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In 2018 the team at Uprise was using a free CRM to track deals, an excel spreadsheet to record leads manually, Intercom for web chat, a web form for inquiries, and email to keep up to date with current and prospective customers.
None of it was linked together.
When the team wanted to follow up with a customer, they first checked the CRM to see what stage the deal was at, then they searched their email account for the customer's contact details.
When a new chat inquiry or form enquiry came in, the team had to manually look up in excel or the CRM or both to see if the inquiry was coming from a customer, a prospect or an app user. Then they could reply accordingly.
Basically, nothing was linked together. Systems were not connected. One platform did not automatically update another and there was no single source of truth for customer, user and prospect data.
Where to begin?
When Uprise engaged the team at Dryv Technology, the first step was to get all of the data they currently had in one place, a CRM. This would be their central source of information and a single source of truth for all customer and prospect information.
When choosing a CRM, we (Dryv & Uprise) had to consider a number of factors:
Price - the cost per user per month
Other systems we wanted to connect, both currently and in the future
Capability - what we wanted the CRM to do for us
Automation - what tasks did we want the CRM to do for us automatically
Customisation
CRMs do not work very well when they come off the shelf, we spent a lot of time working through the different data fields and collection points to determine how the CRM would be structured. From there we could look at how the customer records could be sorted and categorised so they would work for the sales team and the marketing team.
Understanding the Customer
Uprise, at this stage, was going through a shift in the type of customers they were targeting. They were shifting from enterprise clients to small and medium-sized companies that were grossly under-serviced in their market. This shift meant we had to understand how these customers liked to purchase and engage with a company like Uprise.
The main goal was to get customers on a demo call with the sales teams, and Uprise was seeing good numbers from this, their only engagement option for potential customers. They were also seeing a trend of customers emailing to ask for pricing information, so we created a way for customers to formally request a proposal.
This option came from multiple conversations the team had with potential customers who had been directed by their manager to go and find information. These contacts were not going to be involved in the buying process, nor were they decision makers. They were just Googling providers and all they needed was information they could take back to their manager.
Adding this simple engagement option meant that Uprise could engage with 3x more potential customers and they could still convert these leads into customers at the same rate that they were for traditional demo calls.
Tools we needed
There are a lot of all in one CRM platforms out there, tools that do everything from proposal creation to web chat, customer management and invoicing together. As pricing was a major concern for Uprise, these platforms were not a good option. We scoured the market to find the best in class (for the right price) solutions for:
CRM
Web chat
Proposal and quotation management
Team communications
Task automation
Marketing automation
Data collection
Lead discovery and enrichment
Linking everything together
Now that we had the tools we needed, granted some of these changed over time, we started linking everything together.
Using the CRM as the central point of data and the single source of truth we looked at the relationship between the CRM and each of these platforms. By using specific use-cases we were able to ensure that the CRM and all of the software worked well together.
Someone made an enquiry on the website via chat, are they an existing customer, a current user or a potential customer?
When a customer schedules a demo, have they received a proposal already and how many times have they read it?
Where did this customer begin their research and which page of the website prompted them to reach out to Uprise?
Automation
With the shift to targeting smaller customers, Uprise needed to consider that they could not provide every potential customer with the same sort of engagement and support they would give to an enterprise client. They needed volume, and they need to engage potential customers at scale.
So we looked at every interaction the Uprise team would have with a potential customers, and then we looked at which of those interaction were repeatable enough to automate.
One example was the very small customers Uprise was engaging with. These customers made up 25% of the new inquiries, but they were worth about 70% less than average customer coming through to Uprise. To reduce the time impact of these customers on the sales team, we shifted how these customers were initially engaged with and automated the process. The result was that 20% of these customers would sign up with Uprise with little or no support from the team. The other 80% were more informed and closer to making a decision by the time they spoke to the team. Both these outcome greatly reduced the sales cycle and freed up the team to focus on larger opportunities.
Outcomes
The changes to the Uprise business did not happen overnight, and they required a good buy-in from the team to make them successful. But ultimately they achieved:
5x returns on paid marketing
This was achieved by creating multiple endpoints and conversion points for ad campaigns and understanding the logical next steps for customers that was not too confronting.
150% increase in conversion rate
This was achieved by being able to convert a higher number of potential customers to paying customers by automating the engagement and the onboarding. The automation process supported by the centralised information the team had access to made converting customers simple and quick.
300% increase in MRR
Converting more potential leads to leads and converting more of those leads to customers always has a great impact on revenue. That coupled with truly understanding how their customers wanted to engage both before and after the sale was complete was the key to the success Uprise had.