Harness.io automates its free trial offer with LinkedIn and Zapier

Challenge

•   Harness.io, a continuous delivery-as-a-service platform, has been advertising on LinkedIn since Dec 2017, and starting in Jan 2020, found great success using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms to reduce friction and increase lead volume. But with the influx of leads came the additional challenge of routing those leads efficiently and accurately. Provisioning accouts and getting them into Harness’s Marketo system required a clunky process of manual steps across multiple people. With several hoops to jump through, there were many delays and even lost requests.
•   “It was critical for us to have a solution that was triggered immediately in real-time so that leads could get up and running within the platform and start seeing the value of Harness. If there are days or even hours before that initial engagement, we find users don’t end up using the product, it becomes an afterthought.” - Geoffrey Taft, Harness.io’s Director of Digital Marketing.
•   “On top of that, when we started digging into it, we noticed that there were roughly 200 leads that never made it to our CRM system, and we had no context as to why.” - Sara vonDohren, Senior Manager of Programs at Harness.io.

Solution

•   To solve the problem, Harness turned to LinkedIn marketing partner Zapier. One goal was to automate the provision of accounts and eliminate snags stemming from the manual process. Another was to deliver their trial link to leads more seamlessly and speedily.
•   “With the Zapier integration, we’re able to eliminate the question of, ‘Is the lead going to make it into our systems? Will the account be provisioned?’ Now, we can focus on engaging our customers and bringing them further down the funnel,” said Geoffrey.

Results

•   With the Zapier integration automatically handling account provisioning, Harness was able to dramatically increase its speed-to-lead rate and streamline a tech-heavy process. “We’re now seeing customers that are more engaged in a more consistent manner,” says Geoffrey. “It’s a repeatable and predictable process that allows us to focus on growth at scale.”
•   “It is essentially a developer solution that can be used by marketers,” said Sara. “It’s really simplified the resources and support we would need and given us the ability to build these developer-esque solutions ourselves.”

Enabling better automation with Zapier

•   The Harness.io team was able to further leverage the Zapier integration to support its UTM tracking system by adding unique fields.
•   “It’s helpful for adding information to the lead as it’s collected and even funnel and sort leads from LinkedIn to better organize them before it reaches Marketo,” said Sara. “One of those for us is UTM. Using Zapier, we can add certain UTMs based on the information we get from LinkedIn and tag this to the lead without having to send it to Marketo.”

Automated auditing enables swift fixes

•   Thanks to this improved tracking ability between LinkedIn, Zapier, and Marketo, the team also receives increased visibility when things go wrong, enabling Harness.io to quickly address issues as they happen.
•   “We wanted to find a way, to not only get 100% accuracy in terms of leads being carried over from forms to Marketo, but make sure that we had some sort of audit trail to verify if there was an error, what exactly the error was, and be able to log it,” said Sara.

Making sign-ups fast, easy, and pain-free

•   Ultimately, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms combined with Zapier reduced friction with potential leads, making the trial sign-up process fast and painless, especially as the company scaled up its offers.
•   “This is the free trial they’re requesting. We need to deliver on that request in seconds or they lose interest,” said Sara. “It can’t happen in minutes, let alone hours or days — that was never an option with the volume we knew we would experience.”