How ContactMonkey generated $1.3M in pipeline with Storylane

Anael Pichon (Host, Storylane CSM): Hello, everybody. Welcome. We're going to wait a couple of minutes to give people time to join. I see there are already some interactions in there. Hi, guys. Thanks for joining, that's awesome. This is a punctual group, I think. All the different ways to say hi in there — hello, yo, hi. Oh, you guys are popular — that's our PR manager, Ian. Thanks for joining, Ian, so nice to see. I'll give it one more minute and then we'll get started. There's so much to talk about, we don't want to wait too long.

We have a first question about a recording, and I believe this is a one-off event — if you miss it, you miss it. So I don't think we'll be sharing a recording; this is exclusive. Alright, it's 10:03 Pacific time. Are we ready to go? I think we are. So thanks, everybody, and welcome. Thanks for joining this exciting webinar: how ContactMonkey generated $1.3 million and more in pipeline with Storylane. I am Anael Pichon. I'll be your host for today. I'm a customer success manager at Storylane — I help our customers take their demos to the next level, and this is exactly what ContactMonkey has been doing.

Today, this is part of our new Finer Demos Club. We think demo automation is a pretty new category in the demo world, and we need a community for demo creators to share and exchange tactical learnings on what works and what doesn't. So that's what this Finer Demos Club is all about, and today's webinar with ContactMonkey is the first one from this club. Before I let them introduce themselves, I just want to give a quick shout-out to Renee Scribolo from my team, fellow CSM at Storylane, for moderating the chat. She'll be in there answering you, and we'll have a quick Q&A session at the end where we go through your questions. So I'll let Tara Robertson and Peter Wong introduce themselves and take us through what they've been doing, which is pretty amazing — setting this up.

Tara Robertson (ContactMonkey): And I know we mentioned this is not recorded, but if you have follow-up questions, or anything we maybe jumped over too quickly, feel free to reach out. We're easy to find on LinkedIn if you want to connect with us afterwards. Always happy to nerd out over this stuff — it's fun for both Peter and I — so feel free to reach out. So my name is Tara. I've been at ContactMonkey just around seven months now; it's flown by. Previously, I was at a company in the B2B space called Chili Piper for around four years, so I'm super familiar with the product demo space, but this is my first time using Storylane as a customer.

Peter Wong (ContactMonkey, Senior Website Growth Lead): Hi, everyone. My name is Peter, I'm from ContactMonkey. I've been there around a year and a half, in the SaaS world for about seven, and in digital marketing for about twenty. I'm the senior website growth lead at ContactMonkey, and as you'd expect, I manage everything that comes in and out of the website. ContactMonkey, we sell to internal comms and HR folks, so not a super technical audience generally. That's just one thing to keep in mind as we go through our presentation.

Alright, so we'll start off by highlighting where our journey with Storylane started. Like any other SaaS company, we were trying to get more demos. But lots of questions were floating around: how do we get more demos? How do we get more traffic to the site to book demos? And one question landed on us, because we were getting a lot of traffic already: why? Why are people coming to our site and not booking demos? That's where we realized they just weren't ready to book a demo. They weren't ready to talk to someone, weren't ready to commit to the next level. All they really wanted to do was see the inside of the app, poke around, see if the UI and UX fit with their teams. They were really just looking under the hood, and that's where our demo journey started.

I'm going to jump to the next slide. So at first, we experimented with live demos. For us, this was a weekly live demo webinar once a week, and that was one of the key CTAs we had on our site. Initially there was great success — anywhere between seven to maybe 15 signups a week at the beginning. But really quickly it dropped to about one or two. The learning was that it was going through the same thing over and over again, week over week, and it wasn't consistent enough for lead volume to keep sales going. So we experimented with other things. With experiment number two, we tried doing a recording of a walkthrough — a thirty-minute-long one, gated, and we got about three, four, five a week. But because our product keeps evolving and changing, we had to constantly refresh that video, which took a lot of time. So it was high-maintenance and not sustainable.

