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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and there's something that I think we've all experienced when it comes to looking at other businesses is that we've gone to their website and we've thought to ourselves holy cow, this business has so much social proof.
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Their clients, their customers seem to love them.
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Why don't I have that same feedback in that same social proof?
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Well, you're in for a treat today, because we've got an incredible guest and a fellow entrepreneur who's going to highlight all the ways that we can actually take that customer social proof seriously and implement it for our own businesses.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Andy Stauffer.
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Andy is the former VP of sales and marketing at CloudCoach, which is an enterprise SaaS company recently acquired by Maine Capital.
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Today, andy is the founder of a very cool company that can benefit all of us.
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Wait till you hear about all the great work that they do.
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He's the founder of ProofMap, leveraging his experience as a startup sales rep and a go-to-market executive to address a distinct challenge for growing SaaS companies without full marketing teams maximizing the impacts of social proof.
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If you've ever thought that your marketing efforts and your sales efforts are not doing as much as they should be doing.
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Well, that's why Andy's entire business exists.
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We're all going to learn a lot from him today.
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I'm excited about this one, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Andy Stauffer.
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Else, let's dive straight into my interview with Andy Stauffer.
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All right, andy, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thanks, it's great to be here.
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Heck, yes, I'm excited to hear even more about your business.
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I've been researching it ahead of the two of us getting together, but before we get there, you've got to take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Andy?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, so my career has primarily been in startup land.
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I started as employee number eight or nine at a growing enterprise SaaS company.
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I was the first sales rep reporting directly to the founder.
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He kind of took me under his wing and yeah, I've been doing that ever since.
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It's kind of an interesting journey how I got to Proofmap?
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Because I wasn't necessarily good at sales.
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I was 23 years old, straight out of college but I was just really close to the customer experience.
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In those days when your sales are about a small company, you might be also helping with support.
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Funny story my fiance was actually.
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She was on the onboarding team and it was a real Jim and Pam situation at the time.
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But essentially I also.
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When I would sell a deal I would quickly hear how that experience was if I oversold.
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Those could be some rough nights if I oversold and it wasn't a great fit.
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But it was a good, just way of learning through osmosis how to recognize what the customer experience is and then constantly weaving that in to my sales process.
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So I started as a sales rep there.
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The company grew, I moved up to head of sales and then eventually VP of sales and marketing and the company was acquired just about a year and a half ago and that was a good celebration for us.
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And then we took that time to travel the world.
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I actually spent eight months traveling through Asia before coming back to Austin where I started Proof Pap.
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Yeah, I love that overview, Andy, especially because I really appreciate the fact that your story starts in sales, because I think most people don't realize that the entire goal of Social Proof, the entire goal of these client success stories and sharing them with the world, is that our sales and marketing are more effective.
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Talk to us about where, along the journey, you realized wait, social social proof.
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This is one of the secret ingredients when it comes to sales.
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Yeah I mean.
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So I'm going to go back to the very beginning once again.
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So I wouldn't consider myself a natural salesperson, and that's coming from somebody that's now started my own company and also was previously VP of sales, started my own company and also was previously VP of sales.
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But you know, I remember when I first took the role and I was kind of irked, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it because I just had this connotation as far as like sleazy used car salesman.
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But particularly in the B2B enterprise SaaS space, it's very consultative and I found that social proof in having the voice of the customer being the core message and really working with prospects to help solve their problems was actually very fulfilling.
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Speak to actual customer experiences when dealing with prospect objections or even in the discovery calls and kind of calling on other industry leaders that were peers of mine or I would say, customers of mine, because otherwise you could be caught being like a 23-year-old BDR and you're speaking to an executive at, let's say, a VP of professional services trying to give them best practice advice on billable utilization, and there's just no credibility there.
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So customer stories were just a way for me to overcome that and then, as we started to grow and we started to hire more sales reps that were reporting to me, I realized it was a challenge to recreate that, because they weren't coming through this small startup doing everything anymore.
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Now they were just coming on board and they were more specialized roles.
