Case study: Restaurant staffer automates sales cycle through Salesforce

“When people can see their sales and track where they are with their goals, this helps motivate them.” --Kathleen Bone, CA State Manager for PoachedJobs

Poached Jobs is a Portland-based staffing solution for the service and hospitality industry and caters to employers looking to fill a position as well as job seekers in cities across the country. Job seekers can browse open positions and submit their resumes online for free, and Poached reviews and processes this information, submitting it to the restaurant, cafe, hotel, or bar that posted the job in a unique “flip book” style. Poached makes it easy for employers view, rate, and file resumes so they can find the most qualified employees efficiently.

A national market meant the Poached team needed a better way to manage their workload

Although Poached serves job seekers and finders all across the country, the Portland headquarters is run by a fairly small team. Everyone wears a lot of hats, and about six months ago, they made the move to Salesforce, as their old methods of tracking information through Excel spreadsheets and a Wordpress database simply weren’t cutting it. Salesforce came highly recommended to Poached for its versatility and ability to communicate with their website, but they weren’t able to fully get a solid foundation on their own.

Poached soon hit the wall of what they could optimize without help. Like many small companies, the way they were using Salesforce internally was inconsistent, there were hardly any regulations, and it became difficult to track their accounts. Their internal admin Kathleen wanted some support and training around processes and automation. In moving to Salesforce, Poached had wanted to build workflows that could automatically close out opportunities, but after initially setting up their system, they weren’t there yet, so reached out to Idealist Consulting for support.

Optimizing Salesforce to suit their custom needs

As Kathleen explained, “we needed to hear best practices from someone who had worked with lots of different people and give advice on how we could build our database to the best of our abilities.” Poached asked Idealist Consulting to come in and assist them with automation, process flows, managing their opportunities, and building reports that showed progress and key performance indicators.

Now, Poached sends their emails and tracks their calls through Salesforce, and the ability to easily track opportunities means that people can see the fruits of their labor. “When people can see their sales and track where they are with their goals, this helps motivate them,” said Kathleen. There’s still work to be done in getting everyone on board with the platform, but since Poached had Idealist Consulting build it out, they are better able to employ automation through workflows and triggers, track their work, and show their success through reports and dashboards. Some of the automation Idealist Consulting enabled in their platform means that salespeople are automatically credited: another great incentive for fully adopting the system. 

“Now that it’s fully functional, it’s going to be great!” 

Already, the team at Poached has saved countless hours on the back end; the optimization and training they received from Idealist Consulting has made using their system much more intuitive. They will soon be moving away from a confusing multiple-opportunity system and have created ground rules for maintaining their new processes. They’re also getting better information regarding where their leads and customers are coming from, so they can make informed decisions on where they should be spending their time and efforts with prospects. With the added insight into their processes, the team is able to get a real sense of how long it takes to convert someone into a customer, how long the lifecycle is, and what that lifecycle looks like. This is probably the clearest with opportunities management: “We upload a sale and it will automatically close anything open. Prior to working with Idealist Consulting this had to happen manually.”

Next Steps

In Salesforce you are always improving, so now that Poached has seen what is possible with integrations and automation they are eager to do more. Next up will be considering a MailChimp integration and some deeper thinking around how they want registrations on their website to “talk” to Salesforce. Wherever they decide to go next, now they have a team who trusts Salesforce so further enhancements will build on this solid foundation.