Practicing what you preach is very important and as a online sales company, working for financial service providers, telecom providers and auto dealers over the past 7 years, we put our sales skills to the test. The team at SCG were tasked to develop the Caribbean’s first price comparison website for banks, direct lenders, telecom providers and insurers which we called Comparett.com. Within 6 months the site has become a silent but powerful success in the Caribbean resulting in $251m in loan applications and over 23,000 customers applying for loans, credit cards, car and life insurance. Unlocking sales success for your brand is possible and here’s a look and how to do it.

We know from our work with clients as a Google Partner that putting the consumer first and focusing on the value proposition and usability was essential to building a successful online sales offering. It often surprises our clients when we advise them to spend 66% of their time and budget on designing and testing and only 33% on the development but that is exactly what we did with Compare as part of our 5D process.

We obsessed over making quite complicated purchases such as mortgages, life insurance and car loans extremely simple with a big emphasis on mobile which always accounts for ~80% of  sales traffic in the Caribbean. We stripped out all non-essential information and hide the additional details away so only users that wanted them would see them. We designed the wire-frames, built prototypes, tested them and redesigned each journey until we believed we had the formula just right. We believe Compare is both the most efficient lending and insurance platform in the region which is 100% a product of this process.

The hardest designs are often the cleanest and simplest looking. Design out details, information and features is much harder than adding them in and the proof of that is how hard but successful the one button iPhone was at its launch at a time when phones had dozens of buttons.  We designed the entire platform around the customer and in the end it forced us to keep everything as simple as possible so that everyone would find the site easy to use – again even for completed products like insurance.

We then broke down the website development work in 14 micro projects and developed each of these in separate sprints as part of an agile development process. Having working prototypes and high fidelity designs dramatically reduced the time developers took in interpreting or editing designs as well as cutting out edits or changes. This meant that we developed the entire platform in under 4 months coming in over 25% under time and budget and not many companies can say they’ve been able to do that! For our back-end we used our propitiatory sales software which we offer our clients and massively saved time and costs.

Working with a range of financial service providers in the Caribbean we knew there was a big demand from customers to access financial products online, but even we didn’t guess how big that demand would be. With any sales project there is what we call the ‘Sweet Spot’, this is where the ROI case makes the most sense getting the value proposition, investment and revenue levels just right. A key part of find this is getting a rich insight into your customer that enables you to under-engineer a solution that reduces costs but that customers still love. Our insight was that loan and card customers wanted three things:

1. To be able to search and compare options online at home after work. PROOF: Compare’s most active hour is 8pm to 9pm.
2. To be able to do high level research without feeling the pressure of a brand’s sales agent. PROOF: 205,000 customers visited compare.
3. To trust that the information was transparent and unbiased. PROOF: 72% return rate, 95% satisfaction rate and 40 NPS(R) Score.

As always our partner team are on hand to help you meet your business needs and objectives. And if you’ve any questions about this or upcoming projects let us know and see what the team at SCG has to offer you.