How to increase demo bookings? | Interview with Sean Leonard from Active Demand

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Introduction

In today’s episode, we are talking to Sean Leonard who is the CEO and co-founder of ActiveDEMAND. Sean is an entrepreneur with a track record of profitably growing technology-based product businesses. He has extensive experience in building global sales organizations, advanced e-marketing strategies, market-leading brand equity, and an execution-focused corporate culture.

ActiveDEMAND is a marketing technology provider that helps businesses generate demand, improve conversion velocity, build brand advocates, and demonstrate marketing effectiveness. It enables marketers, agencies and businesses to supercharge their marketing efforts through streamlined campaign management, campaign recipes and attribution reporting.

We discussed online marketing strategies and the role of the website for ActiveDEMAND. For example, Sean shares with us his insights about how he has increased demo bookings. Tune in…

See an abstract of the interview below…

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Pathmonk: I was so excited to ask you that question about which role the website plays. It seems to be a crucial one. What type of metrics do you care about? Because obviously when you’re, especially specifically with your tool, you can look into a lot of stuff that would be going on the website. What do you care about?

Sean Leonard: Yeah, so it’s a good observation definitely for digital marketing. I think the website is a, it’s the store, right? It’s where you’re the first engagement people who are really noticing you, they will come to the website. Typically our whole approach is to step one, just get people to the website. Definitely for us, like we’re not trying to boil the ocean. We know which verticals that we’re doing good business in and which ones we’re accelerating. I would say a big metric for us because we’ve got the entire loop is which channels from first touch all the way through true to a subscription are doing the best. Really our job is from a metric is to accelerate the velocity for those channels that are working as opposed to spending a lot of time (…)

Pathmonk: (…) how did you improve your own website to generate more demo bookings? Because I think a lot of folks in the SaaS world would be curious to hear that from your angle because you have the tools basically on hands. Any sort of things that you learned.

Sean Leonard: Yeah. It’s interesting is that when we’re selling software, the thing that most marketers lean on is a form, right? As I need somebody to fill out a form. One of the small changes mistake we made, were, we’ve made lots of mistakes making like we used to be a marketing agency when we built our platform. That’s how we bootstrapped. We built lots of websites and I think the biggest mistake we made in websites and then you see it all over the place, well easy mistake number one is putting your email address on the website. That’s absolutely a huge mistake. Interestingly, number two is you see all the websites, the top right corners reserved to the contact us right? It is perfect real estate. For years we wasted just like everybody else, we wasted that real estate on a link that nobody was going to fill out. You switched it to book a demo and then we offer a time slot, right? Which is a huge value. Once we get the time slot, let me tell you, people will tell you their life story. They’ll fill out the longest form ever. Because they want to use their time wisely. It was an actually measured the impact cause we had the, before we moved to contact link to and replaced it was 530% improvement in conversion rates by making that change (…) We start upfront with the time slot. After that, we’ll, the journey somebody’s going to go through. They’ll just keep giving information, giving information and because they’re thinking to themselves, Oh, I need to, I’m going to give up some of my time.I’m going to make the best use of it.
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