As Marketing Operations Manager at Retool, Jake Levinger’s problem was a familiar one. Instead of removing friction from the sales journey, their website was adding to it. While it was easy for users to sign up for a free trial, their other key call to action—booking a demo—was so far down the page that it was difficult to find. 

When they looked at their data, they found that booking a demo actually had a much larger impact on revenue. Yet it wasn’t a CTA they emphasized and there wasn’t even a dedicated page where users could book a demo. As Jake explains:

“Each demo request, we determined, was worth about a hundred trial sign ups in terms of revenue. We knew we had to optimize that experience.”

But that wasn’t the only problem. Once a visitor did request a demo, the process to assign them to an SDR was manual and unwieldy. There was nothing in place to dig deeper into that prospect in order to put them in front of the right sales team member, and there were no mechanisms to pre-qualify leads, resulting in wasted time and frustration.

All of that meant that Retool’s website wasn’t doing as much as it could to move users through the sales funnel. And the sales team was overextended, with no way to focus their attention on higher-potential leads.

Jake and his team hoped that by optimizing their demo booking experience, they could bring in better quality leads and remove any friction along the way. Clearer CTAs and onsite lead qualification capabilities could also allow them to build out separate sales journeys based on a lead’s potential and the actions they took on the site. 

By pre-qualifying leads with a few simple questions, Jake hypothesized, they could improve the quality of the leads they brought in, which would lead to increased revenue and allow their sales team to better focus their time and effort.

Create a new demo request page—and put it to work

As one of the clearest paths to revenue, Jake knew they had to put more weight on their "Request a Demo" CTA. That meant creating an entirely new demo request page. 

In fact, he saw the potential to add extra functionality to the page. They’d previously only collected contact information, but by requesting critical details like company size and use case, they could learn more about each lead from the get-go.

They didn’t want to add too much friction to the experience, though—potentially giving visitors a reason to drop off if the form took too long to fill. So not only did they create fields to collect more info on leads, but they also enriched each lead, leveraging Clearbit to automatically shorten the form for ~25% of traffic when attributes like company size or job title could be identified. This made form completion as easy as possible while also increasing the quality of their data.

This is what the demo request page looks like now:

Route high-potential leads directly to book a meeting 

With more information available to them, the new demo page lets Retool route leads to the right team—moving smaller organizations to their SMB team and larger companies to an enterprise sales rep.  To further reduce friction, the team also implemented Chili Piper to let prospective customers schedule a meeting with a rep right away. 

“If you meet certain criteria—for example, you have a corporate email and your company has fewer than 100 employees—then if you click the Book a Demo button, it'll pop up the SMB AE’s calendar. If you’re above 100 employees, it’ll pop up the enterprise AE’s calendar. Lower quality leads—mostly those that enter personal email addresses— get passed to the SDR team, who further qualifies them and books meetings where appropriate.”

This is what the Chili Piper pop-up looks like:

Find more opportunities to guide users to book demos

Once the new demo request page was created, it was time to tackle the next hurdle: figuring out when to direct visitors to navigate there. Jake explains:

“If you're on a page for more than 90 seconds—excluding the pricing page and our blog—we fire an Intercom bot that surfaces a CTA to book a demo, and sends traffic to our new demo request landing page.”

Jake also added a CTA to onboarding email flows sending users to the new demo request page, and added CTAs in the product itself.

Iterate!

This is a new initiative, and Jake fully admits there’s more work to be done! Today, he’s collaborating with the sales team to get feedback on additional data points they want for qualification.

He’s also thinking about more experiments he can run to surface the demo request CTA to users who should be seeing it, and not to those who shouldn’t.

Learn from Thomas Maremaa at Brex how to write CTAs to match a visitor's stage of funnel, and remove cognitive friction to get visitors to take action.