Infomedia sharpens competitive edge with faster sales cycle, smarter service, and greater efficiency

It used to take five days for Infomedia to issue a quote to new customers; now it takes 15 minutes. “We were losing business to our competitors,” said Kasper Hülsen, Chief Commercial Officer at Infomedia. “By changing how we package our products and services, and optimising the ‘configure, price, quote’ workflow, we can now send 95% of customers quotes within 15 minutes, which sharpens our competitive edge.”

From a position as market leader in the media intelligence space in Denmark, Infomedia is undergoing a massive transformation to maximize agility in order to conquer new territories and other market spaces in the same pace as the media landscape is changing. “Digital and social technologies have transformed our industry; some clients are now more interested in tracking mentions on Facebook than in newspapers” said Hülsen. “We combine content from multiple channels and multiple countries to provide clients with insights into how their brand and offerings are perceived, as well as market and customer influences within their sector.”

Digitalisation has also impacted how Infomedia collates and stores media intelligence for its 3,000-plus enterprise and SME clients. Since it was founded in 2002, the Copenhagen-based company has been on a digital journey, starting with disrupting the scissor-based press clipping competition by introducing automated PDF delivery, to now offering real time insights across all earned and shared media platforms: print and online media, broadcast and social media.

“We used to have teams of people watching television programmes to find client references, which was very time-consuming,” explained Hülsen. “We are now moving towards machine learning and artificial intelligence based on sentiment and topic detection to help automate the media monitoring and media analysis processes.”

Although Infomedia is increasingly digitalising and automating its core processes, building and maintaining customer relationships is still a key priority and differentiator. Customers are tiered from bronze through to platinum, which helps the service and sales teams prioritise their response to queries and leads.

“We work with most of our customers for five or six years; we want to make sure their people make the most of services during that time as well as maximise our cross-selling and up-selling opportunities,” said Dennis Mølgaard, Head of Sales at Infomedia.

To optimise the sales cycle with new and existing customers, Infomedia needed to improve pipeline visibility and lead nurturing – particularly for the larger volume, lower yield SME sector. “We wanted to make it easier for our teams to follow up with prospects,” said Mølgaard.

At the start of 2017, Infomedia kick-started its optimisation journey with the deployment of Salesforce. “Our previous CRM solution didn’t have the capabilities or capacity to grow with the business, so we found a new one that could,” explained Hülsen. “With Salesforce, we can run our business from a single CRM platform – not multiple email inboxes.”

North Consulting assisted with the implementation, which involved configuring a number of specific workflows. “We approached it as a business optimisation project - not an IT implementation,” said Hülsen. “We didn’t want to just deploy a CRM solution to support current processes; we wanted to rethink how to run our business in the future.” 

The sales, customer success, and customer service teams now rely on Salesforce to automate key processes – from pipeline and account management to contract renewals and cancellations. Automating the configure, price, quote process has proved to be the biggest win. “Salesforce helps to keep things moving within the business,” said Hülsen. “It makes us more focused and strategic.”

In line with Infomedia’s tiered approach to customer relationship management, Sales Cloud prompts team members to prioritise certain leads and tasks. “Knowing what to do at the right time on the right day helps us reach our sales goals,” said Mølgaard. “We’ve already reduced the time between logging a lead and getting a customer signature on a contract.”

With some enterprise sales leads taking six months to convert, end-to-end visibility of the pipeline is essential. “With Sales Cloud, we can track average deal sizes and closing times,” said Mølgaard. “These insights will help us build a more profitable business.”

Infomedia hopes to bring similar visibility to its customer service operation with the deployment of Service Cloud. “With a single platform, we’ll be able to encourage better collaboration and knowledge sharing,” said Hülsen. Service Cloud will eventually replace up to a dozen legacy systems, which will eliminate time-consuming data manipulation increasing both efficiency and service quality.

Infomedia has already increased the team’s productivity by as much as 30%, and the introduction of self-service options will increase this even further. To encourage continuous improvement, Infomedia leaders plan to track a range of service analytics as well as introduce automated customer satisfaction surveys.

Marketing campaigns and communications are also on the automation roadmap for 2017. “We want to understand and target our enterprise and SME prospects better,” said Mølgaard. “With Marketing Cloud, we can add another layer to how we nurture the sales funnel and gain richer insights.”

By centralising sales, service, and marketing activities on a single platform, Infomedia will be able to stay one step ahead of the competition. “With Salesforce, we can now make and meet promises for every customer engagement. This has had a huge impact on the customer experience,” said Hülsen. “We are now a front-runner in innovation in our industry – not only for product development, but also how we approach the market space.”

And there are still more innovations to come – and not just from the top down. For example, a new digital approach for capturing customer signatures on contracts is about to go live following a suggestion from a sales rep. “Salesforce has empowered our people to come up with new ideas to make the business more effective and successful,” said Hülsen. “It’s not just transformed our business, it’s transformed our culture.”