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Sage relied on in-app guides to educate users, but experimentation was slow and manual—making it hard to know what worked. With 40–50 live guides at a time, the team needed faster insights and clearer data to guide decisions.
By adopting Pendo’s Guides experiments, Sage shifted from guesswork to side-by-side A/B testing, enabling faster learning and evidence-backed decisions. The team built a simple, scalable testing framework tied to real user behaviors.
A short video preview drove an 18% lift in CTA clicks—one of many wins from Sage’s new testing practice. Experiments now fuel smarter content, reusable assets, and more confident conversations with leadership.
Sage is a leading cloud financial management solution used by finance teams to run accounting, payroll, project management, and more. Inside this complex product, in-product messaging is a critical channel for educating customers and driving engagement.
Principal Content Designer John Gardiner owns that motion end-to-end—and with Pendo Guides experiments, he’s transformed it from “ship and hope” to a repeatable, data-driven practice that moves the needle.
For years, Sage has relied on in-product guides to engage users, promoting education events, spotlighting features, and driving key actions. But experimentation was manual and linear. A team would run one variant for a while, read the results, then try another. That slowed learning and made it hard to isolate what truly worked.
“We were always trying different guides, but it was a very manual process. We’d run one version, wait, then try a new one and hope it moved the needle.”
— John Gardiner, Principal Content Designer, Sage
Scale added pressure. With 40–50 guides running (carefully segmented to avoid overload), the organization wanted clearer answers: Which message, visual, or format actually resonates with customers the most? Leadership, true to a finance software company’s culture, expected numbers to justify decisions.
At the same time, the team wanted more sophistication in what they measured. Much of the desired impact (e.g., clicking a “Register now” button inside a guide) happens within the guide itself, not just via downstream product usage, making attribution and success-metric setup trickier with traditional approaches.
When Pendo launched Guides experiments, Gardiner raised his hand immediately. Running simultaneous A/B tests let the team compare variants head-to-head, shorten learning cycles, and build an evidence base for what to scale. “I saw the announcement and jumped on it. It dovetailed perfectly with our internal push toward experimentation,” recalls Gardiner.
Here’s how they did it:
Featured experiment: the 10-second video preview
To promote a training event for the Financial Report Writer feature, the team tested two variants:
Setup was quick, and the experiment UI made it straightforward to define segments, variants, and success metrics. “It wasn’t rocket science,” said Gardiner. “We built the clip fast, embedded it in one guide, kept everything else identical, and let the experiment run.”
The video variant outperformed the copy-only control, delivering an 18% increase in “Register now” clicks. Beyond the one-off lift, the team now has reusable video assets they can recycle for recurring education events—compounding returns on the initial creative effort.
An added benefit is that the experiments created a common language with leadership. Instead of subjective opinions about messaging, Gardiner now brings clear, comparative metrics to executive conversations. He can explain the variants, how they performed, and what they’ll iterate on next.
“Executives love numbers. Now I can say: here are the variants, here are the metrics, and here’s what won. That shapes where we take in-product messaging next.”
— John Gardiner
Sage’s experimentation program is shifting the mindset from “launch more guides” to “launch the guide that works.” With consistent A/B testing, tight segmentation, and a growing library of high-performing assets, the team is building a durable, data-first practice for in-product messaging, one that educates customers and drives measurable action.
“In the end," said Gardiner, "everything boils down to changing user behavior. Experiments help us be clear on what success looks like—and how to get there.”
