Madhav (3:33)
Yeah. So I've been in B2B SaaS for more than 12 years now. I worked with companies like Hubstaff, Closed, Bonsai, a bunch of others, and worked on many, many product pages. I've also reviewed hundreds of websites in this last one year itself while working with storylane, while working and seeing, like, some of our customers sort of websites. And I'm actually sort of just wrapping up a website redesign project. So very fresh with the some of the learnings we've had with product pages as well. Right. So there's bit of sort of context from all different places and that's why I'm excited to talk about product pages today. So why focus on product pages? Right, like, and, you know, I always sort of go back to that. You know, there's a very famous sort of graph that, you know, Brand Balfour shared, you know, well, it's sort of been like my career hack where it's sort of like you focus on high impact, low popularity projects, right? Like, those are the ones that sort of help you drive your career. And product pages are sort of those pages, you know, where nobody wants to touch them. They're often overlooked. They're hardly updated. This is the graph I was talking about this from shout out to brand Balfour from reforge. I think product pages live in that high impact, low popularity sort of thing. You know, nobody wants to sort of touch them. They're hardly updated. But if you actually work on them, it can actually drive incremental growth in your pipeline. And what's amazing is that these product pages are where a lot of these buy intent visitors are hanging out, right? So it makes sense to sort of just maybe work on that, right? And maybe just sort of like a background, like what's the point of a product page? So, right. In the earlier session we were sort of doing like a homepage sort of roast there, right? And when you look at the homepage, you basically, you know, have like these top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, visitors coming in, right? And anybody sort of moving to a product page is potentially somebody who's sort of interested to go deeper into the product. And that's what they're sort of trying to go there. You know, they're going from the top of the funnel to more middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel. And they're trying to self educate themselves. And your job is to educate about the product in the most unboring way possible. So they take the next step, which is to either sign up or book a demo. And yet most product pages usually, again I say most product pages make these five mistakes. They're either too long, I think, like maybe sometimes seven or eight scrolls just going one section after the other, ranting away. They're either visually dull, right? So they're just sort of like this textbook sort of a page where you just have just black, you know, white spaces with a lot of text. They're either too technical, they sort of just make the mistake where they jump in directly into like the advanced aspects of the product. Not really sort of realizing that this person sort of moving from just knowing about your product to understanding, you know, like the features, right. They're overwhelming sometimes. This is very common. You know, they have just too much information. They just. Product teams try to just explain every major and minor feature into that one product. They just clam everything in there. And then I think the last one is just putting some sort of abstract visuals or worse, like stock images on these product pages. We've seen that a lot. Instead of like real product screenshots, you know, there's obviously a longer list, but this is probably the five most that at least I've seen while working on product pages. And then there's also like this huge argument that's sort of going on right now. There's a debate, right, like should you have a demo on your product page or should you have a video on your demo page on your product page. Right. And I think my answer to that is that I think there's a place for both. And what I would probably say is that demos are great for active engagement. You know, it's particularly good for like the advanced level technical buyers who are looking to get a hands on feel of your product. You want to sort of encourage interaction. This is perfect, right? And this is where I would say you should put like your main CTA Videos in my opinion are more for like passive engagement, you know, where like for example on the homepage and if you're trying to just sort of educate like a very top of the funnel lister about you know, just about like high level aspects of your product, you would probably put like an ad which is, you know, if you've ever seen the scripts ad. That's a great sort of example of a video where you could sort of just educate on a very high level. Right. And also videos are great, you know, to sort of put like maybe two or three second clips as sort of like gifs in your product page, right? Where you sort of show like how a particular step in the product works there. It sort of makes sense. So that's why I've probably written your non primary spots. Right. But I think what I see a lot of product pages make that mistake is they try to push a video when users actually want a demo and they actually, you know, push for a demo when the users actually want a video. And so maybe like this is not like a standard rule, but at least the way I see it as like top of the funnel or extreme top of the funnel maybe focus more on the video, but middle and bottom of the funnel sort of visitors focus on more demos, right? And basically like your goal should be match the experience to users intent, whatever they're sort of looking for. And just you know, if I like, if you want to kind of get started with interact demos, you can create a free account on Storylane right away. And we pride ourselves that you can actually create a demo within 10 minutes. You can just get started anytime. All right, so I'm just going to take two examples just to sort of give you just a sense of like what may be a good product page and like what could be a bad one. We'd also take a couple of examples later on and do the roast. I'm going to take Gong's example right here. Right. So basically what I love about Gong's product pages are that they're super short. Like they just take three scrolls to sort of go through it. They offer a product tour, right? You know, if you want to sort of go deeper into the product, you can see a product tour. If you see in the particular sections that