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Building a New Business Models
Last year, Taimoor Tariq became the Head of Revenue Operations at Sellics. For leaders in eCommerce software, the three main functions of the Revenue Operations department are: supervising the technology stack, improving processes, and providing analytics for a clear view of the business. To ensure that their scope covers the entire customer journey, they take charge of the sales, marketing, and customer support operations.
When Taimoor assumed this new role, there were two business models running side by side. The first one was a sales-driven model focussed on Sellics' biggest clients, it required high-touch support, and it was centered around Salesforce. The second model was a self-service approach, where interactions were minimal. For this business model, most of their customer data was managed within Stripe, their payment infrastructure. Intercom and Drift then complete their technology stack, enabling some customer support and assistance functions.
In early 2020, with COVID-19, digital commerce accelerated faster than ever, and Sellics had to innovate. The company realized that operating in the middle of these two models with a sales assisted method represented a great opportunity.
If the data collected across the self-service journey became available within Salesforce, the sales reps would be able to track the activity of the self-service customers, improve their conversion rate, and detect upselling opportunities.
But how to bring all these operations together? The technical and structural discrepancies were evident, there were different teams and disparate apps. HubSpot was the only common touchpoint for every single lead and customer of Sellics.
"By examining the entire customer journey, we realized that HubSpot was the common factor between them. All of our leads came from a HubSpot form. That was always the first touchpoint," says Taimoor.
Identifying HubSpot as a connecting piece for both lifecycles was an excellent step towards improving the customer experience. But HubSpot was just one of the many touchpoints with customers and leads. Customer data is collected and stored by different teams within a variety of applications. Due to the lack of connectivity between these apps, the Sellics team was forced to switch between apps frequently. For instance, Intercom is used by the customer support team, but from this app, they didn't have access to customer records. To deliver a complete service, customer support had to place customers on hold and look up their info in Salesforce.
To provide a consistent customer experience, they needed to align their data and make it accessible in the applications where marketing, customer support, and sales were working.
A Complete Integration Solution
The operations team at Sellics analyzed the type of customer information that each team required to offer a consistent customer journey. They determined that they needed customer data from Stripe in HubSpot and a connection between Intercom and HubSpot to have both databases in sync.
Exporting and importing data manually was far from ideal. Taimoor and his team were wasting hours every day manually moving information between systems. Instead of driving business strategy, the Ops team at Sellics spent their days putting out reactive data fires. Until they found PieSync. Before selecting this iPaaS solution, they tested Zapier and Workato but PieSync had all the functionality they needed, and it was the easiest to implement.
According to Taimoor, "In terms of features, the main factors that made us decide were the real-time sync, the easy setup, and degree of connectivity. With PieSync you don't need an action that triggers data. You have the complete databases in sync from day one, that includes all the historical data."
They tested the iPaaS for two weeks and configured the two primary integrations they needed with minimal assistance. "It was straightforward and intuitive to configure. So far, we've set up most syncs ourselves. In terms of support, every time I've reached out to ask questions, they were beneficial, and we always got a reply on the same day," says Taimoor.
Automating Tasks Across Departments
Connecting all their applications through PieSync improved Sellics' customer experience, drove business efficiency, and improved the operations team’s productivity almost immediately. But they didn't stop there, having applications with different functionalities working together opened a window of new possibilities for Sellics.
"Creating these connections via PieSync made us think about processes we could automate which we never considered before. We could make life easier for our team by automating things that, in the past, were done manually."
Using the connection between HubSpot and Intercom, they improved the targeting of a series of Intercom drip campaigns. "To enrich these campaigns, we would have needed manual labor, and that was not an option. Thanks to the connection, we were able to personalize and improve these campaigns with information automatically pulled from HubSpot," says Taimoor.
Another process they could automate via PieSync was ad attribution. Before they started to experiment with third-party integration, when a client reached out through a chatbot via Drift, the CS agent or sales rep had to jump from Drift to HubSpot. Only that way, they could know if the customer was already spending money on advertising and how much.
By connecting HubSpot and Drift, the ad attribution is always available and up-to-date in their chatbot tool.
Through this integration, they've also doubled their upselling opportunities quarter over quarter. "With PieSync's help- we are able to notify the sales reps if the customer becomes eligible for an upsell within an hour."
Having Full Control Of Every Operation
Even with open APIs, building an in-house integration is time-consuming. Having HubSpot connected to other apps via PieSync, saved Sellics engineers more than 20 hours of work. Additionally, they estimate to be saving 2 hours per week in duplicate management and data cleanliness issues.
The integration has a positive impact on employee satisfaction. The teams of customer support, marketing, and sales are now automating several tasks that used to require manual labor. Before PieSync, to obtain data, each team had to request it from operations, who had to wait for the tech team to address it through JIRA tickets. Now, each team has easy access to critical data, and the ops team can deliver other requests in less time.
"PieSync has enabled us to take control of all these different systems. As an operation team, we've empowered all the other teams to have more ownership by giving them access to the data they need, using their systems," says Taimoor.
The sync solution they implemented allows them to have HubSpot and Salesforce data in Intercom. That means that customer support reps can give customers real-time answers based on sales and marketing information instead of having extended internal back-and-forths to track down solutions.
They are also automating several email workflows between apps and expect to keep automating more processes. "For the price, I think it's a great value."
