Conversion Optimization: How Radius.com Created a Very Clever Testing Methodology to Maximize Trial Conversions

John Hurley is the director of product marketing for a venture backed startup called Radius. Radius has raised about $80M so far. They are selling an enterprise software solution to major brand players like American Express.

Today we have a very interesting conversation! We start with the content strategy that Radius uses to get traffic. Then we investigate their conversion process and the extensive multi-step test they conducted on how customers enter their software trial program.

This interview serves as an in-depth case study on detailed conversion optimization testing. It’s an area I’ve never explored in depth with a guest before and is full of great information.

Focus on how they drove traffic and how they maximized conversions. If you are with a SaaS company the issues discussed in this interview will be near and dear to your heart. Regardless, any company that wants to maximize traffic and conversion can pick up some great tips.

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent:

Hey there bright idea hunters welcome back to episode number 176 of the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs, marketers, and sales executives to discover ways to use digital marketing and demand generation and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business.

So if you’re one of those folks and you are looking for proven tactics as opposed to theories and untested ideas right from the horse’s mouth, from people who are actually using this stuff and getting meaningful results, well guess what, this is the podcast for you. Get all that stuff absolutely for free. So how do I make good on that promise? I bring smart people on and I get them to share with you and with me what they are doing.

And this episode is no different. My guest this time around is a fellow by the name of John Hurley who is the director of product marketing for a venture backed startup by the name of Radius and you can see them at Radius.com. They raised about $80 million so far and they are selling an enterprise software solution to some of the whoswho of brands that we’ve all heard of including American Express, Cox Cable, Home Depot and a whole bunch more.

So in this particular episode we are going to talk for the first bit on content strategy, how they develop their content, what types of content that was working for them. So that is how they get traffic, then again traffic without conversion, that is not much good. So we talked about something in this episode that I’ve never actually talked about with another guest before, especially from a software company and that is the conversion process around getting trials.

In this episode we are going to talk at some length about an extensive multi stepped tests on Self Provision Trials. In other words, customer comes to website and signs up for a trial on their own versus requesting a trial where a customer comes to a website, fills out a form and requests a trial.

There was actually six steps that went from that first call to action all the way through to the trial taking place and we will go into detail on what those steps were, which version one on each step was a higher converter and then overall which path was the winner and then there was a surprise on which one was the winner and one of the reasons why it was so incredibly valuable which is included in the discussion obviously.

So grab your pen and paper and get ready to take some notes. If you’re driving, don’t worry, at the end of the show I am going to give you a link where you can get all the shownotes, you can get the transcript, you can get the whole thing. So don’t try and take notes and drive because we don’t want to have anybody making any car accidents.

And finally before we welcome John to the show just a very quick PA announcement:

If you are looking for help with inbound marketing, content creation, developing a content strategy or demand generation in general that is what our agency Groove Digital Marketing does, you can find us at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com. So with that said please join me in welcoming John to the show.

Hey John, thank you so much for coming to talk with me today.

John:

I appreciate the time, I am excited to talk to you and with your audience.

Trent:

Absolutely, so we are going to have a very interesting conversation today about a topic – you guys are a software as a service company and I’ll allow you to introduce yourself here in just a second so the audience knows who you are and what you do. We are going to be talking about some really interesting things you did around the area of conversion as well as how you are generating traffic for your site.

So folks I think you are in for a really good show. Let me introduce the guest, John over to you. Who are you and what do you do?

John:

Awesome, thanks Trent. My name is John Hurley. I am director of product marketing here at Radius.com. Radius is enterprise marketing software. I have different approaches of talking about what Radius does but at the very high level it enterprise marketing software servicing B2B marketers.

What our platform allows B2B marketers to do is tap into a very comprehensive data set on US businesses and connect that data set into their CRM to leverage their historical data to really understand who buys, who does not buy, what is the profile of their ideal customer, how big is their total adjustable market, who are their top prospects and then create a workflow within the Radius software to then target and acquire those prospects they target in campaigns.

