Transformative Strategies in SaaS: SMS Engagement and AI-Driven Personalization

Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I have a long background in sales and marketing. So I started working for a publishing company based out of Los Angeles in I think 2008. Probably aging myself quite a bit a while back. And I, in that time I grew into VP level roles in marketing and then I took an extended break and I lived in a few different places around the world and I was an English teacher. I did some entrepreneurial things. And prior to this is probably about two years prior to the pandemic happening. You know, some predictions that I made when I was just a kid coming up through the marketing ranks where I said to my co workers, there’s no reason why we need to all be in an office to do this. Like everything that we do for communication is via email. We’re doing video calls now like it’s becoming unnecessary for us all to sit in a room. And they basically patted me on the head and said, okay kid. But it ended up a couple of years before the pandemic. The opportunities for remote work really started opening up. And so I saw an opportunity to lean on my marketing and sales experience to be able to do a work for us based companies, but to be able to live where I wanted to live.

So, you know, at the time of this recording, I’m in Italy. I will probably be elsewhere in a couple of months. And so it, it’s given me the ability to really utilize my skill set, but from wherever it is that I want to be, which is nice as far as the transitioning into SaaS and working for Launch Control. I started working for Launch Control basically at its inception, probably about six months in to the founding of the company. And I was brought in largely to really stand up the sales and marketing departments for the company, but also to work on communication strategies with the client base. The client base was based in real estate and specifically the niche of real estate investment and they were, they’re using launch default and text engagement as a way to start conversations with homeowners and adding a level of naturalness to that and adding a level of rapport to that because they weren’t all natural marketers, they weren’t all natural salespeople, they were entrepreneurs. And so there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to that initial level of engagement. And so I had a two pronged purpose to build sales and marketing, but also to build engagement structures for, for the user base.

Yeah, it’s an interesting transition and a fun one. I’ve worn every hat you could possibly imagine in SaaS, aside from being an engineer. Right. So I’ve done everything, run, basically run the entire front of the house. Sales, marketing, support, success, worked on client engagement. Anything that you can do that’s client facing, I’ve done in a SaaS based role, but usually from the top, from the executive level, working with teams, working with individuals and taking a very macro approach to the SaaS business. And as the company’s grown and started to diversify, I know we’re going to talk about some of the ways that the company’s diversified coming up here. As that is happening, I really saw an opportunity for me to accomplish a couple things that I wanted one to be able to take instead of a macro focus on the business, more of a micro focus and really get into some of the things that I really liked which was, you know, the thought leadership and education in the space strategy with our clients and then just working really hands on with some of our sales and marketing teams are just fine tuning a bit of what we do.

And I could do that within a fractional space, which this allows me to then also have pursue some other entrepreneurial roots and, and just have a bit more free time for the work from wherever you want aspect of life.

No, most of my plans are really coming up in the new year. I wanted to take a little bit of a breather in the fractional role. But there is, within the real estate space there are literally hundreds of ways that you can follow an entrepreneurial path in real estate. And so in the process of learning SaaS, I’ve also learned real estate and I’ve also seen a lot of these opportunities and of course, being so heavily involved in the industry, met a lot of very successful people at different stages of the real estate industry. And so I have a pretty strong step in the right direction already. And so I just want to see where that takes me.

Yeah, the core subscriber base currently is real estate investors. And what I mean by that, for those that are not really familiar with the real estate industry, there are the, there’s the known side of real estate, which is the real estate brokers. Right. The person that shows your house and helps you sell your house. But beneath that and less publicized, less kind of public facing, there are real estate investors. So these are people that are buying single family homes that are doing like fix and flips for single family homes. People that are buying commercial real estate space and then developing it and renting it out. So if you think down to the landlord developer level, that’s the niche that we serve is down in the landlord developer level of real estate. And that can take a lot of different forms. That can be single family homes, that can be land acquisition, that can be commercial real estate acquisition. In any, anything that falls into that kind of bucket of real estate investment and its many shapes and forms. That’s our core audience currently. But the usefulness of text as an engagement tool is really, it’s a pan industry tool.

So it’s just a question of recognizing how text engagement can fit your particular business and to kind of help accelerate your particular business. And that’s one of the things that, you know, we’re focusing on moving forward is just of helping to open people’s eyes to the opportunities to implement text engagement in their business.

We’re specific to the United States right now. And the reason for that is just telecom complication, not complications. But the telecom industry in the United States is our starting point. And then the rules and systems in Latin America, Europe, Asia are quite a bit different. Right. So we haven’t expanded internationally yet. It’s on the roadmap, but for now we’re continental use.

Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s, there has been a, depending on where you’re sitting, either a slow maturation process or a rather quick maturation process. But when I started in this industry, probably almost six years ago at this point, the real estate industry itself was very regional. So if you were, like I mentioned, the brokers, if you were going to sell your house, you talk to family, you talk to friends, you wrote down the number on the bus stop, the guy that had a billboard on the bus stop, you wrote down the number, you called that person. Right? So it was very regional in that sense. And then for the, if you go down again, like I said, to the landlord fix and flipper level of real estate, again, very regional, very phone call focused and text was really impactful. It worked very well. But you didn’t have that sense of a larger kind of core corporate marketing where you were really working on lead funnels and getting people to come to your website, data capture and then, and then utilizing that data capture to convert. That didn’t really exist in the real estate space.

And you see, I’m seeing more, we are seeing more and more of that happening where there’s just a maturation towards more advanced marketing happening in the real estate space. And what that’s doing, in my opinion is it’s taking. Because previously it wasn’t just the real estate professionals that had a regional focus. The homeowners did as well, or the property owners in whatever space they own, property, land, commercial, et cetera. They also thought regionally. But as the marketing matures, I think that the seller base is also going to think much more nationally in terms of solutions. Right. Like they don’t have to sell to the person that has a real estate shop in the mini mall down the street. They will have portals available for them to sell. They will have even, just even as simple as leveraging social media, the ability to do self research and the ability to utilize platforms and tools to manage their own sale or manage their own properties in a way that they weren’t previously able to do. So you’ll see a kind of consistent adjustment from both a buyer and seller as that maturation process continues.

Yeah, absolutely. As I said, it’s always been a bit of a regional business. And in lieu of, or despite the maturation process that we’re seeing it still is largely regional and it still is focused on outbound communication. Because the sellers are not yet aware of all of their opportunities, they’re not going and filling out forms often or as often as they could. And because they are not aware of solutions often outside of the MLS, which is like where you would list your house if you wanted to sell your house. Right. That for the majority of the population that is real estate, the end all and be all of real estate. And they don’t know that there’s this subsection beneath where they can have a bit more control and they can sell directly to an investor. And so there is a necessity to build awareness about that level to the sellers and that requires and outbound outreach and it requires outbound education to get people aware so that you can really get them into a true conversion cycle. So what it made it able to do is quite literally from people driving around looking for opportunities and then calling people to being able to reach out to people, find out if they had any interest in learning more about alternative solutions.

And then you know, for those that said yes or those that expressed interest, being able to be able to bring them on as prospects and potentially convert them into clients from there. Gotcha.

Sure. When we talked about a little bit about the maturation process of marketing and for anybody that has a history in sales and marketing, the tenants and a simple example would be email. And so if you’re going             to do an email drip campaign, the marketing stages that they’re going to go through awareness to consideration to all of that and how that fits into larger picture. Now if you’re somebody that’s a 21 year old entrepreneur who never went through the corporate structure and never learned the sales and marketing side of things, all of that is an unknown. Right. So you bring that person, that entrepreneur who’s always had that entrepreneurial spirit and you bring them onto the platform. They don’t have that free education to lean on. So they need it. Right. They need that education so they know how to use an engagement tool in a way that is actually going to create a positive experience for the recipient and a positive outcome for their business. So the podcast is the podcast and the we do, we do webinars usually about three or four a month and there are always a mixture of either real estate based education because a lot of our subscribers are coming in and they’re new to real estate and they need to learn that business itself.

And then the others are sales, marketing and engagement related because almost everyone in the user base needs to learn how to improve on that level, or at least to put their, the team members that manage that side of things in front of us so that they can learn it. Gotcha.

Yeah, so the user base, as I said, they’re in that kind of sub level of real estate for the most part. And that means that they really have to build awareness around the offer, the offering, what they can provide, the solutions that they can provide. And so in order to do that, they need to obviously engage with homeowners, landowners, real estate, property owners. But they also need to be able to articulate value. Right, Articulate. Articulate what’s different about the way that they operate their business, the value propositions that they provide. And so we give people the ability to enter into a conversation or exit out of a conversation, which is important. If they want to unsubscribe, exit out, they can. Those that want to enter into a conversation, we give our subscribers the tools to be able to, in a very kind of systematic way, do what I call what I refer to as keeping up with the speed of texting. And so if I send you a text message right now and you look down, you look at your phone and you’re. Or even better yet, you pull your phone out, right, to see who it is, you’re going to hold your phone in your hand for a set amount of time and it’s not very long.

