VGTM_Ep 53_Sam Shepler_Audio_Edited_For Transcript
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Corey Quinn: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Vertical Go To Market Podcast, where you'll discover new opportunities to grow your business from seven figures to eight for the world's most successful agency and B2B SaaS executives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Today. I'm joined by the CEO and founder of Testimonial Hero, Sam Schepler.
Welcome, Sam.
Sam Shepler: Thanks, Corey. It's great to be here.
I'm super excited to have you here, my friend, and we're going to have a great conversation. I just know it. Could you share a little bit about yourself and Testimonial Hero with the audience?
Absolutely. Great to be here. Sam Shepler, founder and CEO of Testimonial Hero.
Testimonial Hero is a very niche, verticalized video agency. So we are a video agency and we specialize in Customer testimonial videos. And our main vertical that we focus on is [00:01:00] B2B, SaaS, and technology. Although we are working on exploring a few other verticals and, you know, because we have been so focused on that, you know, niche service of.
Video testimonials. We've really gone deep in the ways that we actually, the different methods that we do that. So we have a number of service lines in relation to video testimonials. We have our fully remote video testimonial creation service, where we've really innovated a ton around how can, you know, really delivering the world's best.
Remote video testimonials that, you know, don't actually even look like they're done remotely. That's kind of the magic of our, our remote testimonials is we're trying to do them remote, but without compromising on quality, we also have our onsite, you know, in person filming video testimonial. Business unit where we have a global network of [00:02:00] videographers all over the world, and we are able to utilize that network to do the filming.
And then of course, all the editing does happens in house. So we're able to then deliver a service to our clients at a flat rate, like per shoot, no matter if they're in Sweden or if they're filming in Sweden or if they're filming in San Diego. It's all flat rate and clients really, really appreciate the simplicity of that and also appreciate not having to pay for travel fees, which can be very expensive when you're flying a crew around.
We also have about three other ways that we do, you know, customer testimonials, which, you know, you know, I'm not going to get into because those two are the main ones, but. I think the point is, you know, by really focusing on solving one problem, we've, it seems like it might be a limited thing, but you can actually go super deep and certainly way deeper than I thought when we started the business.
So
Corey Quinn: you've effectively specialized in two different ways, one [00:03:00] in who you serve, B2B SaaS or software, but you also specialize in the other way, which is in what you do. So you're solving. You, you, you, you focused in on a specific type of service within the sort of the realm of marketing, if you will, for B2B SaaS, which is obviously the testimonials.
And as a result of that, you found a, a, a great niche and you've built a successful company. That's
Sam Shepler: exactly right. And a lot of the, at least the initial impetus for this was things that I learned at my prior agency that I ran. I ran a. More generalist video production agency where, you know, from 2012 to 2016, uh, with a couple of business partners and we were kind of, I mean, this was like right after college essentially.
So we were just happy to have clients who were paying us. So we just did every type of video for every type of situation, you know, at least at first, although we quickly realized and for [00:04:00] every type of industry. And we, you know, by the end of that experience, uh, we were able to get a small kind of acqui hire of a company, uh, actually.
So it was kind of, you know, still a good, you know, base hit. But by the end of the experience, we realized, wow, like we're not specializing in any vertical, we're not specializing in any product. And there's a lot of challenges that I'm sure that the audience hears a lot if they listen to the podcast around that lack of specialization.
From a, you know, product and a vertical level for one on the vertical level, you know, when, when you're always, you know, on the marketing side, you know, when you're trying to appeal to so many people, it's like the classic, like you try to appeal to everyone and you appeal to no one. Right. Whereas if you go after one vertical, you can really put your message.
And you're into that coded language that every industry has and speak to them in the lingo that they're used to speaking, you know, for B2B software, you know, our clients that we [00:05:00] sell to, they care about, you know, building trust and, you know, creating pipeline so they can close deals faster. If we were specializing in patient testimonials for the medical device industry, we would not talk about.
Or sorry, patient tests, if we were specializing in patient testimonials for, you know, hospitals around like treatment and care, we would not be talking about how you can close deals faster, we'd be talking about patient, patient outcomes, and it would be completely different language. Right. So I think it's very, yeah, I think it's, it's very important.
Like. Just to, you know, speaking to prospects in their own language is an instant turn on in terms of like, can this person, you know, help me? Do they understand my problems? Like it instantly signals that, you know, it's a good fit. And, and then on the product side, you know, it's just really hard to scale and remove yourself as a founder.
If you're constantly reinventing the wheel on the service delivery, right? If you're doing a commercial one day and an animated [00:06:00] video the next day. And a testimonial, you know, on the third day, like you kind of, you know, I found myself always having to be pretty involved in a lot of projects and that's, you know, when I started Testimonial Hero, I kind of thought to myself, all right, like what is the, you know, one of the most valuable services that we were selling at our other agency, at our old agency, and like from a like willingness to pay perspective.
