S2E15: How to optimize B2B marketing funnels for growth -- ft. Bas Hennephof, Co-Founder of Convert Calculator

Main Insight

Instead of targeting a broad audience, concentrate on particular industries and their unique use cases. This enables you to tailor your messaging, content, and solutions to meet specific customer needs. This funnel-focused approach enables B2B marketers to systematically optimize each stage of the customer journey with targeted, industry-specific strategies, resulting in higher conversions and more efficient growth.

Guest Bio
Bas Hennephof is the co-founder of ConvertCalculator, a no-code builder for interactive content such as calculators, quizzes, lead pages, product configurators, and quote forms. He has extensive experience in business, design, marketing, product, and strategy. In the past, he founded an online startup accelerator, coached multiple innovation teams, and led a corporate innovation initiative at the largest bank in the Netherlands.

Practical Steps

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):
   • Identify the specific industries and use cases where your product or service provides the most value.
   • Develop detailed personas to understand their pain points, needs, and decision-making processes.
2. Map Out Your Customer Journey Using Funnel Metrics:
   • Outline each stage of your funnel: awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.
   • For each stage, list the actions customers take and the conversion rates associated with them.
3. Create Industry-Specific Messaging and Content:
   • Develop landing pages, blogs, and marketing materials tailored to each industry and use case.
   • Use language and examples that resonate with your target audience's specific challenges and goals.
4. Develop Targeted Templates and Tools:
   • Offer templates, calculators, or interactive content that address the unique needs of each segment.
   • Ensure these resources help customers quickly realize the value of your product.
5. Implement Systematic Measurement and Analysis:
   • Set up analytics to track conversion rates at each funnel stage.
   • Regularly review data to identify drop-off points and areas for improvement.
6. Run Focused Experiments:
   • Prioritize one funnel stage at a time and conduct A/B tests to optimize it.
   • Implement changes based on data-driven insights and measure their impact over time.
7. Enhance Onboarding and Activation Processes:
   • Customize onboarding experiences based on customer segmentation.
   • Provide relevant support content, tutorials, and guidance to improve activation rates.
8. Maintain Team Alignment and Communication:
   • Involve all team members in funnel optimization discussions.
   • Use collaborative tools to ensure everyone is informed about goals, strategies, and progress.
9. Stay Disciplined but Flexible:
   • Set clear quarterly goals for each funnel stage and stick to them.
   • Be open to adjusting strategies based on performance data and changing market conditions.
10. Seek Continuous Feedback and Iterate:
    • Collect customer feedback to understand their experience at each funnel stage.
    • Use insights to refine your product offerings and marketing strategies continually.

