Results
The improved lead generation process resulted in tremendous efficiency gains and revenue growth over 6 months:
25% decrease in no-shows for sales meetings
75% increase in signups from high-value leads
$600K in additional revenue
Lower subscriber churn through focused sales outreach
By optimizing lead qualification, I enabled the sales team to focus efforts on promising prospects. This drove a major lift across the funnel - from lead quality to sales conversions and long-term customer retention. Demonstrating strategic thinking combined with strong design, technical, and leadership ability resulted in outsized business impact.
The Problem
Design Pickle struggled with a high volume of unqualified leads that resulted in wasted sales team efforts and mounting costs. Over 60% of our leads were not converting to paid customers.
The Idea
As Growth Product Design Manager for Design Pickle, I oversaw efforts to improve our lead generation and conversion funnel. My idea was to create a product that would provide an improved lead qualification and scoring system to acquire higher-quality leads. This would reduce wasted sales efforts on unqualified prospects and lower our overall customer acquisition costs.
The Action
I led designing and developing a progressive web app that potential customers interact with before reaching a sales rep. The app asks qualifying questions that predict lead quality and fit. It then assigns a variable score to each lead. Higher scoring leads trigger more aggressive sales follow-up actions. High-quality lead data also feeds into Meta to optimize acquisition campaigns.
My contributions spanned:
Design (UI/UX)
Created wireframes and high-fidelity interactive prototypes for the web app user flow
Conducted usability testing with target users to refine and validate the design
Implemented mobile-first and accessible interface following material design principles
Leadership
Led collaboration across product, engineering, and sales teams to align on ideal lead profiles
Developed the lead scoring algorithm and mapped different score ranges to sales actions
Oversaw development process from design to launch, guiding engineers
Strategy
Analyzed historical lead and customer data to identify patterns and common traits of quality leads and customers
Formulated hypotheses around lead qualification criteria that would predict customer conversion
Continuously monitored results post-launch to refine model and improve accuracy over time
Personas
I evaluated Design Pickle’s best customers (those with low CPA, high AOV, high LTV) and created three personas based on common user goals and pain points.
Mary Marketer
Mary is the VP of Marketing at a mid-sized software company. She manages a team of 4 in-house designers and struggles to keep up with the demand from various internal stakeholders. Mary often has to juggle competing priorities from sales, product marketing, and executive leadership. This leads to missed deadlines, frustrated internal partners, and a stressed-out team.
Mary needs an efficient way to expand design capacity so she can take on more marketing projects. She wants a solution that frees up her team to focus on high-value strategic work rather than getting bogged down executing repetitive design tasks.
Corey Creative
As Creative Director at a digital agency, Corey oversees a team of designers across various disciplines - UX, UI, graphic design, etc. He struggles with resource constraints as his staff is lean. Corey has trouble finding and retaining top creative talent. This makes it hard to deliver excellent work consistently across his client base.
To supplement his core team, Corey needs on-demand design support that can match his quality standards. He wants specialists available in different design areas who can jump in as needed. Corey needs the capacity to handle overflow work and new client projects without compromising quality or overworking his team.
Solopreneur Suzy
Suzy recently left her job to start her own business - an ecommerce store selling handmade crafts. As a solopreneur, she handles everything herself from operations to marketing. With no marketing background, Suzy has found it difficult to create the branding, website, ads, and social media content needed to attract customers.
Suzy needs an affordable way to outsource design work so she can focus her limited time on core business operations. She wants a solution that is easy to use and helps her execute marketing activities crucial for getting her business off the ground. Suzy needs design support to create brand assets, grow her online presence, and ultimately drive sales.
User Flow
I aimed to optimize user efficiency by minimizing interactions required to achieve the two major goals.
I designed two primary goals — one for allowing the user to seamlessly answer simple yet pointed questions, and another for qualifying users based on their answers.
Ideation & Wireframing
When I began wireframing, my primary objective was to generate ideas that would lead to an intuitively designed interface.
I wanted users to grasp the functionality of the wizard without investing excessive time in exploration. Drawing inspiration from popular insurance qualification apps, I designed the Jennifer chat feature to closely resemble the process of someone walking users through questions while also encouraging them to completion.
One key usability gap I noted during the low-fidelity wireframing process was the need to address how users could easily move through the wizard’s questions without effort. This led to the idea of advancing automatically once an answer is received.
Lead Quality Methodology
The primary issue of low-quality leads wasting salespersons’ time would be solved by associating points based on a user’s answers.
Based on the total points, a user would be qualified as a High-Quality Lead (HQL), Medium-Quality Lead (MQL), or Low-Quality Lead (LQL). HQLs would be treated with priority and highly personalized communications once intercepted by a salesperson, while MQLs and LQLs would get fed into automated flows.
Final Design
To qualify users with an effortless wizard experience, I worked with product designers to craft a visually bold, energizing design focused on ease of use.
Considering that booking a demo with a salesperson is the core user task, I ensured that users could accomplish this seamlessly after quickly answering the qualification questions.
Additionally, I introduced Jennifer — a thoughtful “chatbot” who empowered users with information about the product, while also encouraging them through each question. Questions are also auto-advanced after being answered. These features addressed the usability gap previously observed in other popular wizard products and questionnaires, allowing users to easily move from start to finish with minimal effort.
Reflection & Future Adjustments
This product was the company’s first journey into qualifying acquisition leads.
6 weeks after launch, I had enough data to optimize the flow and also begin rolling out A/B tests to improve lead quality.
Questions that proved to not correlate to high lead quality were removed in favor of others which over time contributed to stronger HQL signals.
It was found over time that despite being in the purchase and decision-making stages, users needed a better understanding of Design Pickle and its offerings. Several features were tested and added over time to educate users and help them make better-informed decisions.
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