I take? Oh, just take a swig. Okay, like, is it effective at like two tablespoons, one tablespoon once a day? Like, well, I bought, trust me, I've been a doctor for 10 years. This will work. You would never do it.

Okay, or at least I don't think you would. I don't think you'd hope not. Okay. this is now back in the early days of medicine okay and by the way that that time wasn't that long ago okay we're measuring but probably less than a hundred to 200 years of recent history uh that's how people take medicines right that's the the days of patent medicine and people standing on a shoebox hawking their saw hills patent cough syrup hey no one would no one would do that now You would never take a cancer drug that hasn't been tested.

And yet, right? So there's the pre-scientific era to medicine and then we're down in scientific era to medicine. Yet, for people's websites, they do that all the time. They do the equivalent of, I'm a doctor. I've done this for 10 years. I don't know. I gave it to my neighbor.

Work great for them. It should work for you. All the time you look at websites. Why did you do this on the website? Oh, it's best practice. What do you mean it's best practice? Well, I read about it on a blog. Okay, so it worked for one person.

How do you know that works for you? Well, it looks good. CEO liked it. Yeah. Okay. Most of the decisions. I used a template. I picked the best I, I, I'm not going to name brands because this is not the fault of any

of the brands who do website templates. There's lots of really good ones out there. Some also not good ones. I looked at three templates. They said, this was the best template for my landing page. This was my, this was the best looking homepage template. By the way, if your Seahill's Barbershop, that's probably fine. Okay.

But if you're building an actual business where the website is the front door to your business, but you may want to put a little bit more thought into it. Yeah. If you're an e-commerce brand, okay, if you are, if you're selling, B2B SaaS and you're selling cybersecurity software and your average product probably sells for like $100,000. Every lead that comes, every person that comes to your website and goes away, that's really value, millions of dollars you're losing.

So what is A-B testing is taking that same thing that we use in many other parts of our life and applying the taking websites from the pre-scientific gut instinct, era to the scientific era, that's a journey. And for some companies, it makes sense to do that. For some companies, it doesn't. And it doesn't mean you can't make mistakes doing that. It's prone to mistakes. It's not perfect.

But if your website is an important place where you do business in some way with your customers or potential customers, this is a much better. It's a really good way to make your website, your number one salesperson. And we're talking about optimization here. So we're talking about you, you have your website, which is, let's call it your A. Yep. And then what you're doing is you're just testing little things here or there on a variable, on a B variable, and sending traffic to both to seeing what converts. You don't have to limit it to small changes.

You could make a big change. You could make big changes. Yeah, you can make big changes. If you're getting ready to run them. Have you run a marathon or a half marathon ever? I have ran a half marathon once and I promise I would never do it again. My body's not meant to run long distance. I'm in the same day.

My wife ran once and she did great, but just watching her train said, I have other things that I want to do. Okay. When you run, what did you do to get ready? I did the, there was like a protocol. This was a while back. But like I trained with a group and you do your run. and you know, you do your start with your two Ks. You work your way up and then all the way up till you get to where you got to go.

So there's a training regimen. There's a training regimen for sure. There's probably a rest regimen. Okay. If you run 10 miles every day, you're not going to. That's actually worse. Short distance, speed. There was quite a bit of work, yes.

There may have been a dietary component. Okay. Now, depending how serious you are, maybe you didn't need to make drastic changes, but probably some advice told you to avoid. Some foods probably go easy on the hamburgers and milkshakes and maybe go a little bit more on the healthy lean protein. Okay. Now, one way to get ready for a marathon is to only do one of those things. And then you could say my time got better and I know with certainty it was because I wore the right kind of shoes.

