100 employees

100%

increase in Revenue in 2020

 
 

BizClik embraces Sales Cloud to double its revenues in just one year

As technology continues to transform the world of publishing, the days of waiting for the latest edition of your favourite magazine to drop through the letterbox seem as distant as making a call from a telephone box.

Today’s sources of digital news, information, opinion, and insight are constantly evolving, refreshing, and renewing their content, with consumers able to dip in and out at will, day or night, secure in the knowledge that there will always be something new to grab their attention.

But some organisations have gone much further, much faster, realising that if readers enjoy browsing through pages of their magazine of choice, they are also likely to be interested in videos, webinars, virtual events, and other online resources.

Suddenly, a previously remote and disconnected readership can become a connected, dynamic, and engaged digital community – opening up a range of mouth-watering commercial opportunities.

BizClik Media Group is a shining example of just what’s possible in today’s brave new world of digital media. Already a successful publisher of respected titles in diverse business sectors, BizClik is now a global digital media powerhouse, hosting some of the world’s most innovative online communities and content platforms.

Two landmark decisions have contributed to BizClik doubling its revenues in just one year. The first was to embrace its new business model with energy, innovation, and total commitment. The second was to partner with Salesforce to put in place the technology platform that would transform its sales and CRM processes and performance and provide the data and tools to capitalise on priceless new business opportunities.

 

Delivering vision and value

“We were already offering our clients a really powerful product in the form of our digital publications, but we knew that they wanted to do more – and so did we!” explained Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Bursnell.

“We were busy building our own capabilities in order to offer additional services in our transition from publisher to digital media partner. And a key part of that process was a complete reassessment of the tools and technology that our people needed to work quickly and efficiently at all times. And we needed to be able to grow at speed as we delivered the transition.”

BizClik Media Group CEO, Glen White, added: “We’re expanding in numerous areas – we aim to be the ‘One Global Partner’ to many of the world's biggest companies, with our new ‘Media as a Service’ (MaaS) offerings.” 

BizClik’s existing CRM system had worked well during the company’s years as a publisher. But, while it held large quantities of valuable data on customers and prospects, accessing it, analysing it, and sharing it to capitalise on its value was difficult, and its reporting capabilities were limited.

“Our goals are to further expand our offerings and achieve aggressive growth by scaling our operations,” explained Bursnell. To do that, it was clear that BizClik needed the best possible platform to support growing numbers of people, particularly in the sales and marketing teams, and then to really hit the overdrive button.

Working with Salesforce to really understand how its technology and the depth of functionality could support its requirements, now and in the future, it soon became clear that, above all others, Salesforce could help BizClik to deliver its vision and add value.

“We felt that there was a meeting of minds with Salesforce – that they understood us, where we were going, and what we wanted to achieve – and that we could build a long-term partnership to help us to tackle our next set of challenges further down the line,” commented Bursnell.

“Salesforce is a total CRM system,” added White. “We felt that Salesforce offered us the best option on data, customer interaction, and technology integration with many of the other tools we use.”

BizClik selected Sales Cloud to empower its sales team, improve the management of sales processes, and the accessibility of data. This opened up, for the first time, a full audit trail of all contacts and communications with customers and prospects.

“We saw a lot of immediate value,” explained Bursnell. “Our leadership and management teams can go into Sales Cloud and create bespoke reports and dashboards, on an area of interest or performance, or opportunity, and use those to drive highly targeted actions and improvements.”

For example, BizClik’s media sales team, when promoting additional services and opportunities, can now easily access detailed data on those customers traditionally accessing its publications.

“Now, the sales team can see precisely who those warm prospects are, which ones could be open to an approach, which products or packages they may be interested in, and how best to make that approach,” said Bursnell.

“The result is an entirely new funnel of prospects and customers that’s been responsible for a large proportion of our recent growth.”

White said that Salesforce is adding value in a variety of ways: “We have many clients that we work with on multiple projects, and Salesforce allows us to cohesively offer great customer service and to see opportunities within our account base to further expand client relationships.”

BizClik’s spectacular growth

In fact, BizClik has seen spectacular growth, with expansion in all of its teams and overall numbers rising from around 60 employees to more than 100, including an entirely new dedicated data team. In all, the company doubled its revenues in 2020 alone, with similar results anticipated in 2021.

And with Sales Cloud, BizClik now has the ability to manage a huge increase in overall volumes of sales data and insights, delivering many more qualified prospects and leads to be pursued.

“Visibility is the key – to be able to track the success of each sales method or approach is something we’ve never had before and it’s transforming our sales success rates,” said Bursnell.

“We’re a very different company now. We’ve opened a new sales hub in London and Salesforce has made an important contribution in helping us to achieve that transition and to scale so efficiently and successfully.”

The company has also increased its inhouse Salesforce capabilities so that it can ensure that colleagues in the business can maximise the value of the Sales Cloud features and functionality.

“We’re definitely ahead of schedule in terms of how much I anticipated could be achieved when we began working with Salesforce – it’s still early days, but there’s so much more to do,” said Bursnell.

BizClik’s intelligent approach

Next on the agenda for BizClik is Marketing Cloud, to aggregate the collective power and performance of the sales and marketing effort.

“We want to be able to automate as many workflows as we can, to capitalise on the volume of quality data we now have,” said Bursnell. “With Marketing Cloud, we can send out targeted communications to customers and prospects, all recorded in Sales Cloud, to avoid duplication or mixed messages and to streamline the start of the salesperson’s process.”

When the time is right to have an opening conversation with someone – about their goals, their area of interest, and how BizClik can help them – all of that background work has already been completed. The sales process is much further advanced and the team can be confident that it’s taking a data-driven, analytical, and intelligent approach to each opportunity.

BizClik has worked hard to get these core tools and technologies in place and to build user adoption and confidence in them and, though it’s had great success in the past year, it’s now in a strong position to really ramp up the value within Salesforce to scale even further and take the company to the next level.

Customers are also reaping the benefits of BizClik’s transformation, with new services and more opportunities for fruitful engagements, network, and profile building within their specific community. In turn, this is opening up fresh sales channels and routes to market.

Streamlined and efficient

“We’re presenting a clear, comprehensive and compelling set of products and engaging with our customers in a more professional, targeted, and transparent way,” explained Bursnell.

Now, BizClik’s processes, from estimating to invoicing, for example, are more streamlined and efficient and it can see the real value that it has to offer.

The sales team can go into its systems and start to build an opportunity, working directly with a customer on the telephone. Team members can utilise the LinkedIn sales navigator integration, for example, with one window providing a clear picture of everything, walking the customer through each step, and using the DocuSign AppExchange integration for security and speed.

Bursnell believes that the days of disconnected and manual elements of the sales process, and the potential therefore for errors, are well and truly over.

“It’s made it much easier for us to bring great people into the business too,” added Bursnell. “Most people want to work in an environment that gives them the best chance of being successful, for themselves and the company they work for, and Salesforce provides the kind of ecosystem that empowers people to be successful.”

BizClik CEO, White, sees a bright future for the partnership: “We are expanding at a rate of more than 100% year on year, so customer service and data management are crucial. Salesforce certainly helps with our scalability challenges and adding Marketing Cloud will also be important. Once you make the switch to new technology, you have to be committed.”

 

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