Ep. #1141 - Improving Your Sales Cycle Efficiency

Matt DeCoursey  00:01

And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey here to have another conversation I hope helps your business grow. So regardless of what you do, there is in some way shape and form your business has to sell something, it has to generate revenue, therefore it has to have some kind of sales cycle. And overwhelmingly, all of our sales cycles could use some kind of improvement. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Before I introduce today’s guest, today’s episode, Startup Hustle is powered by full scale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult and Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably and has a platform to help you manage that team. Go to FullScale.io to learn more. If you weren’t aware, that’s my company and we love speaking to Startup Hustle listeners. It really does only take about two minutes to answer a couple questions. Let our platform match you up with some really amazing people.

Matt DeCoursey  00:57

With me today. I’ve got the CEO and founder of a company that was recently on Startup Hustle Top Startups in Tulsa’s list, his name Alex Zubey. And Alex, is once again the CEO and co founder of Arriv that spelled A-R-R-I-V. And you can go to A-R-R-I-V.com and learn more about his company. There’s a link in the show notes for that right down there near the fullscale.io link. Without further ado, Alex, Welcome to Startup Hustle.

Alex Zubey  01:25

Thanks, man. Great to meet you. And great to be here. Thanks for having me. I look forward to the conversation.

Matt DeCoursey  01:30

Yeah. And you know, I always like to start those conversations with a little bit about your backstory. So what brought you to being the CEO and co founder of Arriv, and what problem do you guys solve?

Alex Zubey  01:41

Yeah, so we’re in a pretty specific niche for healthcare. I’m sure everyone, healthcare industry are not as pretty aware, just massive, massive consumerism push digital transformation push throughout the whole entire healthcare industry. So we actually spun out of a consulting project. So my two co founders, were doing a consulting project for our health group, really digital marketing related and found that all of their top of funnel acquisition efforts were leading to a online checking platform, which is really the conversion step and felt that it was maybe a bit antiquated, and not necessarily built with the consumer in mind, so that the gears started to turn and, and long story short, led to the formation of of arrive. So problem we’re solving it’s really twofold. So the trickiest thing about healthcare, right, because solve a problem for healthcare consumers, us everyday people, and obviously have to align that initiative with the healthcare operators and make it more worthwhile for them. So for us, we’re all about making make finding and engaging healthcare in your moment of need more human, right. So lead with empathy for the consumer and, and try to bring a frictionless experience when people are starting their care search online and let them easily convert to an actual visit. And for health systems that work with us and hospitals that work with us. It’s all about new patient acquisition. So how can we help them convert their web traffic, whether it’s organic web traffic, paid marketing efforts, whatever it may be, just help can that top of funnel new patient acquisition and get more patients into their doors?

Matt DeCoursey  03:24

So when you talk about like the sales cycle, or you know, the whole digital transformation that doctors offices go into is the problem. That is their main problem, that they’re spending money on marketing, or they’re losing people in the funnel somewhere? I’m assuming like, the things leaky, what are the what are the holes that need to be patched to make that better?

Alex Zubey  03:46

Yeah, that’s it’s I can give you about 100 different answers for him. Well, I

Matt DeCoursey  03:51

think every I think every business has a leaky funnel in some regards. I mean, and that’s not an abnormal thing. I think that businesses that learn how to fix that, okay, Where’s where’s the biggest leak? And can we solve that first, and then sometimes you patch the leaks, and they start leaking again. Yep.

Alex Zubey  04:11

That’s a typically that’s what happened. For us. In particular, we focused on really one service line, and primarily our customers or health systems, or micro hospitals, or in some states like Texas, Arizona, Florida, there’s more prevalent freestanding emergency rooms. And so for us, it’s more of the on demand care. We’re not working with a primary care specialty care providers today. And we started really on someone’s looking for care because they need it right now. And so I think the unique thing with this type of consumer behavior is they’re very high intent, right? It’s not like you or me searching for a new jacket online or a new pair of shoes that we might just be killing time bored, whatever it may be, may or may not make that purchase. for someone looking for an ER or an urgent care in their area, it’s because they need it right? We’re not just searching online when we’re feeling like 100% a million bucks to see what high quality emergency rooms are in our area. So in that regard, it’s how do you just simply reduce the friction and allow them to easily convert on that search, give them the confidence that they can get high quality care here, and really, that that piece of that patient pie is continuing to grow? It’s, it’s 1020 years ago, it sounds crazy to say, someone’s searching online for an emergency room. What do you mean, they’re probably just going to the emergency room. But especially in these larger metro areas, it’s so competitive, you know, you could have 3456 ers within a similar mile radius from your house or your workplace, and you don’t have a go to place to go. So how do you make an informed decision on and feel confident in where you’re gonna go is the right place to get care. And at that point, those folks are starting with an online search. And the digital experience just means a lot to instill that confidence and set the patient experience up, right to get them in the right mindset, and, you know, right foot forward to get the high quality care they’re looking for.