That's where we looked into more of an interactive product tour kind of software. And because I'd worked with Storylane at my previous two companies and had great success with them — I just really loved the product — it was a no-brainer to go with Storylane. So this is where we're at right now. A really quick walkthrough of our app, but it didn't really start off on the right step, I think. We had two versions. At the very beginning, we had many tabs, many steps, showing basically every single feature we have in the app, and it took a long time to build — from concept to storyboard to build. The thinking was, hey, our app has so many features and functions, we want to show off every single thing. And really quickly, we got a lot of feedback from various users that it was very confusing and complicated to use those tabs — jumping back and forth was very hard from a UX perspective. So we took a step back. In version two, which is live on our site right now, it's more of a simplified, high-level overview — bite-sized copy, really just showing off the features that our ICP is looking for. Again, we were thinking through: why are people on the site? What are they looking for? Why are they not booking a demo? And instead, what do they need to see or learn before they book a demo? That was our approach with version two, and that's where we landed.

Tara: Some people describe product tours as approaching it like an appetizer, not giving away the whole meal. As a marketer, it's tempting to throw all of our features in the product tour because we're excited about it. But paring that down and giving people still a reason to book a demo and meet with our team has really helped a lot.

Okay, this slide could be an entire hour-long webinar, but I'll keep it to the point. When I joined, coming from Chili Piper where we gated very little, I was surprised at how many different types of content we had gated here at ContactMonkey. But I wanted to dig into the numbers and figure out why that was before I started ripping forms out and messing with the flow the team had. One thing I was really surprised at is that we gate our product tour right off the bat — so you can't see anything at all until you fill out a form. But because of that, we're able to directly attribute a ton of pipeline and revenue. I saw a question — did we try gating? Not yet. We've been talking about this for so long, putting in different phases of gating. The main reason I'm personally really hesitant to mess with what we have now: almost 30% of the leads we get — last I checked it was 28% — that come in through our gated demo form end up becoming an opportunity. So it's scary to change that today. What we're doing instead is Peter is working on having ungated demos for very specific parts of the platform and new features, versus the entire thing. So to see the full thing, at least for now, we're thinking we'll keep it gated. I'm sure that'll change over time, but that's right now. And really, the main reason it works for us is that clear attribution. We can see that we've driven a bunch of leads right to our sales team and that they're turning into opportunities at a really solid rate. For context, our lead-to-opp rate for someone that raises their hand and books a demo on our site is, I want to say, 48% — it's roughly double what it is for this. So really strong for something I wouldn't consider super bottom-funnel.

And then just one thing on the conversion of the page — Peter, we just made some improvements there. Did you want to speak to that?

Peter: Yeah, just quick learnings I wanted to share with everybody. We went live with a form shortener on this form. Before the form shortener, we were converting at around, let's say, 11% on this page. After the form shortening, it jumps to about 14, 15%, just with that. So form friction is definitely a barrier that we took more into account than before. This was the full thing before — without the shortener. With the shortener, there are only three fields.

Tara: Alrighty. I was joining when we practiced this yesterday, but we should probably update the title of this webinar, because it's actually been generating — last I checked — just under $1.6 million in pipeline that our product tour has generated. So huge numbers for us. I'm just going to quickly get into the nitty-gritty of how that works and the handoff stuff. At a really high level, we have someone fill in the form — ideally they're a qualified prospect of ours. We have some job-title-based qualification running in the background, which I'll show you in a second. Then we're assigning them right to a BDR right away. They go into a sales call-up cadence, which includes phone calls, not just email. And then we're able to attribute directly back to the product tour.

Next slide. This is a little tough to see, sorry about that. I'm a little biased here because I used to work there, but we're using a tool from Chili Piper called Distro, and this lets us qualify and route the leads we're getting from our product tour directly. You can see I have a couple of filters for both leads and contacts, because we're working out of leads and contacts — it's a little different on our Salesforce instance. We're essentially saying, if they're one of our ICP titles, then yes, we want them to go through this flow and be assigned to a BDR. For us, that's internal comms and HR. So if we get titles like account executive, sales, or intern, those typically get funneled to someone on marketing, and we throw them into an automated follow-up cadence — right now I think it's coming from my email.

