Next up in the analyst relations series, Eric Chemi introduces Peter Radizeski. Spanning tech and telecoms, Peter has shaped his career from blogging to channel development to consulting.
Tune in to hear how Peter has approached helping organizations get from point A to point Z.
Click To Read Transcript
0:06 I’m Eric Chemi, and this is Politely Pushy. Welcome to Politely Pushy. I’m your host as always, Eric Chemi. Today, my guest is
0:14 the first ever person I’ve seen themselves described as a blogalyst.
0:20 So, Peter, what does that mean? I I think I can piece together what a blog and and an analyst means, but but what
0:26 do you think it means? How did you come up with that name? I’ve never seen I’ve never seen that word before, even though
0:33 it seems to me it could describe a lot of people that I know. Um, it it wasn’t mine. Um, I can’t
0:41 remember which PR guy at an event came up with it because uh at the time there
0:47 were people that were blogging and then there were like industry analysts and I
0:52 happened to mix kind of the two things together. So he was like, “You’re not
0:58 really a straight blogger, so let’s come up, let’s coin a term for that.” And that was the term he came up with.
1:05 It’s because I spent a lot of time talking about the industry, but uh it’s not a complaint thing. It’s more of a
1:11 like this is the problem and this is how we should fix it. So that’s that’s what
1:16 makes me a little different. I’m not just ranting and complaining. Are there a lot of people that you know
1:22 who are just ranting and complaining? Uh during the mid 2000s there were a
1:28 lot but a lot of people stopped blogging because uh it was it took takes a lot of
1:33 time and they weren’t making any money on it. So they stopped where do they go? What happened to those
1:39 people? I don’t know. Some of them um are recycling now because a lot of the VoIP
1:45 bloggers in in the mid 2000s are coming out and uh they’re popping up around a
1:52 new technology called VCON which is a virtualized conversation. It’s a it’s a way to capture omni channel into a
2:00 standard file format and let AI eat it.
2:05 And I see a lot of the old VoIP guys are piling up over there. So,
2:11 on to the next tech on on your website, rad-info.net with the
2:16 hyphen rad-info.net. I was just looking at it today and I
2:22 love the post that you have right here. Until you listen, you won’t know. And you and you write, “Yesterday, I had a
2:28 call with a VP of enablement, VP of enablement, and they went through feeding AI all the call transcripts, the
2:36 call logs of their sales reps and the three best ones versus the 400 other
2:43 people, right, that that aren’t the three best ones.” And what a striking difference there was that the three best
2:48 ones in a lot of ways did the opposite of what the corporate training would have said and they crushed the
2:54 competition. they crushed their internal competition. So leadership had to realize everything we’re teaching
3:00 people is actually wrong. It’s it’s it’s kind of funny because I’m on a
3:06 lot of sales calls and I’ve managed sales teams and I’ve done a lot of sales training and when you’re going through
3:12 it to get people out of their habits is really hard. And
3:18 to get companies to examine their top salespeople and try to replicate that is
3:23 what we do in the partner community where we’re like how do you make a partner profile? You take your top five
3:28 partners, figure out, you know, all the characteristics you can and then
3:33 duplicate that, right? This is the first time I’ve seen a a sales team actually do that. And
3:41 you know, I was on a sales call uh today with the CEO of a client company and he
3:47 did most of the talking and I was like, “Wow, you’re doing this wrong.” The whole idea of a sales call is to let the customer talk, right? Ask questions, let
3:55 them talk, take notes, figure out what the pain points are, then propose a solution, not
4:02 talk your way into a sale. It’s more of a be quiet. And you know, AI right now,
4:07 whether it’s read.ai AI or notes or Otter or whoever you’re using for note-taking, there’s a score on the
4:13 bottom of how often you uh you spoke during the meeting and stuff like that. Those are important metrics to be
4:19 looking at because if you’re the one doing the most talking, you’re probably doing too much selling, not enough
4:24 listening, which is required to do the selling. Does that work for podcast episodes,
4:30 too? Probably. I mean, your best interviewers ask great questions and then sit back
4:35 and let the other person tell a story and then active listening, you just help
4:41 them expand upon that or move it along to the next subject matter, you know?
