1. Presented by
Ian Smith
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2. My name is Ian Smith
• I work for QuoteWizard
• And I want to talk to you about the anatomy
of a successful lead gen company

3. Dillon, MT

4. Seattle, WA

5. Three topics
• How to build great lead gen funnels
• How to build great teams
• How to innovate at scale

6. About Ian Smith
Industry Veteran
• 8 years of experience
• Helped sell over 10,000,000 leads
• First employee at QuoteWizard
• As VP of Technology: Built our platform
• As VP of Operations: Drive continuous
improvement of our business

7. How to build great lead gen funnels
Step 1: Learn to ride the rapids
Step 2: Test your heart out

8. Learn to ride the rapids

9. Learn to ride the rapids
Two hardest things in lead gen:
• Getting consumers to start
• Getting consumers to share their phone #

10. Learn to ride the rapids

11. What can go wrong
• Not debugging
• Building defensively
• Assuming the visitor knows what to do
• Failing to iterate

12. Test your heart out
• Your funnel can always be better
• You need to test
• You need to be bold
• And be prepared to be surprised

13. Example
• We challenged our design team to make
QuoteWizard look cool

14. Our old home insurance lander

15. Our new insurance lander

16. Which one will work better?
A. B.

17. Which one will work better?
-26%

18. Why?

19. Looking at the heat map for A

20. Looking at the heat map for B

21. What can go wrong
• You make assumptions
• You trust your assumptions
• You fail to test your assumptions
• But testing and empirical decision making isn’t
everyone’s strong suit

22. What can go wrong
• You make assumptions
• You trust your assumptions
• You fail to test your assumptions
• But testing and empirical decision making isn’t
everyone’s strong suit : you’ll need a team

23. How to build great teams
Step 1: Know who you need
Step 2: Hire slow
Step 3: Fight crazies

24. QuoteWizard’s Team

25. QuoteWizard’s Team

26. The four people you need
• Data Scientists
– To ask: Does this really work?
• Marketers
– To ask: What if…?
• Developers
– To ask: How?
• Sales People
– To ask: Would you like to try?

27. How to find good people
1. Hire slow
2. Ask good questions
3. Stress test

28. Good people are like time machines

29. Ask good questions
• Start with the job post
– What questions do you have about our company?
– What relevant experience do you have?
– Do you prefer SQL or Excel to solve a problem?
• Multiple in person interviews
– Describe a time when you had to deliver bad news.
– Describe an interaction with a difficult customer.
– Describe a project that was going badly and you
helped turn around.

30. Stress Test
Potential candidates should be able to demonstrate
the required skills:
• Sales person: Do a test call
• Developer: Write code to solve a problem
• Analyst: Derive findings from sample data
• Client Services: Answer an email
Get messy : multiple tests, followups, white boards
Give feedback and see how they respond

31. Fighting crazies
1. Set expectations
2. Aggressively check-in
3. Serve people

32. Bad people are like groundhog day

33. Set expectations
• Verbal is not enough!
• Write it down:
– Job Description
– Key Results Areas
– Career Development Goals

34. Aggressively check-in
• Project and task follow-up
• Regular 1 on 1s
• Written weekly reports
– Why should I be happy you were here this week?
– High for the week:
– Low for the week:
• Written corrections when something is wrong

35. Serve people
• Your job as a leader is to serve the people who
work for you
• Often the best service you can provide is
showing certain people the door
You will never say to yourself : “Man, I fired
that person too quickly”

36. How to innovate at scale
• You got a funnel. You got customers. You got a
team.

37. How to innovate at scale
• You got a funnel. You got customers. You got a
team. Now your problems scale exponentially.
• So how do you keep focus and innovate at
scale?

38. How to innovate at scale
• Step 1: Create a funnel for ideas
• Step 2: Pick priorities
• Step 3: Keep learning

39. Funnel for Ideas
• Your goal: Make your team compete on
execution, not origination
• We use the PreKickoff

40. PreKickoff Basics
Anyone can have an idea
30 minute meeting with 4 or 5 interested parties to
ask:
• What do you want to do?
• What are alternatives?
• What are the business objectives?
• What metrics will be used to track the project?
• What is the simplest test to prove the value of
this idea?
• What are likely internal objections to this idea?

41. Pitch and Pick
1. The PreKickoff is a barrier to entry
• 90% of ideas self select out before the PreKickoff
2. 50% of PreKickoffs end with the consensus
not to advance a pitch
3. Every 6 weeks the executive team meets for a
Pitch and Pick

42. Pitch and Pick
• 3 Minutes to pitch your idea
• 2 Minutes for questions
• Runoff voting – CEO votes last
• Top 2 to 4 projects advance into the Tech /
Design queue

43. You keep learning

44. Resources are limited
• Every project is vetted by multiple groups of
stake holders
• Business objectives are clearly established and
refined
• The executive team provides clear direction as
to priorities
• Every project is an opportunity to
learn, refine, and improve the process

45. In Summary
“Victory in the next war will depend on
EXECUTION not PLANS and the execution will
depend on some means of making the infantry
move under fire.” - General George S Patton

46. Connect
Email: ismith@quotewizard.com
Cell: 206-406-4874
Twitter: @biastoact

47. Thank You!