Why Aren’t Customers Converting Into Partners?
Background:
A large cloud computing company had a partner program aimed at helping its customers build and scale their businesses and offerings using their products and services. The problem was that they were seeing low uptake on their partner program despite the numerous benefits of joining. BlinkUX was approached to help determine if the website could improve conversion rates and why it wasn’t already. The agency sub-contracted Lauren Isaacson of Curio Research to execute the study.
Proposal:
Lauren was tasked with conducting a series of qualitative interviews with technical business decision makers. All were customers of the cloud computing company, but none were members of its partner program. The objectives had two major components:
Map the journey from awareness of the program to internal buy-in and approval for joining a vendor partner program.
Understand why the website wasn’t converting customers.
Execution:
Before conducting any interviews, Lauren reached out to her personal network of web programmers to gain a foundational understanding of the client's offerings and their experience as members of the partner program. This groundwork allowed her to enter the interviews with a solid base of knowledge, enabling her to engage with these highly technical participants effectively.
For the research, Lauren conducted fifteen interviews with programmers in a position to influence corporate cloud computing decisions. She asked about how such decisions were made, who was involved, what information was needed, and how they approached any challenges to the process. She then showed these participants the company’s website and asked them to review the information about the partner program to see if it met their needs and how it might be improved for better conversion.
Challenges:
The most significant challenge was finding participants who authentically fit the ideal participant profile. It is an unfortunate fact that research participant pools are rife with fraudsters, and one made their way into the study. While Lauren failed to reject the fraudulent participant during the interview, she decided to remove their data from the analysis and notified the recruiter of her suspicions.
Since then, Lauren now asks to see the LinkedIn profile information before approving a participant. But these days, even that is no guarantee.
Results:
Using the results from the interviews, Lauren and a visual designer collaborated on creating a graphic to visualize the process of adopting a new technical program from awareness to critical stakeholder buy-in, known as a journey map. The journey map showed who was involved, what the steps were, and where the cloud computing company could provide information or assistance.
Then she reported on what was missing or should be better prioritized and communicated on the website. One key takeaway from Lauren's casual prep interviews was the high value partner program members placed on the premium customer service they received. She highlighted this as dramatically as she could during the report readout, explaining how much these decision-makers valued such benefits, but it was nowhere to be found on the website. Making that a key benefit of upgrading to partner program membership was predicted to be an effective conversion driver.