Creating Future-Proof B2B SaaS Marketing | Josh McNicholas from Evalu-8

Ernesto Quezada: Pathmonk is the intelligent tool for website lead generation. With increasing online competition, over 98% of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in their buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments. With relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more, stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50%. Add Pathmonk to your website in seconds. Let the AI do all the work and get access to 50% more qualified leads while you keep doing marketing and sales as usual. Check us on pathmonk.com. Welcome to today’s episode. Let’s talk about today’s guest. We have Josh from Evalu-8, head of marketing with them. How are you doing today, Josh?

Josh McNicholas: I’m fantastic. How are you?

Ernesto: I’m doing great. Great. Thank you so much for connecting. I know we have a little bit of a time difference there, so I appreciate you being on with us today. Well, let’s kick it off then. Josh, in your own words, tell us a little bit more about Evalu-8.

Josh: Okay, so Evalu-8 is a B2B SaaS company based here in the UK. We have customers all over the world, UK, Europe, United Arab Emirates. We have three core products. We have HR software, health and safety software, and then a combination of the two. Our main goals and our main mission at Evalu-8 is to service those that are looking to consolidate their HR or EHS into one platform that can be accessed from anywhere by anyone and do everything without limitations for one price.

Ernesto: No tricks, no mirrors.

Josh: No tricks, no mirrors.

Ernesto: Okay, well said. So that way, our listeners could get a good understanding there, Josh, of the company. Would you say that’s the key problem that you guys like to solve or are there other problems that you guys like to solve?

Josh: That’s a little journey I’ve been on since I joined. I joined in January last year as head of marketing, and there was no real positioning or clear problem we solved. The company didn’t have that. And when I came in, I couldn’t understand why. I was like, but there must be something that we do. And as I’ve come to learn, we do solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. So, for example, on the health and safety side, we get people coming to us usually because they’re looking to digitalize risk assessments, Cosh, which is to do with chemical handling, or Ram’s documents. On the health and safety side, it might be document management, it might be employee self-serve. There’s usually one core problem that people come to us looking to solve, and then they see the breadth of the software and realize exactly how much they can solve. So, we now lean on one of many fronts, depending on who we’re talking to. But we know the back end of the conversation is always going to be the same, which is going to be, look at how much you can actually solve. It’s definitely more of an educational process for the prospect than it is a clear-cut problem to solve.

Ernesto: Definitely. All right, and so then what would you say? Is there a certain segment, a vertical, an ideal ICP for Evalu-8?

Josh: I’d say we do really well on the HR side, on the health and safety side, in the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing sector, we absolutely clean up, and we’ve worked with a lot of our manufacturing customers to develop the software further, certainly on the time and attendance side, and various other bits. So it’s really well suited for them. Although, I mean, this week alone, I posted today on the LinkedIn page about just a handful of customers that had come on board and the absolute range of industries they come from, from manufacturing right the way through to fine arts and everything in between. So although we internally believe we do well with manufacturing, we don’t specifically target them. Like I said, we just lean on the people looking to solve, say, risk assessments in a health and safety niche.

Ernesto: Okay. All right, perfect. Thank you so much for sharing that. So say I was in the manufacturing business and I’m looking for a solution. What would you say is Evalu-8’s top client acquisition channel for you guys?

Josh: My primary focus is organic and paid ads and the website. When I joined, there was very, very little, almost no inbound. I think in the first month I was there, I tracked maybe three inbound leads that came through while I was still trying to figure out what this company was. But now we’ve managed to shift that successfully. So a massive focus for me is the messaging and the positioning. And that gets tweaked almost every two weeks. I tweak it because I learn a little bit more about what the customers want, what they need, how they talk. It’s more about how they perceive our product than how we perceive our products. And I’m a big believer in that. Just go with what they say, not what you believe. So website organic is a massive focus for me. I really want to win in Google. There’s so much opportunity there for us on the health and safety side, and then the paid ads, Google PPC is purely just to supplement that at the moment. But ideally, I’d move away from paid ads as quickly as humanly possible.

Ernesto: All right, great process. And so that way, our listeners who are tuned in could go ahead and visit you. They could always check you guys out at evalue-hs.com. What role, then, does the website play for client acquisition, Josh?

Josh: So that is twofold now, really. It’s developed a lot. Like I said, I change the messaging and positioning now less drastically monthly, but it’s the content I’m adding. So we’ve got, obviously, the front end inbound, which is either request a full demo, call us, or watch an instant demo on the website itself. So we’ve got the front end, and then we’ve got the back end, which is all the educational material that we’re putting out there that our sales team can then use during the sales process. Or we have email sequences that we then send out to our customers during the sales process, depending on where they are, to further educate them. And the goal of that is to make the whole process smoother for our team and for the customer so they don’t have to ring us as much, ask as many questions, they get all the answers they need as quickly as they can, ultimately to qualify us as the right choice for them if we are.

Ernesto: That’s funny. Okay, awesome. And on that note, then, Josh, is there any tools or tips or methods that you would recommend to your listeners as far as some website lead generation?

