We gave away
the taste test.

There's a pretty standard rule in B2B marketing: before you give somebody anything valuable, get their email address.

Want to try the software? Sign up. Want to see the report? Fill out the form. Want to watch the demo? Give us your name, company, phone number, annual revenue, mother's maiden name, and possibly a DNA sample.

Okay, maybe not the last two.

When we were building the new SalesDriver website, I wanted visitors to actually use the tools before signing up. It sounded simple enough. Except we had twelve different working platforms to bring together into one experience, right in the header. That turned out to be a considerably bigger engineering job than my original description suggested.

Which, according to our CTO Muhammad, is a recurring theme around here.

But we built it. You can go to SalesDriver.io, open the tools, and use all twelve without making an account. No credit card. No sales appointment. And here's the part that probably gives certain marketing consultants a headache: we can't follow up with five emails, because we never asked who you were.

Before anybody accuses me of having no respect for lead generation, I have spent more than twenty years working in sales. I know exactly why the forms exist. We measure everything. We want to know which campaign worked, who came back, and who might buy next month.

Giving someone a useful tool for free costs money and gives us less information about that visitor. Those are real tradeoffs. I am not pretending otherwise.

But I've always believed something about selling. If you own a restaurant and somebody walks by, you can spend the entire afternoon explaining how good the food is. You can show reviews, describe the ingredients, and talk about the chef's training in Paris. Or you can give them a bite.

If the food is good, there's a pretty decent chance they'll come back. If it isn't, collecting their email address probably won't save the restaurant.

SalesDriver is a big platform. Honestly, sometimes it takes me longer to explain everything we built than it takes somebody to try one part of it. So we're letting people taste the food.

Will that convert better than a traditional lead-capture funnel? I don't know yet. That's an experiment we're willing to run. What I do know is that a spreadsheet full of names doesn't mean much if nobody has seen the value.

And if one of the tools breaks, please tell us. We're still cooking.