BePark

BePark banner
 
50 employees
Salesforce customer since 2016
 
 

BePark evolves into a new business model with Salesforce

When Brussels-based BePark got started back in 2011, it had a simple vision – to create a better urban mobility experience. Back then that meant making it easy for people who need parking to find a vacant spot near them.

But it soon evolved into something much bigger. By making private parking lots available to regular people and generating revenue for building-owners, the business has quickly evolved from delivering services to also delivering Software-as-a-Service.

In that time, it’s grown from 5 people to 50 people and is now active across both Belgium and France. We spoke to Dorian de Broqueville, COO at BePark to find out how they’ve made this evolution a smoother one with Salesforce.
 

Pivoting from a service provider to a SaaS provider is very challenging. But without the process structuring and single view of customer Salesforce has given us, it would be impossible”

–Dorian de Broqueville, COO at BePark

From Spaces-as-a-Service to Software-as-a-Service

“We developed parking management software out of necessity,” explains Dorian. “We had a small team, and multiple buildings to manage. But pretty soon, our customers started asking to use our software to manage their parking spaces.”
Pivoting from a service provider to a Software as a Service provider is no mean feat, entailing a completely different approach to sales and marketing.
For starters, the tactics are completely different. When you’re only marketing to people who live within 300 metres of a spot, the primary battleground is local SEO. And your best weapons are quantity and price. The software market is nothing like this.
“We’re not selling a commodity so much as the concept of leveraging parking for better mobility and employee satisfaction,” says Dorian. “That makes for a more in-depth, complicated and lengthy sales journey.”

Better organisation leads to better sales experiences.

To cope with the complexity of the two different models, BePark has had to organise itself in new ways internally. Dorian knew he needed to be able to track his people’s activities so he could assess pipeline, opportunities and KPIs more effectively.
But he also knew BePark needed to centralise customer information. So he turned to Salesforce.
Until then it had been difficult for anyone to determine which customers someone had spoken to, when they’d spoken to them, and what they’d spoken about.
“Not having that information to hand made it trickier to deliver a really professional service,” says Dorian. “It looks unprofessional if you call a customer twice and you didn’t need to.”
Knowing that Sales Cloud and Service Cloud would enable all of the tracking and sharing of information it needed to do, BePark engaged Salesforce partner Cloud Rebels to handle the implementation.
“We couldn’t have done it without them,” says Dorian. “Unless you know your way around it, Salesforce is a massive piece of software to implement. Their knowledge of Salesforce and experience of implementing it was invaluable.”

Adoption through automation

Salesforce has brought both structure and visibility to BePark’s processes, which has enabled the company to remain internally well-organised even as its operations have grown in scale and complexity.
“Nowadays, a lead process which used to involve one salesperson goes through five different people. That’s what growth looks like,” says Dorian. “Salesforce enables us to keep track of that sort of process as it travels around the company.”

Processes can also be automated with Salesforce, a capability that Dorian credits with smoothing the path to internal adoption of the platform.
“Ultimately, salespeople would rather be having meetings and closing deals than filing in a CRM,” says Dorian. “So, it can be challenging to get them to use it.”

BePark has been able to address this challenge by integrating the tools the salespeople do use (such as the company’s call centre) into Salesforce, which automatically logs their activities.
This way, BePark’s salespeople don’t have to consciously input any information into Salesforce – but the information is there in Salesforce when they (or anybody else) needs it.
“It simplifies things,” says Dorian. “We can get as much information as possible into the CRM without getting in anybody’s way.”

Becoming customer-orientated

The information logged in Salesforce has helped BePark to deliver a better quality of service to an ever-growing customer base.
“When we were selling parking spaces, we took a very transactional approach,” explains Dorian. “But once we moved into B2B sales, we had to take a much more client-orientated approach – and this applies even more now we’re moving into SaaS.”
This approach means that BePark’s customers are now more likely to have lengthy relationships with the company. They also are likely to have conversations with more people from within the business.
“Having this information to hand means we understand more about what a customer needs even before we’ve spoken to them,” says Dorian. “We know what we’ve spoken to them about before – whether they’ve made any complaints previously, for example, or if there are open subjects to address.”
In fact, BePark is also using Knowledge Base to enable its customers to self-serve for Frequently Asked Questions, and as a centralised source of information which BePark’s people can refer to when dealing with customer inquiries.

A vision – and platform – fit for the future

BePark has certainly come a long way in its short history, and – considering the dramatic recent evolution of the company ­– it’s impossible to know quite where it will go next.
In the year of a global pandemic, of course, the future could be expected to look even more uncertain than it did before. But Dorian is optimistic, believing that this year’s crisis has only strengthened the company’s self-belief.
“We’re now seeing that our vision of mobility in cities is aligned with the way things are actually evolving,” he says. “And COVID has only made that clearer. We’re very optimistic about the future of mobility, and the impact we can have on it.”
Since its inception, BePark’s story has been one of evolution and adaptation. And with its vision giving it strategic stability, and Salesforce helping to provide technical stability, you wouldn’t bet against that optimism.
 

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