I’ve worked with different CRM systems for nearly 20 years and Salesforce is the best out there. It’s easy, it’s fun – it’s a no-brainer for me.
Pierre-Alexandre GoyetteSales Director & Business Development Enthusiast, Devolutions Inc.
IT security is a board-level issue for every business - it’s no longer just large enterprises that are vulnerable. Increasingly, smaller organizations are also targets for malware, ransomware, and other cyber-attacks. They need the right tools and capabilities to protect themselves, but these solutions must be affordable and easy to maintain for organizations with limited resources.
Devolutions helps small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) across the globe protect their systems and data with enterprise-standard security solutions. Its software includes specialist solutions for remote desktop connections, password management, and privileged access management. As well as working directly with SMBs, Devolutions also sells to a network of managed service providers.
When Devolutions was smaller, making decisions based on gut feeling was an appropriate strategy, but as the organization has grown, its management team was keen to take a more data-driven approach. For example, the company didn’t have visibility of ROI on its marketing efforts, and was keen to gain a greater understanding of how much it should be investing in each campaign.
After researching the marketing solutions that could provide this visibility, Devolutions rolled out Marketing Cloud in January 2021. Following its success, the company went on to deploy Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Tableau CRM. With Salesforce, Devolutions has put the customer at the heart of its marketing, service, and sales operations to simplify processes, enhance efficiency, and boost engagement. The integrated platform has helped Devolutions to:
Devolutions runs numerous marketing activities every year – from a regular IT security newsletter to keep in touch with existing customers to an annual IT trade show to demonstrate its capabilities to prospects.
With hundreds of incoming leads generated by its activities and campaigns, Devolutions needed to be able to capture leads against them and validate their success so it could allocate marketing spend more effectively. “Now we have a best-of-breed marketing automation solution, it’s easier to nurture potential and existing customers,” comments Maxime Trottier, VP Sales and Marketing at Devolutions. “And most importantly, we can track the results so our marketing budget goes further and we can optimize the customer journey.”
In the past, Devolutions had relied on a number of different service solutions. “The support process worked fairly well,” comments Mathieu Bonin, Salesforce Architect at Devolutions. “But without integration between our tools, our workflows lacked efficiency. This led us to deploy an integrated service solution in 2021.”
The new solution provides visibility into what’s happening with different ticket types - from feature requests to bug fixes - as well as key metrics such as case volumes and average time to resolution. Devolutions is currently adding a knowledge base for internal users and a self-service portal to empower customers to view and manage their accounts and queries for themselves. A partner portal for MSPs is also on the agenda.
With more than 10,000 transactions every year, Devolutions’ sales pipeline and data are complex to capture and manage. The company’s in-house CRM system had supported the company for more than 10 years, but as Devolutions grew it wanted to add new features and automate workflows, which was difficult and time-consuming with its existing system.
So, Devolutions decided to roll out a CRM platform that would integrate seamlessly with its marketing and service solutions. “We now have all our customer-facing information in one place, which is priceless,” says Pierre-Alexandre Goyette, Sales Director & Business Development Enthusiast. “It makes it easier to manage the pipeline according to our Bow Tie sales strategy and we no longer have to switch between solutions.”
Previously, Devolutions’ departments were siloed and important customer information wasn’t always visible across teams. Without the full picture, sales reps were calling customers with outstanding tickets about renewals, creating frustration and inefficiencies.
With its new ecosystem approach, however, Devolutions’ employees are all using the same tools, have access to the same data, and share the same vocabulary. “We now have a 360-degree view of every account via the customer feed, including their assets, opportunities, and open support requests,” comments Trottier. “We’ve also optimized processes by redesigning workflows with the customer at the centre.”
Devolutions is also using a collaboration solution on the platform to connect and share information between teams, which further contributes to more consistent customer communications.
With unified and consolidated data, Devolutions can draw business insights from across its customer base. Dashboards for reps, managers, and directors help provide an overview of what’s happening in the business. And with end-to-end analytics, Devolutions can take a strategic view to monitor trends and verify the impact of operational changes.
“We’re currently building up our data so that we can take advantage of AI-powered tools,” explains Goyette. “We’re only using the analytics capabilities on our internal data at the moment, but in the future, we plan to link to external sources so we can assess global markets and verticals for our go-to-market strategy.”
As Devolutions reaches more SMBs with its security solutions and grows its global customer base, it plans to continue to leverage the best-of-breed platform. “Whenever we face a new challenge, you can bet that there’s a solution for it in the Salesforce ecosystem,” comments Goyette. “I’ve worked with different CRM systems for nearly 20 years and Salesforce is the best out there. It’s easy, it’s fun – it’s a no-brainer for me.”