And then the next marathon, maybe you'll add compression socks. And the next one, you'll eat chicken five times a week. of burgers. You could do that. And then every time you got this like pretty high confidence level, but at the end of the day, you know, what gets you there a lot faster? You should do, you should, you should combine those things. Eat lean protein, wear good socks, wear good shoes, and train and get enough rest. Now, what you know that 10% of your reduction in your race time came from the socks? I'm just making shit up. And another 5% came from eating lean protein. No, you'll never know that. The same as,

true in A-B testing. And you can get away with it, I would say, particular on websites, particularly, you know, on like a B-to-B website. First, I just want to be quick, the stakes are much lower. Okay, we're not injecting a cancer-treating drug into your body. Yes. The stakes are really high, and you want to go one variable to time there, absolutely. We're talking about, can you get someone to fill in a lead generation form or click? I'm ready to start. I'm going to try that software for seven days first, see if it work it. So the stakes are lower. The other thing is, for our audience out there, I'm going to use some acronyms, B2B, D2C,

just business to business, okay, if I'm selling software to other corporations, that's business business. If I'm selling you, you know, shoes on the internet direct to consumer, okay? In directing consumer, you have all this traffic. How many millions of people are maybe going to Nike.com to buy shoes a lot? So you can quickly get a sample size, which means, you know, maybe you run it for a week and there's millions of people coming. And you can very quickly detect there's a difference between the performance two versions of pages. On the B2B side, how many people are shopping for a new cybersecurity software today?

Some, okay? And in fact, there's quite a few, but not as many of shopping for shoes. So one way to get results quicker is to make big changes. You don't want to just do a bunch of random shit, but it is an acceptable tradeoff to maybe you change the message on your homepage and the image that goes with it. And why? Because usually the messaging, the what's called the copywriting and then the visual image, they complement each other.

And so if your headline is making some big claim about how effective. of your product as, say, it's stopping cybersecurity attacks, maybe the image should support that, and they work together. So it's not just changing random things, but this is for our marketing people in the audience today, and we're going to talk about some very specific examples. This is what we're talking about, AB testing. Yeah. I think it's interesting because as you're speaking, I'm thinking, okay, for a true AB test to happen, we need traffic. Yes. So what's, you know, What is that number? I don't think there's a set number, but more is better than less, obviously. And then you're talking about making big changes. Yes, big, small, minute changes.

The question I have, because as a non-A-B testing expert, one thing that I've always thought about AB testing is if you change too many things and you don't know what works because you've changed to everything and you can't control the variable. That's right. That's right. And what I'm talking about here, maybe a good way to kind of put some boundaries on it is I might change. I might be okay. I could probably get okay with changing a few variables on one section of one page. But I wouldn't change multiple sections on the same page.

And I wouldn't change something up funnel or upstream and on the page and maybe after the page. Okay. Like maybe just start with like, I've got a. I'm just going to pick something simple, a shopping cart add to cart. And I want to test, do I get more people to add it to cart if I say free shipping or free returns? By the way, both probably work. Maybe you should test both. I could do that.

Maybe I would change the button collar and maybe I could also change the font size, how visible I want to make it. I probably could roll that all into one test. what I wouldn't do is then also change maybe the the ad copy that gets people to come to that site to emphasize one of the because now I'm really distorting the effect of the experiment. I think that's where most experimenters would say, hang on a sec, be careful about changing too many things because now you're calling what's called confounding, confounding variables. And it clouds. You just really don't know which thing made a difference. I couldn't agree with you more. I haven't heard that we're confounding, but yeah, if you're changing two variables,

then you just don't know which ones are actually working. It's interesting because we can go as detailed as like you said, as as as a simple as a small button going red or green. As simple as, I love what you just said, free shipping or free returns. How, when, when is there, when is there a business ready to start doing this type of A, B testing? Like at what levels of traffic are we talking about to the website? Now, I know that's subjective because I want to make sure everyone is clear. Yes, someone coming to Nike website and buying a pair of shoes very different than a cybersecurity product that's a million dollars.

Having said that within the guardrails, when is it that people are coming to you usually? Where are they when they're saying, hey, we need to hire you and your service for AB testing? So maybe a good way to put it is, well, let's just start, why do we care about traffic? We care because you want to make a decision based on what's called a statistically significant result. So if you run a test for just one day, maybe run it on a Monday, well, maybe the people that shop on the weekends are different than the people that shop on during the week. Who knows? Okay. So you want it to be representative of your traffic.

