Superside goes super-sized with Salesforce
From start-up to scale-up with 300% growth, Superside reveals all
When people hear the word ‘design’, they oscillate between either ooh, let’s make this pretty” to “this is going to be a big project with a lot of slow moving parts”. They don’t think organized, efficient, fast – or do they?
When Superside burst onto the market with its creative-as-a-subscription (CaaS) model and a DesignOps platform in 2015, it gave customers access to the world’s top creatives and a way to make design and creative projects a lot more efficient with little wasted hours, a smoother experience and fast delivery. In a nutshell: they brought to market a true ‘design at scale’ solution.
Customers of all sizes can access resources on demand to create beautiful, on-brand designs from a pool of talent that would be out of reach to hire in-house.
In fact, because Superside’s remote team is spread across 70 countries, creatives aren’t limited to office hours. And by tapping into emerging markets, projects are completed 70% faster at half the cost.
While Superside’s 9.6/10 Net Promoter Score is no surprise, what is surprising is the incredible 300% growth the company has seen in just one year, bringing its headcount from 150 to 600 employees.
We spoke to Andreas Drakos, Director of Revenue Operations, about how Salesforce helped the company grow from start-up to scale-up, and how to know when to swap the simplicity of out-of-the-box for a touch of customization.
1. Working towards Customer 360
As a fledgling company, Superside’s in-bound sales team used Sales Cloud and a mix of office apps to win new business and manage customer relationships. But with a niche product and a growing base of loyal customers, Superside knew it needed a smarter approach to scalability.
“Our platform is all about making life easier for customers with smoother processes and greater visibility of their projects. To achieve our growth goals, we knew we needed to adopt the same approach for internal operations as well,” said Drakos.
The team decided to revamp Salesforce to unlock 360-degree visibility. That meant integrating it with its customer-facing platform, finance tool, and other systems, and automating manual processes to create a single source of company data.
Superside also transformed its approach to sales, adopting a multifunctional sales team to handle inbound and outbound leads, account-based marketing, partnerships and employing customer success managers to nurture long-term relationships with existing customers.
2. Customizing the platform to better support sales reps
“The human experience was the most important element of our transformation. We put ourselves in our sales reps’ shoes and thought about how to make life easier and enable them to do things in fewer clicks,” revealed Drakos. “I never want a colleague to have to block time in their calendar for admin – automated workflows should take care of that so they can focus on having better conversations with customers.”
Drakos worked closely with the sales team to find out what their pain points were. He then customized Sales Cloud to support every step of the customer journey, freeing the team from duplicated effort, data entry, and stripping out steps that don’t require manual intervention.
Salesforce can generate digital contracts for customers to sign, for example, so sales reps don’t have to manually create and send them from templates. And when staff log into Salesforce, they each have a custom dashboard to help them navigate to the features and reports they need quickly and easily, and Slack to keep internal communications in one place.
The refined roles also mean that each team is responsible for a dedicated part of the process, which corresponds to an object in Salesforce – the in-bound team handles leads, while account executives manage opportunities, and the customer success team works with accounts and subscriptions.
But what do the sales team think of the new solution? “It’s like night and day. Our new Salesforce instance is intuitive, and staff didn’t need lots of training to use the platform. It just makes sense,” confirmed Drakos.
3. Better visibility of higher quality data.
As Superside moves more processes onto Salesforce, it’s also benefiting from greater consistency and higher data integrity. Staff don’t have to look at multiple data sources to get a quick overview of what’s happening with each customer, which makes managing subscriptions much easier.
“We’re nearly there with Customer 360. Right now we can see the full customer history, when their subscription is up for renewal, and how many hours they’ve still got in the bank for each month,” explained Drakos. “That means we can proactively reach out when their contract is nearly up and identify where we can up-sell more services.”
Dashboards and reports help the team to monitor performance and opportunities, and to analyze the pipeline to understand how new processes impact KPIs.
The integration between Salesforce and Superside’s DesignOps platform also helps to get a better insight of how customers use the platform and where processes can be improved. And staff love having richer insights – the number of reports pulled has doubled from 500 to 1,000, and dashboard usage has tripled to approximately 15 different dashboards.
4. Joining an inspiring community of Trailblazers.
Customization empowered Superside to tailor Salesforce for its unique business, but it’s not the only way the company is unlocking more value from the platform.
“Being part of the Salesforce community is great. We can see what other people are doing and get support for any issues we run into,” said Drakos. “I also love the AppExchange. There are so many solutions that are fast to implement and make life easier for staff. It’s a great place to get inspiration for future developments.”
As Superside continues to optimize its platform and work towards Customer 360, staff are getting into the Salesforce spirit and proactively suggesting improvements for the platform.
But, as Drakos explained, the secret to a successful transformation is not to get sidetracked: “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned on this journey is to identify changes that will have the biggest impact and scale well with the business. If it takes longer to implement something that will scale better, it’s well worth investing the time to get that right now.”
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