How we boosted website demo requests 6x in one month

At Zelta.ai we recently completed an exercise to align our website messaging to the language customers use to describe their needs and goals

And after publishing this new messaging to our site, the result has been astounding …59 in-bound demo requests in March…a 6x increase vs February and our best growth month ever!!

Below I have created a guide to help others achieve the same including the templates and tools we used. 

The key to messaging that converts: Help prospects make progress

To move prospects from being unaware of your solution all the way to making a purchase we must help them make progress at each stage of the buyer journey. There are four forces at play which help or inhibit progress at each stage.

Positive forces: 

• Push: the struggles prospects face which causes them to look for solutions like yours
• Pull: differentiating benefits of your solution

Negative forces:

• Anxiety: Anxieties that must be satisfied before purchasing, for example:  “how is this different from the last solution I tried”, “is this secure?”
• Inertia: Things which slow down the buying process eg switching costs, habit, concerns on upfront cost etc

The four forces of demand generation

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Further reading on the fours forces: https://jtbd.info/the-forces-of-progress-4408bf995153

So how can marketers help prospects make progress?

• Document push, pull, anxiety and inertia at each stage of the buyer journey
• Build messaging and marketing assets which highlights push and pull and alleviates anxiety / inertia

Step 1: Gather data from calls with prospects and customers

We want to find instances of prospects and customers talking about their struggles, anxieties and desired outcomes. These will be often discussed on sales and customer success calls, if these have been recorded historically you will have a great dataset to start working through. Alternatively you can arrange interviews to ask customers/ prospects directly, below is a list of questions to get started and what to listen for. 

It's important to have a broad and large sample here as individuals likely have very different circumstances and goals, finding the commonality across our customer base is what we're looking for. At Zelta, we used a sample of 500 calls, which was possible due to our own products' AI capabilities, if doing this exercise manually would suggest a minimum of 20 calls per customer persona. 

Sample questions:

Beginning of the Journey:

Questions to ask:

• Could you describe when you first thought of buying something like this?
• What’s going on around you at this time?
• What were you trying to do? (who were you with? Jog their memory)

What to Listen For:

• Listen for unmet needs, anxieties, inertia
• Context, they were happy, then unhappy, something’s changed, what is that?
• Listen for the struggle, (functional, emotional, social?) what is the unmet need?

Research & Mental Trade-offs

Sample Questions:

• What does this product allow you to do/achieve?
• What options did you consider at first?
• What did you google? Who did you speak to?
• Tell me why this is the right solution for you and your team?

What to Listen For:

• This is NOT about products or features. It’s about needs. What are they trying to do?
• Listen for alternative solutions - how are they framing the problem?
• How do they frame the problem online? How did they describe the problem?
• Listen for functional, emotional and social jobs. One product can satisfy many jobs

Purchase Event

Sample Questions:

• What made you buy this at that moment, what was going on around you at this time?
• How long have you been thinking about this purchase?
• What were you using to solve this pain/problem before our solution?
• Describe the buying process to me, help me understand each step 

What to Listen For:

• Listen for the trigger/event that pushed for the purchase, listen for context.
• Listen for context. Why didn’t they purchase anxiety/Inertia? Was the pain not great enough? Why not?
• Listen for alternative solutions/compensating behaviors and dissatisfaction - What changed?
• Who else (other than yourself/ your team) cares about the outcomes this solution will deliver?

• Find out if your prospect undertook this project to gain wider recognition, social or emotional jobs.
• We're listening for the outcomes that were expected from this project.
• We're listening for other stakeholders who are involved in the decision-making. This will tell us who inside the business owns the project and its results.
• What does success look like from the business client's perspective? Listen for emotional jobs.
• Listen for functional, emotional, on social needs. Avoid discussions of price or convenience. Ask why.
• We are listening for alternative solutions. Look beyond obvious suppliers to the job to be done.

Further reading on interview questions: https://www.systm.co/language-market-fit-kit

Step 2: Extract signal from noise

1. Document quotes where customers/ prospects discuss struggles, anxieties, desired outcomes. *Important “quotes not notes”, we want to retain the exact language our market uses
2. Group these quotes by the following per ICP Segment:
   1. Job-to-be-done
   2. Desired outcome, struggle, anxiety, inertia
3. List most common/ recurring themes

Step 3: Build messaging house

1. Use a template to build a messaging house for each job-to-be-done
2. Here is a template for structuring messaging house data
3. This becomes a base from which you can build powerful messaging

How to use the outputs: 

Website: 

1. Headline: The desired outcome expressed a benefit (Now you can..)
2. Sub-headline: What is it, who is it for, what's the benefit for them
3. Social proof
4. Benefits from three product features which reinforce the desired outcome
5. How does it work, target anxieties and inertia
6. FAQ: target anxieties and inertia

General:

1. Position yourself against the struggle 
2. In your ads test messaging around the struggle, desired outcomes
3. Write your landing page to talk about the struggles, desired outcomes and anxieties
4. Testing channels, think about context, where was their struggling moment, where did they look (e.g. search terms, referral partners)
5. Offer lead magnets that do the first of the job or solve a related/ upstream job that they will have. Or replace an inexpensive alternative solution with a free one
6. In your nurture emails, call out their anxieties and do an “accusation audit” Then, you list each anxiety and  make counter argument

Using AI tools for the task

AI can alleviate a lot of the grunt work in the data collection process and allow us to get straight to building outputs in minutes. With tools like Zelta.ai you can connect to your existing call recording tools like Gong, Fireflies, Zoom and Microsoft Teams and ask Zelta to document instances of customers describing their struggles,  anxieties and desired outcomes (sales calls are a treasure trove for this) 

Zelta will create a structured dataset of struggles, anxieties and desired outcomes linked directly to quotes from source data and automatically identify emerging themes. Connecting your CRM to Zelta (we support most of them) will allow you to segment by different customer personas and drill down into your ICP. From here, you will have a base to create messaging around minutes after signing up and the flexibility to assess how needs are changing over time when building future campaigns. 

Reach out today to learn more