Building sustainable revenue as start-up scales up
Fintech start-up Volopay is on an exciting trajectory. Since securing $29M in Series A funding in late 2021, its revenue has surged fourfold. And the company leaves no stone unturned maintaining that growth momentum.
Head of Sales and Customer Success Kashish Gupta plays a central role in building scalable strategies and recurring revenue for the business.
Kashish says, “We’re a company that firmly believes our decision-making should be based on facts, so everything we do has to be backed up with strong analytics.”
Needing more visibility into the customer journey
Today, Volopay has a robust sales infrastructure and high-performing sales team. But just a few years ago, Kashish was disappointed with Volopay’s legacy CRM.
Its user interface was hard to navigate, which discouraged adoption by sales reps. Even more problematic, Kashish couldn’t unlock the data he needed to optimize sales performance and inform opportunities to generate more revenue.
He explains: “For start-ups like ours, it's important to have visibility into how deals are moving ahead and gauge where you’ll be by the end of the quarter or end of year. Also, within our existing business pipeline, we need to understand our customers and what products they’re using, so we can serve them better and cross-sell where we can. All of that visibility is critical to building sustainable revenue, but our existing CRM fell short.”
Manual sales tasks causing inefficiency
With the cost of customer acquisition on the rise, Kashish wanted to maximize efficiency across his team. He wanted to ensure every rep was as productive as possible and no leads were lost in the shuffle.
But limitations with their legacy CRM created manual workload that cost the team time. As a highly experienced sales lead, Kashish knew that managing operations manually was unsustainable.
“At that time, reps were maintaining their pipelines in diaries and spreadsheets. They had no easy way of seeing which deals required priority focus, so tasks weren’t always completed in the most efficient way,” he says.
Inefficiencies on the frontline spiralled into additional workload for Kashish. Getting a clear picture of the progress of deals or reps’ performance meant physically hopping around countless spreadsheets.
“We didn’t have central visibility into which deals had been checked, which had been moved to the next stage or where the last activity on a deal happened. I had to physically go into each deal, and then jump on a call with the rep to find out what was happening.”
Implementing Sales Hub to sell faster and better
Kashish had used and appreciated HubSpot CRM in previous roles. So when the time came to select a better sales CRM, there was only one choice: Sales Hub.
He says, “We evaluated HubSpot and several other contenders on three parameters—commercials, the product, and vendor support. Sales Hub was a no-brainer."
With Sales Hub, Volpay has a connected CRM platform for managing its pipeline effectively, deepening customer relationships, and building more recurring revenue.
Implementation was straightforward. “We had a dedicated account manager who initially assisted us, but we didn’t need much hand holding because HubSpot is so intuitive,” says Kashish
Even colleagues who were CRM newcomers found HubSpot easy to adopt.
“They were comfortable using Sales Hub because it’s very easy to walk around, with lots of help articles if you need assistance. Plus, HubSpot provides chat, email, and phone support if you need it, so user adoption was very easy.”\
Data-driven performance and decision-making
With Sales Hub, Kashish has a single source of truth to get actionable data about everything that’s happening across the sales cycle.
From lead prospecting to people management, and incentives to churn reduction, Kashish captures specific reports to inform all his decisions. This granular level of visibility helps him keep his teams on track, optimize resources, and devise strategies to grow customers and revenue.
He says, “Sales Hub provides a hundred percent of everything I need from an analysis perspective. It gives me direct, actionable insights into how different channels are performing, how specific accounts are performing, and how many accounts have moved to dormant. All of these things are directly correlated to revenue, so this visibility is important. I firmly believe that what gets measured gets acted upon.”
"Sales Hub provides a hundred percent of everything I need from an analysis perspective. It gives me direct, actionable insights into how different channels are performing, how specific accounts are performing, and how many accounts have moved to dormant. All of these things are directly correlated to revenue, so this visibility is important. I firmly believe that what gets measured gets acted upon."
Seamless ISO reporting
As Volopay has grown at pace, so have its reporting requirements. The business needs to satisfy auditors that their operations meet stringent ISO standards to retain their license.
One surprising benefit of Sales Hub is it makes the task of compliance easier. This is because HubSpot is designed to keep data safe, keeps documentation secure, stored, and organized, and offers flexibility to control permissions.
Kashish explains, “The first thing auditors want to make sure is that we’re not compromising client data. They can clearly see that HubSpot does that, so it makes our life easier. HubSpot also allows us to easily define roles and permissions, which help us with our auditors as well.”
Conversions increase 20% in a year
Sales Hub provides a powerful engine that helps Volopay achieve its revenue goals and satisfy customers.
In less than a year, the business increased conversions from product demo to closed sale by a fantastic 20%. In other words, the sales team gets more value from the leads Volopay generates thanks to Sales Hub.
This boost in conversions generates recurring revenue through increased monthly SaaS fees. This creates more stability and certainty as Volopay continues to scale.
Kashish says, “We attribute this increase in conversions to Sales Hub, because it helps us view and track our operations properly. With all of that happening automatically, our attention shifts towards making sure our numbers improve!”
30% time saved for reps; 40% saved for leaders
With Sales Hub, Volopay’s entire sales operation is more efficient and productive. With so many manual interventions replaced with instantaneous automation, sales reps save 30% of their time and sales leaders as much as 40%.
This extra bandwidth enables Volopay to do more without increasing its headcount. They have more capacity to understand and deepen relationships with customers, which is priceless for any start-up.
Kashish says: “HubSpot is a tool we value, because it’s a single source of truth that supports strong decision-making. If somebody asked me to move away from HubSpot, I would never do that.”
Kashish recommends Sales Hub to data-driven sales leaders looking for great UX from a CRM and an engine that drives more revenue.
He concludes: “I have no hesitation in endorsing Sales Hub to anyone. I’ve used it, and I endorse it with total trust.”
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