CTA Expectation Alignment and Process Transparency for Reducing Quote Funnel Drop-Off

Hypothesis: Replacing the "Check Our Prices" CTA with "Get Your Custom Quote" and adding an explanatory intro section before the funnel will reduce drop-off by setting the right expectations before the first click.

Brand of the Week

Pepper is a New York-based food distribution tech company modernizing the way restaurants and food service businesses manage their supplier relationships. With over $30 million in funding, they've built a platform that replaces phone calls and paper invoices with real-time ordering, digital invoicing, and smarter inventory management — all in one place.

Their product is squarely aimed at operators and distributors who are ready to ditch the old way of doing things. And their website reflects that ambition — clean, confident, and clearly positioned for a market that's overdue for a digital overhaul.

But there's one moment in their funnel that's quietly working against them.

The structural challenge sitting behind it is a psychological one. Pepper's pricing is custom — it depends on your distributor network, your order volume, and your location. That means a standard pricing page isn't an option. Users need to go through a quote funnel to get their number.

That's entirely reasonable. The problem is that nobody tells them that before they click.

The Challenge

We took a look at Pepper's Schedule Demo page, and one thing stood out immediately.

The CTA sets an expectation the page can't meet. The button reads "Check Our Prices." That's a specific promise — click here, see prices. But clicking it doesn't show prices. It opens a multi-step quote funnel where users are asked to share details about their business before receiving any pricing information at all.

That gap between what the button promises and what the experience delivers is called an expectation mismatch — and it's one of the most common, and most quietly damaging, conversion problems we see on B2B websites.

Users don't pause to reconsider when an experience doesn't match their expectation. They leave. Not because the product isn't right for them, not because the pricing will be too high — simply because the first moment of the journey felt like a broken promise.

The funnel has no context. Even for users who are willing to go through a quote process, there's nothing on the page that explains why the funnel exists or what they'll get at the end of it.

For a B2B buyer — often someone making a meaningful purchasing decision on behalf of their business — that absence of context amplifies hesitation. Without understanding the why behind the form, it feels like a barrier rather than a pathway to something useful.

Which audience drops off more — users who bounce at the CTA, or users who start the funnel but abandon it without context — isn't a question to settle by assumption. It's a question to A/B test.

So What Would We A/B Test?

Control: Pepper's current Schedule Demo page — a "Check Our Prices" CTA that leads directly into the quote funnel with no framing or context.

Variant (built in MidaGX): A rewritten CTA and an explanatory intro section added before the funnel begins.

Rewrite the CTA copy

"Check Our Prices" becomes "Get Your Custom Quote."

Four words changed. But those four words completely reframe the experience before the click happens. Users now understand that pricing is personalized — which means when they land in the funnel, it makes immediate sense. There's no broken promise, no gap between expectation and reality. The user arrives already knowing what's about to happen and why.

Add a pricing intro section

Just before the funnel begins, a short explanatory block is introduced. It communicates why custom pricing is necessary — that Pepper's quotes are tailored to each business's distributor relationships, order volume, and operational setup — and sets a clear expectation for what the user will get at the end of the process.

On mobile, this section is collapsible to keep the experience clean on smaller screens without sacrificing the context it provides.

Together, the two changes create a funnel that users arrive at informed, reassured, and ready to complete.

Our Hypothesis

We don't think Pepper's current setup is a careless design decision. Custom pricing funnels are standard in B2B, and "Check Our Prices" is a natural instinct for a team that wants to make pricing feel accessible rather than gated.

But we'd expect there's a meaningful segment of users who bounce at the CTA — not because they're not interested, but because they arrived expecting a pricing page and found a form instead. And a second segment who start the funnel but don't finish it, because nothing on the page tells them what they'll get at the end.

By running this as an A/B test, Pepper's team would learn three things at once: how much of the drop-off is happening at the CTA versus inside the funnel, whether the intro section meaningfully improves funnel completion, and which combination of changes has the greatest impact on qualified leads reaching the end of the quote process.

The CRO Principle Underneath

Expectation mismatches don't just cost you the click. They cost you the trust. And in B2B, where the buyer journey is longer and the stakes are higher, trust is the resource you can least afford to spend carelessly.

The fix here isn't a redesign. It's a few words and a short paragraph — changes that take minutes to implement but can meaningfully shift how users experience the entry point to your funnel.

Prescriptive best practice advice will tell you to align your CTA copy with the experience it leads to. Real testing will tell you how much that alignment is actually worth in your funnel, with your traffic.

That's why the CTA is one of the highest-leverage places to run a real A/B test — not just ship a default.

Want to run a test like this on your own site? Get started with Mida for free — now available even if you don't have an account with Mida.