Overview
Where we came in
A B2B project management platform selling to teams of 10 to 200. Paid search and content were both bringing qualified traffic to the trial signup page, and both were losing most of it at the same step. Sales wanted the form fields because the data helped them prioritise outreach. Growth wanted the form gone. Nobody had tested which side was more expensive.
The baseline problem
- The trial signup form asked for 14 fields, including company size, budget range, current tooling and role, before showing the product.
- Form analytics showed 62% of people who started the form abandoned it, with the largest single drop on the budget dropdown.
- Mobile abandonment was worse at 71%, and mobile was 44% of traffic from paid search.
- Sales was receiving fewer, better-qualified leads and had no visibility into the volume lost upstream.
Hypothesis
What we expected, and why
Written before the test was built. Because we observed X, we expect Y, measured by Z.
Because the form asks for commercial qualification before the visitor has seen any product value, we expect that moving all non-essential fields into an in-product onboarding step will increase trial starts per visitor, without reducing the number of trials that reach a qualified sales conversation.
Experiment plan
How the test was set up
Sample size and stop date were both fixed before launch, so no result here was called early.
Two-arm split test on the trial signup route. Control kept the 14-field form. Variant asked for work email, password and team name only, then collected the remaining fields across the first two onboarding screens inside the product.
- Primary metric
- Trial starts per unique visitor to the signup page
- Traffic
- ~18,400 visitors per arm
- Duration
- 21 days, stop date fixed before launch
- Guardrails
- Sales-qualified trials per week, so volume gains cannot come at the cost of lead quality
- Day-7 activation rate, to catch a flood of unserious signups
- Support ticket volume during onboarding
Results
What actually moved
| Metric | Control | Variant | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trial starts per visitor | 4.05% | 5.32% | +31.4% |
| Form completion once started | 38.1% | 81.6% | +43.5pp |
| Mobile trial starts per visitor | 2.71% | 4.44% | +63.8% |
| Day-7 activation | 46.2% | 44.9% | -1.3pp |
| Sales-qualified trials per week | 61 | 74 | +21.3% |
Activation dipped slightly, which is what you would expect when a lower-friction door lets in a wider mix of people. Because the absolute number of qualified trials rose, the trade was worth taking. We flagged the activation dip as the next thing to fix rather than burying it.
What changed
Shipped to production
- Signup reduced to work email, password and team name.
- Company size, role and current tooling moved to onboarding screens two and three, where they now double as personalisation inputs.
- Budget range removed entirely. Sales gets it on the first call, where the answer is more honest anyway.
- Inline validation replaced the on-submit error summary that was sending mobile users back to the top of the form.
Next experiments
Already in the queue
- 01Recover the activation dip with a guided first-project template chosen during onboarding.
- 02Test SSO buttons above the email field for the enterprise-shaped segment.
- 03Test whether asking team size before or after the first invite changes seat count at conversion.