4:47 It’s uh or you get really good banter going back and forth that makes a really good podcast, too, you know.
4:54 Yeah. Because I I think about it like, oh, am I talking too much? I think all hosts wonder, are they talking too much?
4:59 because no host is ever talking too little if that makes sense.
5:05 That’s Yeah, I totally understand that. So, talk about your role right now. If
5:11 you had to describe yourself, right, you’re doing red info, but you’re doing consulting. You said you’re doing sales training, you’re helping with all these
5:17 different components of it. How do you break down on a pie chart the percentage
5:23 of your work that is let’s say you know being an analyst, being a writer, being a trainer, being a consultant, being a
5:29 speaker, there’s so many things that you’re doing, right? It it it fluctuates
5:34 uh throughout the year. If you took a year as a pie chart, I guess it’s
5:41 especially this year. This year being an agent has been probably 55% of what I’ve
5:46 been doing. I spent a lot of time with end users this year. Did you say being an agent? I want to
5:52 hear that right. Yeah, I’m a telco agent, too. So, I spent a lot of time in front of end users actually selling technology and
6:00 this is the first year that that’s been a majority of my time. Then, um I’d say
6:06 sales training was probably about 15%. There’s probably a couple more um sales
6:12 training sessions I left to do this year. Writing has probably been about 15% this year and then consulting has
6:20 been pretty much uh the rest.
6:25 It’s about how it breaks down but it does vary.
6:32 What do you find is the most changed because of AI? Where where do you feel like okay 3 years ago I was doing it a
6:40 certain way but because of AI this particular part of my job is totally different. Mhm.
6:48 I don’t think anything’s really been affected by AI yet other than having to
6:53 explain the hype to business owners, right? Um
6:59 I’m more of a realist when it comes to technology than a pie in the sky.
7:05 uh kind of guy and I I use real world use cases
7:12 uh for how I talk about stuff. I don’t usually hype tech. I usually talk about it in in uh how a business is going to
7:20 benefit from it because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re all hoping for. And AI,
7:28 there’s lots of studies out. I was just reading one yesterday from MIT where 90% of enterprises are having failures in
7:35 their AI projects because one nobody really knows what they’re doing. uh two they don’t have the right
7:42 KPIs on the project so that you know we’re doing one of my clients
7:48 doing a pilot right now with a call center with AI and I was in on the scope
7:54 and then I saw their press release today on what they were using for KPIs and it doesn’t match what was in the scope. So
7:59 I’m wondering how that’s going to match up when they go evaluate whether or not the pilot worked. Why do you think that happened or how do
8:05 you think that happened? I I think the marketing team put
8:11 together the uh the KPIs after technical team and the management
8:18 put together the scope. That’s what I think happened. But and then is there a role for you to try
8:25 to correct that or do you just sit back quietly and watch them sort it out? No, I’m trying to correct it actually
8:30 right now. Uh I got the pre-release for the press release and we’re working on correcting some of those things right
8:36 now. before it before it gets haywire.
8:41 So I I go back to, you know, the the blogalyst and I think about the the analyst part of it. A lot of the analyst
8:49 overlaps with consulting, right? A lot of it is, hey, someone’s hiring me to figure out what I should do. How do you
8:55 how do you differentiate those two roles, right? A consulting role versus an analyst role.
9:03 I guess um a lot of it has to do with scope of work. I I’ve had some really
9:10 interesting uh projects over the years. A couple of times companies have just
9:15 hired me to walk around their office and listen and then figure out what the problems are that the company’s having.
9:22 So, like talk to a lot of employees, you know, walk around, listen a lot, and
9:28 then come back and like give them some feedback on what I heard and what’s going on. Um, other times it’s uh step
9:38 back, look at what they’re doing, and figure out how to get better practices
9:43 happening um to be more effective. That happens a lot in the channel
9:50 programs because um you know people that had programs
9:57 um that were targeted at a specific business model partner
10:02 then try to take that program and widen it and it breaks once the business model
10:08 of your partner differentiates right like best example I can give you
10:14 is uh hardware companies like Cisco go that are now going all software, right?
