PepTalkHer helps close the gender pay gap with Salesforce.

As a young journalist, Meggie Palmer, Founder and CEO of PepTalkHer, knew she had to do something about the pay gap. She’d seen it happen so many times: women being paid less, subjected to inferior workplace conditions, and passed over for promotions offered to their male counterparts. It happened to her colleagues and it happened to her friends. And then it happened to her.

“Once you’ve seen the gap that exists between men and women, you can’t unsee that,” Palmer said. Not one to sit idle, Palmer founded PepTalkHer, a company that soon became a community.

• Meggie Palmer founded PepTalkHer in 2016
• The company is dedicated to closing the gender pay gap by coaching women to be more confident in the workplace
  

How did PepTalkHer go from an idea to a global community of over 60,000 users creating measurable impact, in just a few years? Here are some of the steps they took, which any small business can take to support its own growth.

Equal parts social mission and startup business, PepTalkHer is all about relationships. While many were carried over from Palmer’s days as a journalist, a need quickly emerged to manage more — and more complex — customer relationships.

An entrepreneur friend told Palmer about customer relationship management (CRM) tools and relayed how glad she was that her own business had started using Salesforce. “Her company has grown into a multimillion-dollar endeavor, and CRM made that process a lot easier,” Palmer said.

Before choosing a technology platform, Palmer tried every customer management tool she could find. “It drove my team insane, because I was like, ‘Nope, nope, I don’t like this. It’s not easy enough. It’s not intuitive enough. I was really picky.”

Team members took their time trying out and discussing tools before landing on Salesforce Essentials. Why Essentials? Lots of reasons.

 

First and foremost, Palmer uses Essentials for her email, tracking every customer interaction so nothing falls through the cracks. Keeping everything in a central location also makes it easier for anyone on the team to pick up a conversation with any lead or customer, whether today, tomorrow, or some time further down the line.

Emailing through Salesforce also lets Palmer and her team reply to messages and share pricing info, partnership decks, and other collateral anytime and anywhere. Essentials makes it easy to reply from her desk or from her phone in the back of a car between meetings. For a small business owner with an endless to-do list, turning commute time into work time is a real advantage.

A self-confessed night owl, Palmer also loves the Salesforce Inbox email scheduling feature, which lets her write after-hours emails that don’t go out until business hours the next day. “It’s a bit awkward getting a 3:00 a.m. email, isn’t it?” she asked with a laugh. With Salesforce Inbox — which comes free with Essentials — Palmer and her team can write now and send later, with the tap of a button.

Like any entrepreneur originally from a nonbusiness background, Palmer had to learn the CEO role on the job. When it comes to keeping financial oversight of the business, the Essentials dashboard features come in handy. Customizable, easy-to-read charts provide a bird’s-eye view of revenue, pipeline, and other key metrics.

Time is a precious commodity to any small business, and Essentials’ automation and AI capabilities help make the most of every minute. From tracking leads and projecting revenue to surfacing new opportunities and nudging team members to follow up with customers, Essentials helps PepTalkHer get things done faster.

Palmer lives life by one of her favorite quotes: “Leap, and the net will appear.” Starting any new business is, of course, taking a massive leap. But Palmer is convinced that if you’re setting out to make real change, leaping isn’t actually so hard. For her, that change is closing the gender gap.

Taking that leap produced a net for Palmer, and it created a support net for thousands of other women around the world fighting to have their real value recognized. In just a few years, PepTalkHer has already helped thousands of women track workplace wins and develop their negotiation muscles through its coaching methods, corporate events, and mobile app. The company website touts the story of a woman named Charlotte who used the app to help negotiate a whopping $87,000 raise.

It all flows from there: Help individuals be bold in negotiations, work toward collective success for all women, and impact everyone’s lives for the better.