Perkbox

With Salesforce, we can get to know our customers better. And the more we know our customers, the more we can out-innovate the competition.”

— Chieu Cao, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Perkbox
 

Perkbox doubles sales and halves churn with lead nurturing, personalised emails, and better customer knowledge

Cheap cinema tickets, free drinks, and discount dinners. Everyone likes to feel special – and Perkbox is helping SMEs to attract and retain talent with incentives designed to give employees the same perks they could receive at larger companies.

“Satisfied employees are more productive, creative, and motivated. We’re helping customers invest in their employees’ happiness by rewarding them with perks outside the office,” explained Chieu Cao, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer. “We’ve disrupted white-collar office culture by bringing people a brand that they can relate to – and it’s been a huge success.”

It’s been so successful, in fact, that the company’s headcount has doubled to 120 employees in just 12 months. Perkbox is closing the divide between small and large companies, but having a rapidly expanding customer base of small companies brings its own challenges. “Small companies have the same demands as large enterprises, so we need to be able to meet their demands for exceptional customer service while remaining profitable,” said Cao.

The company works on a complex B2B2C model, with its customers including marketing managers who want to offer loyal customers something extra, as well as HR managers who want to reward their employees. With two business streams and both businesses and consumers to engage with, Perkbox needs a systematic and segmented approach, particularly with its high volume of sales leads.

With Facebook and pay-per-click campaigns bringing in more and more interest, thousands of leads come in every month. “Every lead needs to dealt with in the right way to maximise the chance of it becoming a sale, but with the sheer volume we’re dealing with, manual processes were out of the question,” said Gautam Sahgal, Chief Operating Officer at Perkbox. “We needed a platform for CRM and lead management that would enable us to focus on creativity, not admin.”

Nurturing leads, increasing sales

In early 2015, Perkbox discovered Salesforce and transformed its approach to sales and marketing. “Salesforce complements our ethos, our focus on innovation, and our Software-as-a-Service model,” said Sahgal. “It also offers an integrated ecosystem across different business functions, giving us greater transparency and a joined up user experience.”

Perkbox uses Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Pardot and Salesforce Platform solutions to manage the customer journey through from initial interest to long-term relationship.

Sales Cloud is now at the heart of the business, providing end-to-end visibility of the sales funnel. Sahgal and his team can see how every opportunity is progressing, analyse conversion rates, and track communication touches. They can also see that sales are soaring. “Thanks to Salesforce, we’ve more than doubled monthly sales in less than a year,” said Sahgal. “And that’s from almost the same number of leads – we’re just handling them better.”

When a lead first comes in, it’s logged and automatically scored using a solution from the Salesforce Salesforce Platform. “By scoring leads, we can ensure that the hottest prospects get the most attention,” said Sahgal. “With so many leads coming in each month, prioritising them correctly is vital so we’re not wasting our time.”

Lower scoring leads aren’t dismissed though – they’re segmented and nurtured with automated marketing emails using Pardot. The solution tracks open rates and click rates so the marketing team can analyse email content and timings to get the best results. Sales teams have visibility of all this activity in Sales Cloud, which helps sales and marketing teams to work more closely together. “Using Salesforce encourages a more collaborative and creative approach, which is really important to retaining our culture as we grow,” said Cao.

Better customer knowledge

Once a customer is on board, Perkbox’s account managers continue to manage communications with Salesforce throughout the lifecycle. Automated emails are triggered after the first month and in advance of the first year renewal, and if a customer leaves, Salesforce captures the reason why.

It’s not just its business customers that are important to Perkbox though – it also uses Salesforce to engage with their employees and customers. “It’s the end users that make or break our business, so we have to keep them happy,” said Cao. “With several thousand users on our platform, we use Marketing Cloud to send personalised emails relating to the individual’s history and the offers they’remost interested in.”

Drilling down into customer behaviour also tells Perkbox which products are popular, where customers are having issues, and how this links to churn rate. “Finding the facts behind the figures means we can fix more issues,” said Sahgal. “With Salesforce, we have access to all the data we need to develop bespoke strategies for dealing with different situations.”

For example, Sahgal can slice and dice data to identify the propensity for churn based on the size of the company, the Perkbox package they’ve bought, and any issues in account management. “These are incredibly powerful tools for a small company, and have helped us build microstrategies for addressing churn and lead conversion,” said Sahgal. “In the past year we’ve seen our churn rate halve - we’re not shooting in the dark any more and that makes us a stronger company.”

To extend this level of visibility to customer service, Perkbox has plans for Desk.com next. “To be a really successful company, we need all our functions to work at their peak,” said Cao. “With Salesforce, we can excel across the board.”

As the company continues to innovate and grow, it now has a platform as big as its ambitions. “Without Salesforce, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” said Sahgal. “We can treat every one of our customers with the attention they deserve, we can maximise productivity and profitability, and we can scale easily. And that means we can help more businesses reward their hardworking employees and loyal customers.”

 
 

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