explain the product, it's not a product screenshot, it's a product gif. Right? So it's sort of like a two or three second short video sort of explaining to the product and there's like clear CTAs all across, right? That's what I absolutely love. Like, I think this is sort of like the standard that at least I sort of look up to. And that's what I love about Gong's page. I'll move to the next example of a page that I'm not a huge fan of. This is a page of Rocket Lane, right. And I think there are a couple of things that can be improved here. I think one is that it takes maybe like seven or eight scrolls to sort of just go through it. There's too much information in there. Like what I went to, you know, they've just talked about literally everything that exists in Rocket Lane into that product. And I felt like the entire page was very dull. It just had like this black, monotonous sort of tone that went there, which can easily bore sort of a buyer. Right. And the reason I wanted to sort of explain these two examples was just to sort of come to a couple of takeaways on the product pages. Right? Like, one is that you should keep your product pages short. So maybe three to four scrolls is sort of like the gold standard you could go for again, by the way, just fy like any sort of advice I'm sharing, that's my opinion, Right. Robert could have a different opinion as well on these things, but yeah, that's what we've seen work, right? Like three to four scrolls works pretty great. Don't share everything. Focus on the 8020 info, focus on some of the top features and just maybe share that. I think the second thing is add interactive demos. We've seen that technical buyers want to see the product, not see a description of the product or see a passive viewing of the product before talking to sales or signing up. That's what buyers are expecting more and more in 2024. So would highly urge you to consider that. I think another sort of learning is that you should mix things up visually. To keep them hooked throughout. So have different sort of color contrasts, have different sort of layouts, try different sort of changes every and at every website fold to just sort of keep them hooked throughout right into the story. And I think the last thing I would add into this takeaway is that product gifs are the highest priority. If you can get those, that's amazing. Then the next is product screenshots, and the next is abstract visuals. And the absolute last is stock photography, in my opinion. And that's sort of what you should look at with product pages. And then I'll also maybe just give you a quick couple of takeaways for demos in your product pages because it's very less talked about. And this is based from internal data that we have. One is this actually came from a conversation with Robert last week, which is about never sending visitors to demos with an empty state. So an example is that if you look at Hockey Stacks homepage or something, right? And if you click onto their sort of view interactive demo, what it takes you to is like this demo without any guides. It's like a full interactive product with anywhere you could click onto like a hundred places. And that is overwhelming for the user. They just don't know where to sort of click. Where do they sort of go to? Right? So never sort of do that. Always sort of take them to more like a guided experience into it. Right. The second thing is keep your demo short with like maybe maximum 12 steps. What we recommend is eight to 12 steps. And sometimes products can be very complex. They can't be covered in 12 steps. For example, cybersecurity products, they have a lot of layers to sort of explain. In those cases, we sort of suggest to split your demo into multiple flows. Right? So there are all of these product tours where you can have like these five sort of mini demos within a demo, which can all be like less than 10, 10 steps each. And you can sort of let the buyer decide what flow they want to go for. The third thing I would say is that when you create a demo, you should always focus on telling a story, not just a demo. So you want to keep people hooked. So think of it like a sort of. You're telling a story through your product, right? Like, here's where we start, you know, here's where you would see is the homepage screen, like how you would sort of go and demo a prospect. You should replicate that in your interactive demo as well in your guided experience. Fourth takeaway is that you should definitely have a persistent CTA throughout the demo that Pushes users to either book a call or visit a relevant page. Right. So what we've usually seen is that we see a lot of users, you know, also have like two CTAs where, you know, either book a demo or sort of, you know, watch something. But I think never have too big asks as CTAs in a single screen. Maybe one big ask is good. But any ask that you have, like any sort of CTA in every screen of the demo, right, like, you will see an improvement in conversion traits versus not having a persistent cta. And the last thing I would say is that I see a lot of interactive demos where they're sort of gated right at the beginning. So, you know, even if you go to Gong's demo, when you click onto it, it just sort of shows up a form. You have to fill the form and then you can access the demo. Right. Just a quick rule. This is based on, again, internal data that if you want to get more people to sort of view your demo, you should just ungate it completely. If your focus is on getting leads, then you should gate it. But just know for a fact that a lot of those leads are not going to be great. Just accept that as a fact. Right. And so a middle ground, what we saw with the data is that if you gate at step number four of the demo is usually the best. So what we call is like, you start out the demo, you give them a teaser, the first three steps, just sort of give them a preview of like how it's going to look like. And step number four, to see the rest of the demo, you sort of put like a gated cda. So, yeah, that's about it. And just FYI, like, storyline, like I said, is an Interact demo tool. We do. I said, you know, you can build your first demo in just 10 minutes. It's the easiest demo automation tool in the market. You can also see it on G2. It's used by some of the most famous sales and marketing teams. You can look at people. AI Pearson, Claudie Gong, Outreach Cognizant, Sentinel One, AngelList, NASDAQ, Dow Jones. There's a bunch of them. But yeah, and I'm excited to go into the roast.