Who was typically paying that and, you know, if I rank all those factors, then also cross rank them with how easy it is to fulfill or how, if I can put a process behind this, that was basically how I got to video testimonials is I just thought about it and it, it checked all those boxes as well as a very important fourth box is just, am I actually interested and excited about this?
And I honestly really believe in the [00:07:00] power of. Social proof, the power of video testimonials and how they truly can be the, you know, the most important marketing investment that you make in many cases, like in addition to your website, I think you need, you need a very good website, you know, and you need good positioning, you need good messaging and you need really good customer stories.
More often than not on video. So yeah, I'm a big believer in video testimonials, but for sure was also, you know, thinking critically about, you know, just the thinking about like, is this valuable to a customer? And is this scalable from a fulfillment perspective? Can I put a process behind this?
Corey Quinn: That all makes good sense to me.
I think, gosh, there's so many, so many different directions I can go. And so back in 2016, your generalist production company was, was acquired. Is that effectively what happened? Correct. Yeah. And then, and then what happened? Did you start Testimonial Hero then, or was there a period of time after that before it started?[00:08:00]
Sam Shepler: So I worked as part of the agreement on, on the acquisition. I worked for the acquiring company for about a year. I actually left early on my contract with them because for a number of reasons, but I ultimately like, I'm just not that good at being an employee, to be honest. So I think, so yeah, we parted ways and then I actually, you know, at that point it was like, I always said, you know, Corey, like I am tired of agencies, terrible business, tough, really hard.
It's just brutal, brutal business. I want to do something, you know, scalable. I want to build a software company because that is what all the venture capitalists say is the key to,
Corey Quinn: it's the shiny object,
Sam Shepler: fame. That's, that's, that's how you, how you make headlines in TechCrunch and
Corey Quinn: Git. By the way, I have, I have firsthand experience with this at my last company where.
But yeah, the, the, the SaaS that's right. Gods [00:09:00] descended on, on the agency and, and, uh, disrupted a lot of things. So I know exactly what you're talking
Sam Shepler: about. Yes, that's that. Yeah, that's right. So you, so basically, long story short, I, I spent a year kind of trying to get various software products off the ground.
None of them really did get off the ground, which, you know, I, I learned some stuff and it was fun and, you know, but eventually, like. You know, 'cause it was a very small acquisition. Effectively that was an acquihire. Like eventually I did have to pay some bills. Yeah. And I, that's when I was like, oh, I'll just, you know, do a little agency stuff because I need to pay some bills.
I know agency will work. And then it worked better than I thought. And here I am, I guess this is like five years later after starting Testimonial Hero. And yeah, we're about 30. 32 people, or 32 people full time on the team. And yeah, it's, it's been more rewarding [00:10:00] and than I could have thought. Certainly more challenging than, than I, than I would've thought.
You know, as the saying goes, you know, we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy. . So that's the, the classic,
Corey Quinn: that's the real one. Yep. And so. You're five years in, as you said, 32 people, let's go back to when you were starting the business, right? You know, uh, at that, you know, that mark, what was it?
2019, I guess, ish, 2018, 2018. And so how did you just, at that point, was it intuitively clear that that B2B SaaS was the right solution or did you arrive there over time as far as a focus?
Sam Shepler: Yeah, I think it was pretty intuitively clear to me, thanks to my. Prior experience with my prior agency. And I, you know, I can see that, you know, again, coming to thinking about willingness to pay, like a lot of people want customer testimonial videos.
It's such a [00:11:00] broadly applicable, valuable thing. There's almost no business that won't benefit from them. But, you know, if you think about. You know, the customer's willingness to pay, that's always a function of the, how, of the average order value or the lifetime value of your prospect's customer, right? So, so talk,
Corey Quinn: talk, can you talk about like, define in like the context of, of the people you serve, like what does willingness to pay mean specifically?
Sam Shepler: So yeah, great question. So Say that I want to sell a onsite, in person video testimonial for when I started out. I think we were doing them around like 6, 000 or so. I, cause I, I need to have a 50 percent gross margin on that video testimonial because I'm an agency. And if you're an agency. [00:12:00] You basically need a 50 percent gross margin minimum for a lot of things, especially if you want to have money left over to reinvest in marketing your business.
You can have less than 50 percent gross margin and you can make, have profit, you know, or you can have less than 50 percent gross margin. And have no profit and invest in marketing. But if you have, if you don't have at least 50 percent gross margins, it'd be very hard to have meaningful profit and invest in marketing and sales to grow the company.
