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Marie, VP of Marketing, predicts that she can increase conversions to sales by at least 40 percent. She wants to conduct a series of disruptive experiments that make everyone nervous. Scott, VP of Sales, is especially on edge. The lead-to-contract rate is already a respectable 7.1 percent for this not-so-new marketing technology B2B SaaS. If Marie is right, it’s a homerun. But if she’s wrong, Scott is predicting a debacle on an epic scale.
You’re in charge. Would you give her the green light?
She got the green light.
I want to tell you how and why she succeeded. The best part of this story is how very little it had to do with us. The hero of this story is Marie’s team and a business process called Buyer Legends that encourages a customer-centered, data-driven, customer-experience design approach that is supported by narrative.
For good reasons, our client preferred to remain anonymous, but while they’re not Apple or Coca-Cola, they are known in the Marketing Technology community.
After seven months, Marie had gained confidence in her team’s skills. The team is not so experienced, but they are exceptionally talented, driven to succeed, and eager to learn, as we discovered while training them. The Buyer Legends process we taught gave them a strong sense of how customers navigated the company’s existing persuasive system. They understood their customers and the challenges of their customers’ journeys.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a persuasive system is any system developed to change users’ attitudes or behavior or both. You have a persuasive system too, even if you haven’t thought of it that way. Lead generation is just part of a system that starts at attraction and encompasses every interaction the customer has with your company through to retention and advocacy. Thinking about the entirety as a system allows you to apply total quality management techniques to optimize it.
The company’s product isn’t truly complex. It just approaches a marketing challenge in a somewhat unconventional way, so that in a feature-to-feature comparison it can seem to be inferior. The product is designed to reduce complexity, so it deliberately ignores some features and emphasizes a different approach. For many customers, the reduction in complexity is a huge benefit and produces spectacular results. The real challenge was the reputation the company developed for secretive sales practices.
Scott developed the sales approach when he replaced one of the company’s founders in the role of Sales leader. The Marketing team then consisted of one person focused on search engine traffic and a copywriter. Scott hired top-notch sales people and asked marketing to simply deliver a qualified lead and his team would take it from there. So why the secrecy? Salespeople are usually trained to demonstrate value before discussing price, and they couldn’t explain the value unless they could demonstrate the product. It worked. Scott and his team made it rain.
The Marketing team was armed with a robust set of Buyer Legends. These are stories that are told from the point of view of customers. They understood why their own brand wasn’t what they claimed it was, but instead reflected how their customers experienced their interactions with them. There were several challenges that needed attention in those stories but the 800-pound gorilla in the room was the perception that non-customers held that the product was too complex and the sales process was very secretive.
The Marketing team was confident that they could change the story. They wanted to change two things:
Scott was skeptical but willing to be convinced about changing the product description. However, he was near apoplectic about changes in the lead qualification changes.
Too often, companies are so focused on managing outputs like conversion rates that they lose sight of the inputs. The trouble with obsessing about output is that you are not in control of the output. Nevertheless, you do control the inputs. The output is simply the result of inputs interacting with outside forces you cannot control. To succeed, you must focus on the inputs where you have significantly more control. In a recent hour-long interview with Business Insider, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos does a great job of describing the difference between outputs and inputs in a business.
Both Scott’s and Marie’s teams understood the outputs that would be measured. They were conversions to qualified lead and qualified lead to contract.
1. Reduce friction in the attraction portion of the lead generation path with better product descriptions. The evidence of success would be indications that more visitors were engaging with content.
2. Create persuasive momentum to compel qualified prospective customers to move forward. The evidence of success would be indications that qualified prospects converted to sales more often.
The stakes were high.
It’s one thing to recklessly proclaim, “We are going to increase conversions by 40 percent,” and quite another to confidently state, “We observed that 42 percent of customers are falling out of the funnel at point C because we believe they need (fill in the blank). If we give them a better option at point C, we are confident that we can move at least half of those people along to point D."