And the more traffic you have, the quickly you can more quickly you can represent it. But I want to talk about there's two factors here. One is just the amount of traffic. The other is time. Because if you have a high traffic site, running the test for one day still isn't enough time for the reason we just talked about. Maybe the weekend shoppers are different than the weekday shoppers. So you want to look at both of those things. for a, let's talk about for a business to business type of website,

and you're optimizing for lead generation, lead generation being someone fills in a form and they're saying, hey, I want to check out your product. I want to see a demo. I want to do some kind of free trial. Usually where it starts to make sense that this is worthwhile is if you're getting 100 submissions a month. These are ballpark numbers.

Take them as guidelines. there's some companies where 100 is more than enough, and there's some where it's not nearly enough. But most of the time, if you're south of 100-ish or maybe 50 to 100, one, you probably then don't have enough traffic. So traffic is not enough. You should look at the number of conversions. The second thing is it probably means you're a small business.

Nothing wrong with that. But there are probably other things you need to be working on before you work on conversion rate optimization. you know from the most part maybe you just need to be trying to get more traffic or more of the right traffic getting your your your your ideal but use in marketing jargon icp ideal customer profile your or persona same thing just there in the first place because if they're not even coming to the site optimize it all day long it doesn't really it doesn't move the deal yeah doesn't matter now you guys at your business uh you said you guys do very unique or you have a scientific way

of A, B, testing. What exactly is that, or what makes it unique or different for you? Yeah, so we do a thing called predictive CRO, predictive conversion rate optimization. So what most in-house testing teams do, by the way, there are many, many good ones that are out there. You tend to see these at bigger companies because they have the maturity and the budget to actually hire like a team of data scientists. and they have people whose their whole job is every day is designing, doing like web design. But most companies don't have that. And so when they say, oh, we're going to redesign the site, maybe they hire an agency.

Maybe they have someone in houseings on it. And what they're mostly relying on is personal experience. They might be right. They might be wrong. but the data available to them, like inside their head, is probably a very small number. And it's hard to know if the thing that worked for your last company, is it transferable to your new company? Okay. Okay.

Why? Because two things have changed since you, even if you actually ran this as a good statistically rigorous A-B test. One is a function of the company you're at today and the company you're at yesterday are probably different, at least a little bit. Okay. Number two, time. If you look at a website from five years ago, you can probably tell it was built five years ago. And if you get in the way back machine and just look at some big company that you would consider modern but has been around for a long time, like Salesforce. If you look at in the wayback machine,

you look at Salesforce's website from 10 years. How made you be like, oh my God, what were they thinking? 10 years ago, it looked normal. Yeah. So the thing that worked

that was better than your, quote, control 10, five years ago may not be. It could be. It could not be. But if you're relying on personal experience, now,

maybe you hire an agency to solve that problem for you. They do lots of. because there's lots of CRO agencies, lots of good ones, some not too good ones. They are usually relying on what they've tested for their other customers. It could be a big number, it could be a small number, but it's still a limited number. And while they solve some of that problem, they still have that. What worked? Did it work because circumstance or is it transferable?

And to know that, you want to be able to see where it worked. You also want to see where it didn't work. Winners and losers. Think about if you interview athletes and you only talk to the win, we have the World Cup going on right now. If you only talk to the winner of the World Cup. And he said, what did you do to get ready for this game? It's pretty helpful.

But you probably should also go talk to teams that lost. What did you do? to get ready for this game and then compare that. Yeah. Okay. Same thing here. You want to have the winners and the losers to know what works. And the more of that data set you have, the better.

So the thing that we do that's different, we crawl the internet and we shamelessly steal everybody else's AB tests. Now, I say steal because I'm trying to be a little bit funny. We're not actually stealing anything because all AB testing is in the public domain. Yeah. I hear you were saying. but you look at what everybody else is doing and see what's the most converting for them. How do you know it's converting though? That's great question.

Okay. Think about a company that, let's take Nike.com, they're not a spiralist customer. If they're running a test on their homepage, what we can see is that they're splitting the traffic. We can actually see the visual difference between the A and the B. Imagine every day for two weeks, they're running a split test. And then on the beginning of the third week, they send 100% of traffic. to the B version of that homepage. Do you know how they're sending traffic?