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And in order to maintain social proof as our lead advantage in the sales process, I needed to invest more in customer stories, and so that happened very naturally at CloudCoach.
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And then as I came back, you know, after taking a year off after the sale of CloudCoach and kind of looking into where could I make the greatest impact for companies just like mine at CloudCoach, social proof was the obvious answer for me.
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Yeah, andy, when you articulate that, one thing that really stands out to me is the fact that you say customer stories we're not just merely talking about reviews or testimonials, which I feel like a lot of businesses, they'll email a customer and say, hey, can you send me a review or a one-liner?
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Talk to me about that difference.
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It just seems to me like you really embrace the story, part of the social proof that we're talking about.
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Yeah, I mean to look at it that way.
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I think about who ProofMaps ICP is as well.
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Our ideal customer is really more so B2B customers that have a more enterprise-like sales cycle, meaning it's a lot of touch points, there's discovery, there's demos, there's proposals, there's getting different stakeholders involved and thus there's also typically a higher contract value.
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But what that means you might have a startup that's doing 10 million in ARR, but it's not like they have thousands of clients that they could refer to.
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And that's where you see some of these B2C or more so targeted towards SMB high velocity sales cycles.
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They can afford to go after it from like a volume play and they can have a ton of reviews.
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They can have a wall of fame on their website and there's a lot of applications out there for that.
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But for my clientele it's more so.
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You know you have a subset of your best customers and you're starting to understand where you have product market fit and you got to go a little bit further and that's where customer stories go in.
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So we work with our clients to actually interview their customers and take those interviews and get more out of them.
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So it's more of a volume play sprouting from each individual customer than it is trying to get hundreds of case studies or hundreds of reviews.
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We have a conversation with them, we understand really how our customer solution addressed their customers' problems and then tell that story from beginning to end.
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So what was life like before?
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What were the best solutions and sometimes they're not even what you might have expected in the initial sales cycle, after you get familiar with the product and then what were the actual impacts of solving those problems?
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And then, of course, with that comes sort of this world that didn't even exist before, that you're trying to communicate with your prospects.
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Now that you've solved your problems, what are the new opportunities that you have?
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What are the things that you can start thinking about that you were so inundated with before?
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And that's a story and that's what we try to replicate, and then also think about how we could replicate that in many different formats, which we can talk about later too.
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Yeah, I definitely want to go there with you, Andy, because that's actually probably my favorite part about your website, proofmapcom, which we'll talk about at the end of today's episode.
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But I really love that graphic where you have the customer interview at the center and then it branches into.
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You can generate a case study from there.
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You can generate sales slides from their video testimonials.
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We've all seen those companies on Facebook and Instagram that have customers speaking for them on their behalf about how awesome they are in their social ads.
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The fact that all of that stems from that one thing I've obviously seen your website I'd love for you to paint that picture for our listeners stems from that one thing I've obviously seen your website.
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I'd love for you to paint that picture for our listeners.
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Sure, yeah.
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So one of the challenges that growing SaaS companies face because they don't have a full content marketing team is they simply don't have the capacity to produce as much as possible.
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And what I mean by that is when you have an hour interview with a customer.
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There's a lot of great data there.
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There's raw video, of course.
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Then you have the transcript.
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If you go after that interview the right way, you can start to have not just one case study on your website, or maybe you have one two and a half minute sort of highlight video, but you can start to think about how we can actually get more out of that interview.
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So I always say to my customers if you just have one case today on your website, that you're wasting a lot of potential and you're not having as much impact from that conversation that you could have.
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Look at it this way we think about a buyer journey for SaaS and in the context from a salesperson or a marketing person, there's this funnel and on the marketing side you're thinking about awareness all the way through consideration to the decision process, which is more on the sales front.
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But if you just have a case study on your website, that's somebody that is already new to type in your brand, or they're going to your website.
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That's somebody that already has interest.
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They're already considering different solutions, but that case study is not being utilized within the awareness stage, which is when you might be advertising on LinkedIn, and these are people that's within your ICP but they're not aware of you.
