Validated ID makes the customer-centric approach its hallmark with Salesforce

By 2012, four colleagues with more than 20 years of experience in the IT sector decided to start Validated ID, a company specialized in providing trust services for digital signature and digital identity and attribute verification solutions. The company has doubled its growth every year since then and currently it has more than 40 employees.

Total fiscal 2019 revenue delivered by Validated ID was around €1.5 million and the forecast for 2020 rises up to €3 million, since the company has already embarked on an international expansion strategy, both in Europe (Germany, France or UK) and in LATAM, with Chile, Colombia and Mexico as the reference markets.

This growth rate has been supported by 3,000 global clients and more than 150 partners who embed Validated ID services within their own solutions. Thus, the board of directors considered improving their CRM. Fernando Pino, co-founder of the company and COO, noted that “when you consider changes in your CRM approach, one of the must is Salesforce”, which is a platform its trusted services are integrated with.

When Validated ID migrated from its former CRM to the Salesforce platform, the company wanted to go one step further, reaching levels of integration never experienced in the organization until then. The objective was being able to manage the entire customer lifecycle since the lead onboard until the customer is invoiced. According to Pino, "Salesforce offered us a very flexible platform to connect our marketing tools to our ERP system, letting us to manage the invoices, and integrating our internal systems to provision our services."

That was precisely the most arduous phase of the project; at the end of the day, it was not only about integrating with third-party systems, but also connecting complex processes derived from a sales system that mixes direct and indirect sales, different types of partners and even invoicing methods.

The COO assured that "the implementation was very simple and it culminated very well despite been a project with this complexity". Indeed, the deployment work was done during the fall of 2018 and Salesforce Sales Cloud was already running on January 1, 2019.

Thanks to the flexibility provided by the Salesforce platform and one of its partners (TicMind), the management of invoices, which is not usually managed from the CRM, was among the customizations that the company carried out. "Salesforce goes much further than a conventional CRM does, it is a very complete business management platform that allows you to develop and customize all these features", Pino said.

Validated ID sales cycle is very standard, starting with a lead, followed by an opportunity creation, a quote and finally a contract and an invoice. However, the processes vary significantly if the opportunity comes from one of its partners.

The company has built an ecosystem with more than 150 partners with an extraordinary heterogeneity, since there are very global players who, in turn, have a very wide channel in different countries, along with small ISVs dedicated to customized integration projects.

Previous to the Sales Cloud implementation, it was necessary to carry out this management manually, but it has been now automated. On this regard, Validated ID not only has gained in agility, but as Pino noted “we can identify opportunities that get stuck or that require some kind of push from our reps by having the correct automations and predictive analytics”. According to the manager, "we can act in a proactive way, anticipating problems and solving them, so that opportunities that previously would be at risk or lost can now be recovered."

Having the most complete overview of the customer as possible has become a priority for Validated ID. Pino outlined “one of our obsessions is to have a 360 degree view of everything around the customer and, on this regard, the more integrated everything is, the better”.

The time invested to get natively integrated with Salesforce has not taken long to pay off. Thanks to this integration the company can get a real-time traceability of the customer across the whole lifecycle, since the prospect stage the first time he accessed the website until the invoice is delivered.

The result is the reduction of sales cycles to the point that Pino said that "we started taking several months to turn a lead into a customer and now we could say that the average is a month and a half."

Since its commercial activity was very direct, based on meetings, events, etc., with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic Validated ID had to face the challenge of adapting its internal operative. The executive also remarked the company wanted to help when teleworking and lockdowns were anchoring people home and the business continuity was needed.

The power of Pardot helped Validated ID to active more than 50 campaigns simultaneously during the lockdown period, with the additional complexity of launching them with different partners, different languages (Spanish, English, German and French), regions, etc. and with new onboard processes that had not been carried out until then.

Currently, Validated ID is completing its Salesforce bet with the implementation of Service Cloud. Historically, the company had provided second level support to its customers, leaving the first level to its partners. However, growth levels have significantly increased the volume of support requests and a more robust system is required.

"We prioritize that our agents know the entire client profile, so that they know at a glance who they are, which partner they work with, their location, what product and when they acquired it, renewal date ...", the COO explained. Until Service Cloud deployment, agents spent much of their time figuring out all of this information. So, Pino expects response times will be significantly reduced thanks to the Salesforce solution.

Salesforce Service Cloud allows the customer to feel much more valued, while his account manager has visibility of what has happened to him, how many tickets has reported, offering rewards or delaying the renewal if there were too many… “It is about being able to anticipate problems and solve them, taking advantage of a historic reporting to be able to evaluate if any project in particular generates too many tickets and solved it,” Pino said.

On this regard, the ease to generate reports and cross different sources of information with Service Cloud allows to know the total cost each customer is generating to the company, consolidating its acquisition cost and the hours of dedicated support and crossing this information with the revenue.