Win Report: New lead funnel increases SaaS demos by 58%

Published: March 2024

Win Reports help you to grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each article highlights a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

What if you could increase conversion by repurposing existing content? In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how adding a new lead funnel increased demo requests by 58% at a European SaaS company.
The Sherpany platform on tablet and phone.

Sherpany provides a meeting management platform for the C‑Suites and boardrooms of elite organizations.

Sherpany’s website receives less traffic than many of our clients, but that doesn’t preclude conversion rate optimization. To learn more, see How to successfully apply our methodology when you have low traffic.

Research: Finding the audience

Sherpany’s ideal prospects are senior executives and board members. Despite this, our analysis of the website showed that:

  • The most popular pages offered general “meeting management” advice.
  • The high-level strategic content was hard to find (and rarely read).

Few of the Sherpany’s visitors matched the ideal customer profile—and those that did often left with the wrong impression. The two most common objections to Sherpany rested on the misconception that it was “just another meeting solution”—rather than a platform to improve the meetings at board, Executive Committee, and C‑level.

The top two objections read, ‘We use MS Teams (17%),’ and ‘Already have tools for meetings, (16%).
The top objections highlighted a perception problem.

These misconceptions were costing Sherpany qualified leads. How could we emphasize the company’s strategic nature and better engage with ideal prospects?

Step 5 of our methodology is spotting the hidden wealth in your business:

“Each of our clients has had elements within its business that would have been highly persuasive to its prospects but that the prospects never saw. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets and then present them to the prospects at the right time in the buying process.”

As a leader in its field, Sherpany has published numerous expert articles on the issues around Digital Transformation, an urgent strategic challenge within many C‑Suites. The problem was that almost no one was reading it.

To test an alternative approach, we turned dozens of the company’s best articles into a Digital Transformation strategy guide and offered it as a lead magnet.

Creating a new lead funnel

Although the website included newsletter signup forms, this wasn’t an A/B test in the traditional sense. We were testing a completely new lead funnel.

In our variation, the following overlay appeared after a set amount of time:

A modal sits over the page, with copy and an email signup form. See below for details.
The Variation: An overlay appears over the content, promoting the strategy guide.

The overlay teased the free, high-value content by:

  • Leading with a benefit-driven headline.
  • Listing key takeaways as bullets (or fascinations).
  • Concluding with a relevant desire (accelerated transformation).

Users who opted in were given the chance to join the newsletter on the following screen. Once downloaded, the whitepaper also linked back to Sherpany’s demo funnel.

Everyone who saw the overlay—whether they claimed the PDF or not—understood that Sherpany was not “just another meeting solution.”

Result: A 58% increase in demo requests

Although the test increased newsletter subscriptions by 535%, the real value was a 58% increase in platform demo requests.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Sherpany’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

A few words from Charlotte Linde and Marco Mancini, of Sherpany

“Our experience with Conversion Rate Experts has been exceptional,” says Charlotte Linde, Senior Growth Manager at Sherpany.

Thanks to Sherpany for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

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