Customer case study: Bench.co

What did you use before Close? Why did it suck specifically? We used Base. They had a pre-configured workflow that you were supposed to use that just didn’t work for us.

Trying to fit that tool to our process was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I never realized how important our specific sales process is to us until someone asked us to change it.

Why did you decide to adopt Close for your team?

I tried out Smart Views and was very impressed by the flexibility. Want a list of leads that you’ve emailed over the past 2 weeks but hasn’t opened your emails? Create it in a few seconds and put it on your task bar.

Want a list of customers that you haven’t filled in the industry information for? Easy.

Now that we’ve been using Smart Views for a few months, pretty much our entire follow-up workflow is creating lists of leads that meet certain criteria but haven’t been contacted recently, and trying to reduce that to zero. It’s like an automagically created to-do list for your reps.

Then, I brought it to the dev team to see how easy it would be to integrate into our existing systems. Close has a top notch API that our developers love. After that everyone quickly agreed that we should switch over ASAP.

What were some of the sales challenges before Close?

Follow-ups was number one. It was hard to build a robust follow-up process because we had to manually create our list of leads to contact that day. Creating a list of people that haven’t been contacted in over 7 days was a manual exercise of going through thousands of leads and manually marking them for a new follow-up. Yuck.

The second one was recording the information we wanted to record. We wanted a drop-down menu for Lead Source (i.e. which channel the lead came through), but all we could do was create a text field for that. So you basically had to memorize what your options were for the different sources. The net effect was many people just didn’t record the information, and when we did get it, it was hard to analyze because it was riddled with weird entries and spelling errors.

How did Close help you guys overcome them?

With Close, our follow-up lists are auto-generated. It’s just up to us to decide what kind of leads we want to follow up with, and how often. After that, the lists are auto-generated for the reps and away they go.

Creating a custom drop-down to record information takes seconds. And Smart Views make it super easy to figure out which leads we’ve forgotten to enter that data for. We have close to perfect data on each of our leads and customers now, making analysis super fast and simple.

What are the top two Close features for you and how do you use them?

Smart Views, for everything. Today we decided we want to make sure our current customers are contacted by someone on our team once every 25 days, at the very least. In a few seconds, I created a Smart View that spits out a list of customers that haven’t been contacted for over 25 days, and my entire team can access it. It’s so powerful.

Custom fields, for recording information that we want to analyze later, like Loss Reason, Industry, and Lead Source.

What’s the ROI of Close for you?

We know that every lead is being followed up with. Not a single lead is being “forgotten” due to bad process or human error. That’s huge!

Want to see what our inside sales CRM can do for your sales team? Try Close for free for 14 days.