10:21 But their partners are their entire business model is based around pushing boxes
10:27 and pushing software isn’t really something they have a skill set for or a business model for. They haven’t figured
10:33 out how to compensate salespeople, what they’re going to do with their tech staff. All these things break.
10:40 So you have to analyze all that and figure out like how we’re going to tweak this or change this so that the program
10:47 can work for a different business model and also maybe to figure out how to help
10:53 the partners advance their business to today’s model. So the analysis and the
10:59 consulting kind of come hand in hand a lot of times.
11:05 Do you ever get the bombardment of smaller companies who want to get in
11:10 front of the analysts, get in front of the consultant, hey, hear about our tech. We want you to reference our tech. We want you to help sell our tech or
11:17 push it or talk about it, write about it, mention it, you know, get it in a report. I assume like the smirk you’re
11:24 giving me is is is a possible yes there. Yeah, it’s it’s a yes. Um the
11:31 when I was uh blogging for one of the big tech journals, um they used to slap
11:37 me in the room with all their other editors and it would be nothing but meeting after meeting of people
11:44 pitching their stuff hoping that it would end up in a blog post by the end of the day. But that’s not really if
11:50 anybody’s read anything I’ve written ever. I don’t write those type of blogs. Mine have more to do most of my
11:57 blogs uh come from a conversation I’m having with a customer, another partner,
12:03 another analyst. Um some problem like uh one blog post I
12:09 wrote this week was because I’ve seen way too many AI written uh vendor emails
12:15 that are just stupid and I’m sure if I’m getting five or 10 of them then every partner is getting five or 10 of them.
12:22 So, uh, they get a little disappointed because they don’t they don’t, uh, get
12:28 that pitch. And actually today in the market we’re in, I mean, if they’re not going to pay to pay to pitch, then
12:34 they’re not going to find themselves being written up anyway because almost every analyst at this point, if you
12:40 don’t hire them, you’re never going to get mentioned. So, it’s uh, you know, they all had to come
12:46 up with a business model. And you know, funny because this is one of the big conversations that that I have
12:53 because a lot of outsiders say what you say, hey, you’re not going to get mentioned unless you pay, unless you
12:59 hire them. But you talk to those analysts at those bigger firms and they said that’s not true. We’re neutral. We
13:04 talk to everybody. We we talk to everybody. You know, it’s it’s not about that. And pay-for-play is is like the
13:10 worst thing that that you could be branded with. I I will tell you that I’ve been in this
13:17 industry for almost 30 years and pay-to-play is exactly what this industry
13:23 telecom is about. You any award that you’ve ever seen any vendor ever get. Uh
13:30 look at who presented the award and see if they ever sponsored any of their shows
13:35 or they bought full page ads in uh their magazine or on their website. Trust me,
13:41 it it’s a it’s a I’ll give you this is how one person said, “How would we even
13:47 know unless they engage this that they even exist?” I said, “Well, that’s easy. You walk around, you know, you walk around, you
13:54 pay attention, you find other vendors that are uh the best example I can give anybody is probably Weave Technology.
14:01 Um they they’re in the UCaaS space. They went public a couple of years ago and no
14:08 analyst was covering them and I couldn’t understand why because they were verticalized which was great and they
14:14 did far more than just a phone system. They did insurance verification and credit card payment
14:20 mainly for veterinarians and dentists. That’s very specific very they also do it for like hearing
14:27 centers and eye doctors and very small and it’s over $200 million in ARR right
14:34 now. So, I mean, they’re really killing it. But at the time they went public, no
14:39 analyst was covering them. And I couldn’t understand it because the UCaaS analyst should have seen that coming.
14:45 It’s what they’ve been talking about for years. And there it was. And it IPO’d. So, I don’t even know how
14:52 they missed it, right? So, you can’t tell me you’re not pay for play if a UCaaS provider at $90 million
14:59 IPOed and you missed it. Yeah, like a public company should be
15:06 able to find them, right? That I mean the the IPO always makes noise
15:13 anyway because the insiders all want to, you know, take that day bump. So if
15:19 you’re an analyst in the space, how did you not know? How’d you miss it?
