SAP Concur Increases Funnel Velocity by 4X Using Journey Stages to Personalize Web Experiences

The Situation

SAP Concur, the world’s leading brand for integrated and scalable travel, expense, and invoice management solutions, has been using Demandbase across sales and marketing teams for seven-plus years. Already using Demandbase for analytics reporting, supplemental demographic data, and building out lists, the team leading the Demandbase project added a new use case that is delivering remarkable results.  

Early in the project, the team made a strategic decision to remove barriers to self-help and education for prospects early in their buying journey. Previously, calls-to-action (CTAs) on their core product pages often led to gated content, but after a research project in 2023 that included insights into a new buyer’s journey, the need to stop pushing people into a form became a priority. The Digital Marketing team hypothesized that when prospective buyers are given the time and tools to self-educate, they will become higher-quality leads. 

To implement the updated strategy, the team mapped each page against the updated buyer’s journey to ensure the pages were answering the right questions and guiding visitors with clarity and authority. This led them to reduce the number of CTAs on each page, and prioritize educational and awareness options like videos, blogs, and other ungated assets to help visitors self-educate before being presented with a form. After allowing the new pages time to gather results, there were areas of conversion growth as well as areas where dips were steeper than anticipated. The team realized there must be a middle ground that would get the right conversion points in front of the right people at the right time. They found the answer in Demandbase journey stages. 

Led by Lindsay Hasz, Director of Insights and Optimization, the cross-functional team began using journey stages to segment their audience into “awareness” and “demand gen” segments. The awareness group is in the earliest stages of self-education, while the demand gen segment shows signs that they’re further along in their buying journey and ready for meatier content. 

Lindsay then used the audiences to personalize the experience on the concur.com core product pages to offer different content depending on which type of buyer was visiting — awareness visitors were led to the ungated, higher-level content outlined above, and demand gen visitors were led to gated content, such as whitepapers, eBooks, buyer’s guides, and high-value forms.