“With Salesforce, we can enhance the customer experience, ensuring we protect more businesses and the data they share.”

Billions of business emails are sent every day. Yet email is one of the biggest risks to an organisation’s data security. From phishing attacks and malware to misdirected messages and incorrect attachments, internal and external email threats can cause significant financial and reputational damage.

Egress➚ is on a mission to help organisations minimise that damage with its cybersecurity specialist solutions. “We want to eliminate the most complex cybersecurity challenge every organisation faces – the insider threat,” said Daniel Hoy, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Egress. “Nine out of ten organisations have experienced a data breach due to outbound email.”

Egress has been helping organisations address their cybersecurity challenges since 2009. Its Defend, Prevent, and Protect products now have seven million users and its patented contextual learning technologies protect 75 million emails a day for a customer base that includes 1,000 enterprise and mid-market customers.

With 94% of organisations sending more emails due to the COVID-19 pandemic1, the risk of a data breach is higher than ever before. “The shift to remote working has increased email security risks by 70%,” said Hoy. “With Salesforce, we can enhance customer experience, ensuring we are protecting more businesses and the data they share.”

Egress has been using Salesforce since 2018 to bring greater consistency, visibility, and efficiency to its business. “We’ve been on an incredible journey in a short space of time,” commented Hoy. “Salesforce has fundamentally changed the way we do business. It’s hard to remember life before Salesforce.”

From tracking leads and generating quotes to processing online sales and answering queries, Salesforce is at the heart of the Egress customer journey. And the transformation has helped the company to build stronger relationships and deliver better results: the average order value for major clients has increased considerably since the Salesforce implementation.

But this is just the beginning of the growth success story at Egress; turnover also doubled between 2018 and 2021, and 85 new recruits joined the company in 2020 despite the pandemic. “We have shifted from a start-up to a scale-up business, and we need platforms and partners that can support our future goals,” said Hoy. “With Salesforce, we can unlock new insights and efficiencies to take us to the next level.”

The sales team were the first to benefit from these insights and efficiencies. “When we implemented Sales Cloud, we found far greater efficiencies in our lead and opportunity management processes,” explained Mark Wright, Director of Marketing and Sales Operations at Egress. “We now have a better understanding of what the team is working on.”

Egress also has a better understanding of which sales tactics are the most successful. It has created a series of dashboards and reports to gain a 360-degree view of the sales pipeline, which helps to shape not only future strategies but also team development.

“With Salesforce, we have a more effective and efficient sales operation, which means we can close more deals in a shorter timeframe,” added Hoy. This has contributed to a 20% uplift in conversion rates and a 50% reduction in the time taken to close the average deal.

Introducing a standardised and automated quoting process was key to maximising the productivity and performance of the sales team. “We offer a range of volume discounts on our products, which can make the quoting process complex and time-consuming,” explained Wright. “With Salesforce Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), we can now generate a customer quote in seconds.”

Egress has also used Salesforce CPQ➚ to introduce an internal approval process for customer quotes, which ensures consistent pricing.

Egress also wants to empower its network of security partners around the globe, who account for a considerable percentage of its sales. “With Experience Cloud, we were able to replace our legacy custom-built system with an online community quickly and easily,” said James Sudworth, VP Digital and Customer Experience at Egress.

As its business grows, Egress needed to ensure it could track every customer transaction on every channel. And that meant transforming its ecommerce offering. “Online sales were not captured in a customer’s record, which meant we were losing out on opportunities to sell more licences,” explained Sudworth. “With Salesforce B2B Commerce, account managers can now see if a customer has completed - or abandoned – an online purchase. This helps them have more informed conversations and increase conversion rates.”

By hosting its online store on Salesforce B2B Commerce, Egress has also enriched the customer experience and optimised its ecommerce processes. It has integrated the solution with global payment technology from Digital River, which increases the payment options for customers and simplifies compliance with cross-border trading rules. “With Salesforce B2B Commerce, we can scale our ecommerce offering into new markets more easily,” added Sudworth.

Egress doesn’t just want to boost profitability; it also wants to improve customer intimacy. In November 2020, Egress introduced Service Cloud to support this vision. “With Service Cloud, we can bring all our customer account information together to provide faster and better responses to queries,” explained Sudworth. By integrating Service Cloud with Salesforce B2B Commerce, agents can view past and current customer transactions, which helps them respond to queries more efficiently.

Agents can now handle support cases and web chats all on Service Cloud’s Live Chat and Salesforce B2B Commerce. “With Service Cloud, we can track our performance with real-time dashboards and reports,” commented Sudworth. “We want to ensure all our teams are empowered to provide an exceptional experience at every stage of the customer journey.”

Greater automation will be key to enriching the customer experience. For example, Egress plans to use Service Cloud to streamline repetitive tasks, such as sending reminders for licence renewals.

Egress has worked with a number of Salesforce partners, including Simplus, Docmation, and Nebula Consulting, as well as the Salesforce Customer Success Group to support its roadmap. “Salesforce is not just a technology platform, it’s an ecosystem,” commented Wright. “It helps us integrate and innovate faster.”

The company’s commitment to continuous improvement will be crucial to its ambitious growth plans, which include expanding into new markets and doubling revenue within a couple of years. “With Salesforce, we can keep simplifying our processes and empowering our people to spend more time supporting customers,” said Hoy. “It’s much more than a CRM system; it’s a platform on which we can build and grow our business.”