When I met Kampyle CEO Ariel Finkelstein last week, the first words that came out of his mouth were: “Can you tell me who the hell are these people that sit over there in the Valley and invent all these stupid terms like ‘Pivot’ … ?!” He then went on to tell me about the company’s most important product insight since launch and how it is changing their business.
When Kampyle launched three years ago, the company had a clear product vision: A platform for site owners that gives them an easy way to aggregate and then follow-up on user feedback. The idea was to combine ‘feedback analytics’ with traditional Web analytics. The theory went that by helping companies close their feedback loop, they could better understand and serve their users and customers. The theory became practice, and Kampyle has been growing in every KPI since.
This is when you would expect the story to take a twist with an unforeseen stick in the wheels. Except the opposite happened. Kampyle realized that all along, they were actually sitting on top of what could be a potential goldmine for their customers. The epiphany occurred when Kamyple began noticing that customers were employing user feedback as lead-generation.
The consequences were dramatic… This meant that Kamyple could completely revamp their sales strategy and pricing. From a nice-to-have feedback analytics product for Marketing departments, they could now market the product as a lead-gen tool for Sales departments. User feedbacks would be seen as ‘qualified leads’ with ROI dollar values attached.
Kampyle began rolling-out the lead-gen offering to pilot customers a few months ago. Finkelstein explained that 60% of users, on average, leave feedback along with their real contact details. So when such user feedback forms were funneled to sales teams, they were treated as qualified leads which converted at uncharacteristically high rates of 35-45%. One Kampyle customer, for example, saw conversions rates jump from 2.8% to 29% and average deal size increase by 220% compared to any other lead source used.
With the new focus on lead-gen, Kampyle beefed-up their product offering with some new features:
- Feedback Form Library: For example a custom feedback form for PPC landing pages.
- Tagging: Trigger words within feedback forms are used to transform regular leads to qualified leads.
- Auto-response: Scripted responses, including time-based incentives and coupons.
- API: Integration to Web analytics & CRM products, including SalesForce.
So did Kampyle pivot? My feedback: No, they simply evolved.