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And now that format for how that case study should be utilized is completely different.
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You should be doing little snippets, because they're not familiar with their brand, they're not going to make that investment to go to your website yet.
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So now we're thinking about quotes, we're thinking about small, short video snippets, and the topics need to be more centered around, you know, addressing specific challenges or things that might be more educational, so that you can provide value to them, to get them to view the video or to click and download an ebook.
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So that's the way we start thinking about it, which is like not just looking at case studies for one stage of your buyer journey.
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But how can we go up the funnel and down the funnel?
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Yeah, it's so much fun following this process because obviously the interview is such an important part.
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But, Andy, I'll be honest, where my head goes.
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Hearing you talk about this is holy cow.
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I wouldn't even know who to interview.
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I'm so interested to understand the outreach process and how you even make that list, Because I'm even thinking about the specifics of when do I interview them.
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Is it when they've had successful completion?
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Is it a month later, so they've had time to really soak in all the good results?
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Is it in the middle of it, when excitement is the highest?
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Talk to us about that outreach process and how and when we figure out who we should be talking to.
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Yeah, so there's some obvious things to do.
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You don't want to go too soon because they might not have recognized value yet.
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You don't want to be too late, because stakeholders change, particularly in the B2B space, and the decision maker or the executive sponsor that you might have been working with in the evaluation cycle might not be present anymore, so there's certainly timing at play.
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What we've done at ProofMap, though, as I'll say, is we've reduced the cost to really go after these interviews dramatically.
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I mean, if you're going with just a traditional marketing agency, they don't really specialize in this, so now you're getting their rates as it relates to all these different types of advertising services, and you're not getting a lot of value there.
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Or if you're doing this internally, you're talking about resources that typically isn't owned by one person.
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So, when you think about the skills required to conduct this whole process understanding which customers to go after, like you're saying, being able to have the skills to actually do the interview which is certainly a skill and then to actually see it through, whether it's on the video editing side, content writing, knowing what questions to ask as it relates to different parts of the buyer journey, how salespeople use it, so like that, investment is why timing is such a big concern for a lot of our customers.
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But what we've done is because we've made that process seamless.
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What I like to say is any business stakeholder that's willing to talk, it's worth having that conversation.
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So a lot of times that's just you can look at like what are some signals just with, like your QBRs, as your CSMs are interacting with your clients even implementation if they've had a good implementation and you have a stakeholder that's super excited and they want to talk, we say let's just do it, because these case studies are not just static as well.
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So you might get a lot out of an interview with a stakeholder that's been through implementation.
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They might not have recognized value yet, but we can go back and refer to them or do another quick interview or just even just get an email response or just a recording transcript from a QBR six months later and we can still start to fill out that case study and have it evolve over time too.
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So timing wise, you know it's really just whenever strike while the iron's hot.
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Yeah, I definitely love that answer and I think that a lot of listeners will hear you talking about oh, you need to talk to someone who's eager to talk to you, and I think most entrepreneurs convince themselves that they're putting somebody out or they're asking for too big of a favor when it comes to obtaining these.
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Is that sort of mindset shift Is that something that you encounter when you work with businesses, to say no, you're happy customers, they would love to show up for you.
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What are?
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What's that incentive structure look like?
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Or is it just pure goodwill that we're playing on here?
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Yeah, I think I think my background being in sales, like I'm so used to asking for favors, that's just, that's just part of a sales cycle a lot of the times.
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So that was never, you know, like that's something that takes a little bit of just education and, um, when you're working with, particularly those on the marketing side, um, just a little bit of reinforcement.
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We work with our clients, um, cause a lot of goodwill goes a long way, but what we, what we educate them on, is who's doing the ask way, but what we, what we educate them on, is who's doing the ask.
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So the worst thing I think you can do is it's kind of self serving If you just have a marketing person that's never actually communicated with the client before asking for a case study, you know what?