So that is at a high level what Radius does and we are about two and a half years old as Radius. It has been a very interesting ride. We have grown from (when I started here) about ten people to about over 70 now with plans to grow significantly in 2015.

We have had a lot of great customers, everyone from Fortune 500, American Express, Cox Communications, Home Depot as well as some of those pioneering startups. It is really great partnering with those other pioneering startups that are *inaudible* and a few others.

It has been a great ride, a lot of mistakes, a lot of wins, and a lot of grey hairs.

Trent:

Alright and you guys have raised about $80 million from VCs so far, correct?

John:

That is correct, we’ve had the privilege to partner with a lot of great VC firms.

Trent:

Alright, so folks regardless whether you are in a similar business or a prospective customer really isn’t going to matter, what we are going to focus on in this interview is really two big things. One: how they drove traffic because that is critical for everybody. And then how they created conversions or I should say maximize conversions and if you are with a software as a service company this is going to be an issue that is dear and near to your heart; getting trials, user trials because obviously trials are the step before paid customers.

In the second probably two thirds of the interview we are going to be talking about how they tried I think it is three different methods of trials and we’ll get into the details of that so stay tuned.

Alright John so let’s start at the beginning because obviously conversions don’t matter much if you don’t really have any traffic so let’s talk about the strategy. At the very beginning before you started publishing any content,

I am assuming you guys put some thought into strategies so you guys could figure out who your audience was and what you were going to write about and so forth.

Can you tell us about that?

John:

Sure, and that is an evolution that I think a lot of startups go through, is understanding who your target personas are, who your users are. When I started at Radius there was no marketing team at the time and yes that was very much a first project, “Okay, let’s get our first website up and running.” We had a kind of splash page but that didn’t really provide much insight into it; the benefits and who we are targeting.

And it didn’t provide any thought leadership content. So once we really committed to a first user, that changed after about six or seven months but once we committed to a first user we actually worked to partner with thought leaders who already have that backup audience and that is not something that is entirely new to people but essentially we made a list of 25 of what we believed would be the top influencers in this space.

And there is probably people that you have talked to in that space Trent. Basically we just cold called them. We cold called them and basically did a short thirty minute briefing with them with some very concrete ideas of how we could partner on content, in particular just blog posts with those influencers and it was essentially kind of a selling process but from that we got about 15 or so blog posts that really got us off the ground.

These groups of thought leaders were able to introduce us to their audience in a way that got us that initial traction on our blog.

Trent:

Were these fifteen posts, were they guest posts on the influencers’ blogs or did the influencers all write and aggregate the fifteen posts that went on your blog?

John:

There were about fifteen posts on our blog, we also did a few pieces with those influencers. And those relationships also started to evolve to more content. So we ended up doing probably three or four webinars with some of those folks so that basically provided even more slightly further down the funnel content so that we could continue to engage that same audience with the social proof of that influencer like add on campaigns that could actually help us convert readers into leads that we could continue to nurture and eventually try to offer trials to which we will get to.

Trent:

Okay, so in the buyer persona process, tell us about how you determined – I think you called it a first user – is that essentially what you meant by the phrase first user what your ideal customer was?

John:

Yeah, how we defined that and how we discovered and beforehand and when we decided that was wrong?

Trent:

Sure, talk about all that.

John:

For folks that are in marketing technology or sales technologies you might have more affinity to this ecosystem but we originally for the first six months were selling to sales reps, ADs, so really folks that sales user. And that was just a function of the product. We had built really a first iteration of the product and it was built for that user. At first that was really the most obvious or easiest thing to build.

There are a lot of users out there. There are a lot of sales people out there. So we built a product that any sales person that was selling B2B could use pretty easily. And we had this idea that that would give us a lot of users.

At first that was what we thought was important, a lot of users. What we realized was that sales users were not our ideal user for many reasons.