This is another look at what those routing rules look like at a higher level. Once we qualify them based on their title, we assign them and update that ownership in Salesforce. We also send both a Slack and an email notification to the BDR right away so they're not missing it. And then they're added right into that sales cadence we wrote specifically for the product tour. So we give the sales team tons of context so they can tell right away where this lead came from and how to follow up, versus treating it like any other lead. And just to take a step back: when I joined the team here, one thing I noticed was a bit of a disconnect from marketing to sales about how these leads should be treated. A lot of the cadences we originally had were much more focused on going right to booking that demo and getting them in the door, versus being more of a conversation of, "Hey, you checked out this product tour, did you have questions? Is there anything I can help you with?" So much more leading with curiosity and proving that we know our stuff. We want to get their interest, but we don't want to push, like, "Let's meet on Tuesday." So that's really helped make this cadence more successful.

Peter: Here, I wanted to share that when we were looking at the product tour and its performance, we weren't looking at it just directly on the product tour — we were looking at all the different user journeys on our site. So we were really thinking through every single page, mostly the key pages, and gearing them up toward the product tours and the book-a-demo. When we were going through version two of the product tour, we went through the same thing on the other key pages as well — really simplifying the features we show, simplifying the copy on those pages. The home page is meant to set up the problem and drive the traffic; the feature pages build the intent; the pricing page is the second most visited page before book-a-demo. So the common journey we see on the site is that someone lands on the home page, goes to the pricing page, and then either goes to the product tour or the book-a-demo. That journey has worked for us. Looking into the analytics, over 90% — I think 95%, something like that — of people don't land directly on the product tour from the home page. They go to various different pages before booking or going through the product tour. So what I'm trying to say is that all the different pages on your site have to work together as an ecosystem. Looking at the product tour by itself might not cut it.

Tara: Alright, just to recap, some of the impact we've seen since rolling out the product tour. Again, this is roughly $1.6 million now in influenced pipeline, and that's all inbound right through our product tour. Because it's gated, we have super clear attribution. I'd love to debate this with anyone — you could definitely argue that more people would see our product tour if it were ungated, but it would be really tough for us to make the case of exactly which pipeline we've been able to influence. So that would be different. Obviously, our sales team has really responded well to these leads. I see Ian, our leadership, is in the chat right now expanding on some of my points. He's been a huge help, not just educating the BDR team on the difference between these leads versus a demo request, but also setting it up — this is not someone that put up their hand to talk to us, so we have to approach them a little differently. Working in tandem with him has been super helpful. And lastly, we've had a ton of new product features coming out in the last two months — a release almost every two or three weeks that's been pretty massive to our product. So just having the ability to turn around a product tour in a couple of hours, versus going through a video freelancer, working with our team on a script, getting someone to record it — we've run into a bunch of issues around video creation. So being able to scale this has been huge for us. I think that's it for our slides.

Anael: Wow, thank you so much for sharing all this. Again, pretty impressive, very detailed. I hope everyone agrees you've taught us a lot, and this is a great kickoff to demo best-practices sharing. I'll just wrap up what you guys showed us. You showed us what you tried before Storylane, how you implemented Storylane with v1 and v2 versions — and a two-hour change, you said, to switch to the new type of demos. The gating strategy, a big topic — I think there are a few questions about this, and we're going to talk about it with everybody in the chat. And that auto-qualification added to the process, that's pretty powerful as well — different forms, the gated form versus the book-a-demo form. And then you took a step back and looked at the whole website journey and prospect journey, not just the demo. That's also very important. And how the combination of your strategy and process with Storylane brought — yeah, we should have updated the title — about $1.6 million in influenced pipeline. So congrats, guys, and thanks again.

So now let's take a look at the questions we have. I don't know if people have more questions, or if everything was answered as we went, but feel free to ask any questions we didn't get to.

Peter: Yeah, I saw a question from Jeff: are you using the starter or growth version of Storylane? So I can share that. When we first went live — and sorry to the Storylane team — but we actually went with the free version at the very beginning, and that's what we went live with. But very quickly, we wanted to get more analytics and more features from Storylane, and we upgraded to, I think, the first tier, and then eventually upgraded to another tier after that. But initially, we did start with the free version.

Anael: No issue with that — that's how it goes. You get a taste, and then you want more. And you took it to the next level. Someone was asking, if you remember, how many different screens or pages you had in v1 of the product versus the current one.