Can you see that? There are some ways that are proprietary that we have figured out how to do that. A black hat or gray hat? I wouldn't call it black hat. I would call it white hat. Okay. But there's ways that you can see

how much traffic are going into these different pages. I mean, this is pretty. Or you can estimate it. You can estimate it. So you know that, okay, They're running to, you have basically a way to find out that these big companies are running A-B tests and then figure out which one, which control actually worked so that you can now take that data for your customers.

That's right. And what we're looking for are repeat patterns among similar companies. So if Nike.com runs this really interesting test, I don't think that is necessarily super relevant for CrowdStrike, a big cybersecurity company and vice versa. And by the way, let's say CrowdStrike runs a test. Yes, it may be relevant for other cybersecurity companies, but is it predictive? It's really hard to know if you got an N of one.

I would not go copy that. Because now you're just talking to the winner. You have the winner's curse. Okay. You want to look at the winners and the losers. So what you want to look is like, hey, there's 100 cybersecurity. companies, what is the portfolio of tests they ran and what things tend to win and what things tend to lose and then bet on that portfolio.

Okay. Okay. Not unlike if you were a poker player and you followed someone who's really good World Series of poker type of player. Okay. Any one of her hands or his hands can win or lose. And if you only watch them play one hand, and you say, oh, I'm going to copy that hand. I don't think that's super predictive.

But if you watch them play 100 hands, you're going to detect some patterns. And if you watch five players play 100 hands, you're really going to watch 100 players by 100 hands. Now there's some clear patterns of when they hold, when they fold. When to hold them, when to fold them. That is a, that's what predictive CROs. It predicts not what one test will do. it predicts a portfolio of tests that you should run based on what's worked for similar companies. And similar doesn't have to be just they look just like you.

It could be someone that has a similar call to action on a paid landing page by the paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic traffic. And is it on a home page? Is it on a sign up page? You want to look at all of those and then say, okay, which ones are similar? What's predict the portfolio of tests you should run? Run the whole portfolio because across that portfolio you'll find the winners. Let's talk.

I know you have so much basics here. And I want to talk. When I'm at basics, I'm going to say, sorry, data. You have so much data. And I think for my listeners, I'm just thinking about the smaller businesses that may not be able to bring in yet a data scientist or, you know, have a full CRO team working for them. but they but they can maybe understand different things that we know through data that work like for instance i for things that i know and i could be wrong but i've heard is like you want someone to say yes and move you know hit a button button shouldn't be red because red is a sign of stopping

right maybe you see that's when then i've heard that i've seen i've seen interesting and that's where I heard other people I said, no, you're actually wrong. Red actually does work. So are there, is there anything that for sure that are basics? Like these are the must. Like these are the must that you have to have or that we know. So that's a great question. Here are three things that our listeners today can use right away.

And they don't have to spend money by fancy software, hire an expensive agency to do. Let's start. Number one. And by the, what we're going to tell are like home pages and landing pages. I'm starting because that's where most people's traffic goes. Okay. If you have some niche page or some tech, like a page that describes the technical attributes of your product, those are necessary elements of the user journey.

Okay. I'm putting those aside for now. Okay. Because typically those are so specific to you and your product or your service. You should just. Those are people searching also for. you and they're already in the funnel. If they're looking at the technical page, they're, they're already sold.

They're just trying to find a way to buy. Okay. First thing, show the product, show the product, show the product. Okay. We have a phrase, happy people kill conversions. What does that mean? Happy people hurt conversions? So many websites have stock photos that they got on, you know, in their Adobe account.

of two people in a conference room looking at a tablet going, wow, first of all, who's having this much fun in a conference room? I want to go. My conference room is not that much fun. No one, let's talk about this.

Can you think of the last car ad you saw? Okay. Do you remember what car it was for or what brand? I'm thinking, I remember, I don't know why sticking out for me, but I was thinking about the Audi one. There was one that was an audio.

Okay, cool. Audi. Is it? Audi makes really nice cars. Can you picture what was that? Was it a TV ad, YouTube ad, magazine? It was an awesome TV ad. It was a luxury TV ad. I only remember it because it was around where I live.