What Marie told Scott and her CEO was, “We are going to increase conversions by 40 percent. We have devised a series of experiments to test the two hypotheses we’ve developed as a result of our Buyer Legends. We will start small to gather evidence that the hypotheses are correct, but then we’ll have to run a final, more robust experiment that we will stop if our micro-conversions, at any step of the funnel, drop by 20 percent.”
The Marketing team ran several experiments utilizing the hypotheses they developed. Some made little or no difference, but one test provided a significant win and provided real evidence that they were on the right track.
The lack of transparency about pricing was creating the most significant friction in their funnel. Prospects in middle-to-late buying stages were unwilling to commit themselves to the sales process because they had no idea if the company’s solution would solve their problem or fit their budget. This was too big a challenge to test directly.
The hypothesis, based on the Buyer Legends process, was that a “Before You Buy” checklist would be a valuable and relevant resource for prospective customers who were in the early-to-middle stage of their buying process, in order to help them begin to narrow down their choices. The checklist would frame the company’s solution by comparing apples-to-apples benefits rather than features.
The Marketing Team created a long, detailed blog post that thoroughly addressed the single most important benefit of their solution. This post was targeted at early-to-middle stage prospective customers who were identified as part of the Buyer Legend process. They also developed a “Before You Buy” checklist to accompany the post, downloadable as a PDF with no registration required. They paid to drive traffic to it but within a week the earned media was outperforming their paid media traffic. After thirty days, their leads barely increased but their cost per lead went down almost 10 percent. However, that wasn’t the big win. They also found that repeat visitors to their website increased by 13 percent, and that those repeat visitors were 17 percent more likely to convert to a lead. The big win was that sales was able to close almost 9 percent more sales from leads.
Scott and the Sales team, while initially resistant, noticed the difference in customer behavior between those who had the checklist and those who didn’t. In turn, they began to adapt their sales process as well.
Even if the data and tracking weren’t perfect, there was real evidence that this approach could work. Their product was demonstrably superior to their competitors for the right type of client, and they started to gain confidence in the story they were telling themselves about what matters to customers.
After almost a year, the lead-to-contract rate has increased from 7.1 percent to 10.8 percent. That’s well in excess of Marie’s 40 percent prediction. As predicted, the biggest wins have come from creating more transparency. They continue to optimize using this process.
When we retell this story, people are surprised at Marie’s boldness, but from our perspective it wasn’t bold, because she didn’t pull that number from thin air. It was risky for sure, but she trusted the process to uncover the true inputs. She was committed to understanding the entire persuasive system in order to spot the leaks in the funnel. If these experiments’ results had come in much lower than her predictions, she still would have gained some critical insights and then developed a new hypothesis and corresponding tests. It’s only with those kinds of insights that she could confidently make a bold prediction.
Had Marie not dangled a 40 percent prize in lead-to-contract rate, it’s likely that she never would have developed traction in persuading her company to implement a smaller scale test. The result might have been ordinary. Most companies are content with removing less risky friction points for smaller gains.
Accountability is not just taking responsibility for the output of your marketing, but rather taking responsibility for the input. When you are creating or optimizing a persuasive system like a lead-nurturing path, and you understand the inputs of that system, the outputs take care of themselves.
I’d like to encourage you to be bold, take accountable risks, and by making the customer the hero of your story, become the hero of your company. Are you willing?
Bryan Eisenberg is coauthor of the Wall Street Journal, Amazon, BusinessWeek, and New York Times bestselling books "Call to Action," "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?," and "Always Be Testing." Bryan is a professional marketing speaker and has keynoted conferences globally such as SEMA, SES, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, Econsultancy, Webcom, Gultaggen Norway, the Canadian Marketing Association, and others. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of several venture capital backed companies. He works with his coauthor and brother Jeffrey Eisenberg. You can find them at BryanEisenberg.com.
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