Immedis
Embracing technology to become a world-leader in payroll solutions
In today’s global economy, managing payroll complexity is now one of the major challenges facing businesses with a mobile, international workforce.
Ensuring payroll accuracy, security, and compliance in multiple jurisdictions, all with their own laws and reporting requirements, has become increasingly time-consuming and costly for organisations without a single payroll platform or standardised processes.
But savvy business leaders choosing to tackle that complexity realise that investing in a global payroll model can hold the key to their success. That’s because today’s payroll technology is marshalling huge quantities of priceless, enterprise-wide workforce data, analytics, and insights - powering informed strategic planning and decision making.
Dublin-based Immedis is the world’s fastest growing global payroll technology company. Just five years after launching in 2016, Immedis is now a highly integrated and entrepreneurial powerhouse business that’s delivering comprehensive payroll solutions in over 150 countries, for global brands like Uber, McAfee, and Adobe.
Immedis is not just a market leader, it’s a market shaper, revolutionising the payroll industry through technology, and the passion, commitment, and expert knowledge of its people, achieving annual growth of over 50% year on year in the process.
By automating more than 50% of workflows, the Immedis payroll platform cuts costs, boosts efficiencies, and achieves an accuracy rate of 99.97%, providing a great employee experience and freeing payroll teams for higher value tasks.
Automating and integrating sales and marketing.
As a young business at the forefront of the application of digital technology in its marketplace, Immedis soon turned its attention to identifying a long-term CRM technology partner, initially to automate and integrate its sales and marketing activities, a process led by Revenue Operations Director, Amy McDermott.
“I had worked with Salesforce in two other similar, high growth businesses, requiring rock solid metrics in order to secure investment, so I was aware of its capabilities and strengths,” explained McDermott. “It was essential that we could achieve our key objective of creating a single platform that would fully integrate sales and marketing activities in the first instance. But we were also looking for a solution with the potential to extend into other areas too, such as bid management and solution consulting, and to achieve a 360-degree view of the customer.”
For Immedis to achieve this it recognised that this needed to be a long-term partnership. McDermott and the team didn’t want to invest now and then change direction in three to five years, so it was essential to get this decision right.
“Salesforce was the standout partner for the sheer breadth and depth of its capability. The simplicity of configuration meant we could get up and running quickly but also allowed us to maintain agility as the business evolves. Sales Cloud had all the foundation elements we needed to manage an enterprise sales process with more on top. With each new release, we also get access to enhancements and new capabilities without the need to introduce custom development. It was clear that we would grow with Salesforce – we would never outgrow Salesforce,” explained McDermott. “Another advantage was the scope and scale of the expertise that Salesforce has on the ground here in Dublin.”
Given Immedis’ emphasis on the passion and commitment of its own people, it was important for it to know that it was working with a team that has similar values as its own, that there was a good personality and cultural fit.
“We certainly felt that Salesforce were invested in our story, our journey and the destination we were aiming for. It felt like we had the foundations to build a close and fruitful partnership.”
Streamlining sales processes transparency, agility, and best practice at scale.
Immedis began its journey with Salesforce by selecting Sales Cloud with Inbox to optimise every stage of the sales process, alongside Pardot to automate its marketing activities including email marketing, online events, nurture programmes, and custom scoring of prospects. Later High Velocity Sales was added to support the business development team’s focus on accelerated pipeline building for enterprise level prospects. In just two years, the Immedis sales team has grown from five to 25.
“Salesforce Sales Cloud is really helping us to manage our active pipeline in terms of deal control and execution,” explained McDermott. “We now have very detailed visibility and insight into our sales performance, to see what approaches are successful compared to those that are less successful. It’s really valuable to be able to monitor and evaluate productivity and performance in this way, especially to confirm further investment in the business. We use both dashboards and reports from executive to individual contributor level, so everyone is working off the same underlying data.”
Salesforce Sales Cloud has been the catalyst and the vehicle for Immedis to structure, adopt, and integrate its sales processes and methodology. “We’re now able to have clear visibility of the pipeline, and be much more focused, strategic, and intentional about the accounts we’re going after. As a result, our deal size has increased dramatically, average deal size is now ten times greater compared to three years ago.”
McDermott explained that High Velocity Sales helps her sales teams to forensically manage diaries and accounts, with prompts to make sure nothing falls through the cracks as the average size of each sale increases.