15:25 What’s the answer? What’s the answer to that? They they weren’t they weren’t hired.
15:30 They didn’t buy an ad. They didn’t sponsor a conference. But then is that the failure of that
15:36 company? Then the failure of the company like, hey, you’re not playing the game. This is how the game works. You got to you got to
15:42 put in some coins here. Uh,
15:47 yes and no. I mean, if that if that’s how you want to go about it, uh, then you can do it that way. But I
15:55 mean, they got from 90 to 200 million in ARR without playing that game. So, good for them.
16:02 um you know they’re not rocketing they don’t get as much press as Ring Central or 8 by 8 but they’re not
16:10 paying for the press either. So, you know, if you’re dumping that money back into your partners, your sales team,
16:16 your customers and R&D, it’s a better use of money probably.
16:23 That’s a that’s a provocative thought in some way, right? Like why why are we going to
16:29 go out there and try to convince people when we could just go do the good work ourselves?
16:36 You know, it it’s like Zoom, right? Uh they came out of nowhere. There were a
16:41 lot of companies before them during the pandemic that were doing video conferencing for years. 8 by 8 was WebEx
16:47 was there was a company called PGI that private equity had bought for a billion dollars in 2018 I think. These were all
16:56 doing global video conferencing before the pandemic and yet Zoom came zooming
17:02 out of nowhere and everybody was on Zoom calls and no one was no one was on PGI
17:07 or WebEx. So, um, you know, sometimes the tech, ease of
17:13 use, the UX, the design, uh, sometimes that that beats a PR push.
17:22 It feels like in Zoom’s case, they were the easiest to use, right? The design was simple. WebEx was terrible to use.
17:29 Anytime said, “Hey, we use WebEx,” you think, “Oh, no. Oh, no. This is just
17:34 it’s going to be awful. Doesn’t work. It it’s funny because actually now uh
17:41 you know I have a lot of clients that uh sell WebEx and it’s actually a very
17:47 robust platform. It’s just at the time Zoom made it
17:53 um grandma proof. Right. Right. They made it super easy like the iPhone. Anyone can use the
17:58 iPhone. Right. Just boom. Here you go. Yep. And there’s a lot to be said for that. People forget that, you know, user
18:04 design is a huge part of effectiveness and and user adoption. And yet it in a
18:11 lot of tech, I mean, we were talking about portals because I’ve been on a lot of demos lately, and you could tell who
18:20 uses a a UX designer and who does not pretty quickly.
18:26 I assume they all use a UX designer. You tell me some people don’t. Like, who’s designing that? A lot. Well, usually they just have
18:33 regular developers, although lately actually they’re they’re using like lovable AI and some other AI to uh to
18:39 debug and and write code for them. So, they’re not even hiring a UX. So, it’s it’s kind of interesting. We’re
18:46 at a strange point in coding. What do you think about, do you think it’s going to be for the better or for
18:51 the worse? I think anybody that thinks it’s just going to be AI doesn’t really understand
19:00 uh design. Like there’s going to be a lot of AI assist,
19:07 but not AI by itself. You know, AI can’t can’t architect a
19:14 house, right? You need it could it could, right? You you take
19:20 here’s 20 other houses. You can just average out what those are. Pick what you like from those 20, right? You could
19:25 do it. You could possibly, but you know that those designs are all copywritten. So
19:31 basically, it’s stealing copyright, right? I mean, there’s a there’s what’s technically possible versus what’s
19:37 legally allowed, right? But if if you ignored the copyright, theoretically, it should be able to design it, right?
19:43 Sure. Absolutely. But it’s the it’s it’s all in the details. Like what’s a loadbearing wall?
19:51 Did you design for that? No. You took 12 modules from 12 houses, slapped it. We
19:59 don’t know if anything’s a loadbearing wall. We’ll find out during Hurricane Aaron.
20:05 Yeah, exactly. We’ll find out if it if it worked or not. But
20:11 how are when you’re doing sales training, how has the AI, you know, revolution changed the sales training?