And once you put it away, you’re not quit to me responding, you’re ready to get to it later. Right. But while it’s in your hand, it’s real time and it’s active. And so we give them the opportunity to have a handful of simultaneous conversations that maintain the speed of texting. And then we give them automation tools that allow them to, in sort of a drip fashion to deliver those value points so that they can create a good conversion experience and one that is fitting the needs of the individual that’s receiving that message.

Yeah, look, you’ve got a very extensive background in business building and sales and marketing, so I’ll use a simple example. When you have a CRM and you’re a larger company, let’s say you choose Salesforce as your CRM, that is very foundational to your business. That’s the rebar in the concrete. You’re not getting rid of it. Right. It’s there. And one of the biggest challenges that we had initially and something that we still work on a consistent basis is making people that are coming in. And again, these are on. They’re for the. Our typical subscribers, an entrepreneur, not someone who runs a marketing team or a sales team for a corporate organization. Well, you and I’ll get in that in a second. That’s on the roadmap. But for now, our core subscriber base is entrepreneurs. And so because of that, they don’t, they don’t always see SaaS products as foundational. They see them as something that you test as almost like an iteration. And it’s either going to work in 30 days or it’s not. Right. So to get people to understand that the way marketing functions and the way that you’re going to get the best results is to plug in tools and then to do almost an annual analysis so that you can see, you know, month over month, quarter over quarter, what those results were, know what the results of your AB testing were, what the results of your fine tuning were.

And in doing so, you end up with really foundational tools. An email that you’re not going to change, a CRM that you’re not going to change, a phone service that you’re not going to change unless something goes horribly awry. Right. And so, so getting people to understand that this wasn’t just about converting or getting leads into the system. It was really a foundational tool for their business. Has been a fun challenge for us. All right? So that’s one of the things that goes into just the education process with our users. And then for larger strategies, then it really gets into, and I won’t bore the audience with a bunch of things, but it really gets into like, you know, data segmentation and how you isolate your audience, how you then match your messaging to that particular recipient so they feel like you’re talking to them. How do you how you utilize automation tools to again deliver value. So it gets into kind of the strategy gets into more of the nerdy aspects of sales and marketing but also the kind of the fun stuff that can be a real eye opener for our subscriber base.

To us as a company or for the industry?

Yeah, for us as a company we’ve got a lot of our growth truthfully, word of mouth because it is such a niche industry that once people started having success with the tool then that just sparked conversations on a myriad of Facebook groups and across. Across in person networking events and that kind of thing. So word of mouth played a big role for us. But we’re also, we’ve also done. You’ve seen the podcast. Our podcast is called Deal Nation. We’re using the educational resources like Deal Nation and distributing them across social media via our email list and we’re using those kind of educational tools to increase thought leadership and really get people behind the mission of the company and the supportive growth nature of the company.

Yeah, if you just think about the way that you use and I love this question because it’s something that often gets overlooked. Looked with text is when people think about text engagement from the, from a business perspective, they think of it as a truncated email. Right. It’s just, oh let me just get my message out but my message out in mini. And they tend to forget the way that they use text in their own life. And so in there there are times and these times are limited where you and I need to have a 20 minute conversation. Right. Where we have a partnership. We need to line up what we’re going to do for the quarter and we need to get on a zoom call and have a 20 minute call. Right. There are times when you need to send me an email or vice versa. I’m going to get to that when I get to it probably same day and it’s going to be more lengthy because I need to be able to express whatever it is that I need to express. But if I need to just do something, say something really simple, right.

Hey, are we still recording the podcast today? Yep. As simple as that. Like that I know I’m still holding my phone in my hand because I know that I’m going to get a response really quickly. So the ability to have really natural conversations or even if it is prescripted in a way, even if it is pre automated, to give that kind of, that perception of almost a personality to brands, a humanization of brands and think about it in that way of what can I take from my marketing that I want to just be those kind of real time quick hits of information, even if it doesn’t require a response. But I want, I know that a 98% read rate, which is what text has, that it’s going to be digested. Right. And so when you start thinking about it in that way, of all the ways that businesses could implement a. By the way, oh, we forgot did you know. And those little tidbits of information, those can all be sprinkled through a text engagement process and it can be a really powerful engagement tool with your client base. And I’ll add to that. And because this is another thing that often gets overlooked is that text engagement, everybody wants to put it into that lead bucket of let’s get leads in or convert leads.

