A one-week experiment that turned $500 into a $100K sale and a funded product team
The product team said video calls on the website would take too long to build. I proved the idea in one week with off-the-shelf tools and one sales manager. The first month closed a $100K sale, and the business put a team on it.
- My role
- Designer: journey mapping, tool choice, flow and UI, results
- Team
- PM, one sales manager
- Timeline
- 1 week to build, 1 month to measure
- Stack
- Calendly, Microsoft Teams, bi.group
At −40°C, nobody wants to drive to a sales office
Astana winters reach −40°C. Buying an apartment at BI Group usually meant visiting a sales office, and phone calls rarely closed a deal. The hypothesis: if buyers could book a video consultation from the website, more of them would buy.
The product team declined to build it, estimating the development would take a long time. So it came to the PM and me as an experiment, with one rule: prove it without engineering.
No engineers, one sales manager, existing tools only
The sales office lent us one manager for the experiment, who already had a corporate Microsoft Teams account. That set the shape of the solution: we didn’t need to build calling, only a way for buyers to book it.
I compared booking tools and chose Calendly because it integrates with Teams out of the box, so every booking created a call link automatically.
Two entry points and a booking flow that feels native
I mapped the in-person buying journey with sales to find the moments where buyers need to see something to trust it, then designed the remote flow around them. Video had to be easy to find without disrupting people who just wanted a phone call.
- A “Request a video call” button in the site header
- A video option added to the existing call-back form
- Calendly’s booking pop-up restyled in BI Group’s colours, so it reads as part of the site
- Bookings land in the sales manager’s Teams calendar with a call link
$100K from a $500 experiment
The PM and I launched it in one week and measured after a month. Four buyers requested a video call, and one of them bought an apartment for about 50 million KZT, roughly $100,000. The only cost was the sales manager’s monthly salary, 250,000 KZT or about $500.
That sale did what a slide deck couldn’t. The business and the product team saw the value, took video consultations into development, and assigned a team to build it properly.
What I’d do differently
Four requests is a small sample, and one sale proves potential, not a rate. With more time I would have run the pilot longer, tracked requests by entry point, and compared against phone-call conversion, so the product team could size the opportunity rather than just believe in it.
When a team says an idea is too expensive to try, the fastest argument is a cheap version that works.