About the company
Founded by Aalap Shah and Madhavi Rao, SoMe Connect is a Chicago-based digital marketing agency. It was established in 2011 with a motive to offer social media marketing services. The company later expanded its scope and included paid search as well as content marketing. Its team of 8 people includes SEO specialists, a graphic designer, a community manager, and a creative strategist.
All the sales and marketing efforts are headed by Shah whereas Rao manages client services, delivery, and internal operations.
The internal culture of SoMe is collaborative, supportive, and transparent. The team members are motivated to be direct with each other as well as their clients.
Business Objective
In an industry where almost everyone can open up a social media offerings, the motive of SoMe Connect was to actually build a ‘connect’ with their clients and deliver high-quality services.
“We want to be your strategic business partner more than just your marketing venture,” Shah said.
Strategies adopted by SoMe Connect
Leveraged Pipedrive
It was in 2015 when Aalap came across Pipedrive. Shah was quickly struck with the flexible reporting capabilities and intuitive functionality of the Pipedrive.
“It adjusted to my tastes,” Shah said. “So if I wanted to throw in the deal with just a few details, cool. If I wanted to extensively add notes, cool. It worked for that too.”
There were two pipelines for SoMe Connect.
The first, their sales pipeline, consists of the following stages:
The second is their contract expiration pipeline:
The following Pipedrive capabilities that were leveraged:
Data centralization
Earlier, there was no single point of access for SoMe from which to manage referrals, leads, project deliverables, sales activities, and other key data. There were bits and pieces of information which were scattered across multiple applications.
The lack of cohesion affected timeliness, efficiency, and led to missed opportunities and miscommunication.
“I either had all the information in several different places, or it lived in my email. I’d miss an invite or a document,” Shah said.
With Pipedrive, SoMe became organized in an official manner. They were able to visualize, prioritize their tasks, and retain crucial notes, documentations, and other details.
Quantifying activities
In order to quantify the activities and thereby make a clear pattern between actions and results, Pipedrive was used. Every activity was logged there and pipeline stages were maintained which were later analyzed. By uniting all of the business activities into a single point of access, he developed a nuanced understanding of the output.
“It gave me more confidence in what I do,” Shah said. “Like, if I do these types of activities, these are the things that can happen. Or, these are some things that I did or didn’t do with a deal that helped it close or not close.”
Through quantifying the activities, they were able to see where the new business comes from (whether it is through SEO, networking events, or referrals).
Reminders
With Pipedrive, everything related to sales, the past, present, and future was kept in one place. SoMe connect always had its documents and information at different places and therefore, remembering smaller opportunities and tasks was a heavy duty.1
“Pipedrive reminded me of all the opportunities I had in one place, so I could check in the morning and follow up,” Shah said.
Results
After SoMe Connect’s founder, Aalap Shah started leveraging Pipedrive, they achieved the following results:
- The close rate increased by 60%.
- The annual revenue of SoMe grew from $600,000 to $1.4 million. There was 133% revenue increase.
- The length of the sales cycle of SoMe company steadily decreased from an average of 90 days to an average of 45 days.
Learnings
Consistent use: One can benefit from Pipedrive, once they fully exploit all its features consistently. You can enter the lead and thereby keep the track of it.
Follow-ups: Keeping a track of the leads by noting whom the company follow-ups with and with whom it doesn’t help in evaluating the outcomes. Consistent follow-ups are a key to landing new business and closing deals. It is also important to emphasize the content over speed.
“It’s not necessarily how fast you respond, but the thoughtful response,” Shah said.
Share with your team: The capacity of Pipedrive is stunning and one should share Pipedrive with its team in order to plan out projects accordingly.
“They use my sales pipeline to see how the deals are progressing so they can figure out how to staff,” Shah said.
Pipedrive helped the company in areas of the organization, management, and reminders which eventually increased its sales.
Which tool are you giving try to collect and maintain your company’s leads data and other important data? Have you tried Pipedrive?
Image Credits: Pipedrive
