“The commitment to our company goals was impressive, even if it meant a shorter-term engagement” – Jamie Scarborough, Founding Partner at Sales Talent Agency
Sales Talent Agency is a Canadian recruitment company that helps their clients build elite go-to-market teams, whether they are looking to find one key sales role or staff an entire sales team. They get it done the right way, the first time, and maintain one of the lowest replacement rates in the industry at 3%.
LEAN partnered with Sales Talent Agency to help them optimize and scale their B2B side of the business.
Project #1: Customizing the landing page for the B2B audience
Issue: You may have the best keywords, traffic, and most compelling ad copy, but if your on-site experience isn’t tailored to the user journey, you will lose people on the website. Sales Talent Agency functions as both a recruitment agency and a job board. Their B2B page contained a navigation menu which included a “Search Jobs” button leading people to the B2C-oriented job board, and also featured a “Call us today” as a secondary CTA that didn’t align with typical B2B user behavior (companies want a meeting in their calendar, not to just call another company).
We analyzed historical user flow data and saw that although this page had a lot of interaction with the “Search Jobs” and “Call us today” buttons, there was never a Customer that came through those flows.
Solution: We designed a new SEM-specific landing page in a lightweight and fast-launch format, since we wanted to get some insights and gather data before the client makes a bigger investment into a full re-design. The new page featured a few simple modifications:
- A singular, clear CTA.
- Removed top navigation bar to reduce click-aways.
- Headline that communicates a clear value prop and direct benefit to the user.
- A stock background image that visually communicated a more business setting.
- Trust elements added as a few short bullet points above the fold.
- Rotating logos of companies they’ve worked with.
| Results from Project #1: The new Landing Page brought 2x more leads, and had an almost 200% higher Lead conversion rate. |
Project #2: Further refining the Landing Page experience
Issue: As a part of the landing page testing process, we introduced a heatmaps tool which helped us uncover another weak point in the landing page experience – the proactive Chat Bot. Looking at both the desktop and mobile recordings of the homepage, there were obvious hotspots on the “x” command indicating that people disliked the chat bot and were closing it.
In addition, the chat bot was following the same Lead generating flow as the old page, leading people to the Job Board if they said they were “looking for a job”; or asking for their email if they said they’re “looking to hire”.
Solution: We wanted to understand more about the chat bot interactions, and see whether it may be driving quality leads. So, we dug into the previous 1 year of chat bot data to uncover the following:
- 75% of chat bot interactions were people looking for a job (aka not B2B)
- 20% were looking to hire, but didn’t provide an email address (aka not leads)
- 5% were looking to hire and provided an email address (BUT 3.5% had a gmail, yahoo, outlook email address, again indicating that they are not high-quality B2B type of leads)
The final suggestion was that the chat bot, in its current form, needed to be removed from the website because it’s driving a lot of B2C interactions as well as “junk” leads when it comes to the B2B segment of the business which Sales Talent Agency wanted to grow.
| Results from Project #2: Removing the chat bot reduced B2C-oriented traffic going to the Job Board from the SEM landing pages, without hurting B2C access via organic paths. It was a win-win for the user experience on the website. |
Project #3: Scaling, but with the right company type
Issue: We didn’t have issues when it came to scaling… (just look at the chart below)
…but, the issues arose while closely monitoring the lead quality. There were increasingly more Leads coming from small Companies, or Companies looking to hire commission-only sales people that didn’t have a guaranteed annual salary, all of which would be considered a low quality lead for Sales Talent Agency.
Solution: We didn’t want to continue scaling Leads for just volume over quality. We needed to teach Google’s algorithm who’s the right kind of lead for us. Previously within Google ads, we had one event that tracked conversions whenever someone successfully filled out the lead form following the “Hire a sales person” CTA button, and it didn’t matter who filled out that form.
So, we worked with Sales Talent Agency’s developer team to engineer a dual flow that would indicate the Lead quality, and enable us to only train Google’s algorithm to optimize on the higher quality leads. Here’s the logic of how the flows were constructed:
| Results from Project #3: After engineering the new flow, we set up new conversion tracking events, which would allow us to optimize on the High quality leads conversion events. |
Project #4: Sorting out the business-level backend data
Issue: This was one of our first focus areas when we started working with Sales Talent Agency. We asked for access to the backend data from the client to understand the cross-channel mix, and what each initiative is driving for the business.
What we found was that there was one lumped group called simply Google which was driving the majority of the revenue for the business. The problem was that this group didn’t distinguish between google organic, google paid traffic, or direct traffic as separate sources.
Solution: The solution was as simple as a walk in the park. We needed UTM parameters to append to the paid ads URLs and the client was going to be able to tell apart the two channels in the backend.
| Results from Project #4: WE GOT FIRED (and also got a 5-star review from the client)! In fact, this was one of our earliest fixes — proper UTM tracking — which helped reveal that it was Organic and Direct traffic sources that drove real customers. Aside from the obvious improvements we made in the following months, it was this insight that ultimately saved tens of thousands in wasted ad spend and helped Sales Talent Agency rethink their entire marketing mix (aka no need for an agency to be managing their paid ads efforts) |
The real result for LEAN was a happy client who praised us for being focused on the bottom-line of their business, and that we ultimately left their business in better condition than we found it. For comparison, there was another agency that was previously managing their campaigns for over two years and never thought to dig just a little bit under the surface to find tons of opportunities that can improve the business.
That’s why 100% of LEAN’s clients come from recommendations.