Matt DeCoursey  06:16

But I’m assuming that some of that also means not routing them to you mentioned, like the general care practitioners or, or whatever that’s like, sure, we cannot we’re not accepting new patients. Yeah, we’re available in three weeks, you know, and you’re in a now economy. I would imagine, as well that, you know, these are in these kinds of you talk about these kinds of internet searches. These are the these are also competitive in the nature that well, there’s a whole lot of different things out there when search for online that wants the searcher or the buyer, or the patient in your case, finds what they need. They’re done searching. Yeah. Which means that they’re picking the top of the top of the search results. The also for the business, they’re also the most expensive, that you know, and if you’re just burning through really expensive clicks, and it’s crazy, like I think a lot of people when they when they think about paid, you know, CPC cost per click, advertising don’t really realize how expensive that top spot can be, in some cases, and you know, I have a friend who runs a company that does foundation repair for homes. Okay, it’s crazy how much one click is at the top of that, because usually, what happens is that click if converted properly, results in that person, maybe not going in looking for other stuff. So and then some things, you know, the what’s the value, and what’s the lifetime value, or even the one time value of A converted sale can be very high as well. So, you know, losing that stuff, like I mean, a Full Scale, our average client spends $20,000 a month. So the bit, you know, when you look at, like, what’s the lifetime value of that you’re considering that we provide like long term solutions, it can be millions, and, and it has been in the case of some of our clients. So in that particular case, well, I’m also the founder of giga book.com, which is $15 a month. That is a it takes a lot longer for that life for that user to reach a lifetime value that that approach is what it is at Full Scale. So you know that these things matter. And as as that, you know, where am I going with this? Well, one of the things is, I would imagine that a lot of these hospitals or ER type businesses? Well, they’re in the business of providing medicine. Right. And they’re healing people and running the business are different things. So do you find yourself having to teach your clients or users anything about that?

Alex Zubey  09:07

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an interesting parallel, right? Parallel is probably the wrong word for there to complete polar opposites. When you’re talking about healing and operating a profitable business, you can keep your doors open. So certainly, and I think that’s, like any enterprise sales cycle. I think that’s a lot of times what gets deals through is if you don’t, if you’re not helping educate on the space as a whole. I mean, you consider yourself an expert in the space as while you’re delivering a product, right? And so yet, the interesting piece with these marketing efforts is it’s really tough to actually have visibility and of conversion of your efforts, right? Because historically, if you don’t have any type of conversion mechanism, or saying online, check in or form fill whatever it may be. For us. The conversion mechanism is an online check install Lucien, and that can look and feel a lot of different ways depending on the goals of the system. But ultimately, if you’re going in blind without something like this, you could be spending millions in marketing and you have really no visibility into the actual conversion, you might see who got eyeballs on it and who clicked. But you don’t know if that truly led to these patients coming through your doors, right. So having the the new patient acquisition piece is attractive and measurable. But also measurable is once you start backing into the attribution of all these campaigns, so if you can say, hey, I’m running 10, paid marketing campaigns. And now I can see that these six are actually bringing me patients, and you can tie revenue to that. And these four are not doing anything. Now we could try different efforts for these four or just double down and move all the spend over to the six that are working. So I think that’s a beyond the black and white ROI of new patient acquisition, just the data analytics behind it. And being able to measure attribution is such a critical component for these marketers, because they’re typically responsible for few different service lines as well. So it’s just a lot on their plate to keep track of. And it’s still quite ambiguous if you don’t have a tool like that.

Matt DeCoursey  11:20

So I’m going to openly admit that I’m a nut for onboarding. And essentially, that’s the business you’re really in. You know, I’m at arrive.com, ar, ar ar iv.com. Like for that in the show notes, but you talking about getting? Now I think this is something that any listener is going to wrap their arms around, because you make it faster to check in to right. Yep. I mean, is that how many people listening have are sitting at the half south of the doctor’s office, after filling out the same forms, again, and again, and again, and have wondered, Is there a better way to do this? Now, but But you know, we were here we are talking about improving your sales cycle. But I think so many people get stuck in the front side of like, well, I gotta get a click, I gotta get the cheapest click, I gotta get this. I gotta get that. But if you can’t, if you bring people to a landing page experience that sucks. It’s usually game over, isn’t it?

Alex Zubey  12:28

Yeah, it’s it’s tough and a lot of other landing spirit landing page experience is critical. And then once you I mean, once you’ve acquired right, the consumer in your web properties, why would you ever want them to leave. So other things like linking out to maybe unknown third party website, slow load times, excess information at this point of check in that there is no doubt going to have to give two three more times once they presented the facility. These things just take time, produce an ambiguity in the experience and ultimately lead lead to drop off. But

Matt DeCoursey  13:08

well, a big thing in this day and age too, is just the mobile compatibility. And, you know, and it’s, it’s like, I mean, half of the people that are searching in your case, I would think that, that you would probably have an even higher mobile percentage, because if I hurt myself, like here, you can see on my camera, I’ve got a big sleight of hand. Where did that occur? I was out in the middle of the country riding on a gator, which is a cart in the middle of the country. And there was a tree branch and my way and I pushed it out of the way because I didn’t want it to hit my kids are in the back. And there was a thorn on it. And it I mean, it runs all the way down my for everything. Now, that sad. I didn’t deem that this was er worthy. But this happened over a week ago. So got a big slice on my hand, I’m bleeding out in the middle of nowhere, had I decided to go to an ER department First off, where the hell is one. And second off? If let’s just be realistic, I’m 20 miles outside of South Kansas City. I might be halfway to your hometown of Tulsa at this point. But that isn’t where you’re gonna get your strongest bandwidth and stuff like that. So you got to be able to have things load quickly and, and have an experience on someone’s phone that isn’t like, Oh my God, why is this so painful? Why is this so slow? Why doesn’t this and you know, while that might sound easy? It’s not. Right. It’s not I build software. I have been doing that for 15 years. And the problem is, is all of you have a different kind of phone, you have a different iPhone, you have a different Android phone, you have a different phone size you some people are still for reasons I can’t explain using the Safari browser. You know, and these are the things that drive software developers crazy but all of these things They all come into play and, and affect your sales funnel, your sales cycle and your sales funnel in its efficiency.

Alex Zubey  15:09

Yeah, the we we see almost 80% of the traffic through our product come from a mobile device a lot through Google maps to a specific landing page. And so having all of that cleaned up is crucial. An interesting piece you just mentioned about the different technographic profile of each user as well. And so that’s something that we invested pretty heavily in finding that, you know, this one size fits all approach, we had a hypothesis early on that, that just isn’t going to cut it, especially when we’re looking to get better year over year, and really drive same store growth. And so for us this web traffic conversion rate, and then continuing to make that better is crucial to help them to help these health systems hospitals continue to capture more patients through these digital efforts. And so we find that we might have a will have a client in the same metro area, right stay within Austin or Dallas or El Paso. And they might have, you know, eight facilities scattered out throughout Austin. And the leading user interface in North Austin facility is a little different than the leading converting user interface in South Austin. And it’s because the patients that they serve, make up a different technographic profile. So some the North awesome facility might use iPhone, mobile Safari users and user interface a converts the highest there, where South Austin has a lot of Android Chrome users and user interface B converts the highs there. And so not only is the experience optimized for the things that we mentioned earlier, but it actually goes into a back end algorithm. We have a library of user interfaces, we give them all a shot in the beginning, and then let the algorithm sorted out to see which one converts the highest as the users continue to use it.

Matt DeCoursey  17:07

You mentioned El Paso is you’re talking where you know, if you’re not aware of our El Paso as it touches Mexico, yep. Like you crossed the river into Mexico. If you want to go visit from El Paso, do you also have to take? I would, I would imagine that you probably have to give some consideration to language.

Alex Zubey  17:23

Certainly. Yeah, certainly language considerations. Those are all those are all great. I would say they from our experience, those would be as a tier two consideration to tier one would be more around, you know, the mobile optimization the the intuitive display the different the dynamic user interfaces, but yeah, that’s certainly has an impact and definitely a greater impact, depending on the geographic location.

Matt DeCoursey  17:50

Yeah, one of the things I’m glad you mentioned this, because I wanted to keep moving down our own sales cycle. And during this conversation is, you know, we’ve talked all about, hey, this is okay, we get the click. We want them to have a good landing page experience. And then you mentioned like, getting them back. Right now that how does that work? And in an emergency setting, is that wanting to just keep your your facility front of mind if and when needed?

