RB2B has a 9% Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate?!?! | Our 11% Conversion Rate Cold Email System

RB2Bers -

It’s been another massive week.

Feel free to take a peek at the RB2B Baremetrics dashboard.

We’re pretty close to hitting $1m ARR … and we just ended week 15!!!

9% Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate

This one was a shocker to me.

We still don’t have a salesperson, and it looks like we’re getting 9% the last 7 days.

I don’t know if this is just pent-up demand from our old broken pricing flowing through, or if it’s steady-state.

Look at the last 7 days:

The only problem is that these are TODAY’s signups vs. 30 days ago’s paying customers.

And today - it’s VERY low.

Is our free-to-paid 9%?

Or is it 3%, and the pent up demand is now gone?

Only time will tell.

But I still wrote a post about what happened.

45 days after launching RB2B we had a 0.2% free-to-paid conversion rate. 21 days ago we changed our pricing and our conversion rate jumped to 9%! Here’s what was WRONG and how we fixed it:

BACKGROUND:

• On Mar 1 we “accidentally” launched our Person-Level Identity tool

• We tried to give unlimited leads and a push to Slack for free

• We wanted to charge a tiny percentage for integrations

• It didn’t work because people could parse the slack block with Zapier

Three major problems led to the 0.2% conversion rate:

Problem #1: Our pricing was broken for the little guy

• Certain businesses just can’t pay $495 for something like this

• With a freemium offer, we learned that’s around 90% of signups

• We had around 100 people say they were dying to pay - just not $495

• Our LinkedIn community told us EXACTLY what we needed to do

Problem #2: Our product was broken for the big guy

• Our highest traffic customers needed an ICP filter

• We were also missing HubSpot and Salesforce integrations

• Capping our upside at $495 didn’t make sense either

Problem #3: Nobody knew what to do with the leads.

• People wonder how soon they should reach out (ASAP)

• They also wonder if they should refer to the site visit (NO)

Here’s how we solved the three major problems:

1/ We changed our pricing (THANK YOU LINKEDIN)

OLD PRICING - 0.2% conversion rate

$0/mo unlimited leads/slack only

$495/mo unlimited leads/everything

NEW PRICING - 9% conversion rate

$0/mo 200 leads, slack only

$99/mo 200 leads, everything

$149/mo 300 leads, everything

$249/mo 500 leads, everything

$349/mo 700 leads, everything

$499/mo 1,000 leads, everything

… up to …

$949/mo 10,000 leads, everything

2/ We built features.

• HubSpot integration is LIVE and DOPE. It syncs w/ HS tracking cookie.

• ICP filter is coming next 30 days (I guess we didn’t need it)

• Salesforce integration next Q (we prioritized smaller co’s)

3/ We created educational content, and are going to add a two-touch sales motion.

• We have over 25 pieces of “how to engage the leads” content

• We are creating more every day

• Our goal is to have every possible use case covered by the end of Q3

• 9% is pre-sales … REALLY interested to see how the salesperson changes things

TAKEAWAY

Startups are hard.

A 0.2% free-to-paid conversion rate 45 days in is demoralizing.

Luckily, no decision is permanent, and it’s VERY easy to pivot early on.

When something isn’t working, you can talk to your customers - or your LinkedIn community - and they’ll tell you why.

The hard part for most people is admitting that their “genius” idea was completely WRONG.

The longer I do this, the more I accept the fact that even though I’m SOOO much more experienced than 10 years ago, my intuition, most of the time, is still really bad.

There is wisdom in holding your own ideas very loosely.

Because you don’t really know.

But your customers do.

LIVE EVENT: Our 11% Conversion Cold Email Machine

Taylor Haren and Patrick Spychalski are hosting Inbound-Led Outbound Live this Tuesday at 2pm CST.

They’ll be discussing our RB2B + Clay cold email strategy that has led to 11% cold email conversion rates.

Click here to register.

That’s it for this week!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being RB2B fans.

Keep building.

Adam