VONQ
“With Salesforce, we can get smarter about the future. We can predict prospect behaviour; we can personalise interactions; and we can help our customers find better candidates faster.”
VONQ accelerates growth with smarter business predictions
Eva is an HR manager at a public sector organisation in The Netherlands. When she needs to recruit a new team member with specific skills, she doesn't waste money advertising on generic job sites. Instead she goes to VONQ, where she can take a more targeted approach to recruitment, reaching the right audiences on the right channels.
With a growing gap between demand and the number of prospective candidates, recruiters must look to new channels and technologies to fill placements. As a pioneer in Smart Recruitment Marketing, VONQ helps employers like Eva take a more strategic approach to hiring new talent. And it’s now applying the same intelligence-led model to its own marketing and sales activities. “Our aim is to grow the business by 50% year on year,” said Stan Wasowicz, Global Business Development Manager, at VONQ. “To achieve this, we need to evolve our mindset from a sales-driven organisation to a data-driven organisation.”
Boosting conversion rates with a more predictive and proactive approach
With Salesforce by his side, Wasowicz is blazing a trail in capturing and analysing data across VONQ to make intelligent predictions that support sustainable growth. And the strategy is already delivering great results. By taking a more predictive approach to sales, VONQ has seen a 13% increase in conversion rates.
“With Salesforce, we can make our vision for the business a reality,” said Frank van Deursen, Sales Director at VONQ. “With the ability to predict how prospects will behave, we can forecast sales more accurately and identify where we need to invest in order to grow.”
“With Salesforce, we have the freedom to experiment. We’re constantly trying new things on a small scale, and if they work, it’s easy to implement them across the business.”
Helping recruiters reach the right candidates on the right channels
VONQ was born in 2006 when three entrepreneurs recognised that recruitment marketing needed a fresh approach. To help its clients reach better candidates for a lower spend, VONQ maps the most relevant recruitment channels to different vacancies at different companies.
“There are more than 2,000 media channels in 100 countries for advertising jobs,” said Van Deursen. “Our data-driven approach to recruitment enables organisations to be more proactive when identifying the best channels to reach their target audience.”
Unlocking new intelligence with integrated sales and marketing data
To achieve its growth goals, VONQ needs to empower its own people to be equally proactive. The first step was to bring together disparate sales and marketing systems and data. “Our sales organisation was too reactive,” said Van Deursen. “We had a CRM system but we really only used it to track activities not gain intelligence. We wanted to give them the tools and the insights to get more predictive about opportunities in the pipeline.”
And that is just what Salesforce has delivered. “We wanted a platform that could meet not only our current needs but also our future aspirations – especially around integrating systems and aggregating data,” said Wasowicz.
Tracking opportunities across 20,000 customers and prospects
With help from partner Beethree, the implementation of Sales Cloud and Pardot in early 2017 kick-started a transformation of VONQ’s sales operation. “We’ve mapped specific roles to specific stages in the sales lifecycle, which means we can take greater advantage of team members’ skills,” said Wasowicz.
As well as building stronger skillsets, the new structure provides greater visibility across more than 20,000 recruitment stakeholders, including potential and existing clients. This visibility extends to every marketing communication and every customer touch point. “Sales consultants
can now track the journey from prospect to customer, which makes it easier for them to prioritise which leads to follow up when,” said Wasowicz.
Consultants can also keep in touch with their 1,400 clients across multiple countries more easily and understand their needs, proactively approaching them with help before they even realise they need it.
Bringing sales and marketing closer together
But it doesn’t stop there. Van Deursen has physically seated the marketing and sales teams together in VONQ’s main office in Rotterdam. “By encouraging greater collaboration between teams, we can ensure that marketing is creating content that actually works for sales,” he said.
With the right marketing strategy combined with the power of Pardot, VONQ can provide sales reps with added intelligence about how customers and prospects have engaged with content. “All marketing touch points for prospects and clients are visible in real time in Salesforce, such as white paper downloads, webinar attendees, landing page visits, and email open rates,” explained Marieke Rodenrijs, Marketing Manager at VONQ.
Better information means sales reps can have more relevant conversations with their prospects or upsell opportunities with customers. “As a marketing team, it’s our job to make sure we deliver the right content, at the right time for the right target audience - at every stage of the buyer journey,” added Rodenrijs.
To make sure the marketing budget is spent wisely and truly supports the sales organisation, Rodenrijs and her team use Tableau CRM to measure results and make well-informed decisions. “With the use of Tableau CRM and help from our partner, Harvest Digital, we’re able to track performance data from all the campaigns we run in every country that we target,” she explained. “Our real time dashboard helps us to make smart decisions about the content we use to convert our target audiences into qualified leads, and also quickly learn what doesn’t work for us, preventing wasted investments and reducing effort.”
Driving future growth with AI and analytics
With the sales transformation now under their belts, Van Deursen and Wasowicz are looking to extend their Trailblazer efforts to other areas of the business – from finance and procurement to campaigns and partnerships. And integrated data will continue to be a key success factor.
“By establishing Salesforce as our main business platform, we’ll be able to analyse our data like never before – especially when we add some extra AI magic,” said Wasowicz. No stranger to AI - VONQ’s bespoke marketing platform is based on a machine learning algorithm – VONQ is keen to take advantage of Einstein’s capabilities to make business predictions that fuel growth.
It’s not only VONQ that benefits from the company’s more efficient, data-driven approach, its clients will also be able to enjoy a more tailored and responsive service. “With Salesforce, we can get smarter about the future. We can predict prospect behaviour; we can personalise interactions; and we can help our clients find better candidates faster.”
Keep exploring stories like this one.
Baume brings customisable and sustainable watches to more people with
Bayer uses Salesforce to drive highly personalised ‘data-powered sales’
Royal HaskoningDHV accelerates carbon reduction by 30% with Salesforce
Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.
