Whether it’s a new car or a new bottle of shampoo, consumers demand transparency into the products and services they intend to buy now more than ever. ConsumerAffairs, founded in 1998, is a web-based service that empowers consumers to make highly-informed purchasing decisions. In addition to thousands of consumer reviews, ConsumerAffairs also employs an in-house research team that produces comprehensive buyer guides and how-to articles for over 300 different product and service categories. In 2011, ConsumerAffairs launched “ConsumerAffairs for Brands,” an online platform that succeeded in bringing consumers and brands into one space – closing the traditional gap between the two – and spurring massive growth for the organization.
ConsumerAffairs Optimizes Salesforce to Enable Sales Growth
Business Challenge
Katelyn West joined ConsumerAffairs in 2014 as Sales Operations Manager. She started in the height of an explosive growth period for the company and immediately noticed an opportunity for her new team: They needed to update Salesforce to reflect the effective business processes they had developed over the years — especially their lead process.
Any single lead that comes in for ConsumerAffairs may be relevant to over 300 industry categories. Manually assigning each of them forced the team to dedicate time to administrative tasks that they could have been spending to even further the company’s explosive growth.
Solution
During a routine pulse check with Salesforce, a Salesforce Account Executive confirmed that Katelyn and her team could be seeing even more ROI out of their CRM platform and suggested that they bring in Torrent Consulting. With Torrent’s guidance and support, ConsumerAffairs:
- Created a process that automatically assigns new leads by identifying which of the 300 industries the lead corresponds to and then “round-robining” the lead to the correct salesperson
- Implemented documentation objects that allow the sales team to capture more lead data, so no information is lost when the relationship is passed off from the team’s hunters to its closers
When Consumer Affairs experienced a period of explosive growth, their Sales Operation Manager realized they needed to update their Salesforce org. We stepped in to help.
Results
With these new processes in place, ConsumerAffairs is now able to focus on growth rather than the daunting process of manual lead assignment.
Now that each member of the Business Development team has a clear focus, ConsumerAffairs has been able to grow the team 100%.
The team is also ensuring that leads turn into sales. Housing lead data in Salesforce means no context is lost and the assignment process remains efficient.
Katelyn was able to successfully prove Salesforce’s value and was freed up to focus on other initiatives, including integrating the company’s marketing team into the platform.
