Case study: PPL Labs
What do you think is the most important thing when doing sales for a startup?
Sell it before you make it. If you can’t sell it, it doesn’t matter if you can make it or not. Sell it to understand what the customer is willing to buy before building anything new.
What are the top five Close features for you and how do you use them?
- Setting follow ups/demos etc. via the tasks interface—the ability to sync directly to calendar is pretty sweet.
- Ability to keep track of correspondence easily across phone/email etc.
- The sorting and assignment of campaigns/sales territories using Close’s custom fields.
- The ability to adapt Close to what we’re doing as things evolve is huge. We can track what matters and like any great sandbox, there are many ways to reach any desired end.
- Whenever we need help with Close, support, training, and sound advice is always available from your team. This is really important to us!
What did you use before Close?
We used Highrise and while it was OK to record contacts, it was hard to track deals, had terrible reports and did not have any email capabilities.
What is your overall sales philosophy?
I’m a big fan of Continuous Improvement Process (aka CIP) and I try to leave a minimum of one thing better than I found it each day.
The culture at PPL is extremely supportive of this, which is a whole lot of fun—incremental improvement tends to yield more aggregate change than chewing glass and spending hours spit-balling for that breakthrough moment.
Gathering feedback consistently and evolving everyday is the goal.
A large part of our long-term plan is built on “Pull” as opposed to “Push”. That is to say, we want to give the customer the tools he/she needs to self-determine product fit and capitalize on our considerable body of thought leadership in our space by guiding them through that process.
Automating the early stages of said process is a key goal and will free up sales team to focus on high value activities like customer coaching, gathering testimonials/feedback, and building and nurturing relationships.
Creating that “Aha!” moment where our customer realizes the degree to which we can improve their business is the key. We seek to empower our customer.
What’s the ROI of Close for you?
Close makes it easier for us to keep our growing sales team organized and on task. It saves us time during the early stages of the sales process and gives us potent tools to manage relationships better during the later stages.
Want to see what our inside sales CRM can do for your sales team? Try Close for free for 14 days.
