Case study: Marketing start-up scales business through Salesforce
“Idealist Consulting brought a familiarity with business process efficiencies that helped us to capture, track, and manage prospects within Salesforce that not only gives us measurable outcomes that helps us better serve our clients, but they've now made it easier for us to scale our own business. I would also add that their relaxed, yet professional approach made our deployment fun and educational. I would recommend Idealist Consulting to any organization looking to get more out of their Salesforce CRM.” - Ben Jefferson-Dow, Director of Operations
Envoy Relationship Marketing is a Portland-based marketing startup that is focused on generating leads for its business clients. The Envoy team is a small group of highly trained sales people that are only focused on C-level calls and setting up sales meetings and appointments for their clients. They engaged Idealist Consulting for a “Quickstart” implementation to get up and running on Salesforce.
Challenges: Scattered data and old-school data-entry
Despite a growing client base, Envoy had no centralized location for all of its client data. Each client’s lead information and call result statistics were stored separately in Excel files and Dropbox folders, so there was no efficient way to view and update lead information and provide statuses to clients. The sales team was also manually tracking a large volume of phone calls on paper and then entering that information into Excel spreadsheets. Because data was stored piecemeal in various locations and types of files (electronic and paper), there was no easy way to generate reports and provide them to clients.
Although the existing lead generation process was workable when Envoy was a fledgling start-up, it was not scalable for planned company growth. Envoy needed to define and refine its business process for leads before migrating to Salesforce.
Solutions: Basic Salesforce essentials to get started
The team at Idealist Consulting performed a “Quickstart” implementation - a basic Salesforce customization - to mimic Envoy’s sales closing process and associations, primarily with the Leads and Campaigns objects. The consultants also configured a parent campaign hierarchy structure to set up call campaigns for individual clients.
To reflect the various roles in the company, Idealist Consulting built custom native user profiles (Caller, Call Manager, System Administrator, and CEO) and several basic custom reports. With the use of the simple Salesforce Import Wizard, data, which previously resided in Excel spreadsheets, was uploaded effortlessly into the company’s Salesforce CRM. A customized Web-to-Lead form and the installation of Soapbox Mailer, a mass email solution, now helps the marketing team manage newsletter subscriptions.
Results: Improved business process
With the centralization of client and sales data and the integration of a dialer system, the team at Envoy is now able to spend less time with manual data entry and more time optimizing lead generation for clients. This has become increasingly important as they are growing fast, from three to seven team members just in the past year. Supervisors and team members can clearly track the lead generation process and easily produce reports for internal use, as well as for client use. Reports are shared to clients via email through Salesforce, so clients can access the reports without having to access Salesforce. This capability allows the Envoy team to track which reports have been shared with whom.
Though Envoy’s “Quickstart” implementation was not particularly complex, it was exactly what the company needed to get started with Salesforce. As the company grows, Envoy will explore incorporating more powerful solutions, such as CTI (call automation) integration, to its CRM in the near future.