20:18 I don’t know. it hasn’t uh it hasn’t hit
20:24 who I’m training for, right? Like a lot of the AI assist
20:30 comes in like call center packages where it’s
20:36 throwing up a a script as in real time as uh it’s transcribing what’s going on
20:44 in the call, right? That works great for
20:49 call centers, inbound, uh, BDR, stuff like that. I don’t know
20:55 how well it works, uh, in outbound
21:02 partners, other kind of stuff. Like I I I haven’t really seen where
21:08 AI is going to assist all of that. It works really well in
21:14 like mass market sales, you know. I can make, you know, 100 calls a day. That’s
21:22 great. But it’s I don’t know how well it’s going to work for
21:28 um sales people that aren’t making 100 calls a day that are, you know,
21:33 calling into their network, calling old customers, calling current customers, stuff like that. I don’t know how well it’s going to assist.
21:43 your perspective obviously you said you’ve been in this industry for for 30 years right you’ve seen it from
21:48 all these different angles how does that you know affect your
21:54 perspective right because some people have just been analysts right you like we talked about the Blogalyst from the beginning they they’ve only been
21:59 analysts they’ve never had their own P&L they’ve never been a consultant they’ve never you know led sales efforts or
22:07 trained let’s say they’ve only been analysts right so because you’ve seen all these other things how does that affect the way you go about assessing
22:14 companies or, you know, analyzing them, like what you ask them about, right? Like what are you trying to accomplish
22:21 in your in your writing, in your reports and in what you’re trying to produce for
22:28 for for people who are also in positions that you are in your other roles, if that makes sense. It’s like you’re
22:34 you’re talking to other versions of yourself. A lot of it I think is that um
22:42 I I see the whole process. So like when I’m looking at stuff, let’s
22:47 take lead gen, right? When you’re in lead gen, the most important part of lead gen isn’t actually generating the
22:53 lead. It’s tracking it through the sales process and making sure it drops into somebody in in five minutes and that
22:59 person acts on it within five minutes because a lead only has like a 30 to 45
23:06 minute um bake time before it goes bad, right?
23:11 So if you’re doing lead gen, you could hire and I have a lot of clients that they hire a third party and then the
23:17 leads well what happened? I don’t know. Well, how it’s the process, right? So, a lot of it when we’ve gone in over the
23:23 years, it’s I’m not looking at like one piece. I’m like already back back
23:29 trailing it where where is it going to break, right? Like this all looks good here, but maybe here it’s broken or it’s
23:36 going to break here or you didn’t think about how you were going to track it along this way. And a lot of times, this
23:43 doesn’t happen so much now, but it was happening at the time. Operations and sales were always at odds. So sales
23:49 would sell whatever they wanted to sell and then throw it over to operations to go have the delivered to the customer
23:55 and there was always you sold this. When can you turn it around? Yeah. And I know we can’t really do this but
24:03 do the best you can. As long as it’s close enough. Yeah. Yeah. I just want my commission. So
24:08 could you just And there there were ways that we worked
24:13 to make sure that that wasn’t um wasn’t broken either. We we’d bring operations into the room to talk to sales and we’d
24:20 find out that they didn’t have good product training or maybe the sales engineer wasn’t being engaged when he
24:26 should have been. So, it’s all those little pieces that really helped a lot
24:31 of my clients because I I was able to like step back and go from here from A to Z you’re stuck at like M and M and K
24:39 just are broken. And I think if you just look at product or you just look at the
24:45 marketing or you’re just training the salespeople, you don’t see all of, you don’t see the
24:51 whole picture and you don’t see all the places it can fall apart. It’s kind of like in the channel program when they’re
24:59 like they design this program for a VAR and then they try to sell it to an MSP
25:05 or an agent and they don’t understand why it’s not working right. the business model isn’t the same. So, they don’t
25:13 they don’t engage with the program the same way. Unless you’re in the street, it all looks it all looks great. But
25:20 until you’ve seen it in the street and you’ve seen the car crashes,
25:25 so I’m lucky enough I get to see the car crashes and traffic flow. Well, too,
25:33 you talk about that conflict between, let’s say, sales and development, right? Hey, we sold
25:39 this. We know you don’t have it, but try your best. There often is a similar conflict or disconnect between vendors
25:46 and their partners, too, right? Yep. It’s um
25:53 a lot of times it’s uh it’s hype that does it and
26:00 there’s a there’s a gulf in the engagement between the vendor and the partner. So in a lot of cases
26:09 depending on the vendor obviously um the partner isn’t an expert on the
26:16 vendor. Partner is not an expert on the vendor. Okay. Is a vendor an expert on the
26:22 partner though? No. But the best example I gave you is there’s there’s a lot of uh AI shops
26:28 popping up and CX shops popping up. Yeah. Customer experience.
