There’s a lot to love about having a BellyCard from loyalty platform provider Belly. The company is helping to cut down wallet clutter by consolidating the familiar stack of customer loyalty cards into a single digital card. Instead of stamps or stickers, a quick scan at any member retailer tracks incentive points. But Belly knows there’s more to building strong customer loyalty. “Loyalty to a small business or any retailer is about establishing a feeling,” says CEO and Founder Logan LaHive. “It's not just $2 off, or a text message with a promo code. It’s building a personal connection. We’re giving businesses tools to create that deeper relationship.” That’s why, along with tracking loyalty points, the Belly platform also provides retailers with powerful analytics on their customers’ buying patterns. With this data, they can create more personalized customer experiences and marketing messages. Belly now has over 11,000 retailer members, from local cafes to convenience store chains. And because nearly every consumer business is a candidate for a loyalty program, the company sees virtually unlimited growth potential.
“Salesforce is how we can prepare the company for rapid scaling. Once you have repeatable, scalable processes, then it's just a matter of adding more people.”
But early on, Belly’s rapid growth was presenting challenges, especially in terms of tracking their sales efforts.
They found the solution to their sales process issues — and much more — in Salesforce.
“We recognized that being more efficient in our sales process was going to be critical to our success,” says LaHive. “So we started to look at different CRM solutions, including building our own. Salesforce was the right choice for us. It now actually touches 90% of the company.”
LaHive says going with the global CRM leader made perfect sense, even as a small company. “We discovered that it wasn’t just big companies using Salesforce. Startups were using it. Even the small businesses that we were selling to were using it.”
The decision has certainly been huge for Belly.
“Salesforce allows us to see every interaction with merchants,” says von Halle. “How many times have we called them? What did we discuss? It’s helping our team prioritize and effectively manage their day, and make sure we’re improving the merchant’s experience.”
Belly has even used Salesforce to develop a customized merchant satisfaction scoring system so their account reps, called Merchant Success Managers, can track and score customer relationship health, and focus their efforts accordingly.
To provide companywide transparency and motivate reps, Belly has even mounted TV screens throughout the office that display custom dashboards. The dashboards keep performance successes or concerns front and center. Of course, it also drives one the most important motivators: competition. “Reps can see how many businesses they’ve visited versus someone else,” says von Halle. “That type of information not only shows hustle, it also fosters healthy competition, getting our sales reps to say, ‘Man, my friend has 10 closes. Today I want 12.’” Belly is also benefiting from using dashboards on the small screen — particularly on the Salesforce Mobile. “You have hourly sales in the palm of your hand, and that’s fantastic,” says John Mazur, EVP of Sales and Services. “Before you had to wait a month to get a report made by accounting. I have that now before they have it. That’s very powerful. We couldn’t have a business like we have today without Salesforce.”
Being able to automate processes was another feature that drew Belly to Salesforce. It’s been a massive time saver already, and it’s an ongoing initiative.
“The number one thing we’re working toward is automation of all our processes,” says Mazur. “Excel spreadsheets. Sharing Google Docs. That makes for a lot of manual processing and brain power wasted on menial operations.”
But, as Mazur explains, speed and accuracy aren’t the only benefits. “It’s how we can prepare the company for rapid scaling. Once you have repeatable, scalable processes, then it’s just a matter of adding more people.”
They’ve been able to add even more automation thanks to Salesforce Platform’s seamless integration with third-party applications from the Salesforce AppExchange. “Salesforce, as a platform, defines customization,” explains von Halle. “It’s such a powerful solution out of the box, but then there are so many amazing third-party applications on the AppExchange that enable us to be far more efficient than we could ever imagine.” Belly has seamlessly integrated apps like InsideSales.com’s click-to-call app, Sertifi’s e-contract platform, Zuora’s accounting software, and many more. Integrating apps from the Salesforce AppExchange has been invaluable for field reps using the Salesforce Mobile. Explains von Halle: “For example, we integrated e-sign software into the Salesforce Mobile. Reps in the field collect all the information for the Belly contract, then validate payment. It creates and sends a quote right into Zuora, which is the billing solution we use, then right to finance. All we have to do is click a button. Miraculously it’s saved us around 15 hours of manual data entry a week. You can’t beat it.”
As successful as Belly has been in such a short period of time, they’re hardly sitting back and enjoying their success. The company knows there’s still a lot to be accomplished. “We want to have every business on the Belly platform, spreading the love with their customers. We want to be everywhere,” says Mazur. Belly knows they’ve already found a key ally in reaching that goal.
