What does it mean to ‘stretch’ your business?
We sat down with digital entrepreneur Jeroen De Broyer from our customer Stretch Innovation to find out just that.
This innovation agency prides itself on its hands-on approach, working with companies, large and small, in a wide range of industries such as telecom, food and beverage, real estate, healthcare, technology, and agriculture.
Recently, they implemented guided selling tools for a couple of their clients powered by our Pointerpro assessments.
In line with a guided selling approach, these fully automated selection tools help prospects easily identify the right services or products. Instant recommendations are integrated in the guided selling software, so potential customers can reach a buying decision more easily.
Let’s hear how they went about it and get their key takeaways in this new interview.
Want to know more about guided selling before moving on? Check out our page on guided selling assessments.
First of all, can you explain to our followers what Stretch Innovation does and shed some light on your overall mission in helping companies ‘stretch’ their business?
Stretch Innovation is a growth and innovation agency. We explore, create, validate and launch business concepts and sales channels to generate more revenue.
We help companies with their growth by focusing on 3 things: digitization, innovation, and growth hacking. For example, we focus on digitizing internal processes, or in innovation, we develop new business models and go-to-market strategies.
In my role, I’m a growth hacker and responsible for business development. Growth hacking is a process of experimental and rapid iterative techniques to accelerate the growth of a company. We use different marketing techniques to discover as quickly as possible what works and what doesn’t work to acquire prospects and turn your existing customers into real ambassadors of your brand. Everything we do for the client is substantiated, based on data and analysis.
You’ve used Pointerpro in some campaigns for clients. Could you tell us a bit about what your clients do and what particular challenges they faced?
We’ve used it for 2 clients thus far. The first one is a real estate agent, and the second is an importer and distributor of a well-known agricultural tractor brand.
For both clients, the focus of our collaboration was to increase their lead generation results.
Both strike me as fairly traditional industries. It’s positive to hear that they find their way to agencies like yours to experiment with digital marketing. How did you get the idea of using a solution like Pointerpro to help your clients with their challenges?
We try to ‘hack’ the growth of our customers. In our projects, we usually start with a survey to get an idea of what our clients’ customers are doing and their interests.
From this research and various brainstorms, we concluded that it could be interesting for both clients to make a certain kind of ‘calculator’, or ‘guided selling tool’ if you will, to obtain very valuable data through the questions that were asked and to help their clients reach a decision faster by offering a first recommendation or answer.
With growth hacking, everything is tested and validated first before we would have it fully developed. For this, Pointerpro was the perfect solution.
It is possible to create a guided selling tool very easily through Pointerpro. We send traffic to the assessment through ads or put it on the website if there is enough traffic. Then if we notice in the analytics that people are dropping out or stopping at a certain question, we have a very easy way to delete or adjust that question.
These very accessible and customizable features are what attracted us to Pointerpro.
Did you get any measurable results that you set forth from the beginning?
With both guided selling assessments, the main purpose was to try if your tool was something that could be used to do lead generation.
It turned out that it was. Plus, we did accomplish actual results and valuable leads, so that was a nice bonus.
What criteria did you have while searching for a tool? Why did you choose Pointerpro, instead of another solution?
We chose Pointerpro because we were looking for a tool where we could easily make adjustments after the different analyses so that the guided selling assessments could be fully optimized for lead generation. We found it to be really hands-on and easy to set up or make adjustments.
If we had to build a custom solution, then it would have been much more difficult to do the adjustments and also bound to be more expensive.
How long did the project take?
The tool is very intuitive and easy to set up. The first one took a bit longer because it was the first time we had worked with Pointerpro. But now that we have experience with the tool, we can set up a guided selling assessment for a client in less than 2 days. Completely up and running and ready to test. So really fast. With questionnaires, a big advantage.
Who’s reaping the benefits from your assessment solution? And which ones exactly?
For us, the tool is very useful because we want to be able to set up and modify things quickly. We can quickly test, implement and adapt the learnings directly. That way, we can provide a great service to our clients. It’s all possible with Pointerpro.
We conduct many experiments to see how we can generate the most leads.
For our clients, it is very convenient and accessible. Once we have developed a working and successful guided selling assessment, they can take over the management and add some questions, even after our project with them has finished. And the client already has the possibility to provide value to their customers through the guided selling tool by showing them a simulation or guiding them to the right service or product.
In terms of traffic on the website: how did you manage to get people to fill out the form once they got there?
Homeowners are already being promised an initial appraisal of their property via the real estate agent’s website. Here we noticed in the analyses that many people stopped at the mandatory step of uploading photos. By changing the setting while also clearly indicating that it was fully optional to add any photos, we significantly increased the conversion rate.
For our tractor importer and distributor client, an initial suggestion was made of which tractor would best suit you. Here we saw an increase in conversion once we adjusted the copy and call to action on our ads from ‘find out’ which tractor suits you best to ‘configure’. The framing at the beginning of the guided selling assessment turned out to be very important.
Can you tell us anything about the impact the project had on the client in terms of sales?
Our goal for these specific projects was to generate leads, actual sales are further down in the process.
With the real estate agent, there was a cost of 7.25 EUR per lead. For leads where there is already so much information passed on about the house and why they wanted to sell it, this is very valuable information at a low cost.
For the tractor importer, we saw significant results too. First, we tested Google Ads with landing pages, where we generated leads at about 25 EUR per lead. Which in itself is not a bad result for a tractor that costs more than 100,000 EUR.
Then we also ran Facebook Ads, where we had an average cost per lead of 16 EUR and the cheapest we hit was 5 EUR per lead.
The third experiment we tried for the tractor distributor is that we added campaigns. So we had Facebook ads in combination with Pointerpro’s guided selling assessment. The third time was a charm, because we achieved a cost of 1.90 EUR per lead, and we also got much more information from this tool than from the first 2 experiments. For a tractor of more than 100,000 EUR, these are certainly great results.
Why should someone else do a similar project?
As a growth hacker, I always advise everyone to test and try many things before they try building anything custom. We have learned many times from our experience that if people can receive something through a guided selling tool, it gives positive results.
But again, I recommend testing this in a way that adjustments can be made easily. So that not too much money is invested in something that ultimately does not work. But again, don’t try to build a custom tool, but use Pointerpro to test a guided selling tool to see if it works for you. You can do it quickly, it’s so easy to set up and make any adjustments. And it looks professional!
Wonderful. Thank you so much for this interview and for your time. We are excited to continue working with Stretch Innovation and your clients.
Watch our full interview with Stretch Innovation:
