Middesk posts 50% surge in converting website visitors to qualified leads

“Middesk prides itself on providing the highest quality product to our customers, but we’ve struggled to find ways to make the power of our APIs and data products tangible. Coast makes it simple and fast for anyone on our website to quickly understand how our suite of APIs work together to enable magical customer experiences, which has helped us have more strategic conversations with current and prospective customers about how to use our products.”

- Kyle Mack, CEO and Co-Founder at Middesk

Head of Growth Kate Blumberg and Account Executive Josh Leviloff from Middesk discuss two distinct yet interconnected challenges within the team’s growth function: scaling top-of-funnel pipeline, while improving lead qualification and conversion rates in the mid-funnel stages.

Before Coast, leads interfaced with a Middesk internal dashboard that was repurposed for external product demonstrations. Leads lost sight of the true product—Middesk’s robust API suite—while working in the dashboard, leading to confusion and downstream issues with conversion, qualification, and funnel progression.

Middesk approached the problem with a simple question: how can we efficiently grow and convert leads, especially those in the mid-funnel stage?

Blumberg remembers pulling data from Coast demos after just 60 days and being in awe of what she saw.

“I noticed a dramatic shift after just 60 days. We were seeing leads that interact with a Coast demo convert to qualified buyers 50% more often than our existing sign up flow. The quality of leads was also extraordinary—leads really understood the product and moved to that next stage much quicker than before.”

Leviloff similarly remarked on the game-changing impact that Coast has on his sales team.

“Our product resonates more with leads now that they see real examples of what the APIs can do. Our team doesn’t need to ask as many discovery questions because there's already a basic understanding of what we do and the value we provide. The impact on our sales metrics has been extraordinary."

"On average, I've seen my leads that interact with a Coast demo move through the sales funnel 30% faster than those who don't.”

The consumer identity market has recently gone through a cycle of innovation, primarily predicated on improving the customer onboarding experience. Despite this renewed effort, the business identity market has been relatively unchanged.

Middesk was founded to fill this gap.

The platform is designed to automate and modernize the business identity process.

Traditional financial institutions, fintechs, government agencies, payroll providers, and others utilize Middesk’s APIs to streamline business onboarding, underwrite loans, and more. The Middesk infrastructure empowers these service providers to construct an automated, intelligent flow directly into their existing products, reducing manual touchpoints and improving the overall identity-related process for businesses.

The Middesk growth team, led by Blumberg, is primarily responsible for generating qualified leads and nurturing those leads through the sales funnel. The forward progression of a qualified lead through the sales funnel is arguably the most important lever in a growth team’s arsenal. The mid-funnel education stage is often the inflection point, where leads evolve into qualified buyers and where product education matters most.

“Buyers recognize that they have a problem and that there are solutions, but the real challenge is how do you provide them with the correct educational tools that outline the various solutions and how each would work to address those unique problems,” Blumberg said.

The Middesk team previously relied on an internal generic dashboard that was repurposed to meet this mid-funnel demand. The hope was that leads would engage with this static dashboard and better understand how the Middesk platform would work in real scenarios.

But prospective buyers were confused. What does this look like for me? How did the API work? What would it look like embedded in my product?

Blumberg observed that this confusion led to poor conversion rates, low qualification, and difficulty progressing leads forward in the sales funnel.

“The dashboard was just not purpose-built for demonstrating the APIs. Leads would log in to the dashboard and be confused about where the APIs were and how the APIs would work in real scenarios.”

“My only option was to try to remove it from the website and fix the existing flow, which required significant developer resources. Even then, it was still a dashboard flow and wasn’t the best representation of how the APIs worked. I knew we needed to try something else, but I didn’t know what or how,” shared Blumberg.

Leviloff similarly described how the sales team handled demos before Coast.

“We struggled significantly with demonstrating our APIs to leads. Our internal dashboard was not built for showcasing how our APIs worked in real scenarios. As a result, we saw leads unprepared for an initial discovery call and slow progression to the next stages in the sales funnel.”

The Middesk team embarked on building a new and improved self-serve option for educating leads on its APIs, particularly focused on the mid-funnel stage. This would ideally yield more qualified and educated leads, prepared to move to the subsequent steps in the funnel.

“As a very sales-minded marketer, conversion rate for leads is extremely important to me. I want leads to come in and actually convert to pipeline. The dashboard was not converting leads to actual pipeline. We were seeing less than a 10% conversion to becoming a qualified opportunity, which is way too low,” Blumberg highlighted.

“A lot of API-first companies lean on a self-serve flow for lead conversion. Aside from trying to build something completely custom that the marketing team can't own, I simply thought that all API-first marketing teams were stuck with futile attempts to show the API."

"I’ve felt this pain for my entire career and I didn't know that I had other options before Coast.”

Why is the mid-funnel stage particularly important to a company, specifically an API-first platform like Middesk?

“At this stage [mid-funnel], there is real pipeline value that can be accurately measured and those numbers add up very quickly. My job is to generate pipeline, but it’s also to get new leads educated enough on the product so that those first discovery calls are extremely productive with my sales team partners,” Blumberg explained.

After the Middesk team outlined these challenges during onboarding, it became evident that Coast’s lead-gen embed capability was the right feature set to meet their specific needs. Coast’s lead-gen embed enables self-serve creation of an on-demand, contextualized demo. In the background, Coast sends analytics and prospect information directly to a CRM of choice, just as a traditional ‘Book a Call’ flow might do—with the added value of a shareable, live journey for your prospect.