Right. So, you know, I could talk about this, even this is something I've become very passionate about because it's a huge blind spot, frankly, for a lot of agency owners, like people think net margin. Is the most important line in the P& L, but your net margin is easily fixed. Gross margin is really the most important P& L line in the P& L.
Cause if you don't get it right, it's very hard to magically rearrange it. So point being to answer your question around willingness [00:13:00] to pay. I knew that I would eventually have to hire people and those people are expensive and I got, I had to build in those future costs. To the video testimonial. I got cost on the videographer's side because we're, we're using local onsite videographers cost a few thousand bucks to do the filming.
So really like if I'm selling a video testimonial for 6, 000, which is what we were doing initially, where since it's, it's gone up, but. You know, I, I can't, can't really cost me more than 3, 000 to produce that from, or else my gross margin is not 50%, which is what I need to be. So, so basically, you know, not a pizza shop or a local plumbing business might not spend 6, 000 on a, on a video testimonial.
But B2B SaaS companies will, because their customers are worth, you know, for the, you know, the right customers are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. So that's kind of, you [00:14:00] know, where it comes back to willingness to pay is just sometimes the same deliverable is worth more to better customers.
That's
Corey Quinn: right. And you also happen to have a cost structure that's relatively high for the type of product that you're creating. Correct.
Sam Shepler: Correct. That's exactly right.
Corey Quinn: Very specialized, yeah, resources. So you were pretty clear early on as you were starting that it was going to be B2B SaaS. How did you begin to build the agency?
How did you get new clients? How did you get the word out? Like, what did that look like?
Sam Shepler: Yeah. So initially I had to kind of pound the pavement a bit. Eventually I had, I think I had like a two year non solicitation and then, you know, after my non solicitation, you know, expired, I could basically accept, you know, business from my network who I maybe had previously worked with.
So after, you know, that expired, like. That, that was great. Like that, that, that certainly helped. Right. So I really had like one [00:15:00] year that I really had to like tough it out. Cause I, I took that one year to basically screw around building software products erroneously. So, but yeah, I think, you know, it was, it was a lot of, you know, it was a lot of just brute force, cold outreach, going direct to people, you know, a little bit of, little bit of Google ads.
No blog posts. I don't think we wrote a single blog post until we were like almost like almost to like a million dollars in revenue is when we started, you know, writing blog posts. There's, you know, mostly a lot of cold email, a lot of, you know, DMing people. And then the good thing is when you specialize in an industry and you do good work, you do get a lot of referrals.
It's very easy to refer someone and people feel comfortable referring a specialist who specializes in a specific industry and that helps a ton. It's speaking of like [00:16:00] verticalization, right? So. Yeah. I mean, word of mouth referrals and just going direct cold outreach, which by the way, you know, miss the days when cold outreach and cold email was, you know, not so prevalent.
Cause obviously, you know, everyone gets a thousand sales, cold sales emails a day. Cause marketers ruin everything on a long enough timescale. That's just the truth. We definitely do. So, yeah, but. Totally different landscape today. I, I, cold email is still doable. It's just way harder, I think, than it was back then.
But yeah, that's how we did it. And, and continued from there.
Corey Quinn: So you've, you've worked with some of the largest companies in B2B SaaS to date, right? HubSpot is one that comes to mind. It's a brand that I love, which I would consider to be a type of social proof, right? You focus on the testimonials and customer stories, but, uh, but having sort of evidence that you've been able to solve.
The same problem, let's say I'm a, I'm a B2B software company and I'm coming in and say, ah, you know, I need more social proof. I need more professionally [00:17:00] developed testimonials. These guys have worked with HubSpot. That's, if it's good enough for HubSpot, it's probably good enough for me. How was it before you were able to close those?
Like, how did you get those big deals? Like what, what led to your ability to work with these larger big brands?
Sam Shepler: Yeah, it's a good question. I'm trying to think back. I mean, HubSpot specifically was a referral. So I think that is, and then before that, that was someone that I, you know, networked with, you know, took them out to coffee.
They worked at a different company. They eventually went to a bigger company, you know, and called UiPath. And then they hired me at UiPath to do testimonials for them. And then UiPath being another big company, they also referred me to HubSpot. And yeah, so, you know, just again, it all started. And, and since then, I mean, it's, I've become close friends with, with a guy that, you know, eventually that brought me onto UiPath and eventually to other companies.
So like, I think it's just, [00:18:00] you know, basically it all came from just, you know, not being afraid to shoot someone a message and shoot someone a message and say, Hey, like, and this, you know, I admire what you're doing. You look like you're up to some cool stuff. This is a little bit about me. Like, would you be down and grab some coffee?
I'm sure we'd have a lot to chat about. And so I think that, and that just kind of established the relationship and I, I didn't do it to. I didn't do it intentionally cause I knew this would work out like that. But I think the idea is like, it's just like the harder you work, the luckier you get, or like the more you put in action, the luckier you get.
