The funnels already existed. Nothing pointed at them.

Convoy had two sign-up funnels that worked. One for carriers, one for shippers. The website was pointing people at neither.

The problem

This was 2019. Convoy was building out its marketing practice, and the website had come along for the ride without anyone owning it.

That is the actual diagnosis, and it explains everything downstream. When a site has no single owner, it does not get worse through neglect. It gets worse through contribution. Multiple teams shipped changes, each one defensible on its own, and the accumulated result was a site carrying every group’s priorities and pointing at no destination.

There was no metric falling off a cliff to point at. The symptom was that nobody could say plainly what the site was for. A visitor who arrived with real intent had to work out for themselves which side of the marketplace they were on, then find the path that matched. A two-sided marketplace makes that harder rather than easier, because every page is trying to speak to two audiences who want opposite things.

The WordPress installation had the same problem underneath. It had been maintained by enough different people over enough time that no cohesive structure was left. Templates, plugins, and content types had accumulated without anyone consolidating them.

The approach

I came in directly on a referral and worked day to day with their Senior Manager of Marketing Campaigns.

The audit came first: map what the site was actually doing against what it was supposed to do, then rank the gaps by how much they cost and how fast they could be closed.

The recommendation was subtraction. Convoy already had two working sign-up funnels, one for carriers moving freight and one for shippers with freight to move. Nothing needed to be built. The site needed to stop doing other things and start routing every visitor into whichever of the two applied to them.

That is a less exciting recommendation than a redesign, and it was the point. They needed the change with the greatest immediate impact, not a six month project that would have restarted the same ownership problem on a new template.

On the CMS side I worked with their team on consolidating the WordPress installation, reducing the accumulated sprawl so future changes had somewhere coherent to live. A site with no clear structure and a site with no clear owner are the same problem viewed from two angles, and each one keeps producing the other.

Alongside the site work I built campaigns in their Marketo instance for the email program.

The outcome

Convoy focused the site on the two funnels.

That is the honest extent of what I can tell you. I do not have conversion numbers from this engagement and I am not going to manufacture them. What I know is that the recommendation was adopted and the site stopped trying to be everything to everyone.

If you want the version of this story with numbers attached, the Tableau contact page work is here.

Convoy wound down in 2023, for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this.

Why it worked

I arrived on a referral, which meant trust showed up before I did.

That matters more than it should. The internal debate about the website had not resolved itself, and not because nobody had the right answer. It had not resolved because every internal opinion carried the weight of the person’s role, their history, and whatever they had shipped last. An outside read from someone the team already had reason to trust could say the obvious thing and have it land as a decision rather than as one more opinion in the pile.

The obvious thing was that the funnels already existed. Someone just had to say it out loud and point the site at them.