Alex Zubey  18:19

Yeah, it’s really it’s a great question. So the typical user profile from the patient perspective, is net new, right. So the far majority of the patients using a product like ours, where they’re searching online for care, they’re going to be net new patients to that hospital or that health system. It’s because they don’t have a plan, right. And so we actually had this breakdown, where it’s, you know, six, I’m going to use round numbers here. But like 60% of patients, they’re coming in anyway, right? They know, you’re there go to place, they’re gonna walk into that, er 20%. They have maybe had been there before, but they’re kind of on the fence. And they really value high quality digital experiences, they can get some insights into what’s the best time for them to come, what services you offer, et cetera, you could sway them to go somewhere else. And we see that a lot in patient surveys and and ethnographic research, user interviews, etc. And the other 20% is, you know, the biggest opportunity for lost revenue, if you’re not capturing these patients is they’re completely net new, they don’t know where to go 100% are starting a starting their journey from a digital search. So it’s very within that you’re competing mostly for that 20% is they’re the folks that are really the mote that count for the most of that landing page traffic and their decision making process on where to get care, right. They might have a couple different tabs open, they might be on Google Maps, click on a couple different pins to see which is which instills the confidence in them where they feel the they’re making the best decision to go and get their care. But primarily, it’s it’s net new patients and then Otherwise, it helps just keep the hospital on the cusp of a high quality digital experience. So the people that even though they may be retained patients, they continue to value that and want to utilize a tool like that. And of course, over time, if you continue to not provide an experience like that it will erode and that they may be up for grabs down the road. So

Matt DeCoursey  20:25

I want to talk a little bit more about the importance of tracking success within your own sales cycle. Before we do that, I want to remind everyone that finding expert software developers does not have to be difficult, especially when you go to full scale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs, and then see what available developers testers and leaders are ready to join your team, you can find a link in the show notes, you go to full scale.io. While you’re down there, click the arrived.com link and learn more about what Alex is building at his company. Now, as I’ve mentioned, you know, the importance of tracking your success or failure and a sales cycle is obviously going to lead you to your ability to say, here’s five things that aren’t working, here’s three things that are let’s focus on the three things that are working, it’s to me it feel I feel like with you guys probably have or have had to overcome challenges with that. Because in your when you’re driving people to the ER setting, in some cases, I would imagine, they probably just click the thing, figure out where it’s at. And you’re talking about instilling confidence and improving the digital experience. But in some cases, when it’s an emergency, they’re probably just looking for a location. And they start driving winds, which means that your conversion metrics similar to mine. So it’s the same thing and Full Scale, like a lot of people listen to this podcast, and the only way we have we have a very simple onboarding process, as well. But there’s some things that it’s hard to track the entry point. And I get we get kind of stuck just asking at the end of the form. What drove you here? So Is that Is that a challenge that arrived?

Alex Zubey  22:06

Yeah, for us, not terribly, because the dynamics of the ER are interesting, just because you like what you mentioned, we don’t expect somebody who’s having chest pain or really high acuity issue to be doing a digital search at that point. Right. So for that kind of that, like I mentioned that 20% of the entire patient panel that you’re serving is really the ones who are honed in on this online search. But of course people very high acuity ailment dialing 911 As you should or just going to the nearest hospital and that will always persist for this type of care setting. But really the competition for the kind of mid tier acuity patient where and my I have this stomach pain, you know, the classic appendix example where it kind of hurts but it’s the middle of the night maybe I should go now maybe I shouldn’t those folks started care journey online or like sprains, brakes, rashes, those types of things. But yeah, it’s uh, it’s interesting, too, because just sales cycle, specifically, the product that we deliver is for such a transactional element, right? Like for our clients for these health systems and hospitals. It’s such a quick and transactional sales cycle. And then for us personally on the company side to get our product in is such a long drawn sales cycle. And so, you know, it’s