Everything from terms to budget to even the on boarding process, this wasn’t a strategic big ticket software for them. And as I alluded to a lot of people in the States will understand that. The budgets are really shifting towards the marketer. The more strategic value and analytics and a real platform is in the hands of the marketer and so we moved towards selling to marketers which we needed to create a new – basically a brand new product to do so.

In that process a lot of strategic value for our company because of that budget and because we were able to build honestly a stickier product that a marketer can integrate into their marketing automation, into their CRM, into their ad tech platforms and make it part of their fundamental marketing stack. And that is what we really wanted to be part of, was a stack and sales doesn’t necessarily have that stack outside of their CRM.

Trent:

And so once you had figured out that the marketer was the way to go, in any customer there are going to be multiple different influencers or multiple different personas, there is your financial buyer, there is your technical buyer, there is you inside champion. How did you go about figuring out who all those people were and then what kind of content was going to resonate with them?

John:

I think it is a classic content map that we created. It took us about a week or so to really think about the buyer personas. Basically we created several buyer personas, the executive which is putting pressure on the marketer, the marketer marketing leader, VP of marketing, CMO, director of marketing who has now that budget who is pressured from the executive to utilize predictive analytics, integrated software, marketing automation etc.

And then you have that demand generation type person; the person that is actually doing segmentation while launching campaigns, tracking, measuring, sales / marketing ops and then you have the sales leader who is also a big influencer in these deals. We spent a solid week creating those personas; everything from aspirations to their requirements to giving them names and even giving them – [laughing] we even applied a character in Star Trek to each one of these personas.

Because we did spend a lot of time and were really thoughtful about our process of creating those personas but those personas still are our personas a year and a half later. And that is pretty significant in the lifespan of a startup because things are changing so fast.

Trent:

Did you talk to people who are in each of these roles to ask them questions and learn all about them? If not what process did you go through to actually be able to describe each one of the personas? Because you can’t just really guess, that doesn’t work very well I wouldn’t think?

John:

Right, no you’re absolutely right. It was both interviews with thought leaders who know these personas really well; even the thought leaders that we originally partnered with. They did have that perspective and active influence of our sales audience but they didn’t have a lot of insight into the differences between the marketing team and why those things are or are not aligned.

A lot of our first six months conversations was primarily targeting sales so we had a lot of that feedback from sales users using the product but we did have marketers also using the product. So we had that feedback from sales calls from customers and the conversations we were having with marketers were much more compelling so those were really the best conversations; was actually having conversations with the customers.

Trent:

Okay and what types of things were you trying to uncover during those conversations so that you could really flush out your personas?

John:

I think we were really trying to align it with our strategic business goals. We didn’t want to be a $99 a month platform because just the actual market that we are in and the product that we are offering we didn’t see the scale.

Now that works really well for a lot of products but for us we were looking how we could create a platform or a software that is valuable enough to create a different pricing structure; more aligned with something like CRM or marketing automation and who realistically is going to buy that.

We didn’t see VPs of sales buying that or buying a platform that is reflective of what we could offer. That was really important for us; is aligning to that business goal, understanding those personas and then really building a product; iterating on a product that still had the fundamental data integrations and engineering roots but really creating a different interface and different modeling that applies to that different user that allowed us to charge for a more than access to platform type subscription cost.

Trent:

And just so that folks have an understanding of the price point to give context to your comments; roughly what does a customer pay to use your stuff?

John:

It ranges on the very low end to around $1000 a month all the way up to enterprise customers that are paying upwards of $10,000 or more amonth. Very, very similar pricing structure to marketing automation and I’m sure that we’ll evolve over time as we introduce new features and the landscape drastically changes as it seems to be every day.

Trent:

Absolutely, that is one thing you can count on with a startup. Things are going to change. Alright so you got your strategy nailed, now it is time for you to start producing some content so that you can get traffic – and yes folks we are going to get to conversions. Let’s go quickly through what you did in terms of producing content. How much content did you decide to produce and how did you actually produce it and where did it go?

