Profession helps more candidates kick start their career with Salesforce

Profession is both a B2C and a B2B company, serving job-seekers as well as companies looking to hire. It has an online jobs board, sells ad space, and offers B2B customers access to its CV database on monthly or yearly subscription. It also provides added value services such as shortlisting suitable candidates for employers, which depends on a deep knowledge of both the candidate pool and the culture of the hiring company.

With business booming, the company decided to replace its basic CRM system with a more sophisticated solution that would improve data quality, unlock a 360-degree view of the customer, and drive more traffic from free sources.

In 2019, the team rolled out Sales Cloud, Pardot, and Marketing Cloud with the help of implementation partner United Consult. “We spoke to industry leaders who’ve been through a digital transformation in the last 10 years to find out which platform would suit our needs,” recalled Krisztian Zsédely, Head of Sales and Recruitment Services. “We wanted something user friendly, easy to integrate, and adaptable. Salesforce was the perfect fit.”

Sales Cloud provides a central repository for all customer data, including B2B contract details, purchase history, standing orders, and annual, quarterly, and monthly spend. “We’ve got a great team of sales reps who were holding vast amounts of knowledge in their heads. Salesforce creates user-friendly dashboards that gives everyone access to the information they need to have better interactions with customers,” explained Zsédely.

Along with the new transparency comes a major leap in efficiency. The solution automates the manual tasks that took up resources without delivering customer value. Today, telesales agents can manage up to 900 active accounts each, giving each one a better service based on real insight.

Salesforce also unlocks greater visibility of the sales pipeline and is integrated with a tool to analyse wallet share, wins, and losses against competing companies. In-house, the team tracks key metrics to improve lead conversion and efficiency, such as the length of the sales cycle, number of opportunities, and why leads are lost. “Sales Cloud helps us get more predictive while unlocking that all important single view of the customer,” revealed Tüzes.

The team used these insights to create an ideal buyer persona to help reps sell more effectively—and managers monitor performance to see who would benefit most from coaching and support. By working to KPIs, reps can manage their workloads to make sure they’re hitting company targets. For instance, they can organise more meetings if they see a predicted shortfall in the number of deals closed.

Profession already has a 90% market share of Hungary’s largest companies, so with a small number of opportunities, landing more is a challenge. “Winning those accounts is all in the details, we have to deep dive into every insight available to tell us how they operate and how we can show them the value of our services,” Zsédely added.

Marketing campaigns are predominantly focused on driving higher numbers of job applications from B2C customers. But with 40% of transactions coming from paid sources, the company wanted to drive down cost-per-lead by leveraging its own database and increasing the share of leads coming from its own channels.

“Salesforce helps us reduce our marketing spend. With Marketing Cloud, cost per acquisition is 50% less than paid channels,” said Balázs Varga, Head of Marketing at Profession. “We’re already seeing 3% of applications coming directly from Marketing Cloud and that figure is only going to increase as the rollout matures.”

To build profiles on job seekers, new browsers are prompted to register on the website. On their second visit, they’ll be asked to fill in more basic information that is captured by the EDM database. Finally, they’re prompted to add their CV to a searchable database for B2B customers to browse.

The Profession team working together with United Consult, leaves nothing to chance, building three user journeys to boost all-important application rates. The first uses search data to send registered users emails with jobs they might be interested in. Job seekers can also save a job to apply for later, and will receive a reminder to start the application as well as seeing similar jobs to apply for. Finally, if someone abandons their application, they’ll be encouraged to come back and complete it. All big wins.

To maximise opportunities with B2B customers, the company rolled out email marketing automation on Pardot. “For B2B, we needed a solution that works well with Sales Cloud to hand off leads to the sales team,” says Varga. “With Pardot we can make more sophisticated trigger-based journeys, for example enrolling a customer in upsell emails when they buy one of our services.”

Pardot also helps the sales team target hot leads by notifying them of returning visitors to the website, so reps can proactively call the customer with the right advice at the right time.

With Salesforce, Profession has become a more data-driven organisation, making smarter business decisions and driving better outcomes. “With better information about the market and internal operations, we can challenge our routines and processes, optimise any weak points, and be the best we can be,” adds Tüzes. 

The solution has also been a hit with end users and integrates seamlessly with other business systems to give customers a consistent experience. “Salesforce gives us the agility to proactively adapt to changes in the market so we can always offer our customers an amazing experience. Now, we’ve got everything we need to achieve our goal of becoming Hungary’s top one-stop-shop for recruitment,” Tüzes concludes.