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So what we do instead is we, we take a list, we work with our customers, we find a list of you know what clients are you thinking of going after and they might have ways they might want to do that, whether that's CSAT scores or, you know, checking, having like signals and QBRs where the CSMs are like, hey, we got something here.
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Or just relationships that executives have with other executives, some of their initial customers, for example.
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But then what we'll try to do is decide who's the best person to reach out, and that's usually got to be somebody that, when they're asking for a favor, there's opportunity for a favor to be returned.
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So if a CSM is asking for the favor one, there's already a personal connection there with whoever's working with the CSM, so you're more likely to get a yes because you're doing it out of goodwill for a human being versus for a company, which is just as humans.
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That's what we're more inclined to do.
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But then that person that's asking the favor can actually return a favor down the line.
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Maybe they give them extra support hours, maybe they can actually give them tickets and upcoming conference.
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Particularly if it's an executive, obviously there's a lot more favors down the line that can be happening versus when it's a marketing rep.
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You know there's not a lot of, not a lot of potential.
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There is how I would say.
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The other thing to consider too is when we're producing this content.
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One of the things that we do on behalf of these stakeholders that do the interviews is we produce guest blogs, thought leadership.
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The interviews is we produce guest blogs, thought leadership.
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This really, it takes only an extra, you know, 10 minutes within the interview to just ask for a brain dump on a specific topic, not related to the solution or the vendor, but more so just related to what's happening in the space.
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Give us some expertise as it relates to your domain, because these customers have a lot to offer to your community and that community is within your own customer community, it's within your prospect community, and when you produce such great content on their behalf and then you could post it as a guest blog, they can repost it, they get to promote their own professional brand.
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So there's some goodwill there going both ways and it's a more mutually beneficial relationship.
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Yeah, that's a really cool strategy and some tactical advice that I'm super appreciative of you giving us here on the air, and you talk a lot about the who and I think that that's so important for us.
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To come back to this You've kind of mentioned it a few times but I really want to spell it out for listeners is that's what makes Proof Map so different?
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Is I love the fact that you guys conduct the interview.
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It's not the onus isn't on us as business owners to get in front of our clients and kind of peer pressure them to say nice things about us.
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It is that third party that not only knows how to get the most out of it, but a third party that knows how to put them at ease and just naturally bring out that good stuff.
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Talk to us about the importance of that third party doing the interview.
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Right.
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So I mean, there's a couple of things that happen.
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Well, one, let's think about this You're asking a customer to give up their time, which is very valuable.
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So, from the very get go, when a customer agrees to do a case study for our clients, we get introduced, and the introduction is here's Proof Map.
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This is our, you know.
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We outsource this to a professional case study production company and that already adds a level of formality to the process.
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It also just tells your customer that you value their time and that you're investing in making sure to get the most out of it.
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It also, frankly, because we come in with a lot of guidelines and it's clearly like we have a procedure for this and we even send them equipment there's just a higher level of commitment that they take because they're like, well, wow, this is for real.
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I'm not just jumping on a Zoom call.
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Here's a pre-brief.
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I'm getting a package here a couple of days before the interview.
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So when we have these interviews with our customers customers they're ready to go, they're dressed nice, their background looks great and they want to make the most of it just as much as we do.
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Then, as far as the interview itself, I can't stress this enough and you understand this fully too.
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It's a skill and it's something that we are doing all the time.
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Whereas, uh to one, make, uh, the the client feel at ease, understanding different types of personalities and and what you can push on and what you can be a little bit more honest about, and trying to get more metrics versus what you might need to more.
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So, just kind of, you know, leave it bay and just try to get the most out of the interview and focus on different impacts, um, perhaps things that are more visceral.
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But because we're doing this holistically and we're thinking about, hey, this one case study that we're doing for a customer isn't the end, all be all.
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What we're doing is we're committed to a case study campaign, we're thinking about this client.
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Okay, they're really focused on client experience.
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That's clearly what they care about.
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That's fine.
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That can be the theme of this interview and that's going to.
