Design Pickle runs a high-velocity business model, meaning the sales cycle is short. So short, in fact, that it’s not uncommon for a deal to be closed-won on the first call. What a treat!

Because the sales team is busy, well, selling, that means marketing is on the hook for 100% of pipeline. No outbounding, no prospecting. Just good ‘ol fashioned inbound marketing. 

This means that Design Pickle’s sales and marketing must operate in lock-step. If ‌deal velocity slows down, or the close rate decreases, they won’t hit their revenue targets. For them, efficiency is the name of the game.

Jennifer Osgood, Senior Director of Marketing, saw a problem. 

“The marketing team was generating a ton of qualified leads. However, when we looked at the data, less than 10% were actually converting into any kind of opportunity”.

If the lead doesn’t book a demo, the cost of acquisition goes up and sales won’t have enough pipeline to stay busy.

This observation caused the team to pause and think about how they could solve this disconnect simply and quickly. 

During this discovery phase, they needed to look at the on-site buyer journey to see where the disconnect was happening, so they could craft a plan to fix it. 

They went down the list of questions to diagnose the problem:

• Were they driving enough traffic? Yes, they could see, from their analytics, that the volume of traffic being sent to their request a demo page was constant and healthy. 

• Were they driving qualified traffic? Yup! After looking at their paid ads accounts and CRM, they could see that they were sending qualified audiences towards the demo page. 

• Were visitors completing the form? Not quite. Some were, but the conversion rate wasn’t high enough to drive the amount of pipeline that the sales team needed. 

Because Design Pickle was processing so many demo requests, they needed to collect enough information to route these leads to the correct sales rep. 

This meant that they had a 4-step form that needed to be completed before a prospect could book a sales call.

From this research, they came up with a hypotheses: prospects aren’t reaching the end of the form because they don’t know how many steps are left. The conversion rate can be improved by informing them when they have just one more step to go.

Identify where the dropoff was occurring

The form was doing a great job at making sure the leads are qualified, however it also discouraged a large percentage of users from finishing the process. 

As Jen explains, intentional friction is something that is built into their booking form, by design, to make sure that the leads are serious. This involves multiple screens that ask specific qualifying questions. 

The downside is that even serious leads can give up if they feel like there is an endless amount of questions to answer, when in reality their form only has 4 steps:

• Step 1: Email and company name

• Step 2: What services are you interested in? 

• Step 3: Personal information

• Step 4: Book a time

To find where they needed to focus their efforts, they did an analysis of the form flow. What they found was 90% of prospects moved from step 2 to step 3. Nice! That’s a great conversion rate. 

But then only 50% of those prospects made it to the final step to book a demo (aka the step that matters the most). That meant that tons of prospects were coming sooo close, only to bail at the last step because they didn’t know. That gave Jen an idea…

Reassure prospects of the last step of booking a demo

Jen wanted to test if showing an alternative heading on the last step in the form would be enough to inform prospects that they’re almost done.

So they tested it. The control header read: “Let’s get personal!” 

And the variant read: “Just one more step!”

They used Mutiny to implement a 50/50 split test on that header. This allowed them to instantly test their hypothesis and begin to collect results.

Learn from Alexa at Pendo how she recovers lost leads on their website by giving visitors a softer CTA when they're about to exit.