So, so that's kind of, you know, that specific thing, how that worked for other companies like DocuSign and Intercom that we work with, honestly, they probably came to us via like. Just our, our other marketing campaigns that we run or came inbound. Once those are more recent, relatively like, and who knows, maybe they [00:19:00] saw like, cause I, I've been pretty much out of the sales function too.
So like, that's why I don't know for sure. Like I've been able to coming back to productizing and building a process, like removing yourself, working on the business, not in the business. Like I didn't sell, I didn't other than the HubSpot deal. Like, you know, I didn't sell those, those other deals. You know, I'd have to check, but yeah, I'm pretty sure they just kind of like came to us and you're, we were able to close them.
Cause again, we, we have, we have the evidence, we have the customer stories, we have the niche special, specialization in what we're doing. So yeah, I think it's just a kind of a snowball effect.
Corey Quinn: When did you hire your first salesperson?
Sam Shepler: So we hired our first salesperson in 2019, November of 2019. So, and he's still with us today.
He was, I think the third employee other than, yeah, third employee. I mean, other than myself, so it was myself. Then we hired an awesome [00:20:00] person to lead, you know, the kind of creative. Fulfillment Delivery, like that's what I always say is like, at least my, my experience is like, it's really important to get out of delivery first and foremost, like fulfillment or delivery of the service, whatever you want to call it.
And then we hired an ops person, kind of jack of all trades generalist, who's again, still with us today. Incredibly, incredibly. It's a really important individual and now is actually the GM of the entire company, kind of runs the whole day to day business, owns the P& L, the, again, the second, second hire still with us, and then the third hire was, uh, our, our founder.
Account executive who's also still with us from 2019. So yeah, happy to dive, take that anyway, but anyway you want, but yeah, that's the answer. I
Corey Quinn: think, you know, hiring your first salesperson is, is always a big milestone for, for agency owners, especially earlier on. And I was curious, like what was, what was in happening in your business specifically that told you, Hey, this is the [00:21:00] right time to invest.
I know you were trying to get out of operations, probably get out of sales focus. I'm more on the meta side of the business, but what was happening? Like what, what, what, what told you was the right time to invest in a salesperson?
Sam Shepler: Yeah, that's a good question. I think, you know, one, I, I just, I didn't feel like it was, it was that risky.
But, uh, it's also because we had a pretty aggressively weighted incentive based comp plan and we hired someone in Canada. So it's a bit cheaper than hiring like someone in the U S and we hired someone from like a sales background. But like. Not someone who was working at like a venture funded startup, who's used to venture funded prices, right.
And you know, salaries, like not someone who's used to venture funded salaries. So I think like you can find like when you're an agency and a bootstrapped agency, like you, you can't compromise on actual talent, you know, but you need to sometimes hire talent from [00:22:00] less traditional perhaps sources, right.
You can't just like. Hire X, you know, Uber, X, Salesforce people. 'cause like the, you know, you're not gonna be able to compete. You're probably not gonna be able to compete unless if, if you're, if you're bootstrap, right? If you have, you know, if you've did like a private equity recap, maybe you know, you can, and that, that can be great, you know, if you have that.
But that wasn't the case for us. So, so, yeah. And, and what kind of drove it is like, I probably just was getting like overwhelmed and, you know, honestly, like, I, I think I probably did it like. Too early, but it worked out really well in my situation, but it only the reason that it did. At that time, we had a really simple, we sold one product.
We sold video testimonials and just the onsite testimonials, right? Like, so it was really pretty simple transactional sale. How many video [00:23:00] testimonials do you want to buy? Here's the questions around pricing, you know, what, why, why you guys like, why, you know, what makes you different? Like, so I think like your ability to bring on a salesperson successfully is directly also correlated to how differentiated you are, where your position in the market is like, and, and we were very differentiated and no one was really doing what we were doing at the time, especially.
And so I just kind of felt like, look, the sales, not that complicated. I might as well try bringing on someone. And I put the guy in one day, I was too busy to show up for a call. I was like, you know what? You just take the call. Like he shouted me for a few calls, like probably most of them. And then one day I was like, all right, you just take this one.
Like, I'm, I'm, I can't be bothered to hop on this call today. It's whatever. Don't remember what was happening, but I was just, just like, I just can't be asked to do this at the moment. And he just did it and he did a good enough job and the deal eventually closed. And yeah, he closed the deal. We signed up in November, mid November [00:24:00] and he closed the deal before the end of the year.
Corey Quinn: His first deal he closed. Good for him. That's awesome. So your product is sort of naturally productized, right? Because you're selling a fixed Scope and a fixed number ahead of time, but how did your, how did you approach productizing your, your business and your, and your, your product? You mentioned about the gross margin or the gross revenue.
