“We need a 360° view, so we can see the full customer journey and anticipate what they’ll need next. We’re in partnership with our customers. Salesforce facilitates this.”

Danish tech trailblazer Penneo is on a mission. It wants to make it easy and beneficial for companies to meet regulatory compliance requirements by providing an ecosystem which enables companies to automate their Know-Your-Customer (KYC), onboarding, and signing processes in a secure, compliant, and convenient way.

“Ultimately, we’re making our customers’ operations more efficient by automating workflows. And help them bring trust and transparency in their client relations and digital transactions too," explained Julio Adise, Data & Automations Manager at Penneo.

“Auditors and accountants must follow processes to sign off documents like company financial reports. By automating these processes, they make huge savings. We’re doing something similar with our own operations. We run a subscription model; we can’t make the sale and just leave customers to it. We need a 360° view, so we can see the full customer journey and anticipate what they’ll need next. We’re in partnership with our customers. And Salesforce facilitates that.”

Since forming in 2014, Penneo’s trajectory has been steep. By 2018, it had signed 500 customers; by 2019, most of Scandinavia’s top 10 accountancy firms were using Penneo’s process automation solutions; and in the same year, 60% of Danish annual reports were signed using Penneo, delivering staggering cost savings of up to 93% for accountancy and auditing firms. Today, it serves more than 2,000 customers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Belgium.

As the company grows, so too does the need for Penneo to maximise its own efficiencies to ensure the experience it gives its growing customer base is second to none. “Previously, our customer data was siloed in different departments and there were instances where we were duplicating tasks and data,” said Julio Adise.

“As we scaled up, it became more and more important to ensure that we were serving our customers well, helping them adopt new solutions to adapt to changes in the regulatory landscape, invoicing efficiently and dealing with any service issues quickly and efficiently. We chose Salesforce because we knew it would give us that 360° view of sales, service, marketing and so on. The data structure is very straightforward and it’s open to integrations.”

The company began the implementation in August 2020 and, with the assistance of implementation partner Cloudroute Solutions, Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement had been rolled out by that November. The full roll out of Service Cloud and Community Cloud are ongoing. Such speed is necessary, given the company’s growth. In 2020, Penneo won almost 300 new customers and by the close of the third quarter it had increased annual recurring revenue (ARR) per new customer by 70%.

“Considering the complexity and the range of CRM systems we were using across our operations before, I think the implementation went very well,” said Julio Adise. “I have to say we’re very happy with the results. It’s already been transformational for our business. We’ve implemented InBox and now have Quip up and running. We’ve also customised quoting and deployed a lot of the automations we need to make our operations more efficient and elevate the customer experience.”

At the heart of Penneo’s approach is Sales Cloud, which has become the central control system for the company’s sales functions. The solution gives the sales teams full visibility of each customer’s complete sales and service history, the products they’ve expressed interest in on Penneo’s website (thanks to the integration with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement), current satisfaction levels and more.

“They now have full visibility and complete integration,” said Julio Adise. “Einstein Activity Capture has the functionality to log all your emails and scheduling into Sales Cloud. That saves a huge amount of time in our sales people’s working day by delivering everything they need in one place. And it gives a clear view of the pipeline, so if they have deals going stagnant, you can act.”

Sales Cloud can even help reps predict the mood a customer is likely to be in when they make contact. “We’re working on being able to log metrics like customer service satisfaction and integrating into Sales Cloud so the account managers can clearly see on a timeline how happy a customer has been over a period of time,” explained Julio Adise. “Soon it will no longer be, ‘Well, he said he was cool last time, so he must be’ – we will be able to use the data to interpret our customers’ needs in real time.”

Forewarned is forearmed. So too are sales reps that have full visibility into how customers are interacting with Penneo online. “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement integrates seamlessly with Sales Cloud and gives us information through website and email tracking about what challenges our customers might be facing and what solutions they might be interested in,” said Julio Adise. “This sort of insight is really powerful.”

These insights also allow Penneo to personalise digital marketing activity, while providing tangible data about how well its campaigns are hitting home. “With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, the first half of 2021 has been all about automating marketing activity for us which has been essential because it saves a lot of time in terms of tailoring email campaigns,” explained Julio Adise.

“Marketing Cloud Account Engagement also provides us with a really cool way of tracking the return on investment on our website and email campaigns. Because our data was siloed previously, it was really difficult to determine how effective our marketing was. Now, we can see where a lead came from and we can trigger actions based on what URLs on our website people visited. It’s completely transformed our marketing.”

Efficiency is key to Penneo. This applies to internal reporting as much as sales, marketing and service. “Of course, everyone needs to report to their managers but there’s no longer any need for people to spend so much time doing this,” said Julio Adise. “Now all the manager has to do is refresh the dashboard with the relevant filters and all the information is there for them to see. All the time that would have been spent preparing a report has been saved.”

Next up for Penneo is the full implementation of Community Cloud to give the company’s customers seamless access to their account details and history. Service Cloud will also be fully integrated to give service teams full visibility of customers with one click.

“Salesforce is transforming our business and powering it towards a brighter future,” concluded Julio Adise. “It’s putting structure into all of our processes. It used to be cumbersome having masses of data in different places and on different systems. Salesforce integrates everything and allows us to personalise every process. That’s good for our customers and good for our business.”