[Build Backlinks Online] Growing Sales Without a Sales Team: The Power of Distribution

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Growing Sales Without a Sales
Team: The Power of Distribution'

Posted by AndrewDumont
Early on, we made the decision not to grow a sales team at Moz. We're not
anti-sales, per se, it's just that it does't fit our culture. We believe in
practicing what we preachâinbound marketingânot interruption
selling.


Consequently, that provides a bit of a problem for a B2B SaaS business like
Moz. Growing through traditional inbound channels is immensely powerful, but at
a certain scale, maintaining linearity in growth through content, social media,
and search becomes difficult. Working with the role of Business Development at
Moz, it's my job to find those channels that will introduce growth at scale in a
predictive way.


Which brings me to distribution.


Just over two years ago when I started at Moz, we began to ponder a simple
question: If we offered an extended free trial on Moz (45, 60, 90, or 120 days)
to select partners, could it move the needle on growth?


Before we'd be able to answer that question, however, we needed a few assets.
The first was what we call a "partner page" internallyâa lander that
factors in a coupon code at check-out and offers a soft entry point from a
third-party site. An example of that can be found below, which was shown in a
recent partnership we launched with Get Startup Tools. It should be said that
this is not an ideal partner page. There's much to be tested in the way of
alternate text length and incorporating partner logos, which have proven to bump
conversion in relevant studies.





Next, we needed to find something to provide our partners with value outside
of the extended trial period that they'd be offering to their community through
the distribution. This brought us to the concept of a "perks page," a collection
of top web services that we could offer to Moz subscribers at discounted price,
in a sense offering what we were looking for in return. With these two assets in
place, were were ready to go.





Which brings me back to the question I teed up for myself originally. Yes, it
could move the needle on growth, but how much? Let's take a look. Below is a
breakdown of free trials and paid conversions that have come directly from the
distribution channel since January of 2012.





(click for larger version)


Looking at these numbers, however unsophisticated the graph may be, it begs
another question: Sure, the numbers are growing, but do they perform as well as
organic free trials, or do they churn out at a higher rate? Below is an analysis
of just that, comparing conversion rates and churn of organic trials versus
distribution trials, broken down by month in their subscription.





(click for larger version)


As you'll notice, month 0 and 1 are much higher than organic, but it then
regulates out to something more manageable, a rate very similar to that of
organic. Oddly enough, when we looked at trial length and the corresponding
conversion rate, it didn't increase with length. Out of a fairly large sample
set of 45, 60, 75, 90, and 120-day trials, the 60-day trial performed best by
far. Counterintuitive, to say the least. From a holistic view, the conversion
rate was lower, but not by an insane amount.





(click for larger version)


Now, back to that needle. How much revenueâreal moneyâhave
distributions brought in? As of August 1st, 2013, we generated roughly $139,788
in revenue on a monthly basis through the distribution channel, or $2.3M in
revenue since the channel was created in January of 2012.





(click for larger version)


Not bad. But I haven't even brought up the most amazing part of distribution:
acquisition cost. Each one of these users that came through our partners via
distributions came to us with $0 in acquisition cost, which is why step two of
the legwork I mentioned was so darned important. By offering value back to our
partners through their inclusion in our perks page, all of the numbers listed
above were acquired without a rev-share or acquisition cost. The only spend was
in the form of an increased operating cost from the extended trail. The hottest
of damns.


That's all and well for Moz, but how can you apply it to your business? Well,
regardless of your business, it's definitely worth adding to your tool belt as
one of your 21 tactics, but it's typically best-suited for SaaS businesses like
Moz.


If you're a service provider, you'll likely have to get a little bit more
creative. Though it's not a direct corollary, the closest comparable in the
service world would be a partnership with a software product like Moz, wherein
Moz becomes a recommendation engine for new clients. You can see this in
practice through our partnership with Distilled. For most software companies,
they don't want to derail focus from the product through consulting work, so
there's a lot of value to be added in becoming that missing consultation piece.


Regardless, the same concepts apply. Provide value and receive value; that's
the nature of any partnership. Yet for some reason, partnerships typically
aren't thought of as a growth channel in the inbound marketing mix, when they
can clearly have an impact.


Hell, in this example, they even build links, if you're into that sort of
thing.


A huge thanks to Alyson and Kurtis for making all of this data possible, both
for our internal analysis and for the sake of this post, they employed some
serious mySQL-fu.
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