Canva takes on the enterprise using Salesforce.

Launched in 2013, Canva’s visual collaboration platform is a game changer in the design industry. With more than 800,000 templates, 100 million design assets and a rapidly growing repertoire of easy to use features, Canva simplifies graphic design and empowers more than 60 million monthly active users to create all types of content at speed and scale.

For a long time, almost all of Canva’s users have been consumers and professionals within startups and small businesses. A couple years ago, however, that started to change as visual communication became a universal need across teams and industries of every size.

“Canva began as this really great design tool for consumers and we then introduced our Pro offering which was aimed more at small and medium-sized businesses,” said John Eitel, Vice President of Sales, North America at Canva. “What we found, though, is that the Pro offering was being adopted by a lot of people at large companies.”

Canva quickly capitalised on the demand with a purpose-built enterprise offering supported by a new enterprise sales team. The team is using Salesforce to scale rapidly and build relationships globally. The team is also increasing Canva’s percentage of enterprise users, adding to the 85% of Fortune 500 companies already using the visual collaboration platform.

To succeed in the enterprise space, Canva knew it needed to do things a little differently. It began building its new enterprise offering with features to help large teams collaborate and create on-brand content. These features include built-in security and workflows for approvals, in addition to Canva’s easy-to-use editing tools and premium stock image library which help even non-designers create professional looking presentations that align to their brand’s look and feel.

Simultaneously, Canva established its enterprise sales team. Duncan McIntyre, Head of Sales, APAC at Canva was the first sales leader to come onboard and was tasked with supporting the team’s rapid growth. Scalability was a particular challenge as the business had implemented Salesforce, but was not yet using it to its full potential.

“When I think back to the beginning, almost everything was being managed on spreadsheets, including pipeline, account assignments, and inbound leads,” said McIntyre. “You might be able to get away with that for a while if you have a few sales people in one office. However, as you move into new markets and 10 reps becomes 20 or 30, suddenly everything becomes a lot harder to manage.”

Salesforce was key to building a base from which Canva could grow, and the business continued its rollout, working alongside partner Mav3rik. A year and a half later, Canva’s sales team has expanded rapidly and is now equipped with everything they need to grow business.

Canva now uses Salesforce to manage the sales cycle from end-to-end, starting with lead acquisition and nurturing. With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, for example, marketing can quickly create new landing pages and forms to promote events and capture new audiences. Integrated with tools like Outreach.io and Drift, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement also helps to increase engagement of leads.

"One of the immediate benefits of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has been the increased visibility into leads,” said Eitel. “Leads are automatically allocated to the right people, prioritised appropriately, and come with added insights that help us reach out more effectively.”

The sales team is further supported by Sales Cloud which has built-in business rules that help move leads through the sales cycle. With Ironclad from the AppExchange, the team is also able to seamlessly generate and manage contracts.

“All our pipeline management is now running through Salesforce and we have global reporting which lets us see exactly where everything is up to— each month, each quarter, and each season,” said McIntyre. “The level of visibility Salesforce provides is hyper important when you’re building and inspiring a global sales team.”

The visibility and flexibility of Sales Cloud has also helped Canva manage the change needed to scale the team quickly.

“Things like onboarding new reps and shuffling around territories used to be a massive undertaking, Eitel. “Now, those tasks that took weeks can be completed in days.”

Incredibly, Canva has been forging its new path in the midst of the global pandemic. This has meant onboarding employees and collaborating on sales and strategy remotely. The business’ use of Slack, the secure channel-based messaging platform, has kept work flowing and helped McIntyre and Eitel quickly build the team’s foundations.

“We initially thought we’d be doing things like sending reps to Sydney for onboarding, but everything changed overnight and there was a lot of adapting, improvising, and overcoming,” said Eitel. "We essentially established a whole new team and distributed a new product while working remotely. The visibility and collaboration enabled by Salesforce and Slack were critical."

Canva has used Slack since 2016 and it is now used wall-to-wall, which means everyone is using Slack channels to work and collaborate daily. When emails and phone calls just weren't cutting it, it made sense for the sales team to move their workflow and communications over to Slack too and they now have a number of dedicated sales channels. These include global and regional team channels as well as a #sales-support channel where they can share and solve problems quickly.

There’s also a popular #win channel that brings visibility to sales in the enterprise space. Updates to the channel are triggered automatically when deals close in Salesforce and a flurry of congratulations boost team morale.

“In a product-driven company like Canva, the integration of the sales team into the broader company is critical and some of that comes from just seeing or being part of the conversation in Slack,” said McIntyre.

Over the past year, the sales team also started using Slack Connect to collaborate with people outside the business. This included those who signed up for one of the hundreds of free trials Canva offered to stress test its systems and promote goodwill during the pandemic.

“The collaboration with our customers through Slack Connect has also been invaluable and helped us to set up a major test case within the space of a week and a half. I don’t think we could have done that without having Slack to communicate in real-time,” said McIntyre.

As for what’s next, the sales team is continuing to grow and optimise its sales processes in order to get its products into the hands of more enterprise users.

“We’ve been moving at an incredibly fast In just six months last year, we covered the type of ground I’d expect to cover in 18,” said Eitel. “It’s set us up to really tackle the enterprise space and be the tool that empowers everyone to communicate more visually.”

As a values-driven company with a fundamental value to “be a good human”, Canva’s growth in this space will also support its wider aims, including its commitment to sustainability. Canva has a huge goal to become climate positive by 2023 and has introduced initiatives like One Print, One Tree which sees one tree planted for every print order placed.

Jared Ingersoll, Sustainability Lead at Canva, said that these types of initiatives were not just about offsetting carbon, but about helping to restore and rejuvenate the environment. Canva sees this as a key responsibility for businesses today and, as it grows, it is seeking new ways to make and measure impact. A key focus of its strategy is making meaningful change that anyone can engage with—not just businesses with deep pockets.

“One of the best ways we can make an impact is by empowering others to make positive change. Our job is not done until then,” said Ingersoll.