Sam Shepler: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a great question about how to, how I think about productizing, how I think about productized services. And very early on, I definitely sort of drank the Kool Aid around like productized services and like. I was, my whole idea was like, okay, my agency was challenging. I'm going to start a productized service because everyone says this is like the secret to like solving all these problems, you know, that you've run into with agencies.
Right. And. And [00:25:00] actually it, it did solve a few of them, right? Like it allowed me to, like, it allowed me to remove myself from the business, you know, relatively much earlier. It allowed me to hire a salesperson much earlier than I normally would have. I think it allowed us to grow faster and, you know, fulfill faster.
And, you know, all of these things, I think, but I, I'm not obsessed with like the identity of like, Oh, I am, I run a product, I service, or I, you know, run an agency because it's all, you know, it's really. It's, to me, it's just like, there are benefits to being productized. There are also benefits to being less productized.
Certain customers, to win certain customers, you might have to be less productized, like to win those enterprise deals we were talking about. Like we definitely have to be less productized, but like they're huge deals. So I think it's like, it's ultimately like, it's just a strategic decision that changes during the life cycle of your agency.
And. I really think, um, starting [00:26:00] very productized can be a very good thing. It certainly worked for me. Then I think it can be natural to become a little less productized as you hit, you know, more, maybe like, you know, several million dollars in top line revenue, maybe mid seven figures. Like the way, like we're still working on growing, like our, from the low mid seven figures to, you know, eight figures and beyond.
And if you ask me today, I don't necessarily think the, the best way to do that is to remain super productized. Like I think you, you kind of have to maybe unproductize a little bit to kind of. You know, increase your average order value once you have, once again, once you're in that like mid seven figures range, and then maybe, I don't know, but once you're past eight figures, maybe you have to tighten it up again.
and then operations become so important, you have to kind of reprioritize a bit. So like, to me it's always changing and it's, it's really, it's not like a on or [00:27:00] off light switch. It's more just like a lighting, a dimmers that you just move around depending on your strategic goals, you know what's important.
Yeah.
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Go to anyone, not everyone, dot com. That's. Anyone, not everyone. com. Now back to the show. Super interesting. And I want to shift the conversation a little bit too. Kind of dive into your, your point of view about social proof because social proof has been around for a long time. I've heard you talk about on your podcast about this idea of social proof 1.
0. We're sort of now in this social proof 2. 0. Can you talk about like what social proof is just from a high level? And then what, what, what has changed in the world of. Providing social proof, let's say, in the context of an agency.
Sam Shepler: 100%. Yeah, it's a great question and something I'm very passionate about. So like, you know, in terms of what [00:29:00] is social proof, you know, if you look at just the phrase in general, like proof is basically like evidence, you know, and social is, relates to like your peers, people around you, you know, so it's like basically social evidence or peer evidence that, you know, people like you.
You know, use or have had success with, you know, any service or company. Right. So it's, so it's basically like the goal of social proof is to, you know, increase, you know, trust ultimately. And you know, no deals happen without trust. Like trust is the currency of, you know, accounting may be the language of business, but like trust is the currency of business and you need, you need trust to accomplish anything.
And so. The change in like, from Social Proof 1. 0 to Social Proof 2. 0 is a lot, basically has to do just with that buyers are becoming [00:30:00] a lot more skeptical in general, and they need more social proof. You know, when you move from a more high trust environment into a low trust environment, you need to offset that with a proportionate increase in social proof if you want to even just see the same results, right?
So, I think the other side of that is The way that, you know, buyers buy in B2B has really changed a lot over the past couple of years. It used to be that buyers would talk to a sales rep and they would essentially have the mindset of like, trust but verify. Like, you know, You want to buy an agency, buy from an agency, or you want to buy from software, you go talk to the company.
You're like, okay, great. Like, you know, go through the sales process, whatever. And you kind of at the end, you're like, oh, well, like this is good. Like, do you have some reference calls I can take? Or like, do you have some case studies? I just want to like check my boxes here, like make sure this is [00:31:00] all legit.
So it was like very much like a trust, but verify environment. Now, like the environment is like verify, verify, verify. Like we're not even going to talk to a sales rep. In the beginning, unless we think that like, there's enough social proof that this isn't just going to be a waste of our time. So like the, the key takeaway here is like, if social proof is important and the way that buyers buy has changed, we as sellers and marketers need to also change the way we think about social proof and ascribe a lot more value to it and take it a lot more seriously.
It's, you know, it used to be a nice to have. And kind of an afterthought, I would posit that in this environment, it is a need to have, especially with video, because essentially, you know, most of communication [00:32:00] is actually nonverbal. The vast majority of communication is You know, about 93%, you know, studies disagree, but it's like 90 ish percent of communication is actually non verbal and that's from tone of voice, body language, and also especially, you know, facial expressions, right?
