Executive Summary

Apto turned to Ravience to design, build, and operate their pre-sales customer experience to drive growth. The revenue generated from our leads alone brought in millions in annual recurring revenue and helped this company make it to the Inc. 5000 list for 4 years in a row.

• Increased website conversion rate from 2% to 4% -- a 200% lift.
• Sales close rate increased by over double.

About Apto

Apto is the #1 CRM and deal management software for commercial real estate brokers, with more paid users than any other provider. Apto was built by and for brokers to help them manage contacts, properties, listings, and deals—anywhere, from any device.

Challenges & Objectives

Apto’s Chief Marketing Officer, Michael Bevan, had built the company’s entire marketing strategy and execution on his own. This included everything from the website, blog articles, eBooks, ad campaigns, and sales enablement materials.

As a result, Apto had a marketing strategy that converted website visitors into demos, and some directly paid for the product, but Michael knew that their product was complex and didn’t want to complicate the website copy.

His goal was to provide customer education through live chat to help visitors make a buying decision.

How Ravience Drove Pre-Sales Activities for Apto

In 2017, Apto hired Ravience to create a pre-sales customer experience where prospective customers could educate themselves better on the product, move from the top or middle to the bottom of the funnel, and convert into sales or demos:

• Schedule demos
• Convert visitors to sign-up on an annual plan
• Improve lead’s education to increase demo conversion rate to sales

Ravience began by understanding the different types of personas coming to the website and the types of challenges they face with their existing solutions, their desired outcomes, and the challenges in getting there.

Armed with this knowledge, Ravience built a live chat program that used proactive greetings to engage more website visitors in conversation. Prior to Ravience, Apto had only a bot and the bot was not able to answer the types of questions their visitors were asking. By getting more visitors into a conversation, Ravience’s well-trained team of agents was able to use a consultative-approach to pre-sales and assess whether the visitor was ready for purchase or if they needed an additional touch with a demo.

For those not ready for either step, Ravience converted those visitors onto Apto’s email list by sending those visitors an eBook related to their persona or challenges they expressed within the chat conversation.

Results

Apto saw the benefits immediately. Their website conversion rate doubled and that generated profit from the outset of the engagement. The increase in conversions led to more immediate purchases as well as demos being scheduled.

What Apto found was that their close rate also doubled after doing demos because the visitors were better educated and qualified by Raviecen’s agents. Since Apto is for commercial brokers only, Ravience was able to eliminate unqualified leads such as residential brokers or mortgage lenders.

Apto Makes It Onto Inc. 5000’s List 4 Years in a Row

Apto’s solution is already highly targeted and by adding Ravience to create a pre-sales customer experience, Apto was able to increase their revenue and free up their inbound sales team to focus on better-qualified leads. As a result, they made the Inc. 5000 list 4 years and counting.