Boosting qualified inbound leads by over 300%

Despite having invested $8,000 on a new website — and driving significant traffic to that new site for a year — HiringBranch hadn’t seen a single website visitor convert to a lead.

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So they reached out to Beth Thouin, Forget The Funnel’s Head of Success & Growth Advisor, for help.

Every growth initiative our team leads begins with customer research. This research informs literally everything needed to define new positioning and messaging that will resonate.

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We ran 30-minute interviews with HiringBranch’s best customers to understand:

• The solutions they used before HiringBranch
• The struggle that pushed them to seek a new solution
• What made them decide to try HiringBranch
• Once using HiringBranch, what made them feel certain it was for them
• The #1 thing they could do now that they couldn’t do before HiringBranch

Plus, we complimented customer interviews with thorough competitive research.

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What we learned

• HiringBranch enabled customers to adopted “no interview” hiring model. This was an aha moment for the HiringBranch team. Customers had (independently from each other) defined their new hiring process as a “no interview” process.
• Customers saw dramatically better results across the board. The product worked. It cut time to hire from weeks to days and hired better candidates. All customers saw lower bad-hire rates, better retention rates, and better performance in hires. Gold for social proof.
• Customers loved that the product offered multiple hiring assessments “in-one-go.” Every customer referenced having four hiring assessments in one seamless candidate experience as a huge value-add to the candidate experience.
• Customers are into science! Sometimes high-tech products can be intimidating. Not for HiringBranch customers. They appreciated the product’s scientific approach to assessing soft skills.
• Customers needed a trial to see the proof for themselves. Customers chose HiringBranch because they could do a trial with their proprietary data securely. This proof of concept was absolutely required to get upper echelon approvals.
• Automating soft skills is a new concept for customers. The old way of assessing candidates was a combination of language assessments, personality assessments, and interviews (an attempt to measure soft skill fit). While measuring soft skills was critical, customers assumed automating soft skills couldn’t be done well.

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Preparing for new messaging

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Using the Voice of Customer data collected from interviews, we crafted a Messaging Guide: an evergreen document that directs copywriters on what to say, how to say it, and in what order across all marketing collateral.

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Having a Messaging Guide saves companies from…

• Wasting time recreating messages over and over again
• Inconsistent messaging that confuses the target audience at best, or leaves a negative impression at worst
• Overcomplicating messaging — since, as the people closest to the product, it’s hard to step away from the product and simplify descriptions of it in a way that resonates with people encountering the product for the first time

With the Messaging Guide complete for then “LearningBranch,” it occurred to us that while LearningBranch was an excellent name for the company’s legacy offering (a training solution), it no longer reflected the new core offering (a hiring solution). So we swapped “learning” for “hiring,” and HiringBranch ****was born. Keeping “branch” in the the name helped retain brand equity with existing customers, but also enabled the company better resonate with new potential customers.

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Building a new website

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Research and customer insights: check.

Updated positioning and messaging: check.

Next, we audited the existing website and found several key problem areas:

• Multiple CTAs competing for website visitors’ attention
• CTAs with broken links
• Duplicate content on 7 pages
• No clear description of the product’s value (”what do I get?”)
• No clear division between the legacy training solution vs. the new hiring solution

So we called in Customer-Led Growth certified consultant Kasper Vancoppenolle (co-founder of the website design firm Valued.Be) for help.

Together with Kasper’s team, we:

• Built a new, simpler sitemap
• Built separate product pages for the new hiring solution and the legacy training solution
• Consulted with SEO and content consultant Chandal Nolasco da Silva on keywords, title tags, meta-descriptions and a re-direct map
• Wrote copy using exact words and phrases from our customer research
• Peppered in social proof, data, case studies, and product illustrations
• Built a “Book a Demo” intake form with proper segmentation questions

HiringBranch had gone an entire year with significant website traffic, but no visitors converting into leads.

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Within 12 days of launching the new website, the team saw:

4 qualified inbound leads from multi-million dollar prospects

8 downloads on case studies (2 of which assisted a demo request)

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Whats more, the HiringBranch had a trade show coming up and asked for advice on how to grab the attention of people passing by their booth.

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We armed the HiringBranch team with a theme — the “no interview model” — and used it as the core of their trade show marketing collateral (see t-shirt design below).

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The result? HiringBranch’s attention grabbing t-shirts generated 18 qualified leads and dozens of conversations. The trade show was a success! 🎉