Abstract

Built from the bones of CDLLife's enterprise offering, CDLConnect, Jumpstart was architected as a self sign up, entry level solution for small budget clients. Designed to be autonomously serviced by the client with little onboarding help needed, Jumpstart was created to open the door to relationships with smaller carriers. Formerly, CDLLife was not able to accommodate clients with budget commitments of less than $1200 a month. In order to open up the market beyond mid-large carriers, we realized there was an opportunity to better service smaller carriers through our lead generation engine. This project was designed, developed, and rolled out in less than two months.

Role

• Vice President of Product - Managed & oversaw 1 designer and 2 developers, while guiding the vision, project scope, requirements, execution, and timeline of the project.

When it came to creating Jumpstart, we split the research into two separate parts: an analysis of our current client base, and a financial projection of the small carrier market.

Primary Research

CDLLife's current client base consists of about 70% mid sized carriers, 25% large carriers, and 5% small carriers. The company has historically leaned towards a 'service first' approach best suited to mid sized clients. This is due to the hands on campaign management offered by onsite Digital Media Strategists, and the ability to maximize budget through programmatic budget allocation. CDLLife has refrained (more or less) from pursuing large carriers and whole budgets because of the staffing required to service these clients.

Small carriers though?  That's a whole different ballgame, where quantity matters more than quality of the relationship.

Smaller carriers on average require much less hands on maintenance than medium to large carriers, but also have less recurrent staffing needs & lower budgets to spend on lead generation. In the past, CDLLife has shied away from taking on small carriers due to the manpower required to run campaigns & maintain client relations, as well as the low budget commitment and lack of consistent revenue. Creating a self sign up model would reduce the overhead required to service these clients.

Secondary Research

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, as of April 2023, there were over 750,000 active U.S. motor carriers. Of those carriers, about 95.8% (~718,500) operate 10 or fewer trucks, and 99.7% operate 100 or fewer trucks (Source). That's a huge portion of the market that is, more or less, going untapped. If we were able to capture & maintain just 500 of those small carriers (less than 1%) on a self sign up lead generation plan at $250 a month, it would add over $1.5M to annual revenue alone. We have access to these carriers via word of mouth referrals, open client inquiries, transportation industry relationships, and tradeshows... so why aren't we appealing more to them if they make up the largest audience of carriers in the US?

Considerations

Architectural

When thinking about Jumpstart, we had a few advantages going in from both a design and technical perspective. Following hot on the heels of a fully redesigned, enterprise level client portal (CDLConnect), Jumpstart was able to be created from the bones of what was already designed and developed with CDLConnect. With CDLConnect, emphasis was put on scalability, modern and user friendly design principles, real time integration with the internal Admin Panel that the digital media strategists use, and more robust user permissions & management (particularly for agency clients). Every single component and page was facelifted into the new design system, so that when it came time to fork CDLConnect, creating logic based variants & reskinning the color on top of it was a nominal task. Most of the design effort came from adding user friendly workflows to the onboarding process.

Operational

One nuance of Jumpstart's implementation was how payment & campaign activation would happen behind the scenes. While payment processors like Stripe, Plaid, and Square are easy to implement, they can grow to be costly over time. The way our billing works for current clients is that they are invoiced and held accountable for payment at a specific time in the month (what is lovingly referred to as "Renewal Week"). For an MVP, particularly in the case of Jumpstart being a proof of concept, we wanted to reduce the amount of operational change needed to accommodate the product. This meant creating a space within Jumpstart to enter desired budget & lead volume, which would trigger an email to accounting to issue an invoice to their contact information. This also meant that we needed to build in functionality in the dashboard around providing budget details & filling out their job req as soon as possible in order to get their campaign running.

Behind the scenes, we needed to ensure that the correct team was handling the incoming self sign up clients and placing budget to the correct product lines once payment had been verified. The way our lead generation engine works for enterprise clients is that DMSs (Digital Media Strategists) allocate budget to platforms like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Facebook, etc. based on the job's hiring criteria , desired qualifications, and the amount they think a job will need in order to get the client's specified volume of leads. While our platform has the capability to run this itself based on the type of budget allocation inputted by the self sign up client, we still needed a way to manually verify payment had been made before the campaign started. This was the fastest and easiest way to blend current operations with our new product offering.

Feature Lists

Lastly, as part of creating Jumpstart & defining scope, we needed to understand what separated Jumpstart from CDLConnect so that upsell opportunities could be had with clients that outgrew Jumpstart's capabilities & needed either more leads or advanced data insights.

A preliminary IA digram was made by our designer once the tradeoffs were discussed & final features were decided on. We pared down the IA from the Enterprise offering pretty significantly in order to streamline the experience for newer users without bombarding them with information & data that they likely won't use unless they are a power user or a marketing specialist.

Streamlined Onboarding

In our current onboarding for enterprise clients, potential clients are required to fill out a 25+ question form in order to get their campaign started. Details provided include desired budget, start date, job requisitions and details, hiring criteria, desired driver types, and more. With Jumpstart, we cut those questions down to the 5 we truly need in order to get their campaign running as soon as possible. These questions have also been implemented with event tracking, so we can see where attrition is happening in the onboarding process. We will also know if a company starts and then abandons the process, including their company name and the POC's information.

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Action Oriented Dashboard

One large difference between CDLConnect and Jumpstart is the dashboard. With the Jumpstart dashboard, we wanted to make it overtly obvious what steps they needed to take within the product in order to get their campaign up and running. What would normally be handled by a Digital Media Strategist, in Jumpstart, is intended to be handled by the carrier directly. This meant introducing friendly language and action oriented prompts within the dashboard to get them to fill out a job, provide their company details & benefits, and personalize their branding.

Simplified Budget Configurations

Unlike our enterprise level offering, Jumpstart only has two possible budget configurations: equalized and by job priority. In our enterprise offering, DMSs will allocate budget throughout the month based on campaign performance to a variety of vendors, one being ourselves (and our dynamic job allocation) and to other product lines such as ZipRecruiter, Facebook, etc. With this, a carrier is placing budget only with us, so we just need to know how they want to spend it: equally amongst their jobs, or by priority of requisition?

Improved Job Builder

With Jumpstart, we also created an alternative job builder aimed to provide direction and guidance at every step. We incorporated tooltips, progression meters, and clearly defined steps so that a client can know exactly what to expect and what information we'd need to post their job.

Easy ATS Integration Setup

One important aspect of lead management is the ability to integrate with a carrier's potential ATS. Because CDLLife has never intended to become an ATS due to regulatory concerns and the overhead required to be an ATS, we wanted to offer an easy way for carriers to integrate their leads into an ATS platform they know and trust.

Initial Improvements

Upon initial launch, we realized that users were not creating jobs. They would create an account and abandon the onboarding process. Several improvements were made to prioritize job creation, including the creation of a modal prompting them to continue to job creation, re-prioritizing job creation as the first task in the to do list, and including drip marketing emails prompting them to create their first job in order to get their campaign up and running.

Another issue was that users were unclear how to start their campaign once they had provided all their billing information & job details. This was something we didn't necessarily foresee during the initial ideation, so we ended up adding a pending state to their dashboard to indicate that they campaign was pending until payment verification.

Final Thoughts

Less than two months after launch, we had over thirty prospective sign ups & were able to successfully upgrade two self sign upclients into Enterprise level clients. While there was some functionality we held off developing in the dashboard, the turnaround time from both the design and development team was extraordinary and we were able to reuse much of what was already created from prior projects.