Self Serve Sign-up

Challenge

From the customer's perspective, self-serve looked simple. Internally, contracts, billing, qualification, account creation, tracking implementation, and campaign activation all depended on assisted workflows.

Before investing in automation, we needed evidence that customers would actually move through the experience without sales involvement, including accepting commercial terms and providing payment information.

Strategy

Test the riskiest assumption with the smallest viable investment.

I partnered across Marketing, Finance, Commercial, Legal, and Product to recreate enough of the experience to measure real customer behavior without requiring a full Product or Engineering build.

Paid campaigns drove hotel advertisers into a multi-step sign-up experience, while existing tools and manual internal workflows handled what would eventually require automation.

Key Decisions

Test before building

The full experience would have required meaningful Product and Engineering investment. I intentionally kept the initial test lightweight so we could validate demand before solving the infrastructure problem.

Measure commitment

Rather than survey customers about whether they would use self-serve, we put a real offer in market and measured whether they would progress through terms and payment.

Create and adapt the funnel

I defined measurement at each stage so we could identify where users dropped rather than treating the final conversion as the only signal.

Channel selection was removed after the first two weeks when it appeared to introduce unnecessary friction, and contact information was moved earlier so incomplete sign-ups could still be analyzed and retargeted.

Results & Learnings

Interest in the solution was validated. The self-serve purchase model was not.

Paid campaigns showed that customers were interested in a faster, lower-friction way to get started.

• LinkedIn CTR: 0.48%
• LinkedIn creative emphasizing speed and “skip the sales call” reached 0.53% CTR
• Google CTR: 2.70%
• 151 paid-media users started the self-serve experience

But interest dropped sharply as users moved toward commercial commitment.

• 657 Step 1 events
• 237 progressed to Step 2
• 13 completed the non-payment portion of the form
• 2 submitted payment
• 0 successful payments

One prospect specifically abandoned at payment after deciding the 15% commission did not provide enough value compared with OTA commissions. Sales later converted that lead at a lower rate.

The test also confirmed that a scalable self-serve model would require much more than a signup form. Qualification, contracting, payment processing, Salesforce setup, account creation, tracking, and onboarding still depended heavily on manual operations.

Outcome

• Tested a long-standing executive hypothesis without requiring a full product build
• Validated customer interest in lower-friction acquisition messaging
• Identified payment and perceived commercial value as major barriers
• Exposed operational dependencies that would need to be redesigned before self-serve could scale
• Gave leadership behavioral evidence to guide future investment rather than relying on assumptions

Role & Contributions

Led the self-serve acquisition test from hypothesis through launch, including experiment strategy, success criteria, funnel design, competitive research, tooling evaluation, targeting, measurement, and cross-functional coordination.

Partnered with Meaghan Sandtorv, who designed and built the web experience, while I provided content direction, visual guidance, and feedback on the signup flow.