Diagnosing the Autobooks Demo + Sales Process

How Autobooks closed twice as many leads (in half the time) by overhauling their sales process and demo.

About Autobooks

Autobooks is an integrated payment and accounting platform that allows businesses to send invoices, collect online payments, automate accounting, and build financial reports through their financial institution’s online banking system.

The challenge

When we started working with Autobooks, they were really struggling with their sales demo.

Every 90 days, they would try to redesign and improve it, but they couldn’t figure out where they were going wrong.

A demo that worked for one customer wouldn’t work for another, and they didn’t know what steps they needed to take to improve their close rate and win more customers.

Project information

Industry: Financial Services
Company Size: 51 – 200 employees
Use Case: Uncovering Consumer Insights

I think the opportunity to help small and micro businesses is managing cash flow. We’ve got a team that has really gone deep into this category, and we employ a framework called Jobs to be Done. So, we really get at the root of the pain. What is the problem small businesses are trying to solve?
Steve Robert, cofounder of Autobooks

Our approach.

Together, through our consumer behavior consulting, we dug deeper into their struggle and realized that one of the biggest problems with their demo was that it wasn’t effectively addressing where the prospects were in the sales process.

Autobooks structured the demo to close deals, which meant it only really worked for Deciding stage leads. For prospective customers in the Passive Looking or Active Looking stages, the demo was overwhelming and gave them too much information.

A visualisation of the stages a customer goes through in the buying timeline

To address this issue, Autobooks created three separate sales demos.

The first demo was for leads at the Passive Looking stage and focused more on storytelling and helping them understand the problem they’re solving. The second demo showed all the features to prospects in the Active Looking stage. The third and final demo was designed for leads in the Deciding stage and discussed the trade-offs potential customers would have to make and how to test the product.

The results

They almost halved the time to close from lead to customer and nearly tripled the interaction.

Lead conversions doubled because Autobooks can qualify leads better (and customers can qualify themselves better).

They had a faster and more successful program performance and launch that required less work on the backend.

The impact.

Autobooks completely transformed its approach to sales. Now, their sales team doesn’t just consider where their prospects are in their sales pipeline, but what stage they’re at in their own timelines and why. From there, they can figure out what Job they’re in and what progress they’re trying to make.

Each Job has a timeline so they can see where each prospect is in their decision-making process and what they can do to support them. They’ve even modified their sales funnel to use this language.

We have moved away from pushing features at prospects to engaging them in conversations that offer benefits on their terms. As a result, our sales team has prospects who are ready to make qualified decisions, and our account management team has clients that purchased for the right reasons.
Derik Sutton, CMO, Autobook s

Next steps.

Get unstuck and start optimizing your products and experiences with powerful consumer insights.

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