Peter: V1 had, like, I think honestly 60 or 70, across I think five different tabs. So it was a lot, and that's why it was really complicated.

Tara: And now this new version, I think there's like 12, something like that. Much shorter.

Anael: That's the recommendation. Yep. Alright, Peter, I think you can take this one quickly — someone asked what percentage of visitors fill out the form for the walkthrough, and how many of those book a demo.

Peter: So what was the question — how many people fill in the form for the product tour? That one is around, I think, 14%. But now, with the form shortener, it's about 15%.

Anael: And you use the analytics from Storylane to see this?

Peter: Yes — the combination of Storylane analytics, HubSpot analytics, and GA4 analytics.

Anael: And then there's a question from Travis: what worked best for driving people to your website — SEO?

Peter: Organic search has always been our bread and butter for driving traffic to the site, and that's where we continue to be.

Anael: Alright. And then the last question I saw: do we use these for cold email?

Tara: I'm guessing you mean, do we use the product tour in cold email? So we don't use it in our cold outreach. We get a surprising amount of leads that come in through paid search that aren't ready to book a demo, so this is the secondary offer we're using. So they are in follow-up.

Anael: Blogs, pay-per-click — how did you create SEO? So, just to go back to Travis's question.

Peter: Everything — blogs, key pages, home page. It's a combination of many things, not just one thing.

Anael: Oh, before that — there's a question. Someone asked if you could show the demo, since it's gated, before it gets buried in the chat.

Peter: Sorry about that, one second. Yeah, I do have the ungated version, which I can send out in a second. Let me just try and grab the link here.

Anael: Thank you. Nice, thank you. So that's the one. Okay. And back to the questions — I think it was still on the same topic. Jeff asks: do you see any impacts of AI/LLM-based SEO starting to affect your inbound traffic? Sounds like we're on a tangent into SEO.

Peter: Yes, obviously — I think everyone in the world has. For us, it continues to work because we're really tweaking and modifying our content toward those AI LLMs. The traditional way of doing SEO, you have to rethink it. So yes, our traffic was impacted, but very quickly it's bouncing back up once we made those updates.

Anael: And there's a question about how far most visitors make it through the tour.

Peter: Last time I looked at this, it was around, I'd say, between 50 and 75%, something like that — that's where the majority of visitors go through our tour. Not 100% — that's not the majority for sure — but it was around 50 to 60%.

Anael: That's good. We always look at above 40% as the target, and then the higher above that, the better.

Tara: Sure, it depends on how many steps you have. Like Peter said, you can go nuts and have a 68-step one like our old one, but it's going to be tough to get to 100%.

Anael: Oh yeah, that's very ambitious. So what did we miss — these last two questions from Pratik?

Peter: Yeah — "people end up trying a demo and some skip through to book the demo." I can answer this, along with Alaina's question around whether we've seen a drop in the book-a-demo form submissions. So luckily, no. And this is why we went through Storylane: we realized there were people who weren't ready to book a demo yet. They weren't ready to commit to a time on the calendar, or even fifteen, twenty minutes to talk to someone. They just wanted to see the inside of the app — what does the inside of the app look like? So even when we started the product tour, the book-a-demo leads were not impacted. We're treating these as two very different buckets of leads, and it doesn't seem to be impacting one or the other.

Tara: Yeah, where we have seen it is the secondary CTAs that Peter mentioned at the beginning. We still have that weekly webinar running, but because it had already fallen off a cliff where people weren't signing up every week, now we're getting even less, because they can just do the product tour instead. But we keep it running because it takes about half an hour a week to run that webinar, so it's not a huge time investment.

Anael: Sorry, Tara — you were breaking up a bit, but I think we heard the most important part. We're at time, so we'll take maybe one last question and wrap it up if there is one. I think we're all good. So thank you again so much, Peter and Tara, for showing us all this. Renee, thanks for helping with the chat. Everyone, thanks for joining and for your great questions. I think the debate is just starting, and I'm looking forward to our next Finer Demos Club session — an exclusive webinar, because again, this will not be shared after today. Well done.

Tara: Alright, thanks for having us. Take care, everyone.

Peter: Bye, everyone.

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