Go1 increases reach and speed using Salesforce

Go1 has carved out a niche in online learning by offering curated workplace learning and development courses from leading providers like Harvard Business Review, Skillsoft, Pearson, edX, and Coursera.

Dr. Vu Tran, Go1 Chief Evangelist and Co-founder, likens the company to Spotify for business training. Customers pay a subscription and get on-demand access to training materials and tools.

The model has proved popular with customers who no longer need to choose between different training platforms or manage multiple suppliers. Instead, they can use Go1 to access thousands of courses from subject-matter experts.

“Our goal is to help unlock the potential of people through a love of learning,” said Dr. Tran. “Salesforce provides a single engine to power our vision globally. It helps us manage different teams and sell into different countries with much more sophistication.”

Go1 first turned to Salesforce to improve visibility of its customers and sales activities worldwide. It wanted a solution that would support its fast growth and help it mature operationally. The flexibility and expanded capabilities of Salesforce made it ideal and, with prior experience implementing Salesforce for other companies, the team at Go1 was able to rollout Sales Cloud in under five weeks.

Go1 now uses Sales Cloud to track and manage all opportunities, including those that originate from channel partners. Sales Cloud also allows Go1 to build a complete picture of each lead and customer, helping it sell faster and provide a better customer experience. Time spent on reporting has also been reduced by more than 50%.

“When you have a large sales team, it is incredibly important to understand how they are performing individually, by region and overall,” said Dr. Tran. “Salesforce gives us that visibility while allowing the sales team to spend less time on reporting and more time selling."

And while Dr. Tran has himself moved away from day-to-day management of sales in each region, Salesforce makes it easy to maintain the level of visibility he needs as a founder.

“Just because I’m not directly overseeing the business in the US or UK right now doesn’t mean that I don’t want or need to know what’s happening there. With Salesforce, I can access that information directly which ultimately helps me avoid spending more time in meetings,” said Dr. Tran.

Supported by Salesforce, Go1 has continued to grow rapidly. The company now has offices in Australia, the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Malaysia. It’s also secured a large investor base, with its recent round of Series D funding taking its valuation to $1 Billion USD.

Go1 is currently expanding its global footprint with a particular focus on Southeast Asia and it’s using Pardot to help drive this growth. Campaign and landing page templates are set up in Pardot to be executed locally by teams in different countries and new nurture journeys can be set up in less than 24 hours. Go1 can also easily track engagement with these campaigns and leverage the insights to optimise future ones.

To further improve lead nurturing, Go1 uses Pardot Connectors to track attendance at webinars and events and send targeted follow up materials to no shows and attendees. It’s also connected Pardot with Google Ads to track where leads are coming from and measure ROI.

Additional benefits of Pardot include the simplicity of syncing leads and information between Pardot and Sales Cloud. Pardot also allows all inbound leads to be assigned to a sales person more than twice as fast as before.

Pardot and Salesforce more generally has also been easy for team members to adopt, especially with the availability of Trailhead which provides an easy way for people to get started and learn new features.

“Now that we are managing sales and marketing on one platform we can more seamlessly nurture leads. Pardot also helps us work faster to launch campaigns for specific regions, so we can tailor our messaging without slowing ourselves down,” said Dr. Tran. “That speed is really important to us, because as a high-growth organisation we need the ability to move at a fast pace.”

Over the past couple of years, Go1 has consistently doubled its revenue and has seen a 300% increase in customers and learners on its platform since May 2020. It now estimates that every one to two seconds there’s a customer somewhere in the world completing one of its courses. This increased uptake is partly attributed to existing customers who’ve leveraged the online training more often while working remotely during the pandemic.

One of the solutions Go1 has leaned on more heavily during this time is Slack. Go1 has used the secure, channel-based messaging platform since 2018 when Slack acquired Hipchat—the solution the company initially used for communication.

“Messaging has always been at the core of how we work, but the way we use it has gradually evolved from one-to-one messaging to company-wide messaging and then to messaging with our partners. And now that we have people working remotely across multiple regions, we’re using Slack possibly more than any other piece of technology,” said Dr. Tran.

Go1 has a number of Slack channels that play an integral role in facilitating communication between teams and regions. These channels—like #team-sales, #team-support, and #ask-engineering—are used daily by the individuals in those teams and also open to those who need to jump in and ask questions or collaborate on a project.

There are also fun channels, too, like #random-pet-spam and #bookclub and others like #go1-wellbeing which includes links to meditations and resources to support mental health. Another popular channel is #thoughtleaders where the marketing team shares articles, quotes, and images that employees can post to LinkedIn or other social pages.

Go1 also has a total of 47 Slack integrations and apps that help to automate and speed up workflow. For example, there’s integration with JIRA which posts support tickets to Slack as well as integration with Salesforce through Zapier which enables automatic posting of new deals so that everyone is notified quickly and can congratulate those involved. Go1 is also exploring the possibility of its own integration with Slack which would allow customers to message a bot with a training topic and receive a link to a relevant course.

The company moved its partner communications onto Slack two years ago. Now, it has 62 Slack Connect channels which it uses for seamless collaboration with distributors, content partners, and marketing agencies.

Dr. Tran said the decision was made to cut down on task switching and to establish a single source of truth for communication.

“Task switching is a real pain and results in a lot of lost time and efficiency,” said Dr. Tran. “Now, however, we can manage all our communication on the one platform and it’s all organised and easy to search. It makes us excited for the next generation of integrations and being able to automate more of our workflow.”