Behind the Scenes with Clay Collins

Ezra: Behind the scenes here at Converted 2015 with the man himself, Clay “The Tiger” Collins. I’m like a marketing fanboy right now. This guy is feeding people. Nobody feeds people. You just did a presentation that blew my mind. I truly believe that the next five years of our industry rely on behavioral response marketing, so marketing to people based on the behaviors that they’re making. This is something we’ve been strapping together with little toothpicks and clothespins, using Zapier and stuff like that. What you guys just unveiled has blown my mind. I know it’s not out, yet, but would you just talk a little bit about what it is and what it does?

Clay: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So the first that we unveiled, which I think is really significant is SplitTester.com. We believe that’ll be out in December. And we want to provide enterprise-grade level split testing, using the best mathematics available.

Ezra: Seven hundred bucks a month right now for my conversion rate optimization set, you know?

Clay: So this is gonna be completely free, it’s gonna be competitive with whatever product you’re using, and we really want to democratize access to split testing. We really think that the core foundation of scientific marketing is being able to run split tests.

Ezra: Absolutely.

Clay: And yet, most split testing tools are priced at a level, where it’s just not accessible.

Ezra: That most businesses just can’t afford.

Clay: Right. And so the goal with this product, with SplitTester.com, is we want more businesses to run their very first split test with this tool than with any other tool. And this is part of just our mission to expose this kind of thinking to the broader world and the broader community.

Ezra: Let’s release the price.

Clay: Yeah, it’s totally free.

Ezra: Free split testing for your business. And just looking at the little screenshots and stuff, it looks to be a better tool…I haven’t used it yet. I can’t wait to use it…than what you’re paying for on the market right now. But that’s not what I’m excited about. Okay, split testing, it’s cool. We all know about split testing. Fine, it’s exciting. However, there’s a bigger game afoot here. There’s something that’s higher-level than what most people are talking about that you guys have developed that will be coming out in beta. Are we not talking about that yet? Am I blowing the lid here, you know?

Clay: We can talk about that a little bit.

Ezra: I can also wait to release this.

Clay: Okay, yeah. So we’re releasing a marketing command center. We haven’t released the name of it yet. But we believe that marketing automation should exist at every single level of your marketing stack and that there’s actually a level above what most people are using, where marketing automation should take place. So we’ve built a system, where you can plug in whatever integrations you’re using. If you’re using Infusionsoft, HelpSpot, GoToWebinar, Stripe, Zapier, whatever tools you’re using, you can plug them in to our open marketing automation platform, this marketing command center, this hub, that connects everything and that you can create rules around. And so let’s say someone attends 30 minutes or more of your webinar, they watch over half of your sales video, and then they go to your pricing page, but they don’t buy. That’s a highly qualified lead. So what we would do is we would automatically route that lead directly to Salesforce and maybe ping someone in Slack to let them know.

Ezra: And this is the big problem we have as marketers today, is we all these separate platforms that we’re using that have data sets that can’t communicate with one another. So what this is doing is taking the data from Wistia, from GoToWebinar, from Shopify, pulling them in. Maybe not Shopify, but at some point, probably.

Clay: Oh, no. We’re building Shopify into it, yeah.

Ezra: And allowing you to use that together to make communications to your customers, based on their behavior, which it will take your marketing to the next level. And I’m not going to actually release this video until it’s ready because I’m gonna put my affiliate link in, and I’m gonna do a webinar about it because we’re gonna start using it immediately. Right now, we have five or six tools. We have our own APIs that we’re working with to make this stuff happen. This is how you make a business work. You communicate with people where they are, based on what they’ve done. If you’re communicating with everyone in the same way, you’re not being nearly as effective as you can, and you’re probably not going to be able to advertise effectively. So what this does is it actually allows us to increase our front end advertising because we have more of an ability to communicate with people, based on what they’ve done. It’s unbelievable. I mean, it’s really simple. I mean, it’s not that simple, but it’s simple, yet not. You know what I mean?

Clay: It’s really big, and it’s a lot more than just a simple rules engine. It will be doing all kinds of different things, like lead backup. Everything that comes through, we’ll be tracking that. We spend $350 grand a month on paid media, right, so if GoToWebinar goes down for us for even a day–

Ezra: Screwed.

Clay: –that costs us thousands of dollars.

Ezra: That’s a lot of money. Yeah.

Clay: So it’ll be doing things, like notifying you the second that service goes down, telling you that it’ll tell you when the service goes back up, cashing all the leads, emailing you a CSV with all the leads that were captured while it was down, and when GoToWebinar goes back up, it’ll send them back through. So it’s doing a whole bunch of things at that level. We also think that there’s an opportunity and something that we’ll be providing, is automated lead scoring. So we are observing signals across all of your different marketing tools, so we can notice a correlation. If someone is doing something in Shopify and then visiting a certain set of pages and then opening a certain set of e-mails, we notice correlations between that and buying behavior. And then we can predictively model who is more likely to buy, so you can call them up on the phone.

Ezra: Who’s the best customers? Who’s likely to buy? Instead of sequences based on what you now know about your lead from all these platforms. It’s genius.

Clay: And really, our approach here is not that we want to be the best at everything. We don’t wanna be AWeber. We don’t wanna be Infusionsoft. We don’t wanna send your emails for you. We want you to plug in whatever you want to use. We think that, on one extreme, there’s a lot of do-it-yourself services or do-it-all services that wanna do your marketing automation, your landing pages, your affiliate program, your shopping cart.

Ezra: And they do nothing well. It’s funny. My friend emailed me today and is like, “What do you think of this service over Shopify?” And I go to it, and it’s like, “We do affiliate management, we do email, and we do all this stuff.” And I’m like, “Dude, the reason you want Shopify is because they do commerce better than anyone, and then you can plug in the best third party automation and marketing tools on top of the best commerce platform that exists.” So you don’t want an all-in-one.

Clay: So what we’ve noticed is this shift from an all-in-one platform to a world where actually Stripe is better at payments than anyone else, where CAKE is better at affiliate programs than anyone else, where Shopify is better at commerce than anyone else, where Google Analytics is better at analytics than anyone else, or maybe Mixpanel, depending on what you’re doing. But there’s all these best of breed solutions, and I guarantee you, for every all-in-one platform that exists, there’s other companies that are comprised of 20 dudes–

Ezra: Or three bums on their couch.

Clay: –guys and gals that are making a better point solution for just that, than the all-in-one platform. And we don’t want you to have to choose between an integrated solution and using the best solution. We want to bring it all together in hub.

Ezra: And that’s a really good lesson that we often talk about on this blog, that do something better than everyone else. Figure out what that one thing is, what your product does, what your business does, that’s better than everyone and focus your marketing and your message and your communication on that. You guys do that really, really well. You’re, by far, the best in your industry. I get offers to promote all these other products. I won’t do it because I mean, I am a LeadPages diehard myself from the beginning. But I just also think you guys really care. You’re doing good stuff. Everyone around here is happy. I go these events. People are miserable. I mean, that’s just the way it is. All you guys are having a good time.

Tracy, who you’ll see also on the blog, but you’ve probably seen her by now, is amazing. I’m just really impressed with what you guys are doing. I can’t wait for this thing to come out. It might already be out by the time video comes out. Clay Collins, “The Tiger,” thank you for coming on.

Clay: Dude, thank you, Ezra.