Vevox accelerates growth with better sales conversion and customer retention rates

Parent company Lumi was already using Salesforce for campaign, opportunity, and pipeline management, and decided to expand this to support the launch of Vevox. “We wanted to enable greater automation and personalisation,” said Eyre. “Vevox is a volume play, which means we can’t rely on the direct sales approach used for our other event solutions. We needed to find other ways to engage with prospects and customers – and on a global scale.”

And Vevox has achieved exactly that. Email updates, free trials, and webinars have all become part of the Vevox prospect journey. Thanks to Salesforce, the Vevox team can track every step of the sales process through to conversion.

“When someone completes a form on our website, their details are automatically captured in Pardot,” said Eyre. “Based on the pages visited and the resources requested, we score every lead to help account managers understand how ‘hot’ the prospect is so they can prioritise their response.”

Better lead qualification along with instant notifications helped Vevox account managers increase the sales conversion rate by 24% between June and December 2016. “The team now responds to new opportunities in under 30 minutes; previously it could take as long as four hours,” said Fowler. “I keep track of how our pipeline is progressing in real-time using the Salesforce Mobile App; in fact it’s the first thing I look at in the morning and at night.” With the sales team all using the app to update leads in real-time, Fowler can be sure he’s looking at the most recent figures.

Automated and personalised customer journeys

Vevox has also brought greater velocity and visibility to the onboarding process for new Vevox customers. As Fowler explained: “When someone signs up for a free account, an automated onboarding journey is initiated in Pardot. The customer is then sent a series of emails to help them get the most from Vevox.”

This is just one example of the 35 automated customer journeys that Vevox has created. “There’s only so much one account manager can do in a day,” said Fowler. “We need to continuously nurture our customers to ensure they are making the most of Vevox. By using Pardot to put them on the right journey, we hope to see a customer retention rate of between 70 and 80%.” In the future, Vevox plans to empower its account managers to send out emails direct to customers using templates built in Salesforce Engage.

The automated journeys provide Vevox leaders with a valuable insight into how customers respond to different communications and content. “In the past, we tried to think like our customers, but the data we are now capturing is challenging some of our previous assumptions,” said Eyre. These insights will also help Vevox achieve its personalisation goals. “We want to tailor content and offers to match different customer personas,” added Eyre. “The closer we can get to our customers, the more competitive we will be.”

The journeys are just one of the many ways that Vevox is getting closer to its customers. By integrating the app with Salesforce, it can capture data from every meeting or class and log this within a customer’s record. “We can see how many Vevox sessions a customer has run and what features they’ve used,” said Victoria Wallace, Director of Information Systems at Vevox. Account managers, marketing teams, and customer success specialists use this information to identify relevant journeys, potential advocates, and up-selling opportunities.

Smarter insights, smarter decisions

Tracking every session also enables Vevox leaders to see how customers have responded to new features, which are released every five weeks. The impetus for these product enhancements often come from customers themselves.

Vevox has created a community that enables customers to access knowledge articles, log support requests, and share ideas – not only with the Vevox team but also with each other. The product team checks the community every week for new feature requests from customers, and ranks them according to priority. “Peer-to-peer relationships are very important for our customers. With Community Cloud, we were able to launch the community in just a couple of weeks,” said Eyre.

A better understanding of customer preferences and behaviours doesn't just influence product development, but also marketing spend. By tracking the success of different activities within different sectors, Vevox’s marketing team has been able to take a more targeted approach. “Although we’re attending 23% fewer events, our win rate is up by 66%,” added Eyre.

Vevox’s leaders live and die by statistics like these. And deploying Lightning and Analytics Cloud will make more metrics available to even more people. “Individuals and managers will be able to evaluate sales pipeline progress and marketing campaign results in a couple of clicks,” said Wallace.

Vevox is also using Lightning to push out insights to sales and marketing teams based on customers’ news and social media feeds, which enables even greater personalisation. “Without Salesforce, we’d be flying blind,” said Fowler. “We can now connect with prospects and customers in a better way, and make smarter decisions that help us achieve our goals in weeks instead of months.”