Matt DeCoursey  23:34

let’s talk about that for a second, because mine’s the same way, you know, like, the, you know, Full Scale we service, we help you build software teams, and that’s rarely a quote, emergency right now. And honestly, when it is an emergency, that’s a red flag for us, because we want to know why Why are you suddenly in this situation? Where your sales where your development team turned into vapor? Right, and I say that because if you have a poor relationship with another company similar to ours, are you having a hard time keeping people on your own team for whatever 100 reasons they could be? You know, maybe well, like Tulsa is a good example, because Tulsa is actually one of the cities that’s been super proactive at trying to drive businesses like yours and to Tulsa. Yeah, it’s also Tulsa will pay you as a software developer to come move to Tulsa. It’s really cool. Yeah. And it is really cool. But it’s also like, wow, it kind of shows you like that’s what, that’s okay. Not everybody has that going on in their setting. And by the way, there’s no way that that has worked to the level that it filled the gap, the negative unemployment rate that every US market has when it comes to its shortage of software developers. So sometimes it’s market conditions. Sometimes it’s a lot of different things. And you know, what we run into sometimes when it’s that quote, emergency, it’s because As the the the prospect company that’s inquiring might not have paid their last vendor I see. And they got cut off. So you know, like, you never know, but it’s almost never an emergency. And with us, it’s also not one of those things where you have we have a 0% chance, by our decision to sell anything on that first contact. Yeah, because we want to talk to people, they have to, we have to learn more about them, we have to find the appropriate service providers, if they want to interview our team, these things take. I mean, they can only take a couple of days in some spots. But sometimes we have people that that might inquire today, and a year from today, they become a client. Whatever reason, yeah. So so that that that is the opposite of the emergency cycle. And now you mentioned getting any type of new system into something like a hospital. Oh, man, that sounds excruciating. It is. Yeah, it’s almost like saying the same thing. So I used to many, many, many years ago, I worked in the music industry. And I worked for the world’s largest maker of electronic musical instruments, and through our stores, vendors and outlets, we sold a lot of stuff through government sources, meaning schools, primarily schools, colleges, and whatever. And oh, my god, do I not miss that process? Yeah, I mean, it was I mean, it really was excruciating. Talking about like, it was in North and South Carolina during some of that. And you look at all these different school districts, and at the time, this is a long time ago, things are hopefully more sophisticated. They’re now you couldn’t actually apply as a vendor at all of the states school districts. So if you wanted to sell a piano to one school district, and then the next one next to it, there was a different process for going through that. And in some cases, there might have been two there might have been like, a statewide, and then a district wide, and oh, my God, was it slow and excruciating, it made you not want to sell things on Sundays,

Alex Zubey  27:00

you described a lot of the things that we faced, I mean, a lot of health consolidation has been going on for years now within the health system market. And so a lot of them are almost set up like that, where there’s a corporate entity, that own regional health systems, they may or may not be under the same name. And the dynamic for each one is different. And what I mean by that is the really the umbrella organization, the structure of it all is different one, one, you know, health system, a, all decisions could run through their corporate entity Health System B, they might have a corporate entity with presence in six different states, and each region has decision making power. And so you find that it’s really tough to make a reproducible processes for particular buyer personas, because even similar titles can mean different things within different health systems. And so yes, sir, it certainly presents its own set of challenges.

Matt DeCoursey  28:02

I want to add someone that came to it’s in my world, it’s not uncommon for people to want to, quote, run an idea by me. So someone was had this had this idea about something and they wanted to sell it to insurance companies. And I was like, Dude, you might be looking at like a three year cycle here. Yeah. And he was like, Well, what do you mean, I was like, Well, do you know anybody? That’s a decision maker at Blue Cross Blue Shield? Like, no, I’m like, that might be your first year. Yeah, figuring out exactly who in a massive, massive company. Where do you start? And then, you know, and like, I mean, a lot of that stuff. And I think a lot of startup founders, and businesses in general don’t give enough they die on the vine, because they don’t give enough consideration to how long it might actually take to make a sale.

Alex Zubey  28:51

Yeah, it’s a, we were talking with this one group. And this was for the point of contact, what wasn’t when was not directly involved in our buying process, but it was more you could take you’ll take any touch point you get, especially if it’s an introduction, and so you got an introduction to this person, and we’re talking to them and they work for one of the, you know, one of the larger health systems in the country. And his comment at the end was just, Hey, man, just just hang on, just survive. You’re gonna have to be around for a couple of years for to get a shot here. And the thing I tell everyone is just try not to get discouraged and

Matt DeCoursey  29:34

hear that again, people you might have to be around for a couple years to get a shot. And that’s, that’s a real thing. And that’s that, that doesn’t surprise me at all that echoes kind of what I was saying with the music stuff, and it’s just like there’s there’s a process and now that said, once we got approved or some of the so that would be part of my job was trying to help one of our or, you know, stores or vendors or clients or whatever you wanted to call them, navigate that process. Now, once you navigate a newer an approved vendor, there was a ton you would actually win and get sales. Because here’s the thing, the people on the other side of that transaction, like the lady, that’s the music teacher at XYZ elementary school, she goes to they, they may have a budget for that. And someone’s saying to her, pick someone off this approved vendors list because you don’t, you don’t want to have to go through the process of getting someone else started on that. Totally. So actually, one of the things that we did was preemptively began to recommend that all of the this was one of the ideas that I had. And in that region, I was like, well, we should tell everybody that could possibly sell our product to go ahead and apply to be a vendor on the state and local level. So you’re ready. And you might actually just stumble into sales. And some some places did it and some places don’t. But I know that we definitely made sales, because some people were on the list one time or whatever. But yeah, that so that’s going to be different in every in every shape and form in the your case you’re also dealing with, anytime you have medical or health stuff. There’s a whole bunch of other crap you got to deal with. It’s not as straightforward. You got HIPAA compliance and data privacy, and there’s a lot, there’s a lot of stuff, you got to lock down. How did that go for you?