Josh: It’s a bit out there, but do inbound sales. I firmly believe marketing and sales should work together closely. If you’re a B2B SaaS company anyway, unless you’re products led, then it’s a little different. But if you’re not products led and you do have an outbound sales team like we do, answer some of those inbound calls, because that’s the best insight you’ll ever get. Better than any tool I can imagine is just going face to face with the customer. Not necessarily face to face, but over the phone, talking to them, listening to their initial questions. How are they asking those questions? What are they asking? More importantly, why are they asking those questions? Because that will not only flag to you what you can write content about to capture those search results, but it also tells you what’s missing from your website that they’re looking for that they haven’t yet found. And if you can answer that and you can act on that, you can get to a sale much quicker, hopefully. B2B, it’s not always that simple, but you can get that confidence at least much quicker, which is the name of the game.

Ernesto: Okay, awesome. Great. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Well, let’s switch gears a little bit, Josh, and let’s talk about you as a leader, you being the head of marketing there. I mean, you saw that you had to over to the British HR awards. I mean, you’re doing some fascinating things there at Evalu-8. So what are some key tasks you’re focused on in your day-to-day work?

Josh: I’m spread thin, but for me, I have must-dos, should-dos, and then a column called move the needle. And the move the needle is what’s going to improve the number of inbounds that we do. What’s one action I can do that day to improve the number of inbounds we get or make the process smoother from instant demo to full demo. And that is usually one or two things. It’s either tweaking the ads, reviewing the ads, digging into the data, or it’s playing about with the messaging. Somewhere on the page, be it on the homepage, on a landing page, or even, today was the pricing page. Looking at the pricing page for our EHS side, just tweaking little words, running little experiments, seeing what gets a better result.

Ernesto: Okay, perfect. Awesome. Great to hear that. And in the between cracks when you do have some time available, because it sounds like you have a full plate on your hands, Josh, how do you stay up to date with all the marketing strategies and trends out there in the world today? Is there a preferred channel that you like to stay updated with all that information?

Josh: Today on my commute is podcasts. I don’t have one or two that I listen to. It entirely depends on what my focus is going to be for that month. If I know, for example, I really want to up email marketing next month, hypothetically, I go deep on podcasts. I then go deep on LinkedIn. I find absolute gems on LinkedIn. It’s not necessarily follow this person and that person. I just follow as many people as I can and consume as much as I can because at some point in the day, you are going to find a little bit of gold in there. And yeah, that’s it. And TikTok, occasionally, surprisingly, TikTok does produce. I mean, there’s a lot of fluff on TikTok, and there’s a lot of people spouting stuff from about five years ago and trying to wrap it as something new. But occasionally you do, again, get some real gold on TikTok.

Ernesto: Definitely would agree with you on that note. Surprisingly, but it’s here to stay, so great. Well, let’s jump into our next section here, Josh, which is our rapid-fire question rounds. Are you ready for them?

Josh: Yeah, go for it.

Ernesto: Definitely. Awesome. All right, first off then, Josh, what is the last book that you read?

Josh: The last one that I read or the one I’m reading right now?

Ernesto: The last one.

Josh: The last one was “Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford because I was going deeper into messaging and positioning.

Ernesto: Okay. All right. And then the current one?

Josh: The current one is called “Deep Work.” I forget who wrote it, but it’s basically about how to get more done and get into the flow state quicker so you can achieve better work in a short period of time.

Ernesto: Okay, perfect. Great reads there for our listeners. Next up then, if there would be no boundaries in technology, Josh, what would be that one thing that you want to have fixed for your role as a marketer today?

Josh: I’d automate everything. You could argue a lot of it could be automated, but I don’t have the time to automate it, let alone the know-how to do it all. But I’d automate everything but the messaging and positioning. I really enjoy doing that, so automate everything else for me. That’d be fine.

Ernesto: Okay, perfect. All right. So then what is one single thing that your company is focused on at the moment the most?

Josh: Health and safety, our EHS software. We’re really doubling down on that side of the business.

Ernesto: Okay, perfect. Awesome. And then lastly, Josh, you do have a lot of experience already in the marketing world. I mean, you’ve grown here at Evalu-8 over the past 16 months with tremendous improvement. So, what is that one piece of advice that you would give yourself if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today?

Josh: For the first job, join a very large B2B SaaS company and learn from everyone. Surround yourself in a company where there is a large marketing department, and you can learn from everyone. I didn’t do that. I started off on my own, fresh out of university, working with businesses, and that is a regret that I have. I feel like my growth curve could have been much quicker and much better had I surrounded myself with others who knew more than me.

Ernesto: Perfect. Awesome. It’s great to hear some great advice there, right? I think college education is good, but that experience from somebody that’s dealt with it already is always nice. So great to hear that from you, Josh. And Josh, we are coming to the end of the show here, but before we do end, I do want to give you the last word. So if someone forgets everything about the interview today, what is that one thing they should remember about your company?

Josh: We do the best HR and health and safety software on the planet. That’s it. Hands down.

Ernesto: Well, there you guys heard it. You can always check them out at evalue-8.com, software designed by industry professionals for teams of any size. Josh, thank you so much for being on with us today. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to our next episode at Pathmonk Presents. Thanks a lot, Josh.

Josh: Thank you so much.