BI 325: How Dozuki's Clever Marketing Doubled Its Business in just 1 year!
August 4, 2020
On the show with me today is Brian Sallee; Co-Founder and VP of Sales at Dozuki. Since co-founding Dozuki in 2011 his goal has been to help companies tap into the knowledge of their experienced employees and use it to drive continuous improvement. Brian has helped hundreds of companies like Tesla and Facebook reduce their reliance on “star employees” by capturing their knowledge and using it to train new employees.
In our conversation today, you are going to hear Brian and I talk about how the company was started, how the struggled to get traction in one niche before finding success in another, how they are using SEO and SEM to generate a steady flow of high quality leads, what their lead nurture tech stack looks like, and how SDR's play a role, how they price their software, what customer onboarding looks like (including their ultra-successful pilot projects), and so much more!
If any part of your business involved B2B lead capture and sales, you are definitely going to enjoy this interview.
Thank you so much for listening! Please subscribe rate and review on your favorite podcast listening app. To get to the show notes for today's episode, go to https://brightideas.co/xxx...and if you have any questions for me, you can leave me a voicemail at brightideas.co/asktrent.
In our conversation today, you are going to hear Brian and I talk about how the company was started, how the struggled to get traction in one niche before finding success in another, how they are using SEO and SEM to generate a steady flow of high quality leads, what their lead nurture tech stack looks like, and how SDR's play a role, how they price their software, what customer onboarding looks like (including their ultra-successful pilot projects), and so much more!
If any part of your business involved B2B lead capture and sales, you are definitely going to enjoy this interview.
Thank you so much for listening! Please subscribe rate and review on your favorite podcast listening app. To get to the show notes for today's episode, go to https://brightideas.co/xxx...and if you have any questions for me, you can leave me a voicemail at brightideas.co/asktrent.
Episode Highlights
[3:47] — Brian introduces Dozuki
Dozuki is a content management system primarily focused on manufacturers.
It is a purpose-built tool that serves as a replacement for Word, PowerPoint, and other related software.
Founded in 2011 as a spinout company of iFixit, Dozuki now has 55 employees.
The corporate spinout occurred because of the difference in company goals and overall mission.
[6:56] — Tips on developing your product
Find a niche and be specific.
It’s hard to market a generic product that tries to meet everyone's needs.
Create a tool that your customers can't live without.
[8:33] — How Dozuki took advantage of iFixit’s user base
Being a content management system for engineers, iFixit allowed engineers to notice Dozuki.
Manufacturing companies such as Tesla reached out and became one of their early customers.
Dozuki leveraged the large user base of iFixit in marketing and advertising.
Dozuki eventually scaled its marketing and sales team, albeit at a much slower pace than a traditional VC-backed company would.
[14:41] — Brian’s SaaS marketing examples
Content marketing built Dozuki’s brand to the point that some are interested solely in their content.
Referrals from customers are also vital to them.
Dozuki uses SEO and SEM as well. Around 50% of their efforts are organic.
The company focuses on writing about the current industry challenges and how companies are solving them.
[17:52] — How Dozuki establishes relationships through free services
Dozuki has a free SOP template with calls to action that entice the user to dig deeper.
It creates an entry point for them to begin a conversation with the potential customer.
The goal of the free service is not to pitch a demo right away. It’s to build and nurture goodwill.
[21:11] — Dozuki’s pricing strategy
Pricing starts at $200 a month. It's based on their experience selling to the industry and what the market can bear.
Dozuki has a per-user model; the larger the company, the more expensive it gets.
They are trying to find ways to use the trial period as a way to generate leads.
They serve a broad spectrum of companies in terms of size. Sales cycles tend to be longer in large companies given their strict IT policies around security.
[24:34] — Why Dozuki hasn’t done much partnership
Brian found that partnerships have become a little bit of a distraction.
Nonetheless, there are a lot of opportunities there, particularly amid the COVID-19 crisis.
[29:37] — Tips on converting leads into sales
Marketing-qualified leads are scored based on the actions they take.
For example, SOP templates weigh more compared to blogs.
Sales reps should try to be helpful from the very start.
Dozuki uses sales engagement software such as Outreach and Salesloft to assist the sales representatives in structuring the follow-ups.
[37:35] — Onboarding & churn
Dozuki segments customers according to company size. The larger ones get more attention.
There is a 30-day structured pilot for the users to understand the software better and for the decision-makers to find value in it. It costs less than the monthly subscription.
Dozuki converts 75% of the pilot users into paying customers. Those that did not convert did not have the top management onboard.
Churn rate is unexpectedly low even for smaller manufacturers.
[45:03] — Why SaaS companies should practice dogfooding
Dogfooding is using our own product for quality control and marketing.
Dozuki documents every single sales process so that they can build a training curriculum from it.
This also builds accountability among the employees.