Customer case study: Paddle.com

This case study was written by Harrison Rose, who heads Sales & Biz Dev at Paddle.com.

You can check out his personal blog where he shares sales insights or connect with him on LinkedIn.

About Paddle

Paddle is a developer tools company, aiming to handle the aspects of selling apps and content on desktop, web and mobile, that you don’t want to. All the way from SaaS billing for your web app, to mobile analytics.

Since launch, our most successful method of customer acquisition has been through outbound sales. Our journey to finding Close has been a long one.

We’ve used lots of CRMs

Sometimes it feels like we’ve used every CRM offering out there. You name it, we’ve tried it. Picking one that works for you is hard, and the problems among them seem common:

• Great to use initially, but struggle with masses of leads
• Too much time taken to add/manage leads.
• Difficult for other team members to monitor overall progress in the sales dept.

All CRMs aim to solve these problems, but rarely do they solve these problems AND improve your sales cycle and techniques. This is what sets Close apart.

Living in the age of data-driven sales

While solving these problems through a range of features, like Smart Views, complex search, and easy to access opportunities overview, Close enhances your sales by putting an emphasis on data and metrics about your sales cycle.

Access to this data helps you iterate on your outreach, improve your techniques, and close more deals.

The three features I’d like to highlight which help achieve this, are as follows;

• Sent Emails
• Activity Overview
• Status Changes

Tracking the effectiveness of your e-mails

As an outbound sales-driven organization, outreach is important to us. Which emails are working, who are the most effective customers we’re reaching out to, and how can we improve?

Close makes the tracking is this data easy via the “Sent Mails” view.

(Real world email activity of one of our SDRs)

With Close, you have the ability to setup each of your email templates, track the number of emails sent, the open rate, and the response rate.

In knowing the effectiveness of your emails, you can measure the effect of tweaking their contents, measure which types of email are most effective and to which groups, and thus close more deals.

An example of this is the tweaks to we made to our “break-up” email, covered in a blog-post here. In understanding that open-rates were high, yet response rates could be improved, we were able to tweak the content of this email, and measure the effects.

Improving our outreach, and most importantly, our results.

A top-down view of outreach

There’s been a lot of emphasis made by well-respected sales pros that measuring results, and not activities is of utmost importance. Something I wholeheartedly subscribe to. That’s why at Paddle, employee sales performance is measured on metrics like:

• % of new prospects SDRs can engage in conversion
• # of prospects SDRs can convert into interested/qualified leads
• % of qualified leads Account Execs are able to convert into integrated customers etc.

However, when the above metrics are not being met, or financial KPIs are being missed, looking at how many customers are being put into your sales funnel is extremely important. The “activity overview” is helpful in this regard.

Measuring your sales funnel and employee performance

I mentioned some of the targets we work towards as a team above, e.g. number of leads we’re moving from “Contacted” to “In Conversation” on a weekly and monthly basis. The “Status Change” view is imperative in tracking this.

(Tracking one of our SDRs outreach, over a period of a week)

It’s a simple interface, pulling the data we want and need in seconds.

The Close community

In addition to providing you with the features and data to improve your sales flows, Close “out-teaches the opposition”. Running regular webinars, and a frequently updated blog to help those in our sector. A particular favorite of mine being, “Put some funny in your follow up”.

The team offer simple, actionable advice to help improve you and your skills. Going above and beyond in their role of solving those pesky CRM issues initially discussed.

Love is a funny old thing

In effortlessly solving problems faced using CRMs in the past, and then helping me learn and improve as a biz dev & salesperson, Close not only makes my job easier, but makes it more enjoyable.

For me, this is incredibly rare in a piece of software and once found, is an awesome thing.

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