Alex Zubey  31:29

Yeah, big time. I mean, there’s a lot of liability in there. And and they’re very risk adverse, and for good reasons, right. And your example, with the music teacher, I mean, you hit the nail on the head, it’s like the the people who are buying and evaluating your software. Newsflash, their full time job isn’t to evaluate and buy your software, their full time job is they’re probably juggling 12 Other things, and just trying to make it through their own day and hit their own internal KPIs and be successful and grow within their organization. And so you have to have a ton of empathy for that and do and do whatever you possibly can to remove friction in the buying process for them. Because, like you said, it could be it’s just one more thing for them to do. It’s just one more thing to do. And if you make it hard and complicated, it’s even if there’s value there, it’s it’s, it’s going to be overlooked. And so making

Matt DeCoursey  32:25

it hard lot not hard and complicated. In my opinion, as a general tentative, just selling more stuff in general, the more you’ll hear me say, if you spend enough time around me, you’re gonna hear me say something along the lines of, we got to remove all these obstacles between the buyer and the cash register, like and and you know, we’re in this instant, instant culture where you can buy something with one click at Amazon and have it on your porch later that day. Yep. Which still blows my mind, by the way? Yeah, I mean, it really does. But think about that, that sets a standard for everything, it has sets a standard for the ease of use of so it’s, it’s a symbol, when it comes to improving your sales cycle is having the fewest amount of steps humanly or even electronically possible. Yep. Is that is that one of the things that you guys are focused on?

Alex Zubey  33:18

Yeah, big time, I mean, anything we can do to expedite. And that could be a variety of different things that could be additional compliance certifications that you don’t necessarily need to have for your product to function. But if you have them that could remove, you know, one to six months of it, and compliance evaluation, right. So from that end, all the way to just making every single meeting productive, not productive for you, but productive for your buyer. I think the discovery process just sets the tone, like you were mentioning before the discovery process should not be about us qualifying, the just simply selfishly qualifying the buyer, that they’re a good fit for us, when we’re on a call, we have, you know, an 80 to 90% confidence that this person can get extreme value from our product. So at that point, it’s just helping to uncover, diagnose problems that they may or may not have thought about, probably not because we operate in this particular niche. And so really just uncovering those to show the true value of the solution and then make it worthwhile for them to invest time or stick their neck out and champion the deal. You know, all these things that you need from the buyer to push the deal through. Because we’re going to saddle up for six, six months to two and a half years. That’s kind of the range of our sales cycle at this point from what we’ve experienced. So there needs to be value there and they need to be bought into it.

Matt DeCoursey  34:52

I’ve got an example when you talk about onboarding and I mentioned I’m a little bit of an onboarding nerd but you know, sometimes we are As designers of products and software, don’t, we put things out of order. And a great example is alright, so when you look at a mailing form, and you’re gonna put your name, your address, your city, your state. And then the last thing is the zip code. You know, if you ask the zip code first, you can fill in, like, automatically fill in like five other fields. Yeah, I know what city and state you’re in. I know what currency you use, I know what timezone you’re in. Like, there’s a lot, I might know the approximate distance from where you’re out to where I’m at. And these are things especially in a mobile environment, where you know, like, I gotta click, click, click, click, click, and I’m sitting here, wearing eyeglasses today, because at my near 50 years old of age, I don’t see as well, I fat fingered things, I’m just saying, like you, but the order that you asked things? And do you even need to ask them at all as a big part. And that’s what can speed things up

Alex Zubey  36:05

big time. Some of those quote unquote, little things, I mean, let’s say we’re onboarding a group that has 35 ers throughout six states, we need their facility information, from a basic perspective to get those built on the back end of our software

Matt DeCoursey  36:23

and set it up for them after they get

Alex Zubey  36:25

what worlds would we send them a spreadsheet to go and fill out their facility address when we can just look all that up? Things like that. If we