John:

We did really focus in on the blog at first and really creating those partnerships with the thought leaders. We were generating about two blog posts a week, one which was with our partner or thought leader and one that was created internally. And really it was all focused on easy to consume content; so “How tos” “Five ways” “Five best practices” as well as infographics. We do have a design team so we were able to create some infographics. We also leveraged a few cool tools out there to create infographics.

Trent:

Like what? What tools?

John:

I’m trying to remember the name of that. I will spark that memory on the infographic tool because I did think it was pretty cool. I’ll remember what that product was called.

Trent:

Okay folks I’ll make sure I put that in the shownotes.

John:

Yep, it was easy to consume content. It was top of the funnel content. We wanted to build awareness at first. We wanted people coming in and then leveraging those partners, creating an email list, having them subscribe to the blog and then from there leveraging those partnerships to create better, more middle of funnel type content like webinars. We really tried to scale up our webinars and drive people and prospects to the point that we can actually have sales conversations with after the webinars.

But even with the webinars the organic trial requests or Self Provision Trials depending on what we were testing at the time was the number one lead channel or campaign type; it was definitely trial requests. We did a PR as well, it was definitely a factor so as a startup we really did want to leverage our first initial fundraising, leveraging our ARCO founders and as thought leaders. And so really make sure that whatever assets you have, also as a startup, that you are maximizing those in the very beginning. So funding or people that work here; really try to put those out there to raise that initial awareness.

Trent:

So once you started to create and publish content on your blog, how did you promote that content? Did you syndicate, did you use social media, did you go back to those influencers you were building relationships with? Because if no one is coming to your site and you are publishing content it is hard to get it going?

John:

We definitely leveraged social and we are posting pretty consistently on social making sure we are mentioning as many people as possible; trying in any way to tap into companies or thought leaders that already have that active audience that we want to also be incorporated with. That was really the main strategy.

Even when we were writing a “how to increase email marketing conversion rates” let’s just say. We would go to seven different influencers, have each of them offer a tip or a how to, that way when we actually published that blog post it wasn’t just us tweeting or putting on Facebook or adding it to LinkedIn ( we also leveraged LinkedIn groups a lot). We made sure that everyone was part of as many LinkedIn groups as possible and putting those articles on LinkedIn.

We also had seven other people who were mentioned and contributed to our article who were also mentioning the article. So that basically gives you 7x; easy number like 7x the audience in reach and we found that to be really effective. Even to this day, looking at our SEO from Google Analytics a lot of those initial blog posts are still some of our biggest drivers of traffic.

Trent:

Because everybody in those blog posts are also going to share those posts that live on your blog with their followers both on social and maybe even their mailing list, yes?

John:

Absolutely and I will give you one more quick example. We continued to use this strategy even as we’ve grown. We recently offered a 25 Top Marketing Blogs. It was the title of the blog post. And not only are we mentioning other companies or agencies, consulting companies or thought leaders – their blogs. But we have thought leaders and our customers actually offer us what their top blogs are.

It is like adding layers onto who is contributing and who you are mentioning. In one blog post we are saying, “This company or this thought leader suggested this blog post or this blog” and now you have this thought leader socializing and you have that blog socializing. So of 25 blog posts you now have 50 different agents or ambassadors that are publishing that blog post and that blog post alone has driven about 20% of our blog traffic in the last six months.

So that approach works even as we scale.

Trent:

That is a fantastic idea. Hope you are writing notes folks because you know I am. Okay, time to talk about conversions because those are some pretty darn good content and traffic ideas. There is several different ways – as a software company you are all about trying to get people to do trials because that leads to customers. You told me in the pre interview that you had something you call the organic trial which is self provisioned.

Then I think you said you talked to users prior to a trial and then you had people who requested a trial and you walked them through it. Were those the three different ways that you tested or did I get it mixed up?

John:

I like to say in the world of testing people have variations and then there is optimization. Variations are the bigger bucket and optimizations are the little tests. In optimization sense we probably had fifty different ways of doing a trial but on the variations we had two big types. One was Self Provision Trial. The classic come in, click a button, add your information and you are in product versus a requested trial.

