🗞 What's New: 3 tips for increasing sales

Many founders find the sales process intimidating:

• These 3 tips can change the game when it comes to your sales strategy. Hint: Set your sights on educating your customers, not necessarily convincing them.
• Unpopular opinion: Sometimes, buying a product is better than building it. Here's your guide on why, when, and how to buy instead of building!
• Founder Victor Ponamariov hit $3,000 in sales on the first day his book launched on Product Hunt. Here's his advice on parity pricing, and how he used his newsletter to drive sales quickly.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🧾 Level Up With These Sales Tips

by Tyler Scionti

I’m going to be honest with you: I hated sales. My aversion to sales stunted my growth in the early years of building Centori. I was terrible at cold email, I was too afraid to cold call, and when the stars aligned and someone requested a demo, I bungled it.

Earlier this year, I put my pride aside and decided to learn about sales. I’m at six consecutive months of closing new customers, and I've more than doubled my revenue from last year. Sales start from the minute someone hits your website.

Here are three lessons that helped me turn things around!

1. Learn good (enough) copy

You don’t have to join Mad Men, but you do need to know your way around a webpage. There are two things that will radically transform your copy:

Be clear, not clever:

Here’s what they don’t tell you: Clear is better than clever, and clear will sell.

So many people try to be cute or clever because they see big brands doing it. Here’s the thing: No one buys from the big brands because of their copy. They buy from them because they are the big brands.

If you are not a known entity, you had better be clear if you want to sell. Good copy is hard, but you’d be surprised at how far you can get by being even halfway decent at creating copy.

I wasted a lot of money on landing pages that were clever. It wasn’t until I prioritized clarity and brevity that things started to take off.

Make it about them, not about you:

People care way more about themselves than they care about you. I know we all have awesome products that we care about, but it’s the cold, hard truth.

By focusing on my customers' problem (no traffic from Google, no idea how to get more), and the problem in the industry itself (SEO can be really difficult since it's a crowded space), I can position our framework for building an SEO strategy as the key to success.

Trim the fat, and pivot your messaging from yourself, or your company, to your customer. You will see results!

2. Make it simple for people to take the first step

Once you’ve hooked people with copy, make it dead simple to convert.

Be obvious:

Put a big CTA on your website, and throughout your homepage, directing the visitor to do one thing. Whatever that thing is depends on your sales process. The key is to make it one thing.

Having too many CTAs is confusing, and diverts where your leads are going. Confusion costs you leads. You need one action for them to take, and it needs to be simple.

For us, that one thing is a free consultation. For you, it could be a demo, or to sign up for free. It depends on what you’re selling, and what your customer needs to know, or do, before they buy.

Make it a no-brainer:

Make your value crystal clear, and show that there is indeed something in it for potential customers.

For us, "Book a free consultation" gets the job done. It implies that they will get something for free (they do), and it allows us to vet them as a buyer. It’s a win-win.

3. Educate, don’t convince

This one was the most transformative lesson for me in how I approached sales.

Sales are about guiding your prospects to make the best buying decision possible. That means educating them.

Instead of just having a 30 minute discovery call, I offer a free 45 minute consultation. This allows for 15 minutes of discovery and a 30 minute training.

This training follows a simple formula:

1. State the problem.
2. Show the path to the solution.
3. Share a case study of someone following that solution.
4. Present yourself as the guide to bring them there.

Here’s how it works for us, for example:

1. The web is extremely crowded, and most people get nothing from SEO.
2. You need a strategy.
3. Customer A had X increase in organic traffic, and customer B beats Amazon in their product category.
4. We offer coaching and software to implement this framework and support your team. Would you like a demo?

In the four months since implementing this formula, my close rate from these calls is over 50%.

If you really believe that your product or service will make a positive difference in someone’s life, this call is where you educate them and show that you care.

Helpful resources

I hope this is helpful in your own sales journey. I learned these three things over the past year, but they did not come out of thin air. I’m a big reader, and found the following books extremely helpful:

• The Ultimate Sales Machine, by Chet Holmes.
• Marketing made Simple, by Donald Miller and Dr. J. J. Peterson.
• The Copywriter’s Handbook, by Robert Bly.

Hope these help!

What are your biggest learnings when it comes to sales? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 People did almost 50% of their Black Friday shopping from their phones, which is a new record.

👎 Alexa has been deemed a "colossal failure." Siri and Cortana are also on the decline, as privacy concerns grow.

🤒 Long Covid is the next public health disaster in the making, with its impact expected to rival the Great Depression.

📧 10 ways to declutter your email marketing list for higher ROI.

⭐️ How Shopify mastered personalized ads.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💸 When Buying > Building

by James Fleischmann

Unpopular opinion: Sometimes, buying a business is the best way to go. You're starting with a leg up.

I've been digging into buying businesses, and here's what I've found!

Why (and why not) to buy

The main benefit to buying is obviously the time and energy that you'll save. You're fresh and ready to go after you buy it, but you're already months or years into the product's lifecycle. That's time you've saved, so you're ahead of the game.

If you do it right, you'll be purchasing an established customer base and an influx of MRR. These are beautiful things.