That's just like the way that humans evolved from an evolutionary perspective. Like, we as human beings need to be good at reading people's facial expressions. It's very hard to be a good liar, you know, because people can detect, people can tell when people are bullshitting you, you know, on, on video or in person, but what are historically most video test, most testimonials, it's like a written case study or a little quote that's, you know, it's like people have finally realized, like, how much social proof can I actually ascribe to something if, you know, if I'm not actually able to.
See the person talk, like you don't [00:33:00] get tone through text. So no matter how many emojis you put on, I mean, you can maybe in a personal conversation, but like I've yet to see a case study that includes emojis. That that would be something right. But, but yeah, I think it's just, it's become so much more important.
The buyer journey has changed. You know, if you want to, if you want to win deals at the, at maximum rates, like you need. That trust building, you know, those assets and, you know, video is not the only way to do it, but it is the best way to do it because you, once you have video, you can also create all the downstream content.
You know, you can't create a video from a written case study. If you start with a written case study, say I'm going to create a written case study. That's great. But like, you can't, you know, turn that into a great, you know, video testimonial that you can run on an ad or. You know, used to kick off a sales meeting or right.
So like the key, in my opinion, is video first, social proof, [00:34:00] again, starting from a video first perspective, not video only, but starting with video. And then you can always create that downstream, you know, content that you also want, maybe for your, your sales slides, you can do your pull quotes for your sales slides.
You can do your. You know, social posts, you can do, if you want to do a written case study or a written customer story, you can do that as well. And then, you know, in terms of how agencies can best utilize it, it's really pretty straightforward. It's about aligning the video testimonials that you capture with your ideal buyer personas.
And addressing their actual questions, fears, and doubts that they have at that stage of the buyer journey. So when video testimonials and customer stories are done correctly, you have alignment with your true ICP. Your true ideal [00:35:00] customer profile and the person who's featured in the video testimonial and you have alignment with, you know, what are the questions, questions, fears, or doubts that your buyer will have?
And can we get, you know, these, can we get this person who's just like them in terms of their role that they trust, because that's a key part of social proof is like you, we trust. The opinions of people who we feel like are kind of in our shoes, right? So that is, that's the key for that alignment perspective.
And then, you know, basically just crushing any objections that your buyers might have, like from a way more credible, credible source. This
Corey Quinn: is like one of my favorite topics, I think I'm, I'm with you, I mean, you built a business around it. So you, you're, uh, you know, you're, you're ahead of me on this, but I, I believe so wholeheartedly I've seen it a lot, obviously with the power of providing this, this social proof.
I love how [00:36:00] you, you approach this, this idea of building social proof and testimonials around the questions, fears, and doubts. I've always talked to my clients and my teams around. Like what you just said, using a testimonial or, you know, social proof to diffuse the objection before it ever comes up in the sales process.
Right. So I'll speak from my own experience at an agency running a marketing team to help drive more, more, more clients for the agency. We would spend a ton of focus and effort on getting the video asset done, but then once we got it done. We checked the box in the spreadsheet and then we went off and did something else.
And it kind of never really fully was leveraged to the maximum. So what are, let's look at it from, let's say like an 80 20 perspective. If, what is the 20 percent of places or opportunities an agency can use a video testimonial in their entire sort of [00:37:00] prospective client's buying journey? Like where should they focus?
Sam Shepler: Yeah, it's, it's a great question. So there's a couple of different ways to think of it. And first I would say best practices is not to take a one size fits all approach. And best practices is to create multiple versions of, you know, this, the, the, the video, right? So it's like you, you have, you're 30 minute ish interview with your customer.
So there'll be a few different options there for. You know, some stories and you want to, you know, think about how can I create, you know, the main video and we'll call that, you know, the core video. That's going to be more of the one size fits all that's going to be on your website. And I think first things first, Cory is like most people.
I think that they can't, for some reason, they can't put like their video testimonials on their homepage and they have to like bury them or hide them somewhere on their site [00:38:00] in their CMS. It's like, you know, filter this, filter this, like filter to video, like good luck ever finding it. Like, so I think, you know, at a minimum, you know, it's like put it on your homepage or put it right off a page in your.
Navbar, like a customer's page, like it should only take someone, you know, zero to one click to easily find, like find your video testimonials. Like that is, is the first thing, like, and, you know, like people should, anyone coming to your site and having a normal browsing pattern should just naturally, you know, run into them.
Have the opportunity to watch them. That also, you know, uh, means that you have to have a good thumbnail and think about how you implement them correctly. Right. And make it very clickable. So making sure that you take a smart approach on the website, you know, on your marketing site, that's like. You know, first and foremost, secondly, you know, making sure [00:39:00] that the sales team is, you know, or you, if you're the founder and you are doing the sales yourself, is using them in every single situation.