“We can be talking to many stakeholders on each account, so managing those points of contact becomes very important. We have that level of accountability and transparency now, we can see performance and metrics, for example, which sales cadences or email templates are more effective than others.”
Immedis is an enthusiastic user of Salesforce Inbox too, not only for its great functionality for optimising email engagement with prospects and customers, but also because of its integration with Outlook, ensuring that all email activity is always captured in Sales Cloud for transparency and so that no insight about the customer engagement gets lost.
“It’s great that our people have the flexibility to use Outlook thanks to the connection with Inbox and to know that all of this activity will be automatically tracked into Salesforce. Ultimately, we want a great user experience so having that flexibility is great.”
The speed of evolution has been much faster than anyone anticipated. Immedis now has dashboards and reports personalised for each recipient, highlighting performance and identifying areas for attention. Now it can see, on a day-to-day basis, which new opportunities and leads have come in, what actions staff are taking to convert them, win rates, and which accounts and industries are coming to the fore.
Priceless business intelligence for smarter decisions.
Meanwhile, Digital Marketing Director, Conor Ebbs, had been delivering Salesforce Pardot training and implementation programmes prior to joining Immedis in November 2020.
“Close alignment between sales and marketing is a huge priority, ensuring that our teams are working in unison – and of course that starts with the data. Pardot enables us to present the sales and marketing teams with the same real-time data, enriched with context, so that anyone can go into an account and, through engagement history dashboards, see who’s most engaged.”
Immedis has implemented custom lead scoring, aligned to its value drivers, so that when someone visits the website or actively engages with key content, it can map that engagement to a specific value driver, such as cost reduction or data driven decisions. Then Immedis can add scoring categories in Salesforce to provide immediate context to the sales team to inform their conversations with prospects.
“For our sales colleagues to know that someone is really interested in cost reduction, because they’ve downloaded two items on the subject and visited the cost reduction page, that level of business intelligence is like gold dust. Imagine how helpful that knowledge is to begin a conversation with a potential customer,” said Ebbs.
Supercharged marketing.
Ebbs is keen to pay tribute to the company’s highly creative campaign and content generation team, especially in the production of email marketing nurtures, to create long term relationships with sales prospects, building trust and confidence in the process.
“We’ve heavy users of engagement programmes in Pardot and we often have around 25 active campaigns at any one time,” explained Ebbs. “Our campaign and content colleagues produce amazing resources that we can build into highly targeted nurtures for specific personas, like a CFO or CIO, at every stage of the buying cycle.
“This is really starting to supercharge our account-based marketing activities and Pardot has been central to that success. Average open rates on our emails are exceeding 35% and our average click through rate is 6%, both industry leading. We’re also currently on track to double annual sales conversions through Pardot in 2021, compared to 2020, while website sales conversions have grown fivefold.
“And it feels like we’ve only just started, we haven’t even put the rockets on yet! There’s lots of Pardot features that we’re starting to roll out, such as split testing of emails and advanced dynamic content to provide a unique, personalised experience.”
Everything it does is with one aim – to feed that 360-degree view of its customers and in turn to keep scaling its services, meeting growth targets.
Next on the company’s Salesforce journey is Tableau, for another level of business intelligence, analytics, and insights, and Revenue Cloud to speed up quote to cash processes, to free up salespeople, enabling them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time selling.
Embedded and accessible.
“Salesforce plays a very significant, central role in the performance of the business,” concluded McDermott. “It’s our go to system, we expect everyone to log into Salesforce every day to see what their task list is and to inform their approach to those activities. It’s helping us to both run the business and forecast what’s coming next.”
Salesforce has been especially valuable because Immedis has been able to run recruiting throughout the pandemic. Immedis has been onboarding new colleagues remotely and sharing its company processes and methodology has been very straightforward because everything’s completely embedded and accessible in Salesforce.
“I’m passionate about young talent and graduate recruitment and I’m proud to be able to bring young people into such a professional sales and marketing environment, and to give them a great opportunity to develop and demonstrate their skills,” said McDermott.
Concluded Aislinn Brennan, Director of Internal Communications and People Engagement: “At Immedis, we have massive aspirations, we know where we want the company to go and who we want to be, so what we are doing now is laying the best possible foundations across the whole organisation to enable us to scale.
“Part of this is working with the best companies that will allow us to grow and be the best we can be, and we feel that there are so many opportunities for us to grow with Salesforce.”
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