26:33 They may be experts in how call centers should deploy customer experience,
26:41 but they’re not experts on the specific vendor. When I’m on calls with CX firms,
26:47 usually they they have two or three very preferred vendors, and them they can
26:52 talk deep into. But if the customer wanted vendor D or E,
26:59 they’re going to try to apply what they know about the first three to the next two. And that sometimes has a
27:06 disconnect. And a partner’s kind of the vendors kind of got to be aware of that. So does the
27:12 partner. And that happens probably in the UCaaS space, right? When you think
27:18 about like Cloudcom, they all kind of have the same features, but how it gets deployed and how the
27:24 service delivery happens, that’s really where like uh the tires meet the road.
27:31 And if you’re selling five or six different vendors, you’re not going to be very familiar with the service
27:38 delivery. So, as a partner, you better pick um you better pick a vendor that
27:43 service delivery is what they’re talking to you about on onboarding.
27:51 What are some what are some stories like you talk about the car crashes? What are some stories of where things have just gone totally wrong and then people feel
27:58 burned and angry about hey this just really is not what I wanted? uh in
28:05 early it might have been like 2006 I think I was up with a company with their
28:11 partner program and they just got it running and then they couldn’t keep the
28:16 product working for like nine months. They had like a crash a week
28:23 and all that time, energy, and money they had spent uh recruiting partners and getting them
28:30 up and running, they ended up with all but like I think six I think six
28:36 stayed and the rest just bail out. That’s that’s a mess.
28:43 That’s that’s probably the the worst mess I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen some others where um I’ve seen vendors
28:50 decided they were going to go go to channel uh not real this happened recently
28:57 with product not realizing the buyer was the CMO and basically partners don’t sell into
29:03 the marketing department. I mean that’s really not who we’re selling to. We sell to the tech department or utilities or
29:10 network or lots of other partners. We hardly ever touch marketing. So, they spent all this time, money, they’re at
29:17 events, they’re pushing it, and then four months later, they don’t have a sale, and they’re like, “What went wrong?” I’m like, “Uh, you had a uh you
29:26 had a partner fit mismatch because your buyer persona did not match up with the partners you were chasing.”
29:34 And they didn’t even know that was a thing, right? Like, what do you mean? Like, they’re selling to that
29:39 they’re selling to that company. That company is who we want as a client. I’m like, “Yes, but the buyer is not who
29:45 they talk to, you know, and that’s and they’re thinking, you know, vendors saying,
29:51 well, why can’t they just like get into that department?” Because that’s not it’s not what they do, right? When I’m
29:56 in there, I could hand me off to the marketing department so I can go talk to them about buying this other tech.
30:03 That’s that rarely rarely happens. So, what’s the advice for that situation? How do you help them?
30:09 You got to have a better partner fit. You got to have a partner profile. And to do that, you also have to have a customer profile and a buyer persona.
30:16 Like who’s the buyer? Okay. Who’s your ideal customer? What partners touch that? Touch both. If you don’t know, and
30:24 that’s mainly the problem. Like most vendors, who’s your customer? Everybody. I’m like, no, you’re not Lays potato
30:31 chips. You’re not hood milk, right? Like not everybody is buying your shit
30:38 everybody. Your specific high-tech thing is definitely not for everybody. Yeah,
30:43 it it’s you know like uh I try to like bring it back to earth like the largest
30:49 alternative carriers like C beyond USC paytech
30:55 the they maxed out at 55,000 customers right so it’s get the next thousand it’s
31:05 not I need to get a million it’s I need to get a thousand that will pay me find
31:10 me valuable and I can profit off of and then repeat. But they all have this
31:17 thing that they’re going to like turn it on and a million people are going to come through the door and want to buy it and they’re going to be AT&T and that’s
31:25 the reality situation is that’s just a lousy uh way to go to market.