I don't mean most situations, I mean, every single situation, you know, sending them before a call, probably sending them after the call, because when you get on the call, you'd be like. Oh, by the way, did you get a chance, just so I know, did you watch that video testimonial from such and such, you know, and they're like, Oh yeah, I saw it, but I didn't, I mean, I saw you send it.
I haven't watched it yet. Okay. And then, you know, no worries. Great. And then you follow up with the, after the call, like making sure that is, you know, you need to follow up until you know, they watched it, right. And. You know, most people just, a lot of times it's just, you know, don't even use it in the followup, right?
Or they, if you have a larger sales team, they might forget about it or not even know that it exists or not know that they have a specific video testimonial for that. Use case or vertical, right? So I think, so, so that's one [00:40:00] thing. And we're just talking strictly with like the core typical one size fits all video.
Then from there, I would suggest making one objection crusher. We call it an objection crusher, which is typically a shorter, you know, if a core video is around 90 seconds on average, you know, the objection crusher is closer to 60 seconds. And this is on, you know, the number one objection that you have. So this is, this, if you have it, is one of the ones that you sent after the sales call after, you know, you've surfaced the objection and be like, Oh, by the way, you know how we talked about this.
I mentioned that, you know, a lot of people feel this way, but, or felt that way, but after, you know, doing X, Y, Z, now they, they, they feel this way. And, and you can say like, by the way, you know, here's an example of that topic. We were talking about how customer X, who's also in your industry, here's how they think about, you know, ROI, or [00:41:00] here's how they think about the cost of inaction, you know, or whatever.
So, you know, having those specialty objection crushers. And then. And last but not least, you know, making sure you have a shorter version of the testimonial for social and or ads, you know, now, like it used to be like five years ago, like things were distributed. On, you know, it was like blog written and blog.
Now, I'd argue it's like things are distributed as video on social. So, you know, it, the way that algorithms on social, especially on LinkedIn are, are, you know, favorite video is significant. And, you know, you, you want to be, you know, sending a shorter, you know, more direct, you know, you know, version of your main video there.
You don't, you know, it's, it's fine to post a 90 second video on LinkedIn. It's not going to crush it though. Like you're better off with a 30 to 45 second version. On LinkedIn, that's a little more high level. And then you can also, you know, run that as an ad, or even if you want to get [00:42:00] super fancy, make like a 15 or 30 second true ad version cut down.
I guess that's maybe not the 80 20, but that's, that's like, that's like the 101 and 201. The 80 20 would be make sure you have a good, good website implementation and make sure your sales reps are using it after every single call. Before and after every single call, yeah.
Corey Quinn: I love this practical advice.
Looking back now, after, what, five years now in this business, what advice would you have to agency owners who maybe are struggling with scaling?
Sam Shepler: That's a great question. Man, I wish we had another hour to, uh, to talk about this. I know, we are running short. Yeah, I think, I mean, this is something I'm passionate about.
I share a lot of, like, agency, agency thoughts on my Twitter, which, so if anyone wants to pick up this conversation after this, they can feel free to follow me there. It's just at Sam Schepler and my name is exactly how it's spelled. I think, you know, the things [00:43:00] that are really important and a lot of people, uh, mess up or things that I wish I understood, you know, earlier.
Because I've made all these mistakes is, you know, one, I think really understanding how important, you know, gross margin is. And, you know, in my opinion, and in a lot of people's opinion, gross margin is the most important line on your P& L. But if you ask people, oh, how's your gross margin? Like they'll almost always, often they'll tell you what their net margin is because they don't even think about gross margin or don't even know what it is.
You know, again, early on, you know, You know, that's pretty common. So like, or they might not even know what it is and, or they're calculated it wrong. You know, and, and the reason that gross margin is so important is because, you know, gross margin is really like truly how good your offer is as, as an agency.
That's like your, your base unit economics. Because on your net margin, you can, you can move a lot of things around. [00:44:00] Like there's a lot of things like gun to your head, metaphorically speaking, that if you had to, you could cut on the, on the OPEX side of the business, right? You could, you could use a cheaper accounting firm.
Like you could do, there's a lot of stuff that you could cut if you had to, but you're really stuck. Your gross margin, you know, you can't just say, Oh, I'm going to shave 10 points off my gross margin out of the blue, that that's impossible. Like it's, it's, and you know, if you don't have a good gross margin to start with, it's, there's like this cascading waterfall effect that makes it impossible to, you know, both invest in your business.
and grow it with sales and marketing and have profit left over. So like, I think it's like understanding, like every year I have a greater appreciation and obsessive focus on gross margin. And I thought I thought it was important. I thought I knew how important it was like three years ago. And like now I'm just like, man, I had no idea.
