Great product. Check. Experienced B2B SaaS leadership team. Check. The only thing missing? A strategy to build awareness and take the product to market. In the first 90 days of partnering with Five Tool, BuildOps filled their sales pipeline, closed their first five marketing-generated deals, and implemented a scalable lead generation strategy.
It’s not an uncommon story. A tech Company develops a product with strong potential. The founders team up with good investors. The investors make some introductions and, voila, the first beta customer is on the platform. However, the next few steps are tricky but crucial – since they lead to more funding.
This is where Five Tool entered the fray.
The challenge “how to create a funnel that can get a prospect from unknown to Closed Won.” It’s one thing to get a customer into beta via a warm investor intro. It’s a whole different ballgame to find, demo, negotiate, and close a new deal – all on the back good targeting, and good messaging. And that’s just what BuildOps did with a little help from their friends at Five Tool.
September 23, 2021
Series A
Field Service Management Software
New website build, SEO, Paid Ads, Marketing Automation
Coming off of a $5.8 million seed round, it was clear the SaaS platform BuildOps, and its CEO Alok Chanani had found a foothold with their target market – commercial subcontractors. As is usually the case, new investment means aggressive growth targets.
Some cold outbound and investor introductions had created a handful of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) but BuildOps needed to win faster. There weren’t enough opportunities coming through the door to feed the sales team. And growing companies gotta eat. Enter Five Tool.
The goal was clear – fill the sales team’s calendar. We started by reworking the original website. We stripped away the noise and focused on one task – pushing all web traffic to Request a Demo. We initially focused on two channels to drive SQLs – paid and SEO.
Why paid and SEO? Paid for immediate results (but at a higher cost) and SEO for the longer-term play at lower cost. SEO takes time but is vital to long-term, sustainable growth. Paid on the other hand allows us to “buy” insights (and, if done right, new customers).
With paid, we’re able to immediately drive traffic to a page, observe behavior, and evaluate how good our offer and messaging are – e.g. if no one is opting to “Get a Demo” then we either aren’t targeting the right audience or we don’t have the right messaging.
Simply the best! In less than 6 months, we went from ZERO marketing driven leads to generating over 25+ new SQLs per month. Five Tool truly understands the mentality of a startup. Be quick, test often, and be comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.
After a quick website tune-up (tweaking messaging, fixing some UX issues, etc), we now had a place to get conversions. We began by testing three digital PPC channels:
Here we used search ads focused on the two software categories where BuildOps already had beta customers – commercial HVAC software and commercial electrician software. We worked with the BuildOps team to craft the ad copy, build out landing pages, create a bid strategy, and set up the integrations that would push any form fills directly into Salesforce and send the sales team a notification.
Capterra is a pay-to-play software listing/reviews website. Because Capterra had the number 2 position on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP), we knew bidding for a top-three spot on Capterra would generate significant traffic.
Also, due to high traffic volume, we were able to split-test our messaging between two landing pages to accelerate findings on which messaging would resonate best (and lead to more demos).
This final paid channel is slightly different than Google Ads and Capterra. Software Advice vets prospects over the phone and then sends the lead to the top 1-5 software companies that best fit the prospects’ needs. Software Advice had the #3 spot in the Google SERP.
After 60-days of testing and tweaking, the three channels were generating a +700% return on ad spend and helped BuildOps land 3 of their first 5 customers.
With the Paid Ad campaigns up and running, we turned our attention to SEO. Remember, this is where we build the foundation for long-term sustainable lead volume. The BuildOps website was SLIM – both in terms of pages and content on each page.
For comparison, the average competitor had around 125 pages on their website. BuildOps had 15 pages. While BuildOps didn’t need 125 pages, they would need higher quality pages concentrated on one or two areas to compete.
We went to work collecting content for the pages – testimonials, screenshots, FAQs, sales copy. The output was 15 additional pages focused on topics specific to commercial HVAC and commercial electrical contractor software.
Over the course of 6 months, BuildOps went from 674 organic visits/month to 2,115 visits/month (a 313% increase). This jump in traffic resulted in a 375% increase in marketing qualified leads MQL.
More importantly, the improvement in website traffic and performance paved the way for a longer-term SEO strategy with a significantly higher ceiling for traffic and new revenue.
Our mission is to help great products find the people and companies they help most. We’d be honored to help bring your vision to market. Let’s have a conversation.