And it was, you know, a ball and ad with a new car. Cool. Rolling into a $40 million home on the bank of the ocean and, you know, with the beautiful life. Jack's, you know, husband gets out, smiles, throw the keys to her. She gets in. They drive off. And then the Audi comes in, quattro, right? Awesome.

Awesome. So there's a component of lifestyle. There's a component of aspiration. Yeah. But there's also kind of showing the car. Imagine the same ad. Okay, picture it right now. And just imagine you had a magic eraser and you just erase the car from that ad. Yeah, totally.

What would be left? Lifestyle. Lifestyle. Lifestyle. Yeah. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Yeah. Good looking. Okay.

Would anyone then say, I think I'm going to go to my Audi dealer and check out a car? No. No, you big, what the hell is this? This is actually really important. I hope people are, if they're here listening, we're starting to get something very important here, a.k.a. remove the stock photos. If you have, if you're a product company, show the product. If your service company, show the people who deliver the service.

Explain that. Okay. So we worked with a company that does home air conditioning repair. Imagine, now, I live in Georgia. If my AC breaks, that is like the top of the list. I might fix the AC before I fix the toilet. It's like 110 degrees in August. You just cannot live without air conditioning.

Okay. I can go to the backyard to go to the bathroom. I can't live without air conditioning. And we ran an AB test. Their homepage had stock photo of mom with two kids. Everyone looks happy. And it kind of looked like, I don't know, Mother's Day, like the kids were giving her tulips. It was a happy person.

I think it was supposed to convey that, hey, if you need your AC fixed, you're going to be happy when it's fixed. And the AB test we ran against it, we replaced the photo with an image of three uniformed people in front of their van with the brand name of the van. And that was the image on the homepage. Didn't change the copy. Didn't change the offer. Didn't change anything else. the social proof and there was a double digit improvement in people either filling in the form or clicking they had two call to action it's a local it's a local thing so it's click to call or

fill out the form okay keep in mind these people are already very high intent when you need your air conditioning you would think what could you do to actually stop someone from calling what turns out yeah double digit change just by people saying oh this is who I'm going to get I get a I get a I get professional person coming to my home in a nice van and they're going to fix my AC right away. We worked with a company that does home warranty. And the homepage showed images of that. Again, stock photos of happy people. Presumably it resonates.

It's like, oh, they're happy. I'll be happy. They have, yeah. They have home insurance or whatever warranty. I have it. Yeah. Yeah. And what we, what we tested against it is images of things getting fixed. Okay. An AC unit getting fixed. A, uh, it was like a, uh, like a faucet, like a bathroom faucet getting fixed. Yeah. Water and then. Water. Yeah. And then like an electrical, like you know the, what is it called where they, they put that thing in your, in your outlet to see if it's producing electrical charge.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are all intuitive things. Okay, the kind of things also just the average DIYer probably doesn't do themselves. They want to call professional. So it's clear, like, you will get these things fixed. Someone's going to come to your home and fix them. These are problems. Double-digit lift.

Wow. What about, I'm interested? Show the product, show the product. So, like, for a SaaS company, you would just show, show, like, the product. A screenshot of the app. The screenshot of the app, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

There's lots of different ways to do it, to style it. if you're concerned that the picture of your app is proprietary and that's a source of competitive advantage. First, let me say your competitors almost certainly already know what your app looks like. Okay, they've downloaded it. They probably signed up with a different email and they're using it.

Everyone does that. So just let me... I hear that objection. But even if you think that's true, you can do a stylized version of your user interface, but you're trying to get the person to do is just think of that out of yet. You got to put a person.

put the car in the Audi ad to get the person to go to the dealership. Yeah. Put a picture of your, of your product. So it's number one. Everyone can do that right now. Just go to your website. Just ask yourself, do I have happy people? Because I'm probably hearing conversions.

Okay. Number two. This is a good one. Take your homepage. Right. You just in a browser. Right click in Chrome. And one of the things will be Google Translate.