As long as you have some money in your pocket, buying may be the best option in the following situations:

• You don't have any ideas that you want to move forward with.
• You have an idea, and you find a product for sale that fits into it.
• You'd like to try your hand at growth without having to spend time building.
• You don't know how to code, but you're eager to learn (or outsource).
• You're short on time.

How to buy

The first step is to set your budget. How much can you spend on the purchase? Remember that you may also need money for other things afterwards, like marketing. It's possible to get an SBA loan in the US, but I wouldn't recommend it. Going into debt for this is a risk; better to save up or build your own.

As far as how much it will cost you, most valuations are between 2x and 4x ARR, with 3x being the go-to.

With your budget determined, the easiest option is to head to a marketplace and use search filters to find the right opportunity for you. You can also jump on their email lists to be notified about recent listings.

Make sure to create a solid profile. The seller needs to have confidence in you, just as you need confidence in them. Then, reach out with an introduction, why you're interested, and any questions you may have. If everything looks good and you've agreed on a price, you'll usually send a letter of intent (LOI). Most marketplaces will make this easy for you.

Next, complete your due diligence. If your LOI is accepted, both parties will sign an asset purchase agreement where you finalize the terms. Finally, you transfer the funds to escrow (if your marketplace doesn't have a solution for this, use a service like Escrow). They will be released upon transfer of all promised assets.

One thing to note here: Make sure that your contract includes a "hold harmless and indemnify" clause to mitigate the risk of business liabilities that you're unaware of.

Key metrics to check

The product doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be within your budget, and capable of growing. When you first start looking at an opportunity, I'd suggest putting together a plan of how you would grow it.

Here are some things you'll need to look into before you make any decisions:

• MRR: Get the income tax return for every year of operation, along with the current profit and loss statement. If they don't have those, get the Stripe revenue. Understand the revenue, and the trajectory it's on.
• Retention and churn: This might be the most important question you ask.
• Conversion rate from free to paid.
• How much traffic the site gets, and how many monthly average users.
• Operating costs.
• Debt: You can conduct a commercial code search in the US by contacting the public records department.
• Business model: If it's a subscription, figure out how many customers are monthly vs. yearly. If everyone is yearly, and the seller already took that to the bank, you'll be waiting a year for your next payment, even if the business has healthy MRR.
• Lifetime value (LTV) of the customers.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC).
• LTV to CAC ratio: Make sure it's 3:1 at a minimum.
• If growth is stalling, find out why.
• Competition: Do a competitive analysis.
• Code review: Is the code in a good state? What is the architecture? What is the uptime? What is the choke point? And, is it in a language you are familiar with?
• Take a look at their customer support tickets: What are customers saying? If it's a B2B company, it can also be worthwhile to speak with one of its clients.

Best acquisition marketplaces

There are lots of marketplaces out there where you can buy businesses, but these are the best for indie hackers:

• MicroAcquire.
• Flippa.
• SideProjectors.
• Tiny Acquisitions.
• GetAcquired.
• Motion Invest.
• IndieMaker.

You could also go with a broker, like FEInternational or Empire Flippers.

Resources

• Valuation calculator.
• 14 free e-books on SaaS acquisition.

Have you bought a business? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

🚀 The Spector Report

by Josh Spector

I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:

Invest in yourself.

If you can afford to invest 10 hours to create something, you can afford to invest $10 to make sure it actually gets seen by people, giving it a better chance to succeed.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

🗓 Victor Ponamariov Hit $3K in One Day

by Victor Ponamariov

Hello, indie hackers! I want to share with you my experience of launching a book via newsletter and Twitter. Right now, I'm launching the book on Product Hunt, and I've enabled parity pricing for the first time. I'm really curious about how it's going to work!

But, back to the newsletter. Read on for more!

The newsletter

I have ~12.5K newsletter subscribers. Before the launch, I made a landing page to collect emails from people, and give them a special discount. These are my early adopters.

I was able to get exactly 700 subscribers over to this list. Take a look at the open rates:

Compare that to the general list (those 700 subscribers above are excluded from this list):

Also, when I sent newsletters with useful information like UI/UX tips, the open rate went up to 45%, while here, it's below 40%. I suspect that what matters is where you put the CTA. When I sent a very short email, I got ~100 sales in a day. But, when I explained a lot, provided screenshots, and so on, I got 10 sales.

Two lessons learned:

1. Make a special list of those who are waiting for your product.
2. Put the CTA at the top, and make it short and clear.

The packages

A very useful insight is that, when you provide two packages, one big and one small, make the price more or less comparable. If you do that, the big package wins.

So far, I've sold:

• 78 copies of the complete package.
• 10 copies of the book alone.

Take a look at these:

So, the tactic worked perfectly. Aside from being a marketing trick, I included quite a lot of additional information in the second tier.

My revenue for the first day was ~$3K.

If you found this post useful, please support me on Product Hunt! Also, I'll write a complete breakdown, with all the traffic analytics and the final results, at the end of the year.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Tyler Scionti, Priyanka Vazirani, Darko, James Fleischmann, Josh Spector, and Victor Ponamariov for contributing posts. —Channing