A Forget The Funnel case study

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*The team at Autobooks had a robust product: an all-in-one finance management platform for small business owners.

They also had a reliable channel for acquiring new customers: teaming up with banks and credit unions as integration partners.*

Product adoption wasn’t bad, but the team knew that for how many SMBs they had access to through their bank & credit union partners, there was a big opportunity to convert more of those SMBs to paying customers.

*Ultimately, Autobooks boosted the rate of new SMBs signing up for their product by 64% — and increased the rate of customers actually using a critical feature by 300%.

Here’s how it happened…*

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🔗 Preparing to level up

🔗 Uncovering where customers really get value

🔗 Results

Preparing to level up

Valuable product and solid acquisition channel in place, the Autobooks team knew it was time to invest heavily in landing more new customers.

<aside> ⭐ “Adoption was okay, but it was time to really kickstart & level up.”

—Chris Spiek, Autobooks Chief Product Officer

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Chris Spiek, Autobooks Chief Product Officer

So Chris Spiek, Autobooks’ Chief Product Officer (and prior to Autobooks, one of the pioneers of the Jobs-to-be-Done theory), led the team in running interviews with their most engaged customers: those who were using the product frequently and loved it.

Out of those interviews came something surprising.

Uncovering where customers really get value

Up to that point, Autobooks had emphasized that their platform was “all-in-one”: invoicing, bill pay, bookkeeping, accounting, and so much other good stuff.

But the research showed that only one feature set actually got small business owners through the door: online invoicing and payment processing.

Because the team understood internally how powerful the all-in-one platform was, their messaging had been throwing all of Autobooks’ features at customers all at once. But customers didn’t understand and didn’t have time to sort out an all-in-one finance management platform.

And that was Autobooks’ key takeaway: they needed to narrow down their messaging and highlight the one feature that made their customers’ lives easier.

Everything about how they talked to small businesses needed reworking.

Autobooks brought in Claire Suellentrop (Forget the Funnel co-founder & COO) to lead the messaging overhaul: “Give your customers a way to pay you by credit card, right into your bank account.” That most-desired feature became the only thing the new messaging highlighted.

Once customers grew more confident, then Autobooks could introduce its additional features, one at a time, in a way that addressed customers’ next most pressing need.