Pick a language that the people around, you don't speak. Okay, so maybe pick Arabic, pick Hindi, I'm picking languages and speak it at home growing up, okay? And then take your homepage, show it to five people who don't know that it's your company, know you want, just ask them, what do you think this company does? Okay. And by the way, they're not going to come up with something specific.

Like, this is a point of sale entry system for multi-location retailers. But they might say something like, oh, this looks like business software or something. Okay. If they can't even come close to the category, you have a problem. And the translation technique, what it's doing is it's removing the copywriting from the equation. And it's forcing the person to use the imagery to draw an instantaneous conclusion about am I in the right place. And by the way, that is what your audience does when they reach your homepage or landing page, because the brain processes images faster than words. So imagery is very important then on a. Super important. super important. And so if your copywriting is doing all the heavy lifting, you have a problem because you've created this high cognitive load homepage or landing page. The copywriting is absolutely important,

but the instantaneous reaction decision that almost everyone knows when they get to a page was, am I even in the right place? Just like when you walk into a restaurant, okay, if you're on date night, you're looking for certain things, some ambiance. You haven't tasted anything. Okay. You're in for ambiance. Is there a smile? My the matri-D? What's on the tablecloth? Okay, if you're going to tell, is this like white tablecloth? Is this checkered, more casual Italian, like little Italy kind of thing? Or am I going to Chipotle? I love Chipotle. There's certain things I expect my walking Chipotle. Okay. And if I don't see them, my brain's making kind of real quick decisions. You know, if I go into Chipotle, I expect to kind of smell a certain.

way. It's kind of that grilled chicken that, you know, that's what I expect. If I go to kind of date night at a nice place, there's a different kind of just all these little things. And my brain's making instantaneous subconscious level decisions about am I in the right place? I, you can, yeah, you can do this. Don't spend money on fancy software. Don't hire an agency. I want to be very clear because I didn't get it and then I got it. And I was like, oh my God. So I want to make sure it's very clear for people here. Like step one, remove the stock image. Just get rid of any happy, go lucky stock.

And replace it with your product or service. And replace it. If you're a product based business, replace it with your product. If you're a service based business, replace it with the service people or the type of service. Or the outcome. Or the outcome. Like, so for example, like we worked with a higher education company. Show the diploma.

Yeah. Yeah. Show them getting graduate. Show them graduating. and show them throwing the whatever the hat up or whatever it is. Number two, this is very interesting. Take your website, put into a different language. Take the homepage.

You only need to do this for the homepage. Take your homepage, sorry, take your homepage, put into a different language, send it to somebody and just say, hey, what does this company? What is this company doing? And if they can't tell you within a range, obviously, within a range, It's a business service. Oh, it's this type of service or this type of product that tells your imagery is off. And people look at the imagery versus the copy, which is very interesting to me because I come from direct response copy market, like writing, where it's all copy.

Like the copy is like the most important thing. And you just said imagery and copy are both almost equal. Well, well, let's talk about that a little bit. there's two jobs. What the imagery does is it helps establish for the website visitor that they are in the right place. It is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and you go, hey, am I in the right type of restaurant, fast food or fine dining? What the copywriting does, think of that as I'm reading the menu. And if I see some things and they're described in a way that's enticing, that speaks to me to what I'm,

looking to get out of the experience. And I'm going to order. Okay. And by the way, at McDonald's, they write those value meals in a certain way. That's copyrighting.

Yeah. Okay. And it works. And if you go to a nice restaurant, and if you go to a nice restaurant on date night, the way they write the menu is written in a certain way to make you feel like, oh,

the chef is just, I'm getting something so special. This meal is just, it's going to be. And they talk about where is the food source from and whatever foam they use to decorate the plane and all these things. And you would never see that on McDonald's value meal and vice versa. So the copywriting is from it. But they serve two.

And for our conversation we're having today, they really kind of have two different jobs. Yeah. Okay. Now let's talk about the copy. Is this number three? Number three. Number three. Number three.

Let's see number three. So we talked about first just tactically get rid of stock vote. Number two, make sure whatever images you use are low cognitive load. Yeah, low cognitive load. No cognitive load. Okay. I see this all the time in B2B websites. They have like a schematic of how their software fits into the ecosystem and the tech stack and how it integrates with 17 different things and it's animated and things are flowing.

