Welcome to TouchPoints, the newsletter that breaks down marketing collateral from top SAAS brands for inspiration and analysis.

This week we’re looking at Hubspot’s homepage, plus ads from Kustomer and Pandadoc.

Hubspot

Full Homepage

Homepage Hero

Kustomer

Linkedin Ad

Pandadoc

Linkedin Ad

Observations

Why Commit to Product or Sales Led?

I don’t think this necessarily applies to everyone, but many of the large SAAS companies I investigate seem to follow the same convention seen in Hubspot’s Hero above.

Namely, their CTA section splits the difference between Sales-led and Product led.

This is great, especially for the homepage of a product that has such a wide array of use cases and broad group of potential customers.

Hubspot is quickly building enterprise tools, but it’s unlikely an executive at a 1000+ employee company will see the value in their product by creating a free account.

And to be fair, that is true of most SAAS products. It’s tough to demonstrate enterprise use cases in a demo, trial, or free version.

But Hubspot is also trying to keep their downmarket dominance. Small startups that start using the CRM and add features as they grow. This is their bread and butter. No reason to get rid of the product-led CTA.

So like many other companies in their “weight class” Hubspot splits the difference with a double CTA.

Many CRO experts will tell you to never make a page with two intended actions. I’d bet Hubspot has tested this and concluded it’s the best way to keep from alienating anyone who is researching their product.

What Does "Improve Customer Service by 45%" Mean?

I’m not sure what is going on over at Kustomer. I only heard about them because they were bought by Meta. I have never met someone who uses their product, and I am not sure I will be featuring them going forward.

This ad is really tough to make heads or tails of.

The design is pretty good, but the copy leaves a lot to be desired.

“Paying less for a customer platform”, Ok good start.

“Give customers a better experience”… How so?

Then in the image, it says “cut costs by 25%”. I like how they are quantifying their pricing in the greater CX industry, but they have no indication of what they compared their price to.

Then comes the big blunder of the ad:

“Improve customer service by 45%”.

If that is true, awesome. But how did you calculate that? What are you actually measuring? Customer surveys? Net promoter score?

And if they can back it up, that’s great. Maybe the thinking is that writing it this way will entice a landing page view, and they will explain the math on the landing page.

Trust me, you are better off clearly stating how you concluded that (very round seeming) number on the ad itself.

Industry Data & Partnerships to Prove Your Outcome Claims

Pandadoc’s ad is a much better example of how to use stats and figures to contextualize your outcome claims.

While I’m not fully sold on the opening line, it does accomplish its basic need.

From there, we have a great example of a partnership/integration ad that uses social proof’s nerdy cousin, Industry Data.

These are hard hitting facts for anyone who is handling proposals and contract documents.

20% lower customer acquisition costs. That’s not fluff, that is a real figure. We don’t have much context on where it came from, but it is sure to pique the interest of anyone responsible for lowering CPAs at an organization.

92% reduction in proposal creation time. An incredible and well-quantified outcome if I’ve ever seen one.

This ad takes you to a case study showing how a PandaDoc customer achieved these results using Pandadoc’s integration with Hubspot.

This is the type of thing that can heavily influence the research process that often occurs before a prospect gets in touch with sales.

Take note.

Any Questions?

Looking for more explanation about the elements of messaging that I highlight? Check out my guide here.

Anything further? I'm happy to take a break from exploring the wider world of marketing & eating chocolate chip cookies to address your questions.

Email me here.

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend our thanks to the following companies for providing examples and insights that made this edition of TouchPoints possible:

• Adfolio - For their awesome repository of B2B ads, with excellent commentary.

• Founderway.AI - An awesome resource that helped me better figure out how to run this newsletter, and forever friends of TouchPoints.

• Concise Copy - Pavlo is an absolute expert at homepage copy. Check out his value prop canvas for a super useful resource.

• Growth Therapy - Amanda is more B2C than me, but her insights about paid media and growth marketing are always welcome.

I sincerely appreciate these folks for providing great content and inspiration. It's great thinkers like these that allow me to deliver the best of modern SaaS marketing to you, our subscribers, every week in TouchPoints.