From cold calls to hot prospects: How Eniro dialled up its digital strength with Salesforce

The internet changed everything. Not a single industry was untouched by the dawning of the age of Google and the explosion in internet connectivity. Look no further than the phone and business directory sector for an example of this. It takes true Trailblazers like Swedish firm Eniro to win in such a rapidly evolving market.

“As a business you used to be able to achieve a lot in local search by being in the phone book – now you need Google and Facebook,” explained Magnus Andersson, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Eniro, which was formed in 2000 when it bought the telephone directory and online services of Swedish phone operator Telia. “Our ambition is to become the number one digital marketing partner for small to medium-sized businesses in the Nordics, so we have to be able to provide everything our clients need to be successful in internet marketing. And with Salesforce, we can do just that.”

Eniro adopted Salesforce in 2016 in a bid to harmonise its sales, marketing, and lead management functions across its three key markets, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Built on Salesforce, the company’s new platform incorporates Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Pardot throughout its operations.

“What used to take us months we can now do in a week,” said Nordic Sales Efficiency Manager, Torbjörn Liljedahl. “We used to have different release schedules and templates for each country but now it’s been harmonised. We had quite high operational costs and operational risk with one team per country. Now we have one central team managing all three countries.”

Eniro tested two other CRM systems before deploying Salesforce. According to Eniro Head of CRM Preben Roed Skaksen, the holistic view of the sales process from prospect identification all the way through to customer services and renewals was a key selling point. “We’re now able to follow the customer journey from start to finish,” he said. “Our sales reps have a totally holistic view of all engagement with a customer in one place. We can now segment prospects, store scripts, record engagements, and issue customer satisfaction surveys with every transaction we complete, for example. We’ve transformed our business.”

Not only has Eniro become leaner and more cost efficient; it’s also able to direct its sales teams towards more promising leads by collecting and analysing more data about clients and prospects. With Salesforce, Eniro is converting cold calls into red hot prospects far more easily.

“In this industry much of the sales process relies on cold calling, so it is key to increase conversion rates,” said Liljedahl. “Now we’re transitioning from simple outbound cold calls, which have a conversion rate of between 2-3%, towards steering leads to our channels and then nurturing and tracing those prospects. Doing it this way results in a conversion rate of about 10%.”

Pardot forms the foundation of this new approach to nurturing and tracing prospects. Eniro Group’s digital services – including search engines such as Sweden’s Eniro.se, Denmark’s Krak.dk and Norway’s Gulesider.no – are among the biggest in Scandinavia, so the opportunity to win more business is huge.

“Pardot gave us our first true lead generation, qualification, and nurturing programme,” recalled Liljedahl. “It gave us the tool to act on prospects’ activities on our landing pages and advertising on social media. We can qualify these leads and move them to sales reps, which is how we’re achieving higher conversion rates.”

According to Liljedahl, Pardot allows Eniro to warm up prospects before an initial call is made. “We have good insights on what our customers are looking for,” he commented. “We want to be able to leverage that with new prospects by sending emails tailored to customers’ interests. We can see click through and open rates, and adjust subject lines, messaging and so on to make them more effective. Salesforce has been transformational but there’s so much more we can do.”

Further automation of lead nurturing is a key area of interest at Eniro, as is the roll out of the Lightning platform and artificial intelligence. Indeed, Andersson says this will be ‘crucial’ to the future development of the business, which is now looking into implementing Einstein throughout its operations. “We have so much data in our business, but to use it in the smartest way we need the smartest tools,” he said.

“We have our own search properties, so we know what users are searching for. We’re in the directories business so have a list of 3.2 million businesses – that’s more or less all active Nordic companies – that’s now in Salesforce. The combination of that data and Salesforce is extremely powerful.”

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