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Transcript

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Okay, so today I'm sitting down with Bas. He is the co-founder of Convert Calculator,
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which is a no-code builder for interactive content like quizzes,
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calculators, lead pages,
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and he has extensive experience in business, design, marketing, product, and strategy.
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In the past, he actually founded an online startup accelerator.
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He's coached multiple innovation teams, and he's led a corporate innovation
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initiative at the largest bank in the Netherlands.
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So, boss, I am super excited to chat with you and dig into your background. Likewise.
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Likewise. Thank you for having me.
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Yeah, absolutely. So could you tell me a little bit about what led you to co-found
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Convert with Calculator?
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Yeah, actually, it's an interesting story because my co-founder,
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Joris, he's the technical co-founder.
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I met him coincidentally. He started this product.
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He usually or before worked as a freelancing developer, but every freelance
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developer wants to start their own startup.
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So he was working on some side projects. One of those side projects was Convert Calculator, actually.
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And I worked with him from a business perspective, because if you're a lone
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wolf, it's sometimes a bit difficult to keep all the plates in the air, so to say.
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So we would sometimes meet up
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and then discuss different topics about the business, about the product.
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So we did that for a couple of years, but the product started growing and growing
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and growing and growing.
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And eventually, he learned that he could really use a co-founder.
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And at the time, I was wrapping up a corporate innovation initiative.
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So yeah, timing-wise, it was very good. And we decided to link up.
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And that's how I became the co-founder of Convert Calculator,
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with mainly the focus on the overall product strategy and the business side of things.
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But obviously, we're a small team. So responsibilities shift.
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In a small startup, you wear a lot of hats. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Cool.
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So since you've been building Convert Calculator, what would you say is the
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main insight that has allowed you to grow the business or promote the business?
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Yeah, so with Convert Calculator, we allow users themselves,
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so it's a no-code tool to create interactive content.
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And a simple, everybody has, maybe not everybody, but a lot of people have built
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landing pages, for instance.
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But that's static content. So you have landing page, landing page builders.
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We have interactive content. So you have a sort of similar content as a landing
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page at different elements that you can bring alive with Excel-like formats.
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So it is, what I want to say, it's a very horizontal product because it can
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be a lot of different things for a lot of different people and a lot of different businesses.
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So it has a lot of use cases within a lot of industries.
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And that's awesome, right? Because it gives you a lot of outs,
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but it's also a real challenge because it requires focus, and focus requires
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saying no to a whole lot of things, which is very difficult.
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But in order to be successful, we need to focus. So we have an industry approach
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where we connect specific use cases to specific industries, and what really
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helps there is funnel thinking.
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So thinking in the funnel from your specific industry use case combination,
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right? because it forces you to think about who is the exact customer.
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You have to have the persona, the profile, the audience.
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And what specific pain points are they trying to solve? How can they solve that with your product?
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So all of that really helps you create the proper messaging.
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So we have, for instance, different industry pages on our landing page as well.
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So we can cater with more direct content to different audiences.
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Instance but it also helps in different templates for
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instance for them to get started to to go
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successfully through the activation activation state so digging down into the
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the funnels and yeah that really helped us with yeah with our industry use case
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approach so i would say that's the main that's the main thing okay that building
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funnels kind of allows you to be to look more
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specifically at that entire customer journey.
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And it helps you kind of like improve over time and kind of have a systematic
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way of improving those conversions, right?
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Yeah, indeed, indeed, indeed. Because it also helps us deliver the right content,
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create the right content,
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create the right templates, create the right support structure with support
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videos, but also working with channel partners, for instance, and,
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So you really need to learn about the industry, about their specific pain points
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and how your product can solve it and then help them solve that successfully.
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Because like I said, we are a do-it-yourself product. We try to make it as easy
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as possible, but there's still work to be done.
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And different industries come with different personas, different people,
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and they all need to be successful in our product.
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So sometimes I'm anxious or not anxious. I'm jealous about businesses that have
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a really specific, that target a really specific niche because they can focus
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their entire company on that niche.
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And for us, it always itches because we can do so much more and there's an abundance
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of ideas and opportunities.
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But then, no, getting back to the drawing board and sticking to your plan and
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working from those funnels, it really helps.
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So it kind of helps you stay focused on what is really most important to be
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building or what's the most important thing that you could be working on that's
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going to benefit your customers?
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Indeed. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, indeed. So to make progress, you need to take steps,
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many, many small steps, steps ahead.
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And yeah, dialing it down into a level that's concrete enough and a funnel approach
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helps with that. It helps you, allows you to make the progress,
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to define actions and finish actions and continue.
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Yeah, I'm curious, what was it like before you started taking this funnel-based
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approach to systematically learning about customer pain points and improving your product?
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It was chaos, right? Because we could do so much for so many people, right?
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And our name is, for instance, Convert Calculator, because that's how we started.
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It we we created for instance quoting
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calculators yeah but but over time
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the product and the functionality functionality grew and
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we're not a calculator anymore it's way too it's
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way too narrow so yeah it's and then we started thinking about our positioning
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and what are we are we interactive content builder but that's also that's also
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vape right so you need to narrow it down in order to make sense to people coming from a certain angle.
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If you have a cleaning business, you get a lot of quotes, quote requests online.