Matt DeCoursey  36:33

do this is lazy shit that people don’t do like a lot. Like, here’s the thing is, it’s back to that always ask yourself, Am I giving my buyer one more thing to do? Because it is that that it’s that it’s that sales, it’s empathy for the buyer. And it’s that intuitive nature of sales, the easier you make it, for people to buy something, the more people are going to buy something from you, the easier you make it for people to help you, the more help you’re gonna get. Yep, it’s that simple. And some of that, and these particular talking about your sales cycle, and this is where your salespeople or you can mess it up. I like to lead with that, like art one of our our at Full Scale, build your software team quickly and affordably, like those quickly and affordably are to two very important parts of our process. Because we know and understand that you as a startup or an established business are hoping to get a million other things going on, you don’t come and hire a company and work with a company like Full Scale because you want to embrace the full process that you would go through without us. So you know, we only hire one in 42 applicants, for example, what what is the true value of our service? It we’re eliminating your need to first off find 42 candidates? Because that can be difficult itself? Yeah. And then how do you get the 40 or 41 of them out of the way that you didn’t want on your team? Anyway? That’s that direct path to like, it’s kind of like what you guys do in some regards, like, let us put you in the best experience as quickly as possible. Even if whether you need an hour later. Yep. And you know, and that’s the thing so and so what are we selling? We’re selling peace of mind. You figure out a way to sell peace of mind. You’ve got you’ve got then you’ve got something?

Alex Zubey  38:29

Yeah. Do you find it challenging? Because I mean, that’s uh, do you find it challenging to get your buyers to truly extrapolate the value of that peace of mind?

Matt DeCoursey  38:40

Right, sometimes, sometimes they don’t think about it. So we got you know, as an entrepreneur, I’ve over these last few years especially I’ve really focused on this concept of lesson to the echo. And so you like in your sales process or any process you’re gonna hear an echo, it’s the same questions asked again and again, and again, it’s the same value propositions questions, or you know, any of that. And you know, for us so my I have 300 employees in the Philippines. So we get the same questions. Do they speak English? Do they work on our timezone? Are they going to be any gut, you know, and so some of that, with that we’ve reshaped the whole value proposition and the whole presentation, I consider it a huge compliment. When I talk to someone and in like, less than a minute, I’m able to tell them all the things that they know. And at the end of that minute, I hear something like, thanks that answered almost all of my questions or all of my questions. And that’s that efficiency of understanding that you know, because it’s the same questions again and again and again and, and for us, like one of the things we’ll run into is oftentimes, people have had so you can go to the peace of mind thing goes two ways. So if you ask him Have you ever worked with an offshore team before? And they say, Yeah, and we had a horrible experience. Okay, well, our number one, our number one goal is to make sure that doesn’t happen for you again. You know, and that’s the thing is, so they have that they’ve experienced the opposite of peace of mind. And now there can be a couple ways to climb over that. I mean, obviously, they’re on the call with us, and they know what you do at that point. So they’re not completely terrified of the concept. But you sometimes you got to climb over other people’s failures to deal with it.

Alex Zubey  40:31

Oh, big time. It that’s I like that

Matt DeCoursey  40:35

are you run into that too? Well, we tried a system like this. And it was, of course,

Alex Zubey  40:39

it was terrible. And that’s great. I love hearing that, because you can really break down, they felt the pain already. And they

Matt DeCoursey  40:48

understand the importance of the peace of mind.

Alex Zubey  40:50

Exactly. And so like, your example, I thought was interesting, because for me, if I’m thinking about hiring another product, person, engineering, person, salesperson, whatever may be hiring a person, you could think about some subset of challenges that takes to get from job description right up to hiring everything in between. But you don’t think of it like, it’s, you know, it’s gonna be hard. But it’s not as grueling of a process in your mind versus the opposite of that of what you just said, of not interviewing and not hiring 41 people to get to that one person that is just a different framing of it, and is a lot more impact. But

Matt DeCoursey  41:34

it’s the truth of the matter. That’s what you’re paying for. And then in some situations, for us, it’s also keeping that seat fall. Yeah, yes, the idea that you’re going to do, one thing I can tell you is you have a 0% chance of hiring anyone that will work for your company for eternity, right? Unless we figured out how to live forever. But with that, you know, that’s okay. Because things change, and maybe your needs as a company change. Or maybe you need more people or whatever. And there’s a lot of ways to go around that. What I do know is that people that run technology companies are usually at least decent at building their own technology. But that doesn’t mean you know anything about hiring people. Right? You met you know, and that’s a whole nother process, man. There’s a whole and some of that. It’s like, Oh, give me an example. Like we don’t hire people that don’t speak English. Right? Because all of our clients are English speaking companies. So like, you know, understanding what could frustrate a buyer. And that doesn’t mean there aren’t great developers out there that don’t speak English, because there certainly are we tell them we can’t hire them all the time. Yeah. You know, some of that’s about understanding what what pops and what doesn’t. So I told you before we hit record that these these recordings go by pretty quick. And here we are at the end of the show.