And that's the wrong place to put it. That's a high cognitive. Put that on your technical page. Put in your solutions page. put it on your, you know, how the whole thing works. Okay. This is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and the matrily, before they ask you, hi, how many people today or do you have a reservation or you want to sit at the bar or the dining room explaining to you like the 17 steps the chef does to prepare the vegetables today. You're like, whoa, whoa, wait on. I just,

like, could I just see the menu or like, I just want to tell you, table for two? Okay. You don't lead with, let me tell you where we source. the chicken and, you know, that kind of, right? So imagery is important. Homepages should start with low cognitive load and then move the user to higher cognitive load as they move through the journey. You got a restaurant, you start with, can I get your drink? Let me bring you the menu. Have you thought about an appetizer today? Okay, let's pick your meal. McDonald's has it down to, or Wendy, pick your food. There's like, number one, Number one. Number one, just start there. You don't have to say, you say two words. Yeah, yeah. Give me a one. Three words.

Low cognitive load. Low, low, low, low consciousness. Then, yeah, then you go to a higher cognitive load. Okay. Don't do like some complicated schematic, blah, blah, blah, okay. Number three, you're talking about the copywriting. Make it skimable. The more it offends your 12th grade English teacher, the better. you're not writing for the AP English exam. Not taking the S.A.T. This is not the entrance exam. This is not your personal statement to get into graduate school. No one cares about what your belief system is, your aspirations, or what you think you're about. They came there because they have a problem they're trying to solve.

So, well, you've done direct response copy, right? You can make it easy. What is this? It's interesting because the, it's interesting. I, yeah, oh man, you're going to open up a whole can of worms here for me. Because I have seen little copy convert, right? But then where we're talking about, so I'm talking to B to C at this point, right, business is a consumer.

And there's people that I see writing copy that are like essays. I mean essays, but they're converting. It's like long form. I'm sure you heard of like a long form sales letter. It can work. Long form can absolutely work. Long form copy, long form video, long form anything can work in the right place. Like I come from the world where it's pre-headline, headline,

headline, subheadline. That's great. And what do you put in the headline? Well, that's the hook, yeah. The hook. Start with a hook. Yeah. That is,

that's, either the pain or the solution, right? Yeah. Pain or solution. Start with the hook. Pre. Pre is who it's for, right?

Yep. Those things are all called skimability. Yeah. Okay. And if you write a long paragraph, now how can you find the hook? Yeah. Lead with the hook.

And then your subheading needs to support the original claim. claim before you make new claims. Yeah. We see this all the time. There's a bold claim and then there's three new claims. Hang on a second. I just, like, I still haven't. I haven't bought into your first claim. Why are you telling about the next claim?

Like if your hook is safe car, we just bought a Volvo. So we just, my oldest is, um, learn, is about to get her license. Yeah. So she's going to not tomorrow. but after some practice, she's going to inherit our 2017 Subaru, great safe car. So we went out and found a nice

pre-owned car for my wife. We bought a Volvo, like beautiful car, safe. The hook, great safe car. Well, I was just going to say, right? Like, everyone knows Volvo safe, right? You think Volvo's known. And they do a great job.

They've also moved upmarket, by the way, right? The old boxy cars that we all grew up, the gray box Volvo that we know is like instruct indestructible cage. They look nice too. Okay. But they first get you to buy into that it's safe before they start telling you about all the other things, right?

Everything is, hey, we're safe. That's the hook. Why is it safe? We've got these great cameras. We've created this like motion detection. By the way, I didn't know this until we went shopping. Do you know a Volvo weighs more than a suburban? I would assume so, yeah.

I didn't. I didn't. Well, it's the steel. It's like some kind of special steel they're made out of. Yeah, they're safety. They're heavy cars. They're heavy. Yeah. Super heavy cars. You're driving basically a modern tank. Yeah. Anyway. So they support the first claim. Then they go in and tell you about, okay, now let's talk about some other things. Let's say about what this is a fun car. And let's talk about how we made it nice. And same thing on your website, good copywriting. You start with a hook. Make the hook believable before you start introducing your claims. These are three things that everyone can do on the website today. I'm just going to say it again, right?

