The Simple SAAS Play with Shaun Clark

In this episode, Shaun Clark—the Founder of HighLevel Software—and I unpack a simple strategy to increase profit, retention, and impact in your niche. How? By adding a simple SAAS offer for your clients. Every one of the prospects in your niche needs lead conversion automation, reputation management, and website chat.

We’ll discover how you can put a simple highly profitable offer in place to:

➣ Have something for all those prospects/leads that are not a right fit for your core program

➣ Increase your stickiness to the clients you already serve

➣ Maximize profitability & retention in your agency

➣ Increase your rankings on Google

We’ll also cover just a few of the ways the SaaS play can benefit your business including:

➣ Reputation management

➣ Google my Business messaging

➣ Google my Business missed call text back

➣ Text to pay

➣ Web chat

➣ Two-way text messaging

➣ Text to pay

➣ Facebook messenger

Sounds promising, right? Don’t miss this one!

Outline of This Episode

• [1:50] The potential that exists
• [4:41] The features of SaaS
• [11:02] Google my Business messaging
• [19:47] GMB missed call text back
• [24:53] The text-to-pay integration
• [27:36] Reviews + Google dispute tool + Facebook Messenger
• [29:12] How do you sell SaaS to make money?
• [41:33] The special incentive for those looking to test the SaaS plan
• [45:37] Q&A session with Shaun

The potential that exists

Thryv is a publicly-traded company—that handles every yellow page company you can think of—that makes $1.3 billion in revenue. They’ve made a hard pivot from the world of selling yellow pages to selling SaaS. What’s exciting about this? They’re selling a white-label version of the platform vcita. They’ve grown their client base and the average revenue per user by 26%. Those numbers are phenomenal. They’re the yellow pages! Customers are paying an average of $304 a month. Shaun believes it’s about selling software and technology in harmony to create value. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. It won’t change your approach but add to it. How? Your customers will use it.

The features of SaaS

Everyone is familiar with reputation management, right? Alpine Heating & Air Conditioning came to Shaun’s house and did a phenomenal job. He was so impressed. When he went to leave them a review, he found they only had 12 reviews on Google. So he asked the owner, “What if there was a piece of software that would automatically help you get more reviews?” Shaun charged $300 a month for the service. He went from 12 Google reviews to 365. He went from two trucks on his lot to 13 trucks. Obviously, it’s working! It’s a good example of how SaaS can be used for reputation management.

Another win? Shaun put the web chat widget on someone’s website one day before recording this webinar—the only change they made. Before the day was over, this client got two new leads. Web chat is a simple example of how to generate free leads for a client overnight.

Google my Business messaging

If you go to Google and search for “Visionary Law Group” you’ll see a chat icon on GMB. It’s a pop-up in-browser chat experience. You can chat with that business through Google. It’s not only an awesome way to connect with customers but a huge change at Google themselves. They’ve seen Yelp, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, etc. steal their traffic. They’re not going to let that happen anymore. They want people to stay on Google.

They’re running ad pilots with 20–30 agencies right now. Eventually, they’ll offer desktop support, payment integrations, reservations, and more. It’s going to be a massive integration for Google. Alpine Heating & Air had over 4,700 searches that GMB tracked. As of right now, GMB messaging only shows up for direct searches. As of next month, people just looking for an HVAC company and not explicitly typing in “Alpine Heating & Air” will see the messaging option as well. As soon as they turn this feature on, you may see a flood of business overnight.

Even more interesting: Google will now use this as a ranking factor. So anyone using chat boxes on their website can get a bump in rankings. Google will look at the length and quality of the conversations (because, of course, Google’s “goal” is to return the best results). Over time, this will result in higher search rankings.

The workflow just went live in HighLevel today and will have a visual builder to do campaign creation, automation, and automatic chat responses. Automatic responses will be the default when you do set up GMB chat integration.

Listen to the whole webinar to learn about the GMB missed call text back integration!

The text-to-pay option

Every time a customer wants to collect payment from someone, they can create a link in HighLevel that allows them to do it. There’s a button on the conversations page that says “collect payment.” You enter their information, the charges, implement a due date, and save it. It will generate a link that you can send any way you like. It pulls up a page to pay immediately or pay with a card. It’s a simple yet powerful payment function integrated with Stripe (PayPal and other payment platforms will be added at some point).

How do you sell SaaS to make money?

HighLevel recently rolled out the SaaS plan for agencies. You can choose what you charge your clients, what credits you’ll offer for free, and whether or not to offer a free trial. You can take Twilio costs and mark them up. These tools help you create margin. Your clients are paying a markup for text and email software—why not do it through you instead?

You can create a landing page and have clients sign up through that page. It’s exactly how they do it at HighLevel. After the client fills out the order form, an account is added, the credentials are sent, the credit card is captured, and when the person logs in they see the exact feature set that you defined—nothing more.

If you don’t know how to set it up, HighLevel offers a service to do it for you. You can charge the client a setup fee and use some of that to pay HighLevel. They’ll set everything up and do a small training on the basic features. HighLevel has options for ongoing support as well.

This is a great play to create instantaneous value for leads that don’t qualify to work with your agency! HighLevel is continuing to add new features and integrations to help you and your clients succeed. Listen to the whole episode to hear Shaun answer all of the questions that arose during the episode!

Resources & People Mentioned

• Shaun is also giving you guys a 30-day FREE trial of HighLevel’s SaaS Pro Plan – CLICK HERE
• thryv
• vcita
• Stripe
• Twilio
• Podium
• Birdeye
• Chiefmartec
• Yext

Connect with Shaun Clark

• HighLevel

Connect With Josh Nelson

• Josh’s Coaching Page on Facebook
• The Agency Success Facebook Group
• www.SevenFigureAgency.com
• Seven Figure Agency on YouTube
• Josh on Twitter: @joshnelsonimc
• Josh on LinkedIn

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