Alex Zubey  42:54

I just looked at the time. The same thing. Yeah, once

Matt DeCoursey  42:57

again with me today, I’ve got Alex Zubi, the CEO and co founder of arrive they are on Startup Hustle top Tulsa startups go to arrive.com. That’s a r i v.com. There’s a link in the show notes for that. Before we do the founders freestyle, I want to remind everyone, if you need to hire software engineers, testers and leaders let Full Scale help talked enough about Full Scale. In this episode. These were comparable examples and go to FullScale.io. To learn more now, I like to end my episodes of Startup Hustle with founders and give during the founders freestyle, or I hand over the microphone. It’s easy to sometimes, as mentioned, I warn everyone before the show starts because I had mentioned the founders freestyle at the end of what what should I talk about? Probably the stuff that stood out or the stuff that you forgot to say. So or whatever. I’ve had people rap sang poetry. I mean, I’ve been shocked. But but as we as we round out this episode of Startup Hustle, that’d be What do you want to say on the way out Alex?

Alex Zubey  44:02

Yeah, well, I mean, I enjoyed the conversation. It absolutely flew by so so thanks for having me. I think you mentioned it before a little bit. But specific to Tulsa. There’s some really cool programs going on there through the George Kaiser Family Foundation at Tulsa remote when it’s not specific to software developers, it’s really across the board. They’re doing programs where they paid people $10,000 to relocate to Tulsa. So I would just say, Tulsa is a cool city. And if anybody’s considering a movie, they should check out some of those programs and see what it has to offer.

Matt DeCoursey  44:34

Tulsa reminds me a lot of Kansas City 10 years ago, or is it even Yeah, a little longer because you know, Kansas City, we got Google Fiber. Okay, and that and so and a lot of people don’t even think about that. Now. The Kansas City was the very first city in the United States to have city wide Fiber Internet. And Google chose Kansas City out of like, hundreds of sales funny, Topeka, Kansas and actually renamed the city for a day to Google Kansas, to try to get attention any of that. So, but with that, you know, this, this, this accessibility to this new bandwidth and all these other things. It drew a lot of people, including myself, so I’m from Kansas City, but at the time I was living in Indianapolis and my wife and I were, you know, looking at a lot of different things. And we ended up moving to Kansas City. That was one of the reasons but, you know, it created this really interesting offering now with Tulsa, I’ve seen multiple companies from Kansas City relocate to Tulsa to take advantage of the of the plans, you know, one of them is is on the list with you. That’s bottle learning. Okay, Claire, Clarence, and Edna. We’re, we’re doing really well here in Kansas City and and saw the amazing offering that the Tulsa had now for those of you listening, whether it’s Tulsa or anywhere else, there’s a lot of this stuff going on. And I think as an entrepreneur, you know, I mean, I mean, I’ve done like a whole circle around the United States in my lifetime, because opportunity is best when pursuit like that, figure out where that opportunity is for you whether it’s Tulsa, Kansas City, I don’t know. But it is almost right now, always the the places that are aggressively seeking your presence. And where would you rather run a business where the city and the community and everything is trying to cater to your needs? Or somewhere else where you are in this uphill climb to exist?

Alex Zubey  46:39

Yeah, I mean, the rest is you got enough uphill climbs to battle with a company running a company. So why not make start? It’s also easier. Yeah, so my two business partners are from Tulsa. They run another company there. And that’s how that’s how we got our roots there.

Matt DeCoursey  46:57

So it’s also drawing people in. I mean, there’s a couple instances just from Kansas City, that means there’s a couple from a lot of big businesses.

Alex Zubey  47:04

Yeah.

Matt DeCoursey  47:04

And that’s good because you get that supporting infrastructure and things around you. There’s more grant money. And then another thing too is, is look people that are going to invest in companies like yours or others or any of that. You know, Tulsa is becoming a target rich environment.

Alex Zubey  47:22

Yeah, it’s it’s been really cool to see. I think it’s just the beginning for it.

Matt DeCoursey  47:27

Well, congrats again on making it on our top startups list. I love what you’re doing and I’ll catch up with you down the road.

Alex Zubey  47:33

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Matt.