Submitted by Emma Butler

Invite-only onboarding processes seem to gain more and more traction. In particular, the email client Superhuman has recently made it very popular. It’s an idea we hated at the beginning at Actiondesk. It seems anti-democratic; why should some users get access to your product and others not? Also, why the hell would you reject some potential users? That’s quite counter-intuitive.

Yet, we’ve been running an invite-only private beta for roughly four months and it increased our conversion rate tenfold (yes, you might call it a 10x onboarding process…). We’ve written about the thought process behind this move here.

But this article is more around how exactly our onboarding process works: the tools, the logic and the workflow. In particular, we use three instrumental tools in this process: Typeform, Actiondesk (of course, we use Actiondesk), and Hubspot. And guess what? 99% of the process is without code.

So how does it work?

The form

We created a Typeform with some questions to determine if the potential customer is actually a good fit for Actiondesk. This will help us assess whether Actiondesk can actually bring value to that user. If it can’t, the user and our team are better off not wasting time trying to make it work. We know time is precious (of course we do; we’re a productivity tool) and we don’t want to be the ones to waste yours.

Questions include:

• What is your full name?
• What is the name of your company?
• What is your position at {company name}?
• What is your work email address?
• How big if your company?
• What would you like to do with Actiondesk?
• Which data sources and applications do you intend to connect to Actiondesk?
• Could you please describe in detail the first automation you’d like to implement with Actiondesk?
• How did you hear about Actiondesk?

To get to this closed beta Typeform, all you need to do is go to our homepage. On our website, buttons labeled “Sign Up” and “Request Access” are sprinkled throughout the site. Clicking on this button brings you directly to our Typeform.

Embedding the Typeform on the website

You can embed the Typeform by copying the snippet to your website HTML or using embed elements (e.g. on Webflow, Carrd etc)

Make it viral

We use the button feature in Typeform and clicktotweet to incentivize users to ask a referral on Twitter.

The lead scoring

To determine which leads are qualified and which leads aren’t we need to calculate a score for each lead based on their Typeform answers. To do this we logged onto our Actiondesk account and imported our Typeform data from our form “Lead Generation”.

We use Actiondesk to ingest all the entries to the form and do the following things:

• Calculate a lead score depending on the answers to the Typeform
• Send a slack message to the whole Actiondesk team saying there is a lead.
• Push the qualified leads to Hubspot, creating contacts with the information from the form and their lead score that’s pushed to a custom field
• Send an automated email for the lead with a score of 0 (this is just mostly people who didn’t fill the form properly).

To calculate the lead score, we then used our spreadsheet knowledge. Actiondesk has a spreadsheet interface, so when you import data from your data source, it looks like it would on a .csv, excel or Google Sheets.

We add a column called “Lead score” with the function IF which takes the parameters [“logical_expression, value_if_ture, value_if_false"].

You could create a formula so the outputs create a number based on some IF() formula. If x ,y , andz are true then the score for that lead is 10, if only x and y are true then the score is 5, etc.. Then you can filter based on scores, let’s say, greater than 4, to be qualified leads.

Once we have the column with the calculated score we send a message to our team through Slack. We do this by clicking on “Program Actions” on the top, filtering the action for only qualified leads with the filter feature, choosing Slack as your destination and having it run as often as every 5 minutes. We always know immediately when we have a qualified lead!

Our next step is to push qualified leads to Hubspot and create a new Contact.

All our qualified leads are sent to Hubspot as contacts with their information from the Typeform.

What about for the leads that aren’t qualified?

We set up another programmed action to send an email automatically to that lead telling them they will be on the waitlist. We simply click Program Actions, filter for unqualified leads, and choose Gmail as a destination. They’ll receive a message like this:

The qualification

For lead with score > 0, we review manually the answers of the Typeform in Hubspot.

To make sure we don’t miss any, we have a task automatically created by Actiondesk in Hubspot. So once a week, we just go through the queue of tasks.

We’ll look particularly to the type of workflows the user wants to build and which apps she’d like to connect to Actiondesk.

Depending on whether we think a user is a good fit or not, we’ll send an invite email or not.

At the current stage of the product, users are not able to get the ahamoment, to see the value of Actiondesk by themselves. We need one call with qualified leads to show them how to get everything going. We schedule a quick 40-minute Zoom demo where a team member shows the potential client how Actiondesk works by sharing our screen and running through a use case.

We’ve found that our customers have a strong connection with our tool and our brand; it all starts with the Typeform and then the personalized demo.

What could you build

Our customers have come up with unique use cases with Typeform they’ve shared with us.

Some of our customers take Typeform data and create new Trello cards on certain boards in a certain stage. Others push email data from their Typeform right into Mailchimp. Others integrate with Salesforce, MySQL, Pipedrive, Intercom, Airtable or any of our other integrations. We have use cases where customers push their Typeform data to Google Sheets to create a highly customized automated dashboard that also has data from Stripe or a different CRM.

We’re not sure what the future of Actiondesk looks like with invite-only closed beta far down the road, but for now, we enjoy getting to know our customers, show them the tool we’ve built, and help them be more productive.