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There's going to be a lot of valuable content that can be utilized for the latter stages of a buyer journey, when prospects are now committed to a solution and they like the product, but now they're just trying to understand what the onboarding experience is like.
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This case study will be really useful for that and then on the next case study you might have somebody that's really willing, already has reports pulled up and they have a lot of great metrics and that can be great for more top level.
00:20:34.204 --> 00:20:38.713
You know awareness and consideration content, and that's fine too.
00:20:38.713 --> 00:20:44.755
So we think about each one of these interviews as a subset of an overarching marketing campaign.
00:20:45.415 --> 00:20:46.178
Yeah, I love that.
00:20:46.178 --> 00:21:12.019
Andy, as someone who interviews entrepreneurs and business owners and solution providers for a living, I will say to me that's very much part of your secret sauce is that you're not just getting great customer feedback on in video interviews, but you're doing it for a purpose, and the fact that you and it's probably a testament to your experience leading up to you founding this company is the fact that you understand the sales cycle, the sales process, the fulfillment process, so it shines through in the way that you operate.
00:21:12.019 --> 00:21:15.584
I do want to switch gears a little bit and talk to you about the elephant in the room.
00:21:15.584 --> 00:21:19.136
It's come up in so many of our conversations this year, and that is, of course, AI.
00:21:19.136 --> 00:21:22.893
So many companies are asking themselves how do we incorporate AI?
00:21:22.893 --> 00:21:27.103
How does AI make our processes more efficient or higher quality?
00:21:27.103 --> 00:21:30.296
All of that, Talk to us about how AI plays into the work that you're doing.
00:21:31.317 --> 00:21:33.260
Yeah, so so much.
00:21:33.260 --> 00:21:44.695
But at the same time, one thing that I've tried to do as far as how I communicate our value to our prospects and our clients it, you know, it's, it's.
00:21:44.695 --> 00:21:45.518
It's kind of ironic.
00:21:45.518 --> 00:21:48.551
I actually tried not to mention AI too much, because I really believe AI.
00:21:48.551 --> 00:21:56.623
I mean that's just the standard If you're if you're a new agency or a new SaaS company and you're starting a company now and you're not leveraging AI.
00:21:56.623 --> 00:21:58.391
I mean that would just be foolish.
00:21:58.391 --> 00:22:04.483
So really, what I try to do is more focus on customer experience, what's the outcomes?
00:22:04.483 --> 00:22:12.113
And really, like AI is more of a benefit to me and my ability to scale my business than it is to my customers.
00:22:12.113 --> 00:22:28.653
At the end of the day, whether I have fully automated my backend processes with AI, which I have for the most part, or I'm offshoring resources and we have people working overtime to produce the outcome for our customers, they don't really care.
00:22:28.653 --> 00:22:30.740
So what I like to focus on is more.
00:22:30.740 --> 00:22:42.998
So just always be thinking about what are the outcomes that you're chasing and then reverse engineer from there with how you can leverage AI as much as possible without reducing the quality of the outputs.
00:22:44.361 --> 00:22:48.595
What I also think it's done for companies like myself that are starting out is.
00:22:48.756 --> 00:22:50.278
It's just a true advantage.
00:22:50.880 --> 00:23:08.017
So ProofMmap is a company that's focusing on customer case studies and producing as much content from these interviews as possible, and at the moment it's a service and it's highly productized in the sense that I can have a commercial model that's very similar to just getting a software subscription.
00:23:08.679 --> 00:23:18.411
Over time we're going to continue to productize what we're doing and eventually, ideally, we'll have an actual application that we're going to market with and hear within the next six months to a year.
00:23:18.411 --> 00:23:23.323
But as far as the customer experience, it's not really going to be any different.
00:23:23.323 --> 00:23:24.693
They're still going to get the same outcome.
00:23:24.693 --> 00:23:26.519
It'll just allow me to scale my business.
00:23:26.519 --> 00:23:32.900
So I think that it's done for entrepreneurs like myself, particularly those that are not necessarily as technical.