So I think that is super important. Especially, I mean, especially as you are in the, you know, a couple million dollars in revenue and above, or you have [00:45:00] ambitions to be that, like if you are really happy running a boutique consultancy with you and two other people and you want to just do that, then maybe it's not as important.
But if you're looking to scale, you know, your agency and have the option to sell it one day, then it's extremely important. That's one of the biggest things that an acquirer will look at on your P& L is what's your gross margin? Yeah. Because if you don't have a good gross margin and they want, they're going to like, how are they going to reinvest?
In marketing, you know, so it's like, like, and, you know, be profitable. If you, if you have a, you know, 50 percent gross margin, you know, they have it, there's enough margin left over to put 10, 20 percent more into sales and marketing. And still have. OpEx and a little bit of profit. So yeah, very important. I would say also just the one thing that really, [00:46:00] I wouldn't say like screwed us over, but like it was a painful lesson to learn was how different for some businesses like cash basis and accrual accounting are.
And I come from, you know, a creative and video background. So it may be surprising to people that like, I'm like. Talking about accrual basis accounting and gross margin. And I'm like a creative, but like, that is actually like, those are the big unsexy lessons that you have to learn. You know, if you want to get past a certain point, you know, even if you come from a creative background and it's like, you have to, you can't.
Not understand like the business fundamentals. And, you know, so I think, you know, accrual for our business, doing a lot of projects and getting, collecting cash upfront, getting paid up front, and then like working against that project, anything in that situation where you're collecting cash in advance, makes your accruals very different than your cash basis.
So I would say like. Every agency should get [00:47:00] on accrual, you know, as soon as, as possible, like, especially around, like once you get around a million dollars or so in revenue, but especially if you have some sort of inherent like mismatch in how you deliver the service and how you get paid, it's imperative that you get on accrual ASAP because.
Otherwise you're just flying, flying blind, essentially. And you have no real, you know, understanding of the actual performance of your business because your revenue is not being matched up with your expenses. And that is what accrual does is it actually matches up your, unlike the monthly basis actually matches up your true revenue that you're able to recognize with your expenses.
And that was a hard lesson. That we had to learn because we had our revenue recognition at one point in the business, a couple of years ago, like we, you know, had our, and actually even sooner, like we've really just finally solved a [00:48:00] lot of these issues, you know, actually this year, honestly. So like the, you know, revenue rec, like almost in a lot of cases, like unless your revenue recognition is very simple.
There's a high probability your revenue recognition is being done incorrectly in some way, shape or fashion. And that is the key with accruals, like getting your revenue recognition, right? Like smoothing out some big expenses. That's important too. But like the real change is like, usually comes around revenue recognition.
So yeah, that's, that's my answer is like, watch your gross margin. And get really good accounting help, especially in move through accrual before you need it, especially if you're in that sort of situation. And then I could go on, but I'll save it for episode two.
Corey Quinn: Yeah. Let's, let's definitely do that. You, you have a lot more to share in this regard and unfortunately we have to cut it a little short here, but I want to, first off, thank you so much for coming on, Sam.
Again, there's more, more to unpack here, so we need to schedule a follow [00:49:00] up. But yeah, your story and your journey and sharing it here has been really helpful for myself and the audience, as well as getting a peek into your point of view around social proof, which is one of the most powerful levers you have in marketing.
So thank you again for coming on.
Sam Shepler: My pleasure, Corey. And I will say thank you for everything you do. It's truly, honestly, a, I guess, a gift that you take the time to put out, you know, share all your hard won knowledge that you've. Learned over the years, and I really appreciate everything that you do and listening to your podcast, reading your newsletter.
Obviously we've all also worked together. You've given me some incredible coaching value, and I really appreciate that. So thank you for everything that you do as well for the community and agency owners. Oh,
Corey Quinn: thanks for saying that, Sam. Where can people reach out to you if they want to follow up? Is that reach out via Twitter or X or is there another [00:50:00] place you recommend?
Sam Shepler: Yeah, absolutely. If you're interested in, you know, Testimonial Hero, it's testimonialhero. com. If you want to hear my agency rants, X, Twitter, whatever the kids call it these days, that's great. It's just at Sam Schepler. Shepler is S H E P L E R, and then I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, on the social proof stuff.
I rant about social proof on LinkedIn and I rant about agency life on Twitter. So that's kind of, you know, what you'll expect if you follow me
Corey Quinn: there. Got it. Got our bases covered there. Okay. Thanks so much for joining, Sam. We'll talk soon.
Sam Shepler: Perfect. Thanks
Corey Quinn: so much, Corey. All right, folks, that's it for today.
I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time for the Vertical Go To Market Podcast. If you receive value from the show, I would love a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks, and we'll see you soon.[00:51:00]