Think about it. If you think about it across every stage of your business, every stage of any business really is the same. Right. You’d have to get customers, you have to make sure that they’re happy in the beginning and then you have to make sure that they stick around and buy again. And so if you think about it in just those three simple phases, you can think of very specific ways in which text can be impactful to get customers, to educate customers and to keep customers.

One of the things that I think is most important and it’s not really a do or don’t, if you look at a data capture crossed the whole spectrum, what’s the number one thing that people data capture.

It’s most often email I use. I see. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I’d say probably 80% of the form, they just have email. They don’t have phone.

Email and just having email. How often do you put your email in and go, I can’t wait to read that email.

You put your email in knowing that you can ignore it, right? Or knowing that you can pick and choose when you’ll engage with it. And I’ll, I like I use every morning I come in and I open up my email and the first thing that I do is I click through everything that I don’t want to read and I put it as Mark as read. And then I refresh the page and I and my emails in my, and this is my business account, right? It drops from like 45 emails to five and then I take time to read those five ones from you. One’s from my boss, one’s from a coworker. I read those five emails and then I move on with my day and I never look at any of those emails that I just clicked Mark as read and moved on. If you’re capturing someone’s phone number in that same instance and then setting up automation so that they’re immediately getting a text message and even if the text message just says thanks for, thanks for joining us at Launch Control, we’ll only text you a few times a month, you can expect these things from us even if it’s just that now you’ve got an open channel with them on text and you can use that again for getting the client, educating the client, keeping the client and you’ve got a single thread in which you can do that.

And so if more companies defaulted to phone rather than email, they’d open up a lot of opportunities to be able to have more real time engagement with their clients and more of a direct kind of two way conversation, direct impact with them.

Oh, we’ve actually got countless stories of this because the way that our subscription model works at launch we have a light, a core and then a pro or enterprise package. Right. And the upward trajection trajectory of the industry and like the investor experience very much mirrors those packages. So when people are brand new, they don’t know much about real estate investment. They just want to escape their 9 to 5 job and they’re hoping this is the way to do it. They’re usually on our light package. When this has become somewhat of A career for them, they’re making a good amount of money, they’re on our core package. And when they’re quite successful trending up to wealthy, they’re on that, on the upper tier of our package. And so we have countless stories of people that came in on a light package were nervous. We’re just getting started in the industry, really leaned on our team, our customer success team in particular to, you know, gain knowledge about how to use text engagement, but also just gain some knowledge about the real estate investment industry and having it have a tool that allowed them to really quickly build some growth and get some stability so that they felt comfortable in this moving forward.

And then you see them move up and their businesses grow and they move up to that next tier of our package. And then, you know, a couple of years on, they’ve got a team of six and they’re, they’re trending towards $2 million for the year. And it’s, we have those kind of remember win moments where they came in nervous and now they’re quite literally millionaires. And so a really rewarding experience to know the individuals and to see that trajectory. It’s great for them and it’s rewarding for us.

Right.

Yeah. So Launch AI is a new application that we’re just in the process of rolling out now that’s multi industry focused. So a lot of what I just, a lot of what I just outlined, we. Yes, our core subscriber base right now for the real estate tool is real estate investors. But those principles that we were just discussing of find customers, educate customers, keep customers customers of capturing data and being able to get really quick response and personalized engagement with people that applies to any industry out there. Right. That they’re. Every business has a model in which they need to get educated and keep their clients. And so Launch AI is really geared at, for giving companies across industries the tools and ability to really leverage text engagement to interact with the client base and whatever their goals may be. Right. They may be focused on education, they may be focused on lead conversion, they may be focused on customer service. There’s different directions that they can take it, but it’s a tool that enables that in a non industry specific way and it’s got some cool new features and things that are just specific to that application.

Yeah, on the marketing side there’s like for. Well, I guess not necessarily on the marketing side, but it’s got some really robust automation tools that allow people to go different paths, down different paths based on the answers that they give. So if you were to say, for instance, send out A, in one of your first or second message, you sent a poll, and in that poll anybody who answered A is going to get taken down drip path A, they answered B, down drip path B. So you have the ability to create tailored experiences for recipients without having to have monitoring it and going over it. You’re able to pre-craft those custom experiences and essentially let people choose their own adventure, which can be, it’s great for client development and client interaction, makes it feel very personalized to them, but it also allows you to do this in a very hands off kind of way. Right. So it’s. As long as you, as long as you put some forethought into it and craft the right experiences, then the results will run naturally in the background.