We just called it RAT. That is the classic where you are filling out a form and then getting contacted by sales. Those were the two big variations that we tested for a few months and had some really interesting results.

Trent:

Okay, so tell me about it.

John:

Okay so the basic parallels of the flow here were – even today – when you come to our home page; a button that says, “Start a free trial” or “Try it now”. Once you clicked on that button you went into two different flips. We used some different tools to actually track these things and if we quickly go through those they would be Optimizely, we used *inaudible* tool called Heap; which was basically a better way of doing analytics.

Optimizely was for testing. We used a tool called Segment.io which brought in our product user data as well as our web data into one analytics platform. We used Intercom to actually track user engagement and do in app messaging. We tested Walk Me for a very short period on doing in app tutorials. And then we also used Oarc to also do in app messaging or chat.

So a few different tools sets for everybody to check out. Once you clicked on that button you went into two different flows; one flow was (again) simply request a trial form. And we had many optimizations on that page.

Everything from the forms, the buttons, the copy, to the lay out but that was simply fill out form five to seven fields and that would trigger MQL once you filled out that form and you would be contacted by sales and go through a classic enterprise sales process of getting in the demo, being presented there, if you are qualified, creating a trial for you at that point.

Then the other flow was the Self Provision Trial which is where you would come to one page to fill out your personal information. That was a very clean page with a form; a little bit of information about you as the user, create a password etc. And then a second form a little more about the company information. So “how big are you” “what industry are you in” etc.

And then you were in the live application; in the software. And we had a tutorial that walk you through a workflow of how to use the product. And then you were in anywhere from a five to a thirty day trial and that also triggered trial best practices emails or drip campaigns. We were getting outreach from sales and there was in app messaging. And we were attracting all that user engagement through Intercom.

Trent:

Sorry – what is the URL – sorry to interrupt you – what is the URL for Intercom because that is a rather ambiguous word, there is a lot of sites for that?

John:

Intercom.io and that is a great tool. So essentially we ran these tests and optimizations on each one of those for several months. Really it came down to the quantitative results from lead conversions (and I can go through those). It also came down to qualitative things such as engineering resources; “How many more engineering resources are we willing to spend particularly on the Self Provision Trial?”

As most of us know that the golden resource is engineering time.

Trent:

Well let’s first talk about the quantitative results.

John:

Sure, and I will give you our prefaces by telling you what we ended up doing. And tell you through these results and these metrics why we ended up choosing this. So we ended up going with the request a trial landing pages instead of a Self Provision Trial. Again we will give you some of the metrics here why.

At first we just looked at homepage click through rates. We did test a few different call to actions. If we were offering a Request a Trail we would say, “Request a trial” versus on the Self Provision Trial we could play a little more with different call to actions such as “Build your first market segment; things that were honestly more engaging and spurred a little bit more activity.

And so we saw increased click rates on some of those Self Provision Trials. We weren’t able to create those call to actions with a Request a Trial because they were misleading. We would have people click on “Build your first segment” and come in and we would say, “Okay we are going to give you a call from sales” and they were like, “What!

I thought I was going to use the product.”

So we did have increased clicks on self provision. Then we looked at the page conversion rate. That is a classic now. Once you land on this page, how many people were actually filling out the form and totally different flows here because the Request a Trial was just fill out a form on one page and that was it versus the Self Provision Trial, you basically had a two step process to fill out the form. One was your personal one was your company information, so two different pages on that.

Even though that was two different pages on self provisioning we had higher page conversion rates on that self provision flow. So a hundred people came in on both of those flows, we had around 20% higher than conversions on self provision and our hypothesis there was that you are actually leading people into using the product versus the request a trial which is clearly you are going to get called which people really don’t like, so increased page conversions on Self Provision Trial.

We also looked at inbound connect rates; so how often or how likely was it that sales could have a conversation or how likely or how often did they have a conversation with a prospect depending on which flow they went through. At the end of the day in order for us to sell the product we did have to have a sales conversation, no matter what. We actually saw that on the Request a Trial landing page.