00:23:32.900 --> 00:23:41.538
I do have a more technical co-founder that's assisting on a part-time basis and help bridging some of the gap as far as the backend stuff goes.
00:23:41.538 --> 00:23:57.626
But I don't feel as much pressure to go to market with an actual software application versus being able to still keep this as a productized service and focus on customer value and then just bridge that gap once we figure out the right product to produce.
00:23:57.626 --> 00:24:04.003
And that's definitely been an interesting shift in the way I think entrepreneurs can start companies in 2025.
00:24:04.630 --> 00:24:07.356
Yes, I'm so glad that you said it that way, Andy.
00:24:07.356 --> 00:24:10.586
I'm so appreciative of the way that you think about and the way that you talk about AI.
00:24:10.586 --> 00:24:13.702
So many people are focused on the front end of the way that you think about and the way that you talk about AI.
00:24:13.702 --> 00:24:27.750
So many people are focused on the front end of we have to say that we are an AI company, whereas all of us pretty much I mean it's almost a universal truth at this point is that we can all use AI to streamline things on the back end so that we can provide better service, more personable service, to free up our time in those ways.
00:24:27.750 --> 00:24:34.280
So I really appreciate that you brought up a word that I think you and I both knew we'd go here in today's conversation, which is productized services.
00:24:34.280 --> 00:24:42.211
I think that that's a new way for people to view the types of companies that they can launch, or even that they can add on to what it is that they're already doing.
00:24:42.211 --> 00:24:46.261
Talk to us more about what a productized service is, Andy.
00:24:47.109 --> 00:25:01.807
Yeah, I think I was in SaaS and when I figured I'd started my own company, it would have to be a software company, and that can be pretty daunting when you're more of a business co-founder, more of a sales co-founder like myself.
00:25:01.807 --> 00:25:23.498
More appealing because suddenly you could start to get margins that are similar to that of a software company and you could start to scale in a similar way without actually having a login application from the customer standpoint.
00:25:23.498 --> 00:25:35.595
And so that's where I think productized services is something that is actually pretty exciting, and I think entrepreneurs should consider that as an avenue to get into eventually launching a SAS product.
00:25:35.595 --> 00:25:52.400
One thing, one reason why I like this approach too, is as we start to build the wireframe for our application, we're getting customer data from the get go, versus if we, if we had to build a product to start, who knows?
00:25:52.400 --> 00:25:55.132
I mean there's there's a lot of things that we would have over-engineered.
00:25:55.132 --> 00:26:01.477
There's a lot of customer feedback that we would have gotten too late and invested a lot of time and energy going one direction.
00:26:02.398 --> 00:26:09.842
There's this concept of an MVP, which is just a best practice so that you can just start to get more customer input.
00:26:09.842 --> 00:26:11.211
Well, now the MVP.
00:26:11.211 --> 00:26:12.933
You don't even actually need an MVP.
00:26:12.933 --> 00:26:21.125
You can still provide a productized service and start to at least get the business model up and running.
00:26:21.125 --> 00:26:32.106
And so all my go-to-market stuff, all my marketing, getting the brand going, that that was able to get started before actually having a SaaS application and that's really exciting.
00:26:32.106 --> 00:26:33.088
And now I have customers.
00:26:33.088 --> 00:26:36.644
Proof Map is the idea probably.
00:26:36.644 --> 00:26:38.563
I started working on the idea in September.
00:26:38.563 --> 00:26:43.115
I started taking pilots November, december and January, february.
00:26:43.115 --> 00:26:50.451
We're getting our first generation of customers and every month I'm learning exactly like I'm learning.
00:26:50.451 --> 00:26:54.654
I'm getting more and more feedback for how we could actually productize this in a software application.
00:26:54.654 --> 00:26:59.647
But for the time being, we can bridge that gap with a productized service offering, which is really exciting.
00:27:00.335 --> 00:27:01.420
Yeah, I love that approach.
00:27:01.420 --> 00:27:02.959
I think that that will result.
