Creativity is born out of constraint
We had planned ambitious marketing and growth goals for QuotaPath in 2020. Less than three months in the world changed as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
In the product, we’ve seen a drop in usage as furloughs and layoffs happened. Sales teams are throwing quotas out the window. And budgets are tightening. Our site traffic has taken a hit and sign-ups have slowed.
For the marketing team, it felt like the outside world halted for a few weeks in a state of shock, but our product and engineering teams were continuously working hard on awesome new features. And, it’d be a shame if sales teams didn’t get the chance to learn about what QuotaPath can do for them. So, in a world where marketing can feel like you’re walking on thin ice, what do you do?
Motivate with Team Contests
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Learn MoreWith this new set of constraints ranging from the physical felt while working from home — to the financial of scaling back budgets — a creative idea was born.
After hearing that sales reps are missing those interpersonal interactions in the office, the light bulb moment happened. We could build a virtual way to encourage, motivate, recognize and celebrate success in a very familiar-feeling way, with a tool called Virtual High Fives.
Creating community is in our brand DNA
You might be asking yourself, virtual high fives, what does this have to do with commission tracking software? Well, at QuotaPath we aren’t just building a SaaS sales tool, our vision is to build a community of high-performing sales reps and teams.
Working remotely is changing sales team dynamics, distributed sales teams are looking for new ways to stay connected, and it’s important to find new ways to celebrate wins together. Plus, can’t we all use a little fun and delight, in any form these days?
With budget limitations, an exercise in brand awareness and affinity felt like the right opportunity to explore.
Fail fast, fail often and recover quickly
In the past year, we’ve bounced several ideas for microsites around. But with everything else we juggle as a marketing team of three, we hadn’t prioritized our time or resources for a project that wasn’t core to QuotaPath. Being home, and needing a creative outlet presented us with a new opportunity to play and test a different idea.
How everything quickly fell apart
After a very successful launch at the end of March with our refreshed website, we turned to our backlog to determine what to tackle in Q2. There was one concept we’ve been tossing around for a year. It felt like it was a good project with brand and lead gen benefits, but probably wouldn’t drive immediate results. After doing some research and writing a brief, we ditched the idea within 24 hours of kicking it off. With all the events that are happening daily, we wondered if there was a way to make a more immediate impact.
How it came together as virtual high fives
We kept coming back to the idea that people are wanting ways to feel connected. High fives connect people. We had the visual assets from our brand library to work with– they are an important element for us since they represent the community, connection, success, and celebration. So we thought, maybe build a way to send virtual high fives?
Digging in a little deeper, it turns out that searches for “virtual high five” increased an estimated 580% in March 2020 according to Google Keyword Planner. We were on to something and went all in.
The project was completed, start to finish within a week as a tag-team effort done in the evening and on weekends. It was important not to divert resources away from a big month of product development, but this project needed involvement from every team — marketing, product, growth, and engineering, plus calling in a favor from a good friend.
We didn’t have a specific launch day in mind until we discovered the next day, Thursday, April 16th, was National High Five day. Coincidental, but completely perfect.
We kept the project and team lean so we could maximize the impact and surprise the rest of the company. Our second birthday was the week prior, so it felt like a belated present since we weren’t able to celebrate together.
Roll out started with love notes over Slack praising and thanking each team member for their unique contributions to QuotaPath’s product and culture. The official launch happened on LinkedIn and on Product Hunt, where it was featured as Top 10 of the day!
A win for our brand
Within the first 72 hours, we had seen incredible engagement. Less than a week after launch, and since writing this, we’ve had:
- 82,347+ high fives (and counting)
- 900+ unique names generated
- 1,100+ shares
- 98+ countries reached
- 10% increase in referral traffic to QuotaPath.com
- 300% increase in traffic to QuotaPath.com the day after launch
Overall, this was a successful endeavor for us, that didn’t take too much valuable time or resources away from the team. By creating this microsite and running this experiment we were able to:
- Create an asset that will foster brand affinity with our audience
- Proved a new way to drive traffic organically
- Gave our team a creative outlet to play with
- Spread a little joy around the world
Virtual high fives all around!
