Quadrupling Sales in 1 Quarter

SaaS company had great initial growth at launch due to the founder’s extensive network. After the founder’s network was extinguished, the company quickly spun up a typical google ads → demo funnel. The quick pivot lead to an unreasonably high CAC despite and severely inefficient inbound funnel.

Alongside the mentors at the DMZ, I conducted a full audit of the inbound funnel to identify & remove bottlenecks.

The product was purpose built for the largest customers in the market but at the same time was perhaps the smallest company in the competitive landscape in terms of revenue and overall resources due to it being a new entrant into the hyper competitive niche.

The product’s target market being the largest customers mixed with the hyper competitive nature of the relatively small SaaS niche resulted in an absurdly high CAC that often times was higher than LTV. This was due to the companies with the largest marketshare raising large investment rounds to enable them to price out the competition as a denfense to the market's relatively low barrier to entry.

I conducted an audit of the entire inbound funnel as well as lead generation channels. The audit tracked every inbound funnel stage conversion rate to the next stage. The funnel stages that were tracked are: 
- website visitors that clicked on a CTA button (either "Book a Demo" or "Sign up for a Trial")
- website visitors who clicked on a CTA button that actually ended up filling out the form to sign up for a demo or trial
- trial or demo sign ups that became a paying customer
- percentage of first time website visitors that ended up becoming paying customers

These were the results:

The findings revealed significant issues, particularly in the “CTA Clicks to Trial → Demo Signups” conversion rate. While website visitors who clicked the button to book a demo or start a trial clearly demonstrated intent to engage, only 16% of them completed the sign-up form. This underscored the need for an overhaul of the demo and trial sign-up process.
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The 11% demo conversion rate was also a significant bottleneck as it was well below industry standard.

Trial and Demo Sign up Form Revamp
I redesigned both the trial and demo sign up pages with a faster four step process that captured leads at the very first stage. This change reduced the average demo sign-up time from five minutes to just 30 seconds, significantly minimizing friction for users. This new sign up process also captured leads that hadn't fully filled out the sign up form.

Addressing the Below Industry Standard Demo Conversion Rate
We hired a full time employee that specialised in demos to address the 11% demo conversion rate and implemented a post-demo drip campaign.

The results of optimising each stage of the onboarding funnel:

*Visitors that clicked on CTA buttons ended up increasing to over 23% the following week due to Google Ad optimizations
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Combatting Competitors Pricing Out Efforts on Google Ads
Google ads cost to book a demo pre-audit was $190 making CAC through Google Ads over $1600 which was the business' only real sales channel. This cost to book a demo through this channel made CAC:LTV ratio unsustainable for the business. Alongside the website funnel optimisation I overhauled the Google Ads campaigns by targeting keywords not priced out by competitors. This update to the campaign the cost to book a demo from $190 to $52.

- The optimised Google Ads mixed with the improved demo conversion rate resulted in a CAC of $315, an 80% decrease from pre-audit CAC.
- The company went from 8 new customers in the month of May to 40 new customers in August with the same marketing spend.

*If you would like a template of the dashboard that I conducted the audit with, check out the Free Resources page.