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Okay, for you, for that cleaning business, we are a way to automate that first
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part of the sales funnel with a quote calculator on your website and start getting
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those quotes automatically instead of you having to answer phone calls or emails all day.
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And for a different kind of industry, we're a different product or it can be a different product.
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But yeah, like I said, the industry approach, it really helps.
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Okay, that makes sense. So let's say that I work in a BB SaaS and I want to
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start being more systematic and intentional using conversion funnels to figure
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out my audience and what to build with my product.
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So like step-by-step, what advice would you give me in order to implement that.
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Yeah, I would say the pirate metrics funnel, going from awareness to acquisition,
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activation, retention, revenue referral.
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Those are the top line funnel steps.
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And then work your way from the top down again and again and again.
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So for instance, on activation, you have this funnel where people sign up for your product.
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What happens after the sign-up? So you start building your level one funnel,
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for instance, but that's still very high level, right?
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And then you pick one step of that funnel and you start dialing it down again
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into different funnel steps.
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And there you will find issues to improve or work to be done,
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different pain points or how your solution can solve for those audiences.
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Audiences so starting starting pretty
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high level and then taking each funnel step
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and dialing down onto into that funnel step
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that i would say is a pretty systematic approach and you will also learn that
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you will do that you don't know a lot but that will give you give you that will
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give you the clues to do some further uh yeah customer exploration for instance okay you said something
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really interesting because I have, I'm aware of these steps,
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awareness, acquisition, activation, retention.
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Referral. But the idea of picking one and then saying, okay,
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we need to fix our awareness piece.
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So now let's look at these six steps again and try to figure out within the
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awareness piece or within this very specific thing that we want to fix,
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what are the pain points and issues of
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customers like for that specific piece of the
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overall marketing funnel yeah and
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indeed so for awareness for awareness you
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need to define who your customer is because if if
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you cannot define who your ideal customer is you cannot
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define the channels to reach them right so and
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then you start thinking about doing all that work the customer
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segmentation building personas whatever strategy
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you like to employ and then
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for instance start building your awareness funnel i
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i don't know it could be a solution that you set up
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with with search engine optimization or with
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different ads leading to the end of the awareness funnel which is the acquisition
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sometimes they they are taken together but i like to separate them to the acquisition
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step where people your audience lands on your landing page and recognizes your
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message and also finds your message desirable, right?
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So they take the next step on within that funnel.
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And for us, it's a sign up to the free trial.
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But a lot of things happen for your audience when they reach your website, right?
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So you can build a funnel for that as well.
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So the highest level step is, okay, I come from an ad, for instance,
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I click on the ad and I land on my landing page.
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That is the high level step. And then you can dial down that high level step.
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Okay, when a visitor lands on the landing page, he starts reading the hero,
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the header, and he maybe looks at a video, he starts scrolling,
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he clicks through a couple of pages.
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Those are also different steps you can think about and analyze in a way.
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And everything is a funnel is conversion, right?
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Because for us, it's very important that every visitor we attract,
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as many visitors as we attract, we want to convert them into customers.
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But customers is way down the funnel.
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A lot of things need to happen before people eventually become a customer.
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And the same thing applies to a visitor, a new visitor on your website,
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from visitor to sign-up.
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Everything is conversion and conversion rates.
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Conversion rates are usually pretty low, which can be a bit depressing.
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But for us, improving conversion rates with % already has massive effect.
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Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Cause I assume you guys are getting a lot of traffic, so.
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It's, it's, it's work in progress, but the more traffic you get there,
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if you can just improve conversion rates minimally in each of those different
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steps, it has huge effects.
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So approximately when you're, when you're doing this, approximately how long
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is it taking for you to see results in terms of like a higher conversion rate at each of these stages?
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Yeah, so I can share a recent example where my co-founder, Joris,
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has focused a little bit more on on-site SEO.
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So improving the webpage, creating new pages with all the different keywords,
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research etc but also fixing some fundamental
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fundamental issues on our
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website and we saw instant results
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we we saw maybe a percent increase in in traffic obviously you need a little
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bit of time to see if it's significant and and if it's not from a singular yeah
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from an outlier, of course.
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So some things can go pretty quickly. And also with each action you take.
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Each experiment, so to say, you have the experiment, but also how you will measure it, right?
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And when you will feel that you are successful or not.
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So, for instance, an activation experiment could be that in our onboarding funnel,
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we ask some qualifying questions to our new users.
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And based on their answers, we provide specific template options for them.
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Because then we can match the customer and the specific template better.
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And the idea is, the hypothesis, if you would like, is that you help them become
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successful easier in a way.
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And you can measure that. You can measure how many people fill in that segmentation.
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You can measure how many people actually start with that template,
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start working with that template, publish that template, have that template
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on their website, and start gaining visits on that.
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So all of the things, if you dial it down to a deep enough level,
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you can build, measure, learn in a way, which is obviously the lean startup approach.
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But lean startup is sometimes a little bit vague. But if you dial it down to
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a detailed level, detailed enough, then yeah, you can really make progress.
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That said, it's a lot of work, right? We are a small team and we have way more
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ideas than we can put to action.
