Having a lot of leads is a good problem to have. Except when those leads are not the right fit for your business. If not fixed early, this issue can cause major problems for your business down the road.
For us, this problem resulted in not meeting customer expectations, difficulty matching pricing to value, difficulty focusing on what to improve in the product, and a muddled marketing message that perpetuated the problem.
By leveraging data to qualify your leads, you can find your niche and grow your business by focusing on that niche of customers that are the right fit for your product or service.
The problem with not qualifying leads
One of our challenges has always been focusing on our main value proposition. With a product like Daylite that does so many things for so many different types of businesses, our marketing message got muddled over the years. We ended up with customers whose needs were vastly different which made pricing Daylite extremely tricky as well as selecting which areas of the app to focus on improving.
For some businesses, Daylite was their CRM or sales tool, for others, it was their project and task manager. And other businesses just used it for the calendar or for keeping track of contacts.
We tried to be everything to everyone. The problem with that is that there’s no focus. It became difficult to market Daylite and we had customers asking for feature improvements that were all over the map which made it impossible to please the majority. Adding what one group of customers wanted was irrelevant to others and vice versa.
Another challenge was pricing Daylite. For customers using Daylite to manage customers and sales, they were surprised Daylite didn’t cost more. Whereas when it came to other customers that just used Daylite for keeping track of their tasks and a few projects, they felt the price was too high. We couldn’t win.
The importance of finding your niche
To start to fix this problem, we needed to nail our niche. In the past, we said YES to everything and spread ourselves too thin. We now needed to focus on the most common needs of our buyers and customers and start saying NO to whatever didn’t match that. Basically, saying NO to fringe cases so we could focus on the majority of what was working well.
How we found our “right fit” customers by qualifying leads
We needed to identify what the “right fit” customer was for us. This meant identifying trends and leading indicators of what worked to get and keep customers.
We started capturing information about every lead we spoke to and focused on prodding questions to figure out the main business problem they were looking to solve. Our goal was to identify and match the buyer needs with the value Daylite offers so we knew what needs to focus on.
The process started by creating a Form in Daylite where we could capture information about our leads that we spoke to, then be able to filter and identify trends to nail what was working.
We created a form with the following questions that our team filled out during and after a call with a lead.
- What was the main business problem that they’re looking to solve? (So we know their pain points to focus on in our marketing message)
- What does success look like to solving that problem? (So we understand their expectation and whether or not we meet it)
- What part of Daylite WOW’d them and convinced them Daylite was the right tool to solve that problem? (So we know the high-value features in Daylite to focus on getting trial users to see early on)
- What friction points in the app prevented them from seeing that value on their own? (So we know what to improve in the app to make it more intuitive so they see value sooner)
- What other apps are they trying? (So we know who our direct competitors are and the market we’re competing in)
- What questions did they ask? (So we know what needs to be more prominent on our website or in our emails during their trial)
For every call we had with someone in a trial of Daylite, we filled out these questions in the form. We then tracked if they subscribed to Daylite and added the keyword “Subscribed” to the form if they did become a customer.
Once we had a decent sample size of these forms, we started filtering through them to look for trends and insights.
The first thing we did was focus on the ones that subscribed. We then filtered the forms with the keyword “Subscribed”. We then started sorting by the main business problem they were looking to solve.
We started to see trends. The most beneficial part of this was having words that the customer used on the call to describe the business problem they were looking to solve. This helped us craft our marketing message. By using the words buyers used to describe their problem, we could create a message that resonated with the right people. We knew the specific pain points they were looking to solve.
The results
Once we started tweaking our marketing message on our website to focus on these pain points that customers were describing, we started to see something amazing. Our conversion rate of traffic to trial signups on our website doubled! On top of that, our conversion rate from trial signups to subscriptions also started to increase and those customers had higher retention. We had found our marketing message that resonates, and were getting better-qualified leads!
Conclusion
This is an ongoing process for us and while we may not have quite nailed our niche, we can tell we’re moving in the right direction. Through this process, it’s helping us identify who our target market is, the needs they care most about solving, and what needs to be improved and made more obvious in the app to show them that value. By continuing to make small tweaks regularly, we’re getting close to nailing our niche.
About the author:
Kristie Holden is the former VP of Marketing at Marketcircle/Daylite. She’s now an online marketing consultant. She helps startups get more leads by clarifying their message and creating a marketing strategy to attract and convert their ideal client. Connect with her on Instagram.
