RESOURCE CENTER

Canva expands its footprint with the help of Salesforce.

Time to read: 5 minutes

Launched in 2013, Canva began as a design tool for consumers and grew into a visual collaboration platform where everyone from small and medium businesses (SMBs) to Fortune 500s can create their content at speed and scale.

“When I think back to the beginning, almost everything was being managed on spreadsheets, including pipeline, account assignments, and inbound leads,” said Duncan McIntyre, Head of Sales, APAC, at Canva.

Since the company’s public launch in 2013, more than 7 billion designs have been created

85% of Fortune 500 companies use Canva

Canva has over 800,000 templates, 100 million design assets, and 65 million monthly active users.
Canva quickly capitalized on overwhelming demand with a tailored Salesforce enterprise offering supported by a new sales team.

How is the team using Salesforce to rapidly scale and build relationships globally? The same way businesses of all sizes can follow their path to increase product adoption.

Table of Contents:

Gear up for a new opportunity.
Optimize sales end to end.
Facilitate collaboration and future growth.

1. Gear up for a new opportunity.

To succeed in the enterprise space, Canva knew it needed to do things differently. It built its new enterprise offering to help large teams collaborate and create on-brand content, including security and workflows for approvals.

Simultaneously, Canva established its enterprise sales team. Duncan McIntyre was the first sales leader to come on board. Scalability was particularly challenging as the business had implemented Salesforce, but was not yet using it to its full potential.

Salesforce was key to building a base Canva could grow alongside partner Mav3rik. A year and a half later, Canva’s sales team expanded rapidly, equipped with everything it needed for growth.

John Eitel Global VP, Sales & Success, North America, Canva

“The visibility and collaboration enabled by Salesforce and Slack were critical.”

John Eitel | Global VP, Sales & Success, North America, Canva

2. Optimize sales end to end.

Canva uses Salesforce to manage its complete sales cycle, starting with lead acquisition and nurturing. With Pardot, marketing creates landing pages and forms to promote events and capture new audiences. The best part? Pardot also helps increase the engagement of leads.

"One of the immediate benefits of Pardot has been the increased visibility into leads,” said John Eitel, Global VP, Sales & Success, North America, at Canva. “Leads are automatically allocated to the right people, prioritized appropriately, and come with added insights that help us reach out more effectively.”

Sales Cloud’s built-in business rules help move leads through the sales cycle. With Ironclad from AppExchange, the team generates and manages contracts.

Duncan McIntyre Head of Sales, APAC, Canva

“All our pipeline management is now running through Salesforce, and we have global reporting, which lets us see exactly where everything is up to.”

Duncan McIntyre | Head of Sales, APAC, Canva

3. Facilitate collaboration and future growth.

Canva has used Slack since 2016 and is now using it in every part of its business. Emails and phone calls between the team — and their customers — weren't cutting it, so the sales team moved its workflow and communications to Slack. Canva has dedicated sales channels, including global and regional team channels, as well as a #sales-support channel where it solves problems quickly and a #win channel to celebrate closing deals and boost morale.

The sales team started using Slack Connect to collaborate with people outside the business too. “The collaboration with our customers through Slack Connect has also been invaluable and helped us to set up a major test case within the space of a week and a half. I don’t think we could have done that without having Slack to communicate in real time,” said McIntyre.

As for what’s next, the sales team is continuing to grow and optimize its sales processes in order to get its products into the hands of more enterprise users.

A person works at the computer using Canva

“We’ve been moving at an incredibly fast rate. In just six months last year, we covered the type of ground I’d expect to cover in 18.”

John Eitel | Global VP, Sales & Success, North America, Canva