Set Up a Mimiran Lead Capture/Proposal Autoresponder in an Hour

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Here’s a guest post from a customer on setting up a web form and a proposal auto responder in Mimiran. This is a great way to collect and convert more leads. If you have a Contact Us page, consider adding a Mimiran web form widget in addition or in place of. Compared to traditional contact forms, you get:

  • Convert more leads. Traditional contact forms don’t convert as well as Mimiran web form widgets, which feature a button that pops up a dialog.
  • Immediate follow up. This is hard, especially in small companies where everyone is billing or working on projects. Responding while the customer is still on your website vs the next day can increase lead conversion by 60X. (Just to reiterate: not 6X, 60X.)
  • Great content. Create a template (or multiple templates) and deliver compelling content, including benefits, success stories, nice images, even embedded video.
  • Qualify faster. See who engages, and when. Follow up effectively. If you have minimum price points, you can even include “starting from…” pricing to weed out leads who will never buy.
  • Convert faster. In addition to giving a fast response with great content, you can offer multiple options in your proposal, so the prospect can find something they like. You can call and figure out exactly what they need, and you already have a proposal to start.

Anyway, here’s how Matt Konda of Jemurai used Mimiran to set up a web form and auto responder quickly.

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Let me start with a little background.  I’m an engineer who became a software architect, then a project manager, then a director at a security company then traded all that to become an entrepreneur and chase what I think is a very specific problem:  helping developers do a better job with security.  I like to think I’m ok with people, but I’m really heavily oriented to awesome delivery – not sales.  That’s why the contents of this post matters a lot to me and my business.

Today I turned on an automated sales workflow on the Jemurai website enabled by Mimiran, software I use to help me with client proposals.  I’m excited because it will help me to focus on what I’m good at and love doing, which is technical delivery, strategy and coaching – not business development or sales.  With the new workflow in place, someone interested in getting detailed terms for an engagement can do that right from my site.  For simple engagements, they can pay with PayPal and be ready to start without me having to do anything at all.  The detail comes right out of the proposal template I already built and use.  All I have to do is engage to schedule and deliver.

Setting it up was easy.  It only took me a few minutes to configure the Mimiran side and another hour to build and deploy a page I was happy with on my own site to put the button on.  I already have proposal templates for different types of projects.  That means I don’t have to start from scratch or worry about typos or other errors.  I have a controlled set of offerings with managed pricing and can produce a new proposal for a customer in minutes.  I can also get analytics about how they are using the proposal.  Anyway, to embed the widget that generates a real proposal on the fly from my site was one line of JavaScript that Mimiran provided based on how I wanted the integration to work.  The Mimiran UI made it easy to build the form exactly how I wanted it. (I can even make changes to the widget in Mimiran without having to edit my website.)

The flow ends up something like this:

User is on my site and wants a proposal for a service, say a one hour consultation

They click the friendly green “GET HELP!” button. (You can configure the style for the button, but I think the default looks pretty good, so I just left it that way.)

 

That pops up a simple form that gets their email and company name (fields are flexible and configurably required – this is an awesome Mimiran feature)
Those values get automatically populated in a new proposal that gets sent to them (which can include quotes for different levels of service).
They use the link in the email to review the proposal and accept right there (moments from when they requested it!). I get a notification email telling me that they’re looking at it– really helpful because I don’t spend all day on the phones– I need to be able to call back a prospect at the right time.)
As they review the proposal, I can see which sections they are looking at.  If they go through the whole thing, it is a good indication they are serious about doing the work.
For lower price offerings, when they accept, I send them to a Jemurai page with a paypal form so they can prepay and the deal is closed literally with zero additional work on my part.
I can track all the steps in Mimiran and when accepted (and paid if applicable), I can start the work.

No sales.  No legal.

The next step will be to round out proposals and integration for my other service offerings.

Beyond that I want to make it easy for partners to sell for me –and earn a commission.

 About Matt:

Matt Konda has helped dozens of development teams improve security while being more agile.  He views security as something to bake into software (sometimes in creative ways), rather than something you try to tack on afterwards. After years as a software architect and director of engineering, he founded Jemurai to bridge the gap between developers and security experts. Through security consulting, workshops, training, and coaching, he brings better security to software projects in creative ways (yes, he’s been known to serve beer at conference talks).

Check out Jemurai and improve your software’s security.

Update: Congrats, Matt, who was just elected to the board of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
Update: I originally titled the post “Set Up a Mimiran Lead Capture/Proposal Autoresponder in a Morning” and Matt tweeted “more like 1hr.”
If you want to set up one of your own, just sign up and go.
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