Loopio fast-tracks growth and RFPs with Salesforce

People are an organization’s most important asset. But to tap into their knowledge and brain-power, companies need to empower teams to collaborate effectively across the business. Loopio helps organizations bring together people and their collective knowledge, so they can respond better to RFPs and win more business.

As a fast-growing company, Loopio needs scalable teams and tools. With Salesforce, it can grow its business while enabling employees for success. “With Salesforce, our people can do their jobs more efficiently, maximizing job satisfaction and helping them better support our customers,” confirmed Cailin Radcliffe, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Loopio. “By automating repetitive and mundane tasks, we’ve been able to free up our sales and marketing teams to focus on customer relationships.”

Loopio’s RFP response software helps a broad range of customers, from SMBs to enterprise organizations. Companies like DocuSign and IBM love Loopio for its innovative solution that helps simplify the process of responding to RFPs, enabling them to collaborate so they can provide stronger responses and increase their chances of success. It is the market-leading, most-loved RFP software.

With the COVID-19 pandemic causing a fundamental shift to home working, Loopio has found its technology in higher demand than ever before. To ensure it can keep pace with its customers and give prospects the attention they deserve, the company needs a centralized CRM solution that captures contact details and powers greater automation.

When developing its own software, Loopio is focused on making it as easy to use as possible, and expects the same from the solutions it uses internally. To meet these needs, Loopio has used Salesforce since 2016. “Salesforce provides the consistency and visibility we need,” explained Erin Blakeley, Senior Revenue Systems Manager at Loopio. “The Salesforce ecosystem, AppExchange, and Salesforce Community is always one step ahead, so we have access to a wide range of solutions and resources we can leverage as and when we need them.”

With Sales Cloud, Loopio has been able to keep sales on track and encourage greater ownership, collaboration, and enthusiasm within its teams. “Everyone has an insight into how well we’re doing as a team, which motivates us to do our best,” commented Radcliffe. “We use Salesforce to capture leads, support opportunities, and celebrate wins.”

The company calculates all its sales KPIs via Salesforce, which has revealed a 20% reduction in the deal cycle. This has been achieved in part by automating and standardizing sales processes. For example, Sales Cloud ensures a clear entry and exit at every stage of the funnel to help sales reps keep things moving. Its transparency makes it easier for new sales reps to get up to speed too, as they can view the entire customer history in one place.

Other Salesforce-generated reports include weekly collaborative forecasting and forecast snapshots, which help the team understand the projected sales for each month.

It’s not just sales reps that benefit from Sales Cloud – so do Loopio’s customers. With onboarding, enablement, and customer success teams able to understand their customers’ initial objectives, ongoing use of the solution, and quarterly business reviews, they can make recommendations and advise on best practices to help each and every customer maximize their investment.

With Salesforce Inbox, relevant emails are captured alongside opportunities, which further simplifies collaboration for the team. They also use DocuSign integration to gain instant access to contracts and prevent delays.

Loopio added Salesforce CPQ in February 2020 to boost efficiency and standardization even more. Instead of managing quotes and orders via spreadsheets, the sales team can now track everything via Salesforce, which has helped improve the accuracy of order forms. “It’s all about making the process as customer-friendly as possible,” explained Blakeley. “Now we can go into much greater detail, providing customers with an idea of what their future pricing might be, or what an upgrade might look like.”

To ensure a seamless customer journey, Loopio integrated Pardot for marketing communications in April 2020. With Pardot, the marketing team can score and assign leads to kick-start the sales process, and ensure prospects only receive relevant emails. “Pardot helps us maintain consistency and continuity in our communications, while enabling us to quickly and dynamically update content,” confirmed Blakeley. “We can target our campaigns for specific audiences, plus the team has started to use its AB testing feature to optimize our messaging.”

The integration between Sales Cloud and Pardot means that marketing and sales teams can work seamlessly together, with the customer at the heart of all their activities. From the first point of contact and lead nurturing, through to onboarding and renewals, Loopio has a single source of truth to help teams make the right decisions. “Our success is directly linked to our ability to view and share the same information. It means we can pool knowledge and expertise and move customer conversations forward in a productive way,” explained Radcliffe. “It’s not just about selling more, but better supporting the customer throughout their journey.”

Thanks to its 360-degree customer view, Loopio has the awareness it needs to fuel growth and retention. In fact, its ongoing focus on the customer has contributed to a best-in-class retention rate. It’s also helped the company adjust and adapt its business model to cope with COVID-19.

In the future, Loopio also plans to harness Salesforce Einstein and AI to help with forecasting and business decisions. “Salesforce has helped us establish the structure, visibility, and collaborative approach we need to stand out from our competitors,” concluded Radcliffe. “We can easily access the data we need to make smart decisions, action them quickly, and grow the business in the right direction.”