Even though it was a lower number we did have higher connect rates from sales. We believe that was because people

was expecting to be getting a call from sales. And then we looked at page views to trial and that was much higher on the Self Provision Trial. We got a lot more people in the product when they had the Self Provision Trial going versus the Request a Trail; almost over 40% more users using the product.

Then we looked at – this was kind of more classic metrics – from lead to opportunity rates and both of those different campaigns and then lead to opportunity time. So could we accelerate people through the sales process if we could get them into a Self Provision Trial faster or into the product faster?

And the last more user data type metric was actual trial engagement so leads that were on a trial that came through request a trial actually had a much higher engagement than those that went through the Self Provision Trial. We saw a lot of drop offs.

We saw a lot of people make it through the on boarding process of filling out forms and going through the tutorial but we didn’t see the type of engagement or activity once they were in that Self Provision Trial which was a big thing for us.

We wanted the product to be sticky and for people to see value right away and therefore have high engagement but we weren’t seeing that as much so those were the metrics that we were really looking at.

Trent:

So you described two and we don’t know who the winner was. Lead to opportunity rate and lead to opportunity time, which was the higher converter, the Self Provision Trial or the Request a Trial on those two metrics?

John:

Lead to opportunity, the rate was higher on Request a Trail. We had a lower number coming through on the top of the funnel so lower total number but the rate was an increase of a little bit over 20% which was significant for us.

And then the lead to opportunity time was actually really hard to track. That comes into some of the more engineering and operational struggles of doing Self Provision Trials because it is simply the integrations into your CRM and your marketing automation.

What we had a hard time doing was we had a lot of trial requests or trials created for opportunities that were already in existence or accounts that were already in existence. We even had customers come in who would somehow find a leak to sign up for a new trial account even though they were already a paying customer and that was difficult to actually then come up with numbers on how long did it truly take for a lead to become an opportunity.

Trent:

Okay so determine the overall winner it looks to me like despite the multiple phases of conversion along the path you would have looked at lead to paid customer. Was that ultimately the piece of data that you looked at that helped you to decide that the Request a Trial was the better way to go?

John:

I would love to say that that was the ultimate requirement or metric there but I think – and this might resonate with a lot of entrepreneurs or really early stage startups – the biggest thing for us at that period was really trying to understand who our customers were, what our pricing model should be and we had a hard time doing that with Self Provision Trials and really taking any significant results and conditioning those into long term strategies when looking at lead to opportunity amount or revenue created.

Because we knew that we were going to be iterating our pricing model. We were still trying to figure out who our users were and for us the actual Request a Trial – since it did create a lot more conversations on the phone for us – so that increased connect rate and higher trial engagement. We were able to really control the narrative there and have qualitative feedback and build a closer relationship with the prospect and ultimately with the customer.

And that relationship early on was crucial for us to figure out what we were building, who we were building it for, how to price it and ultimately how to sell it.

Even though there were winners and there were losers for the metrics on Request a Trial, it came down to some of the software qualitative things that as an early stage startup we needed to understand and figure out. That approach allowed us to have that conversation to figure out our personas, to figure out our pricing model, figure out our value proposition.

Trent:

So that is an incredibly powerful insight, folks I hope you get the big take away from that, is if you’re early on with your startup and you don’t have a lot of this stuff figured out yet, those conversations as John just said with your customers are gold mines of incredibly valuable information that has now helped you guys to improve your product to market fit, right?

John:

Yeah, and I will say that it really does differ from the stage the company is in or the type of product or stage that you are offering. I look at a product for instance like Buffer. And maybe some of you have used Buffer out there and that is a great simple social media tool. The product hasn’t fundamentally changed in maybe four years –

Trent:

Yeah.

John:

– and it is in a space that is pretty well understood and may offer Self Provision Trials and that works incredibly well for their business model. Add in the large number of users, getting them into a very simple product quickly. My insights might be biased just because of the space or product that we are offering or maybe even the approach that we took was not the right approach.

