An enterprise IT vendor cut its cost per demo by a third with matched pages

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

Field sales feeds this enterprise IT-management vendor's pipeline, and paid search is where the feeding starts. The product is deeply technical — deployment, integrations, day-one behavior — but its marketing pages had been written for a CIO audience from an earlier era. Marketing ran paid acquisition with a small in-house team; sales ran a fixed qualification script that had not changed in years. The two functions shared a CRM but not a language: sales described leads in qualification terms the paid team never saw, and the paid team described performance in click terms sales did not trust.

What it was costing

Search ads for a technical product landed on pages written for CIOs while the clickers were infrastructure engineers — proof sections answered the wrong questions, demos booked from ads churned in qualification, and cost per qualified demo climbed.

What they could see

• Engineers bounced off proof sections that talked strategy while the questions they arrived with sat unanswered.
• Demos booked from search churned in qualification at a rate the sales director had started calling 'the paid problem' in forecasts.
• The paid team's cost per demo looked acceptable while cost per qualified demo climbed quarter over quarter.
• Copy requests moved through legal one claim at a time, so pages could not respond to what search terms actually asked.
• Reps re-explained deployment architecture on every first call because the page had promised a different shape of product.

The constraints we worked inside

• Product claims required legal pre-approval; testing could not invent new claims, only re-weight existing ones.
• Sales qualification criteria were fixed — the funnel had to deliver demos that pass the existing bar.
• The paid team ran tight budgets; test pages had to earn or die within the quarter.

What had been tried before

The paid team had tightened match types and added audience layers across the campaigns.

The filtering improved click quality but the destination stayed wrong — better-qualified engineers kept arriving at the same executive page and leaving with the same verdict.

Marketing commissioned a technical whitepaper as the ad destination.

Gating shifted the friction instead of removing it; engineers resented the form, and sales inherited demos scheduled off a download rather than any demonstrated intent.

Sales had set a routing rule that deprioritized leads from one ad source.

It protected the calendar and entrenched the feud; the underlying mismatch — who the page speaks to — stayed exactly where it was, and trust fell further.

What we proposed

Restructure the pages around the practitioner's questions — how it deploys, what it integrates with, what it does on day one — with the executive framing moved below, not deleted. Dynamic text replacement carries each search query's intent into headlines and proof points, using only the legal-approved claim register, re-weighted rather than rewritten. The demo form asks the two questions sales actually qualifies on, and the answers write straight into the CRM, so a demo arrives pre-scored against the existing bar instead of restarting the argument about what qualified means.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• Retargeting sequences to re-engage bounced engineers — It would spend more money to re-show the same wrong page; the bounce was a verdict on the message, not a lapse in attention that a second impression could fix.
• A gated self-serve evaluation environment as the destination — Product claims required legal pre-approval and a self-serve environment exposes behavior marketing cannot hold to approved wording — and the sales motion depends on that first conversation.
• Rewriting the pages in the main CMS via the web team — The quarter was the deadline — test pages had to earn or die fast, and a CMS release cycle would have outlived the pages it was meant to serve.

How the work ran

Delivered by the growth pod — strategist over 6 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

Unbounce

The quarter's constraint was the web team's security-review queue, not design ability; Unbounce let the paid team publish and retire test pages without that queue anywhere in the loop.

DTR

Sales's qualification notes read like a ledger of the terms buyers actually type — stack names, deployment targets, runtimes — and DTR lifts the searcher's literal term into the headline, so the page opens in the buyer's own notation.

Smart Traffic

The legacy ad groups each mix renewal-stage researchers with fresh evaluators, and a renewals-heavy quarter leaves no budget for the wrong message; Smart Traffic triages each group's spend toward the variant that produces qualified demos.

CRM integration

The two qualifying answers land on the opportunity record as the demo books, so the AE's pre-call prep starts from the form's facts — the win is the AE walking in prepared, not a cleaner pipeline report.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

A Monday 30-minute call with the paid team and a fortnightly sales check-in; the test tracker was shared and live, with every page's status visible to both sides.

Client side

The paid lead owned campaign structure; a sales director lent two reps' call notes and an hour a fortnight; legal reviewed claims in scheduled batches.

Decisions

Page decisions followed the written test plan; conflicts between paid and sales were settled against the shared qualification definition, written down in week two.

They provided

Call notes and qualification recordings, the approved-claims register, CRM field access, and search-term reports going back eight quarters.

What changed

The headline: cost per qualified demo across the quarter versus the prior quarter — −34%, read from Paid platform plus CRM qualification data. A second check: demo completion rate (booked → held) at +22%.

The feud ended in the least dramatic way possible: the numbers agreed. Sales sees demos arrive with the two answers they qualify on already filled in, and no-shows stopped being a forecast line item. The paid team budgets against qualified demos, which changed what they are willing to bid on. Engineers land on a page that answers the first three questions they were going to ask on the call, so the calls start closer to evaluation than explanation. Nobody won the argument — the page simply stopped being in it.

The result was read from Paid platform plus CRM qualification data against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on demo completion rate (booked → held). Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The Unbounce workspace with practitioner-first page templates per ad group.
• The approved-claims-to-page mapping, maintained against legal's register.
• The qualification definition document co-signed by paid and sales.
• CRM field-mapping notes for the two qualifying questions, with fallbacks.
• A quarterly page-review ritual written into the paid team's calendar.