003: Brennan Dunn | How You Think About Sales Makes a Big Difference

The Longcut: A SaaS Business Podcast

Brennan Dunn is the co-founder of RightMessage, and the founder of Double Your Freelancing, a community of freelancers and agencies, offering courses that help freelancers increase their rates and charge what they're worth.

Brennan's latest venture, RightMessage, is a tool that helps marketers build highly targeted messaging for website visitors. The idea behind RightMessage is that you want to talk to people differently depending on who they are and what their needs and interests are. RightMessage allows you to change the content on your website to speak directly to the person who's visiting your website. It's an extremely powerful tool that lets marketers do things that, until recently, were only available to the most sophisticated internet marketers.

If you've been following RightMessage since they launched in February 2018, you might think it looks like an overnight success. As usual, that's not the case. The idea of personalizing website content for your visitors is not new, and it's something that Brennan was helping freelance web marketers do through Double Your Freelancing.

In this episode, I caught up with Brennan to ask him the story behind RightMessage. Brennan paints a picture for us of how his early experience shaped his knowledge of sales, and how validation for the idea started long before they started writing any code.

Takeaways:

Pre-selling is a powerful way to validate your business proposition and generate early cash flow. Brennan pre-sold the product before they began building it. This is a technique a lot of founders could take advantage of.

Direct sales are not always the first sales channel that comes to mind for SaaS founders. But direct sales can help to get your product on the map. The first 100 customers for RightMessage came from direct sales, not from SEO, or content marketing. That’s not to say that you can ignore those other channels and just do direct sales, but selling directly from the very beginning can help to pump a lot of momentum into your growth flywheel.

Don’t rely on SEO to move the needle when you’re starting out. Very few people are probably searching for software that does exactly what your software does. Think about how you can meet people where they are now and prepare them and nurture them and condition them to be a customer.

Full Shownotes:

• https://thelongcut.fm/brennan-dunn

Links mentioned in this episode:

• RightMessage.com
• Double Your Freelancing
• PlanScope
• @BrennanDunn

Sponsor:

Booster Stage is sponsored this week by MastermindJam.com: Your mastermind group gives you accountability, feedback, and support from like-minded entrepreneurs to hel --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thelongcut-fm/message