But it did lead us to where we are and we’ve had success there. But thinking about our conversation today Trent, I felt like today I was going to end up bashing Self Provision Trials which I didn’t want to. I was actually a big proponent of them. We wanted to make them work. I was basically thinking of these four different factors to making a self provision trial work.

And basically the first step is your website and the content. And generally you can say the content that you are building, what have you built for yourself as a brand. What is the perception of someone when they go into the trial? Are you going to confirm their perception or are you going to disconfirm their perception. What are they expecting to see and what value are they expecting to experience once they get in.

Actually that is making it work through your website and through the content.

The second thing would be user experience and user interface. UI UX. Once they are there how can you enable them to be successful whether that is through videos, onboard in flows, and just the product itself, making it very useful and easy.

The third one was through community, so making sure – kind of the extension of UI and UX – if people still have questions, how can you create help content or support content or even better, activate your current users and customers to offer best practices to create community around that.

The fourth way was really stickiness. When someone comes into a Self Provision Trial, and this is what we experienced, you saw people get through on boarding and then drop off quickly. They weren’t coming back the next day, and that was a problem for us.

So how do you create stickiness; whether through emailing them best practices or in app notifications or just creating some value that they felt like they needed to come back the next day or if they were running tests they want to come back to see those tests; so stickiness.

I said there were four factors and there is actually five. And the last one was really personal sales responsiveness. I think there are some classic metrics out there that if you don’t respond in under five minutes then the connect rates are significantly decreased.

We do believe that whether it is five minutes or seven minutes we are not going to share but that’s still extremely important when reaching out from sales to quickly help confirm or help them through that Self Provision Process and acting as a consultant with them; not necessarily trying to sell them right away but making sure that you can answer any questions and making sure that they’re using the product in the best possible way.

And through that you will obviously do qualification and more discovery and find out this is a hot prospect or not.

Those are some factors for making Self Provisioning work and we think that the metrics that we use to track that are really important as well and helps us make decisions and decide whether or not we are creating a great experience for our prospects.

Trent:

You said five, what was the one before UI UX, that was the second one, correct?

John:

That was website or generally content. What is the brand or perception that people have when they come into the product?

Trent:

Alright John before we wrap up is there anything that you think we need to talk about to make this interview complete given our promise to the audience when we started or do you think that we have covered it?

John:

I think that was a pretty good session. I enjoyed talking about this topic. I haven’t necessarily had the opportunity to talk about it too much. I appreciate that opportunity Trent; and I welcome anybody who would like to hear more about how we approach things to feel free to reach out to me and I’d love to connect and hear about how you’re approaching this or if you disagree or if you’ve seen different results, would love to connect with people whether that is on Twitter or on email.

Trent:

And your email address is?

John:

john@radius.com.

Trent:

Alright John, that will go in the shownotes as well. Thank you very much for making some time to come and chat with me. I took several pages of notes myself. Some things here that I am actually going to be able to implement for some of the clients that we are working with so that is terrific. On behalf of the audience thank you very much for making some time.

John:

Thank you very much Trent.

Trent:

Alright folks, to get to the shownotes for this episode go to BrightIdeas.co/ 176 and if you enjoyed it as much as I did – and I hope you did – I’d love it if you would head over to iTunes and left some feedback for our show in the iTunes store. It is really, really helpful when you do that. And if that is too much just head over to BrightIdeas.co/love and there is a tweet that you can just click the mouse and it will send it out. It is already pre written for you.

So that is it for this episode. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. If you need help with inbound marketing or demand generation come look up our agency at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com and with that said I look forward to having you back for another episode soon.

Take care, bye-bye.

About John Hurley

With 5+ years experience in building startups, John specializes in empowering growth at pioneering technology companies by coupling superior marketing intuition with a data-driven understanding of customers and markets.

At Radius, John applies marketing experience to determine what to build, who to build for, and how to sell it. He is responsible for creating the optimal product-to-market fit and driving customer acquisition so Radius can own the B2B marketing space and expand into new ones.