About the company:
Escola is software development company with over 10 years of experience, specializing in mobile and web application development for the e-learning and e-commerce sectors, among others.
Industry:
IT
Number of employees:
50+
www.escola.pl
Software Development company Escola improves sales and increases revenue by 180% after implementing Livespace
Livespace helps Escola streamline three divergent sales departments and processes, enabling high team performance.
increase in revenue in 2019-2020 YOY
saved on job reporting each month
shorter status meetings
The Challenge
Escola, a software development company, is always looking at ways how to increase software sales and their company footprint. A major part of this growth strategy is to use mergers and acquisitions as a key lever for expanding their technology portfolio.
In 2019, as part of their strategy, the company acquired two software development agencies. As the companies merged, Escola realized that they needed to consolidate the existing three sales departments into one – all of which had different sales processes and tools. They knew that this was the only way to increase their revenues from software development projects and get a return on investment.
The Solution
Having previously worked with Livespace CRM, Ilona Leoniewska, Chief Revenue Officer at Escola knew that Livespace would help organize and unify the three sales departments.
On top of Livespaces customizable nonlinear sales process feature, which would reflect Escola’s sales process accurately, Livespace offered more essential features than other CRMs, which she knew were essential for team alignment and to increase sales in the software company, including:
- A news feed to keep everyone in the team informed and on the same page.
- A fully configurable multi-stage sales process, with activities and tasks customizable to stages and steps in the process,
- An extensive and powerful reporting functionality with:
- in depth statistics on tasks,
- funnel effectiveness and sales results, along with
- goal setting and monitoring capabilities per team and team member.
While Escola implemented Livespace, the team also began working on optimizing its sales processes for its products and software development services. Within a few months, the statistics available in Livespace allowed Escola to verify the effectiveness of their sales activities and to optimize them accordingly.
Using Livespace helped to highlight that involving clients within the sales process more deeply and improving customer service directly increased conversion. As a result, the team significantly reduced the time between the initial inquiry submitted by the client and the preparation of their initial offer. Now, clients are contacted within just 15 minutes of submitting their query, with the initial offer being sent to them within two days of that.
The data showed that an additional driver to significantly increase conversion were discovery workshops. They are now an essential part of Escola’s software development sales process and customer qualification. New clients are strongly encouraged to participate in a paid workshop, as a supplement to their initial offer, during which the scope and project requirements are mapped out. Clients who participate in these workshops tend to purchase software development services more often.
Additionally, customer qualification improved significantly. The software development sales team started to be able to identify precise client segments and profiles within their sales process, as well as within the customer relationship management process itself. This allows them to identify the best sources of potential orders, and calculate and understand the conversion rates per source, thereby increasing sales.
We save a lot of time thanks to Livespace. Our software development sales team is fairly small (for now ;-)), and we have a ton of work, so it’s critical for us to work together efficiently.
Livespace helps us save 3 working days a month by using its scorecards as a tool to structure our status meetings. And now that we’ve gained a better understanding of our customers and are more effective in qualifying, thanks to the reporting insights, we’ve also stopped wasting time on engaging prospects for whom our services are just too expensive.
Ilona Leoniewska, Chief Revenue Officer Escola S. A.
The Result
Improved reporting results in over 15% sales ops efficiency gains.
By managing the sales process, funnel and activities in Livespace, day-to-day operations have become more efficient by over 15%. Thanks to improved reporting alone, the software development sales team has gained an additional 3 working days per month. On top of that, the time allocated to status meetings has been cut in half, thanks to the Kanban board view of sales deals and the news feed in Livespace’s dashboard.
Better qualification increase software development sales effectiveness.
The sales team qualifies clients faster thanks to the implementation of scoping workshops. As a result the sales cycle has been shortened considerably by the quick turnaround time when creating offers, and profitability stays high thanks clearer requirements that prevent project creep.
Clearer understanding of product-market fit ensures only high-quality leads enter into the funnel.
The data and statistics in Livespace allow Escola to focus on marketing activities that increase the number of high-quality leads. Clearly defined criteria allows the Escola sales team to only build and maintain relationships with high-potential prospect, which in turn, allows them to use the time saved on acquiring new leads.
As a result of implementing Livespace, Escola has been able to unify their sales team and introduce critical changes to their sales process and sales operations.
In so doing, they have been able to increase their software development sales resulting in YoY revenue growth of 180% for 2019-2020.
The company was also named the sixth fastest-growing software agency in the world by Clutch in 2020.
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