Yeah, this is just my personal opinion. I am by no means an engineer. I am not an, I am not an AI expert. So the only way that I can speak to this is really more from the recipient experience and my experience within sales and marketing. When new tools like this come out, what often happens is that the companies utilizing them want to exit the conversation as quickly as possible. Right. And so when they want to exit the conversation as quickly as possible, what you end up with is a bad user experience. You get a lot of clickbait, you get irrelevant information, you get conversion funnels or information drips that stop at the first message because they’re not relevant. Right. People are not inspired to continue reading, to continue following, because they essentially recognize that they’ve been baited and they exit. Right. And so if we don’t, if we exit the conversation too soon and don’t make sure that, and ensure that there’s a level of personalization and an ongoing development of personalization in these AI tools, we will run the risk of it just running afoul and us having to restart the whole business.

And the other element to that that I think is really important because we’ve seen this with any marketing tool, is that when you try to do things with too much volume too fast, it ends up getting regulated or if not regulated, then at least spam boxed, right? So, like there was a brief little window when all of our inboxes were filled with spam and that got fixed quickly. And that’s. You don’t even see your spam folder anymore. You know where it is, but you don’t look at it. And so the AI, if we’re not careful, there’s that risk of it being either regulated to the point that it’s very difficult to implement or utilize, or it just gets spam box because filtering gets put into place that recognizes that it’s not human. So it’s. If we find the right balance. I know I’m getting a little babbly here, but if we find the right balance and we put enough personalization into it, it’s going to be incredible. If we exit the conversation too soon, it’s not.

I don’t know if I’m ready, but yeah.

Oh, I think every marketer has learned this and this is the reason why there’s AB testing in general. Every marketer had the subject line that was just perfect and it was going to get all the opens or the email campaign that was just perfect and it was going to really hit the text message that was just perfect. It’s your perfect is rarely the most successful. And I’ve learned the hard way that you have to iterate because it’s oftentimes the subject line that you wrote as you were running out to lunch because you were five minutes late and you’re like, whatever. Send huge open rate, huge response. Like, really? You know, I put all this effort into every other iteration in that one. So, you know, it’s that humbling experience I think every marketer’s had. But yeah, I’m no, no stranger to that, certainly.

One marketing cliche I wish would disappear. I guess a variation of content is king. I think people feel like they have to just put out content, even if it’s crap, to just have content out there. And I think people don’t want a lot of content. They want the right content.

Yeah, yeah, gotcha.

Oh, I follow Neil Patel. I don’t interact a ton, but I definitely follow his stuff. And then there’s marketers that you know or influencers within the real estate investment space that people probably wouldn’t know. But it’s important for me to follow them because it’s educational for me.

1. Steve Trang runs a. He has a podcast called Real Estate Disruptors. That’s really good. That’s one I think is really worth following. And there are a few people on the, in the land space, Seth Williams and Jaron Barnes that I follow. I’m learning a lot from those guys. So yeah, just if pick a niche within real estate investment and there’s a few people that I follow and listen to because they’re how I learn.

Oh, I’ll be part of, I’ve been a part of. I’ve worked mainly for, I’ve worked mainly for companies that have to play it a little bit straight. We haven’t done anything like too bizarre. Nothing like remember the old Budweiser frogs? Like not. Nothing like that. So I don’t know, I can’t think of anything off top of my head that was just really wacky and I couldn’t believe it worked. But I, it’s, it’s like remembering a joke. Like you try to remember it and you can’t. There’s, I feel every week I see something in the advertising or marketing space where I have to raise an eyebrow and go, hmm, but you know, nothing that’s really jumping out right now.

Boring. Like the last one that I specifically wrote was aimed at creating a value based drip campaign for people that were looking to purchase land. So it was like educating people about selling land in an off market sense. What the values were, what the challenges were, testimonials from other people that have done it. But getting AI to write all of those messages so that we could put it into the app and that people could generate variations of that drip automation themselves and then make some kind of corrective measures to make it their own. So it’s, it’s nothing exciting. I didn’t rewrite Shakespeare with it. I just, you know, it works stuff traditionally.

Oh, probably 9010 where I’m, I’m still using, I’m still using Google for the most part. But if it’s, if it’s general research where I just need stated information Google if it’s something where I would maybe want to do a consult with someone or I want a little bit of a deeper level of information probably both and then do a compare and contrast and see what comes up.

There’s a few that I’m forgetting the names of that are pretty great in for real estate investment stuff. I’m chat GPT like everyone else for the simple stuff.

Yeah no happy to be happy to do it. Hope that the real estate stuff resonates with at least some of your audience.

Exactly with that one that applies to anyone listening. Follow up at Launch AI and get in touch with the team and see if it’s a good fit for you.