Connect MVP, B2B product
Connect is a B2B product launched by Meilleurs Agents. It allows agents reaching out to clients through online prospecting.
Why did we work on this subject at Meilleurs Agents?
Constant feedback from clients/agents showed us that traditional prospecting (prospecting letters, door-knocking, cold calling, …) is frustrating for real estate agents, because it’s time-consuming and has very few results. However, they also consider that it’s mandatory and one important way to reach out prospects. I worked from the beginning to the MVP launch on this project, with two product managers, developers, product marketing managers, sales, …
The concept
On Meilleurs agents site, owners estimate their property and specify if they want to get in touch with agents to help them sell it.
Through Connect, agents can target projects and send emails to certain owners with a personalized message. They will receive the contact information of the owner only if he or she explicitly accepts the connection with the agency.
Discovery: Lean canvas, qualitative data
Our discovery process is based on the Lean Canvas: an adaptation of Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder which Ash Maurya created in the Lean Startup spirit (Fast, Concise and Effective startup). It focuses on problems, solutions, key metrics and competitive advantages.
It’s based on hypotheses that you have to verify after running some interviews. We run phone interviews and also face-to-face ones during events.
These interviews were important to our projects, we could complete and understand the problems that agent face every day. Then, the solutions interviews allowed us to verify if our ideas could solve the problems.
Concept testing, quantitative data
In parallel, when our solution was clearer, the marketing studies team helped us submit a quantitative survey explaining the Connect concept to our agent database in order to check if our hypotheses and our solution were really responding to a problem.
Design studios
Design studios are collaborative and participating workshops.
The goal is to generate solutions to respond to a design problem, gathering stakeholders from different departments.
For this project, to create a draft of a solution, I organised 3 design studios to work on these features: the targeting, personalization and the dashboard page.
User testing
I run several user testing sessions to evaluate the usability of our product and to decide whether it was ready to be launched for real users. There were in-person and remote moderated user tests. Both on B2C and B2B sides.
I tested different things:
– several versions of the email sent to owners (completed with A/B tests) in relevant user flows.
– Connect product at different stages, from the first draft to the MVP.
Check my article about remote moderated user tests (french).