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Because a lot of times I hear podcasts with people who say, yeah,
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you work with a marketing team and a product team and a customer service team and a sales team.
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To us, it's only a couple of persons in a way.
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So we wear a lot of hats. that does make us pretty efficient as well because
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we punch way above our weight with product, with marketing, basically with everything.
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But still, it's still a lot of work.
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And that has me a little bit curious about,
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maybe what are some of the pitfalls that people might encounter counter as they
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try to implement, you know, this conversion funnel and conversion rate optimization
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at different stages of the funnels?
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Yeah. So in a lot of teams, it's separated functions, right?
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So being a smaller business allows us to have insight into all the different steps, right?
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So we can really connect all the dots. And if you work with bigger teams who
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have separated responsibilities, that overall holistic overview might not always be there, right?
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So it really requires a lot of communications between the different functions as well.
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And to me, that can be a pitfall, right?
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Because then you spend a lot of time on communicating instead of producing,
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instead of really making actual progress.
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So yeah, there's always a balance there. So how do you handle that balance, if that makes any sense?
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How much of your time as a founder within your team is spent on improving conversion rates?
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And how do you balance that against everything else that needs to get done?
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Yeah, it's difficult. It requires a lot of discipline.
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We only have a success rate of %, for instance.
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Instance, where our goals or our internal goals are just not met because you
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are observed by just the daily business and all the other things you need to do.
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So yeah, there's no magic pill. It's just discipline and discipline is hard
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and it's also hard for us.
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We have, like I said, half of the time we are not disciplined enough,
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but a hundred percent discipline is difficult.
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Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, but indeed, we are growing the team.
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And when you're growing a team, it becomes more difficult, right?
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So then probably new structures need to be in place.
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However, you still want to stay productive.
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We prioritize productivity over the rest.
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Okay. So is this like an ongoing initiative? Like, do you just,
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you just set some metrics like that you guys want to hit and it's just part
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of like your quarterly goals or, or whatever.
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And you say, okay, well, we want to focus on like the acquisition,
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activation and retention part of like this, this, this, and this,
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and this, these are our percentage goals. How do you manage it?
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Yeah, I can give an example because you can, you can work backwards,
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right? So we have a certain revenue goal, just to call it an arbitrary number.
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But say we want to hit a million in revenue per year. We know what we do right now.
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And we know the funnel steps. So we know how many customers we need in order
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to reach that one million.
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We know our conversion rates. So we know, for instance, how many visitors we
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need to attract all the way down in the funnel.
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And there's little dials that we can turn because within that funnel,
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for instance, in the activation step, if we are able to activate a little bit more users,
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then we have to attract less new customers or less new visitors because our
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funnel is becoming more efficient.
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And if you dial it down to these steps and apply specific actions within each
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step, right? So, for instance, for attracting new visitors, you need content, you need pages.
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So, yeah, we need to create new content every week, for instance.
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That's a process that you put in place.
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After a while, how you measure it, you measure if that content ranks already.
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You measure if visitors start appearing from that page.
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You can measure what they do after they land on the page. Do they sign up?
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If they sign up, do they become active?
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If they become active, are they becoming a customer?
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So everywhere, there's different dials you can turn, but it all needs to be in balance, right?
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So if I attract visitors a month on my website and almost nobody signs
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up, I do really well on the awareness step, but I do horrible on the acquisition step, for instance.
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So in your entire funnel, there can be things that can be optimized, basically.
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Okay, that makes sense. So it's like you're setting these overarching goals
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for something like the amount of customers that you want to get.
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And then you say, OK, well, let's focus on a piece of the funnel or let's try
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to set let's try to set metrics for each piece of the funnel.
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Like we need X amount of visitors and we need X amount of people going to the
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landing pages. And then you try to optimize each of those.
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And then once you optimize it, like, let's say you make more landing pages or
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you improve your landing pages, then the conversion rate goes up.
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So then you dial down the amount of traffic that you projected that you would need.
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Indeed. Indeed. And if everything works in your favor, you go way past your goal in a way.
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But it's not a perfect world. I would say we are a bootstrap company.
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So we are an actual business. We make more money than we spend.
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And that also requires you to be disciplined in a way.
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It's not so difficult to grow something if you lose a lot of money in the process.
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Process sometimes i would say it's it's it's it could also be beneficial to
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have a little bit more free cash flow where things can fail in a way and because
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you it all has to it all has to do with the,
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correct balance between being opportunistic and and being too being too rigid in in a way.
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So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.
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Well, I really appreciate this, Bas.
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And as we're wrapping up, I'd just like to ask if there's any projects you're
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working on, anything that you'd like people to know, and anywhere you'd like
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people to get in touch with you?
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Yeah, we're always working on cool projects. So indeed, if you are a marketeer,
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then interactive content, that could be the next new wave that will help you
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improve your conversion rates in your process.
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So really do check out the product, ConvertCalculator.com.
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Play around with it. It's a super
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versatile, flexible product and have a little bit of a learning curve.
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But we are working on that to alleviate, lessen the curve. But if you want to
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create cool things, you sometimes need to put in the effort.
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So yeah, I would say check out our website, play around with the examples.
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And if you're inspired, yeah, go play around with it a little bit yourself and we are there to help.
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If you have a specific use case, we are there to help you through the process as well.
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All right. Makes sense. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much,
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Bas, for sharing your story and all the insights. Yeah, you too.