Get rid of the stock of images or the happy images. Show your product or show your service or the outcome of the service. Low cognitive load on the pictures. So again, translate it to some language nobody can understand. Send it to somebody and say, do you know what this company does? If the answer is if they can't say it quickly, you know the problem. And then third is skimable copy. I mean, this is huge.

This is big stuff. Like any business owner, open up your website right now and just look at it right now. Like, you want to, if you're wondering, how do I make my website better? It's like we just gave you the three answers. Very simple. Openly a website. I want to do it right now with you. So we can go through it.

I'm not going to. That's how I'm feeling. And then the bonus. What's the bonus? Here's the bonus. We gave you three. So, kind of one, two, three. This is like three A.

Okay. Take whatever hook you have on your headline today. Or if you're thinking of writing a new one. Okay, write the new one. Take your three closest competitors. Take their homepage. Put them next to yours. Like one, two, three, four.

And then see if you can tell the difference. And if you can take your headline and put it under competitors, it means you don't have a good hook because it doesn't stand out. And you're simulating what your audience is doing. They may not be explicitly. They may be doing it implicitly. But you should always assume that your audience has your competitors. They either come from your competitors' website or they're going there next or they have them up side by side. Yeah.

And it's a great test of the hook. and what it tends to do is it strips, it tends to force you to strip out jargon and fluff and not even worry about am I better, just start with am I different. Still saying the clear message though. Yeah, yeah, it's got to be clear. And I'm saying do it on a homepage and not on like a technical page

or a solutions page because that's just a different ballgame. Okay, there. The home age, you got to keep it simple. and you just you got to strip out the jargon. Would you say, well, you're saying it less is more. Would you say on a home pages? I'm seeing this more and more like homepages have very little copy almost now. Especially in the hero.

Yeah. The top, we call it the hero section, the top section. So I think there's a happy medium. I think you should not be afraid of putting copy on your homepage. It does a lot of the heavy work. but it works better if you make it easy to skim and you have a good hook. Yeah, I love it. What type of businesses do you work with?

So we mainly work with B2B SaaS companies, what we call the mid-market to about 100 people to about 3,000 people and about 50 million in revenue to about a billion, billion and a half in revenue. The companies are smaller than that. they usually are trying to solve other problems that we don't help them with. And the companies that are bigger than that, especially a lot bigger, they don't need our help. They have their own internal army of data scientists. And that's great.

That's great for them. But for that part of the market, we can give them a lot of help. So $50 million plus SaaS companies is who you really focus on. That's right. And I love it. You said this. I remember, you said this to me before and I was like, wow. And I, you said anyone before $50 million, they don't have a conversion problem.

They got a marketing problem. Or you think you said they got a marketing sales problem. Yeah. There's other problems you need to solve first before you worry about optimization. You know, I think of it as if you're if you're out of shape and you haven't done any exercise, hey, you don't need to be trying to get your like marathon time down. I probably should start with like walk three times a week. Yeah.

Yeah. Then maybe get to like, can you do 10 pushups? you do that then you can start doing things like optimizing for diet and body composition and maybe can I do not just 10 pushups but 10 pull-ups but if you go straight to that probably not going to work yeah I love it where can people find you if they if they are a I mean it's you know if you are a 50 million dollar plus SaaS company and you want obviously I the best and the best in the business right here A B testing where can people find you?

So they can go to spiralize.com if they would like to find out more. Also, if you want to hear more tips on like the kind we just talked about, check me out on LinkedIn. I post four mornings a week at 7.30 a.m. Eastern, and it's always some combination of easy to digest 30 to 60 second things.

I also have a game show where people come on. They try and beat me in finding different CRO Crimes. That's actually the name of the show, CRO Crimes. Nice. It's a lot of fun. Seven lightning rounds. The winner gets $100 for the charity. I love it. Well, we're going to make sure we have those in the show notes for you. Any last departing secrets, words for the audience? I think we covered it great. Thank you for having me on. Thank you. If anyone made it this far, thank you for listening. Yeah, and I appreciate it. Thanks so much.