31:31 So what’s your best advice for someone? Let’s say someone’s listening to this, right? We’ve got let’s say it’s one of our clients, right? One of our one of
31:37 our startup clients that wants to make an impact in the space. They want to get on your radar. They want to they want to
31:42 have a better partner fit. They want to get into the right customers. What’s let’s say a 90 day, hey, do this thing
31:48 for the next 90 days to to get yourself up to speed. Maybe you’re you’re up and coming, but people don’t know if they
31:54 can trust you. They don’t know if they want to bring you on, but maybe let’s let’s assume the tech works. Let’s
31:59 assume it’s not going to crash once a week. What should they do? Okay. Um,
32:05 use the formula for startup week, right? Startup week is a national thing.
32:11 Um, I’ve mentored lots of startups through that. Go to the mall and talk to
32:16 people about your product. If you don’t have customers yet, if you’re, you know, just wireframed out your app, go just go
32:22 to the mall and just talk to people about your about your app. Get their feedback. If you’ve already have
32:28 customers, talk to them. What are they doing with the app? What don’t they like? What do they like? How are they
32:33 interacting with the app? If you don’t know, this is the best way to find out.
32:38 And then from that feedback you can figure out like what’s the benefit I’ll give you a little example on how
32:45 like that real times this goes back to like 2005 or 2006 but I was talking to
32:51 this guy I just sold him his first UCaaS thing and I’m like well what do you like about it? He goes, “I actually like
32:56 voicemail to email because on my Blackberry, I have big fat thumbs and I’m always fat thumbming stuff. So, I
33:03 can just forward the voicemail to whoever needs to read it to go help that customer.” And I’m that fast. And I’m
33:09 thinking voicemail to email like the simplest feature that we have. This is the thing. But it was like, well, that’s
33:16 a customer voice, right? Voice of the customer is the most impactful thing if you’ll just go extract that data.
33:24 So, I would go talk to customers and if you don’t have a lot of them,
33:30 uh, think about a trial and then see how they play with it, right? Like in the
33:36 beginning, Ring Central used to um um track everybody that went in their
33:42 portal. So, if you didn’t log in in the first day, they would call you and be like, “Hey, you didn’t log into the
33:48 portal. You know, you don’t really need a phone. You can do everything you want right through the portal. Let me talk you through it.” because they knew that
33:53 if you didn’t interact with the portal in the first week, your chance of churn was 90%. You’re not you’re done. It means you
33:59 don’t need it, you’re not using it, you don’t know how to use it, whatever. Yep. So those kind of datas and
34:05 feedbacks in that kind of loop is like and that’s the lifeblood of a startup.
34:10 How much does freemium still work? I think it works well. I mean, Zoom has it.
34:16 Right. Right. The the thing about freemium is one is you’re going to get a lot of
34:22 feedback on the product and then two you have to have a very
34:28 real benefit for them to pay for it and you have to have a sales team that is able to
34:34 uh do the upsell. And if you think about uh some of your
34:41 best SAS, HubSpot is a great example of freemium to uh premium, right? Their CRM
34:49 is awesome and it doesn’t cost anything until you want to use premium features
34:54 and then it starts costing you. So, it can be done. I mean, it it really
35:00 depends on like the thing about HubSpot is they’re using the CRM just to get you in the into
35:06 their ecosystem and then they have an an incredible upsell organization working on you
35:17 and not everybody has that, but that model everyone should be examining and
35:23 breaking down. I like it. I like it. I I was thinking
35:30 about what are some other what are some other pieces of advice for companies, but I think I think you’ve given a good
35:36 a good set of freemium ones right here. I feel like the rest they got to pay for, right? You can’t give it too much away.
35:41 Um, this has been great, Peter. Thanks so much for the time today. Thank you. It was wonderful. Talk to you soon.
35:48 Thank you to my guest and thanks for listening. Subscribe to get the latest episodes each week and we’ll see you
35:53 next time.