Itoc shakes up go-to-market strategy and accelerates revenue growth

Itoc is an Advanced Consulting Partner of Amazon Web Services (AWS), helping customers across Australia and New Zealand fast track their journey to the cloud. Founded in Queensland in 2012, the business has grown steadily and now has offices in New South Wales and plans to open locations in Victoria and New Zealand. It has also gained a foothold across several industries, including financial services, the public sector, SaaS, healthcare, ecommerce, and retail.

With the adoption of Salesforce, Itoc has accelerated its growth— driving increases in revenue and bringing on over 200 new customers in just one year. The business has also refined its sales strategy and matured its sales processes, setting itself up for long term success.

Itoc’s early growth was boosted by referrals, reflecting the quality of its people and delivery. Its challenge, like that of many small businesses, was that with its growth in sales, it also outgrew its systems.

For Itoc to maintain and build on its momentum, it needed a solution that would help it to manage and close deals in a more effective and scalable way. Head of Sales and Customer Growth Simone Longden and Sales Operations Lead Maddie Lewin had prior experience with Salesforce and felt it was precisely what the business needed. A complete review of different options only solidified this choice.

“Salesforce met our requirements for a long-term solution that would integrate with our existing tools and support other parts of the business,” said Longden.

Itoc made the decision to manage the implementation internally and, drawing on the sales team’s existing knowledge and Trailhead, it was able to go live in just two weeks.

“I did a number of courses on Trailhead which made it really easy to understand how Salesforce worked and to create the small number of workflows we needed to customise it to our business,” said Lewin.

The most time-consuming part of the implementation was cleansing data before putting it into Sales Cloud—something that Longden recommended to any business getting started with the platform.

“Your data is everything and if it’s not accurate or outdated, you’re not going to get the insights you need,” said Longden. “So we started with the data cleanse, then switched on Sales Cloud, and two weeks later everything was different. We had so much more insight and greater rigour around how we managed our sales cycle that it drove an uptick in sales.”

Some of the benefits have come from improved task management and lead scoring which helps the sales team manage its pipeline more effectively. Itoc is also using Sales Cloud together with DocuSign from the AppExchange to speed up the process of finalising master services agreements and proposals. As a result of all these things, Itoc has reduced the average time between discovery conversations and proposals by roughly half. It has also achieved a three-fold acceleration of the sales cycle, with sales reps now delivering two or three times the established opportunity closure.

Sales Cloud has also provided greater insight on where the biggest growth opportunities are, leading Itoc to shake-up its go-to-market strategy and focus on the industries and products driving the most revenue. This has led to significant growth in the public sector and retail where Itoc has signed multi-year deals with several large customers after refining its value proposition.

“By gaining a complete view of customer data, we were able to determine where to invest our energy and resources, whether in terms of specific industries or products. This process helped us map a better path to growth, one that was evidence-backed and data-driven,” said Longden.

Leveraging the insights and efficiency from Salesforce, Itoc has driven consistent revenue growth, including a doubling of revenue one year after its transformation. Productivity is also at an all-time high. “Salesforce helps us work faster in almost every area and we can see a direct correlation between our activities and the opportunities being closed,” said Longden.

Slack, the secure channel-based messaging platform, contributes to the efficiency of both sales and service. Itoc uses the platform to collaborate internally on opportunities and projects and to facilitate 24-hour customer support. Slack integration with Sumo Logic and Datadog, for example, supports system monitoring and alerting and helps Itoc quickly resolve any issues.

Itoc also uses Slack Connect to collaborate with customers and partners, including AWS. Moving conversations out of emails and into Slack channels has streamlined communications and helped the business respond faster to incoming requests.

“Most of the interactions we have with our customers and partners are now initiated in Slack and it’s really helped us strengthen those long term relationships,” said Longden. “Providing our employees with solutions like Slack and Sales Cloud also helps us to meet new expectations around hybrid workplaces and user-friendly, less manual tools.”