The Global Associates delivers better results to customers with Salesforce

The Global Associates is a sales and marketing organisation that offers businesses customised sales solutions to increase their outreach in existing and new markets. With clients in over fifteen countries, the company has been helping businesses scale sales globally by focusing on delivering actionable leads.

“We are a solution-driven company that aims to impact our customers’ sales positively. More than 95% of our monthly revenue is from repeat customers – this shows the impact of our customer-centric values,” says Jhumki Pandey-Sinha Roy, Director of Business Operations & Customer Success, The Global Associates. 

Businesses are increasingly choosing to concentrate on their core capabilities and outsource other critical functions, such as lead generation. “They now see value in outsourcing these operations to us for 360 prospecting, so that their sales teams’ can focus all their efforts on closing deals faster,” explains Roy. 

As the demand for its services increased, the company chose to invest in technology to help deliver on its customer promise. From providing high-quality leads to keeping customers engaged with transparent and accurate reporting, The Global Associates wanted to put customers-first in every sense of the way.

While The Global Associates has always been a technology-oriented company, there was still room to automate many internal processes. These were driven by a patchwork of systems that worked in silos. The existing CRM solution was a basic one with limited customisation capabilities. Which meant that many of the tools the company used, like the marketing automation solution, sat outside the solution. Also, a lack of integration meant that data had to be moved manually from system to system.

“Our employee performance tracker was also on a separate system and reporting was manual,” details Roy. “We wanted to unify everything on one platform to ensure transparency and efficiency.” The team hence looked for a powerful CRM solution capable of multiple integrations and extensive customisation. 

“This search for a comprehensive solution led us to Salesforce. It is a one-stop solution for all our needs,” says Roy. “Salesforce is also integrated with Pardot, which is easily the best email marketing solution in the market - that made it an obvious choice for us.”

Today, The Global Associates uses Salesforce for both internal as well as customer-facing processes.

Internally, the sales team uses Sales Cloud to streamline lead and pipeline management. The sales team can segment and score leads, while keeping track of all sales conversations in one place. 

“Sales is all about follow-ups and closing. With all data now stored in one place, our team can make informed choices on when to follow up and how often to follow up,” says Roy. 

“We also use Salesforce Inbox to send emails and proposals to clients. This means we don’t have to toggle between windows – it’s just one interface for everything – and that has really boosted efficiency.” 

The sales team also uses Pardot to run email campaigns. The data from Pardot automatically flows into Salesforce, empowering the team with a unified view of all campaign-related data. 

All this automation has helped the sales team free up valuable time, leading to a 30 percent increase in employee productivity.

“The new data-driven processes have also led to an increase in conversion rates,” says Roy.

More importantly, The Global Associates uses Salesforce to drive its business model and delivery of solutions. 

“My job is to ensure that we deliver on our customer promise – so really ensure that we deliver good quality leads to our customers and help them meet their sales goals,” says Roy. The team leverages technology to meet this goal. 

Using Pardot, sales reps run multiple effective outreach campaigns for clients across the world. The leads obtained from these campaigns flow back into Sales Cloud where they are cleaned, evaluated, and qualified.  

“Email performance data like open rates and click rates can be tracked through simple, yet rich dashboards,” explains Roy. “This helps our reps assess leads, structure them, and send them across to our customers.”

With Pardot at its fingertips, The Global Associates has seen an uptick in email campaign performance. With better open and click-through rates, email lead-generation effectiveness has improved by 20%. 

Also, this kind of automation is allowing the team to scale fast. Currently a team of over 70 sales and marketing professionals is able to run over 30 campaigns at a time across geographies. 

Rich sales reports have helped the company establish trust and transparency with its customers. 

“With the increased level of automation and data accuracy, we now work swiftly on our deliverables and see longer engagements with clients. They’re very happy with the level of service we provide,” says Roy. “As shown by the high number of repeat customers.”

The Global Associates has gone beyond the out-of-the-box solution to innovate and build custom solutions on the Salesforce Lightning Platform. One such solution, for example, captures employee targets and maps them against performance.  The data available through the tracker helps the leadership team track and make data-driven decisions on overall employee performance - a crucial aspect in a target-oriented business model. 

Roy credits the success of the implementation to Salesforce partner, StackNexus. “The StackNexus team helped us customise the platform to meet our exact requirements, and also to automate and simplify many processes. It was a pleasure to work with them.”

The Global Associates plans to continue investing in technology to scale operations. The company foresees many opportunities for specialised services and plans on expanding to new geographies. 

Roy wants to next deploy business intelligence tools like Einstein Analytics to understand customers at a deeper level. 

“Businesses today must embrace technology, and we strongly recommend Salesforce to anyone looking to do so. The ease of use and extent of customisation offered by Salesforce is unmatched,” she concludes.