WhiteHat Jr gears up to be India’s fastest unicorn with Salesforce

WhiteHat Jr is changing the face of technology education in India. Founded in 2018, the startup offers live, one-on-one coding classes for children in the age group of 6-14. Highly qualified teachers lead each child through the fundamentals of algorithmic thinking, logic, sequence, and UI/UX. By the end, the children are able to build their own apps, and even pitch their ideas to investors. 

“Our mission is to make kids creators rather than just consumers of technology,” says Gaurav Yadav, VP of Sales at WhiteHat Jr. “We’re offering them the pathways to becoming CEOs, entrepreneurs, and scientists even at age 13.”

To date, the company has offered 250,000+ student trials, worked with students to create 500,000+ projects, and onboarded 1,000+ teachers. In 2019, its revenues grew 40%-50% every month. By March 2020, these figures had begun to double.

“We take pride in working exceptionally hard, and growing really quickly,” explains Yadav. “Our goal is to be India’s fastest unicorn.”

But to sustain such ambitious growth, the company’s underlying support systems need to be robust and scalable. Till six months ago, they weren’t.

WhiteHat Jr initially relied on spreadsheets to manage sales data. But as the company’s growth skyrocketed, the limitations of these tools quickly became apparent. 

Data wasn’t being captured effectively across the sales funnel. Teams were wasting valuable time collating siloed information from across spreadsheets, and reporting was becoming increasingly cumbersome. The company knew that it was time for a change.

“In six months alone, our sales team had grown ten-fold,” recounts Yadav. “We needed more robust systems to support them.” 

WhiteHat Jr had already expanded into the US with significant success, and was beginning to explore other international markets. With this global vision came the need for a global platform.

“We chose Salesforce to scale up our processes and data operations for global success,” says Yadav. “We also wanted to understand our customers better, so that we could reach out to them at the right time with the right service.”

Today, Sales Cloud enables WhiteHat Jr to capture customer interactions at every touchpoint across the sales funnel. This data helps sales teams identify how to convert more leads faster.  

Whenever a potential selling opportunity arises—for example, when a child has completed a trial class—the sales team is automatically notified. They can then proactively follow up with the parent on new deals, package upgrades, or even referrals from existing delighted customers. 

All customer data is stored on the Salesforce platform, giving the company a rich source of insights to evaluate sales performance. 

“We look at over a 100 metrics a day,” says Yadav. “If, for whatever reason the data changes, we want to know why. Salesforce helps us find those answers.”

Through granular data analysis, WhiteHat Jr determined that the average sales person in the company can convert a maximum of 13-14 leads a day before fatigue sets in, and customer engagement is impacted. With this optimal number in mind, sales teams have been able to engage customers better, rather than rushing through conversations with them. The result? More conversions.  

“Since implementing Salesforce, our conversion rates have shot up from 6% to 15%,” says Yadav. “The quality of our sales pitches and customer engagements has also improved.” 

Teachers are an integral part of WhiteHat Jr’s ecosystem. Whenever they need assistance, they can reach out to support teams through the live chat options provided by Service Cloud. Their feedback and observations are tracked to help the company understand how to support and engage them better.

Service Cloud also provides parents with personalised and instant service across multiple channels. Parents can raise queries or complaints through emails, phone calls, and even—in the near future—WhatsApp. These cases are routed to support teams for quick resolution.

Sales teams who were initially resistant to adopting new technology have come around quickly upon realising its benefits.

“Within two months of the implementation, our sales teams were thanking us,” recounts Yadav. “For the first time, their processes were completely streamlined. The data they needed was available at the click of a button.”

Team leads have also benefited. Instead of spending time collating data, they can focus on providing constructive insights. Powerful dashboards enable them to advise the business on sales trends, conversion rates, and other key metrics. 

In a fast-growing business like WhiteHat Jr, data volumes can get overwhelming. But with Salesforce, the company has a single source of truth that makes it easy to manage and visualise data.

“Our leadership team can track leads and conversions not just in India, but around the globe,” says Yadav. “They can view emerging opportunities across markets. They can also use the metrics to develop incentives that energise sales teams.”

Since schools were shut as part of the COVID-19 lockdown, the demand for White Hat Jr’s services has soared to keep at-home students engaged and productive. But rather than buckling under the pressure of high sales volumes, the company is thriving. This, despite the disruptions created by the pandemic. 

Teachers and leadership teams remain committed to offering high-quality education. As more children are enrolled, teaching staff and timetables are being scaled up.

The company is also boosting sales productivity in novel ways. With innovation embedded into its very way of working, the startup has collaborated with Salesforce partners to create a productivity enhancement solution that allows sales teams to log calls from their mobile phones to the Salesforce platform. The data from each sales call is automatically fed into Salesforce. An additional voice recognition feature captures important call notes directly on the platform.

With these tools, sales teams can continue working from home without disruption.  They can also spend more time engaging customers on calls than on uploading data. And this means that they are able to address the needs of all customers who are looking to keep their children engaged at home – even though these numbers have gone up exponentially.

Meanwhile, leadership teams can continue to seamlessly monitor key metrics such as the number of calls and their effect on revenue. 

In short, technology has enabled the company to successfully ride the wave of disruption created by the pandemic. Sales volumes around the globe have soared – so much so, that the company has now introduced four sales shifts, instead of just one. 

“While many companies have slowed down during the pandemic, our productivity has actually increased, thanks to technologies like Salesforce,” says Yadav. “Even our ops team is looking at purchasing more Salesforce licenses to strengthen monitoring.”

Having set its sights on becoming India’s youngest unicorn, WhiteHat Jr is doing everything it can to optimise growth. Many of its approaches are trailblazing in their innovation.

For instance, the company is developing a solution to record and analyse sales calls, so that teams can measure the factors that drive purchase decisions. The idea is to understand what makes a successful sales call, and accordingly strengthen strategy.  

“Salesforce has helped us grow our business in truly innovative ways,” says Yadav. “We plan on increasing our sales team from 170 members to 1,000 members by the end of the year. We’re also adding new global markets, new teachers, and new customers. With this kind of scale in mind, there could be no better platform for us than Salesforce.”