A pivotal moment after those initial discovery sessions was the mere speed in which the team could have a working product fully functional across its website.

“Your speed to market blew me away,” Blumberg recalled. “There was a meaningful and measurable change in less than a month from when we got our first API demos on the website.”

One crucial component that the team brainstormed together was placement.

Which website product page would a self-serve API demo make the most impact? Where on this page would the demo drive the most engagement?

“We started out placing the Coast API demo on our ‘Business Verification’ page,” Blumberg said. “At the time, that page was one of our main landing pages and our second most-trafficked page on the website..”

By default, every Middesk lead that interfaces with a Coast-powered API demo does not just see the APIs working live, but can visualize the example use cases supported with the Middesk platform. Even more, the entire demo is completely tailored to the lead’s brand, logo, and colors in real-time.

As a demand generation team, analytics are essential for measuring success. Coast provides rich data to the Middesk team’s existing stack, refining the lead funnel with real-time data from every unique demo.

With Coast, Middesk is able to construct custom signals to track throughout the demo experience to go beyond a traditional ‘Request a Demo’ form, where you need to weigh the cost of added friction with every input field. Now, Middesk can track usage signals and capture information while the prospect gets true value from the demo experience.

The Middesk growth team’s analytics stack is primarily comprised of Salesforce, Google Analytics (particularly Google’s “Tag Manager”), and HubSpot.

As a lead engages with a Coast-powered API demo on the Middesk website, the Google Tag Manager integration on the website fires events during specified activities. These raw metrics then get tied back to the events driving those behaviors. As a result, when a lead completes the website form to see the interactive API demo, Middesk’s parent website is notified in real-time of precisely which page that conversion is happening on from the form. This invaluable data is then pushed to the team’s HubSpot instance for normalization and ultimately fed into the team’s Salesforce dashboard for reporting.

Blumberg’s team can then take appropriate action with leads based on this data, nurturing leads with curated content and support.

“Integrating Coast into how we measure just meant that we would be able to very quickly and easily, in all of our existing systems, track the activities and events back to the campaigns. This powerful analytics feature allows my team to more accurately tailor experiences for leads and drive engagement with leads in real-time,” Blumberg shared.

“After we put it on the website, the entire team was blown away. We saw a significant spike in our top-of-funnel demand. In the first few weeks, we received a huge influx of new leads through the demo.”

The Middesk growth team’s success criteria for a new API demo process was improving the mid-funnel process, specifically within conversion rates, qualification, and accelerating the speed in which leads move through the funnel.

After just 90 days, Blumberg submitted a formal request to evaluate Coast against the existing self-serve flow still on areas of the Middesk website.

The entire revenue team agreed: take the existing self-serve demo off the website and replace exclusively with Coast.

As the team scaled up usage of Coast, placement throughout the website was the first expansion action.

“We initially only had Coast demos on the ‘Business Verification’ page, but Coast is now on all of our landing pages. If you go to the Middesk website today, we've rolled out to even more product pages. Additionally, we also use Coast in our PPC pages,” outlined Blumberg. “We’ve really leaned into this concept that Coast is how our customers want to educate themselves. It doesn’t hurt that these leads are easily our best prospects.”

“During a demo, the lead can pick the kind of company that it wants to onboard with Middesk and the demo automatically personalizes how different data attributes are relevant or important. We were very intentional with how we built the flow of these demos, so that leads would feel like it was built specifically for their unique challenges. Leads are able to see how the data and corresponding story changes dynamically based on the way they interact in the demo. That’s extremely valuable to us,” Blumberg detailed.

Results were not limited to the marketing team; sales leaders noticed a distinct difference with leads that engaged with a Coast demo.

“I know immediately if it’s a Coast lead,” Leviloff proudly affirmed.

Blumberg is also deeply passionate about bringing education and awareness to API-first marketing leads.

“I really feel like every marketer who is selling a non-tangible product like an API should be using Coast. I just don't know how others in the market are educating their buyers, ”Blumberg said. “Even with access to a full stack engineer, I couldn't build this even if I tried. That's just not happening for marketers. There’s real cost and potential impact to your pipeline if you have a bad, outdated flow. Building and maintaining something like that internally just wasn’t an option for us.”

Blumberg provided an overview of where the growth team is planning to expand usage of Coast in the forthcoming months.

“Our next priorities with Coast are events and outbound. We want to take Coast to all events so that leads can see an API demo right at the booth. Using Coast at events in a more meaningful way, really talking through the actual product live with prospects, will significantly help drive ROI.”

The sales team is equally eager to leverage Coast more in its daily operations. “Our sales team loves Coast and wants to figure out how to use it more during calls. I think about what we could do if we were using Coast on all of our sales calls.”

One of the Middesk team’s favorite things about the Coast team is how it matches, even outpaces, the typical partnership collaboration speed.“I appreciate that you guys move as fast as we move and are as nimble as we are,” Blumberg said. “Coast has always been faster than us. It’s so nice to feel like we could really lean on you to help us build something awesome.”

Blumberg is optimistic and energized about Coast not just because of Middesk’s specific results, but because of the trends she sees in global B2B sales.

“One of the reasons that I am so bullish on Coast as a product is because APIs are the future. More technical products like APIs are being sold to non-technical buyers. Being able to help a marketing, growth, sales function visualize an API and allowing leads to really experience the product is going to be key moving forward.”