The payments industry is highly complex and competitive. To power its growth, Checkout.com must constantly innovate and harness the needs of its merchants and their customers.

“Merchants need a partner who they can trust will consistently drive value and innovation,” explained Jenny Hadlow, Vice President of Sales Operations at Checkout.com. “We must earn their business every day by delivering a great experience.”

For Checkout.com, a great experience means more than ensuring a high acceptance rate for digital payments; it involves sharing insights and solving problems to drive bottom-line revenue and increased customer lifetime value. “The complexity involved in enabling digital payments means it is often viewed as an overhead rather than an opportunity,” said Hadlow. “We help merchants harness the strategic power of payments so they can be more successful.”

To provide personalised payment solutions and insights, Checkout.com needs to understand the different ways it supports and interacts with individual merchants. “By enabling 360-degree visibility, we can be a stronger partner to our clients. We could never achieve this without Salesforce,” said Hadlow. “It underpins everything that we do.” And Hadlow means everything – from tracking opportunities and simplifying onboarding to resolving support queries and executing marketing campaigns.

The platform has become so strategic that Checkout.com has established a Salesforce Centre of Excellence, which sits within Sales Operations under Hadlow. “We originally deployed Salesforce just within our commercial operation, but it’s now used by around 10 different teams, including legal and finance,” said Hadlow. “With a Salesforce Centre of Excellence, we can adapt faster and smarter to changes in the industry and deliver new features in a shorter time frame.”

To unlock 360-degree visibility, Checkout.com had to ensure it was capturing the right insights in the right places throughout the merchant journey. “We transitioned quickly from start-up to scale-up and realised how vital it is to have a unified view of our merchant data,” explained Hadlow. “We put a lot of effort into defining a structure and reconciling information to ensure Salesforce could become our system of record.”

Merchant records are hosted in Sales Cloud and provide the commercial team with visibility of key relationship insights, such as payment transaction volumes, open support cases, and cross-selling opportunities. Checkout.com also uses Sales Cloud to track interactions with prospects throughout the sales cycle, which can take up to two years for large enterprises.

“We can’t succeed unless everyone has bought into using Salesforce,” said Hadlow. “When a business scales at speed, it needs a single source of truth.” And Checkout.com’s growth has been phenomenal: in the space of a decade, it has expanded to 2,000 employees across 20 locations.

With centralised visibility of its global pipeline, Checkout.com can alert its underwriting, onboarding, and operations teams to impending merchant signings so they can keep pace with growing demand. “We use the data in Sales Cloud to predict when a new merchant will be ready to go live based on previous lookalike deals, which enables us to prioritise our resources more effectively,” said Hadlow.

By integrating Sales Cloud with CRM Analytics, Checkout.com can achieve even more granularity and flexibility when visualising prospect and client data. For example, it can compare sales performance across different regions and teams to better understand the impact of a recent product launch on win rates. It can also identify common bottlenecks in the sales cycle and win/loss trends. “With CRM Analytics, we can unlock actionable insights for optimising our processes, developing our people, and boosting our performance,” said Hadlow. “It helps our leadership team define our future strategy.”

In a competitive market, merchant experience is paramount. To maximise conversion rates, Checkout.com needs to ensure prospects stay engaged throughout the sales cycle. With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, the demand generation team has been able to enrich the prospect experience with more personalised content.

“We’ve gone from a single nurturing programme to different tracks based on a prospect’s industry, region, and engagement history,” explained Jonathan Junowicz, Vice President of Digital Marketing for Checkout.com. “Marketing Cloud has enabled us to quickly and effectively scale our demand generation efforts.”

To ensure the strongest prospects are prioritised, Checkout.com uses Marketing Cloud for lead scoring and lead grading. As prospects progress through the sales cycle, automated alerts trigger different actions, such as a follow-up call from sales or an email sharing thought leadership content. “With Marketing Cloud, it’s faster and easier to execute and optimise campaigns. It has boosted efficiency and enriched the prospect experience,” added Junowicz.

Thanks to an integration between Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, the commercial team can see how prospects have engaged with demand generation content, which helps to drive more meaningful conversations. The campaign insights captured by Marketing Cloud also enable Checkout.com to continually refine its assets and messages to drive stronger engagement.

“Demonstrating to your prospects that you understand them translates to faster time to revenue,” said Junowicz. “With Marketing Cloud, we can accelerate growth.”

As its merchant community continues to expand, Checkout.com needs to ensure it can provide responsive support services at scale. “Customer service is a competitive advantage,” said Hadlow. “With Salesforce, we can respond more intelligently and quickly to merchant queries.”

Checkout.com’s merchant support team logs hundreds of cases in Service Cloud every month. “We need to ensure any payment processing problems are resolved as quickly as possible to prevent disruption to merchants and their customers,” added Hadlow. “With Service Cloud, we can escalate issues more effectively and prioritise our response accordingly.”

To check it’s meeting expectations, Checkout.com uses Service Cloud to trigger Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys at key points during the merchant journey. Thanks to an integration between Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud, commercial teams can see if a merchant has any outstanding cases. “With Salesforce, our commercial teams have all the merchant insights they need at their fingertips,” said Hadlow.

With more than half of ecommerce merchants stating digital payments will be the number one enabler for business model innovation, Checkout.com is systematically looking for new ways to remove blockers to success – for its merchants and partners. “Merchants want to go live with new payment options and features as quickly as possible,” said Nougué. “By integrating Checkout.com’s APIs with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Order Management, we can offer merchants greater choice and convenience.”

For example, Checkout.com has developed a connector that integrates with Commerce Cloud to enable merchants to process payments on its platform, which supports 150+ currencies in almost 50 countries. The connector is available on the Salesforce marketplace and can be customised to support enterprise resource planning and order management integrations.

Checkout.com has also developed a connector for Salesforce Order Management, which supports merchants looking to expand their payment capabilities into the areas of logistics and fulfilment. The connector, which is available on Salesforce AppExchange, allows merchants to capture and refund payments directly from Salesforce Order Management.

Checkout.com is one of the first and few payment processors to integrate with Salesforce Order Management. “The Salesforce marketplace is a great place for businesses to discover new opportunities and explore new ideas,” commented Nougué. “By partnering with Salesforce, we can help merchants maximise the potential of the digital economy and achieve higher payment approval rates.”

As Checkout.com continues to automate and integrate more of its processes, it will be able to unlock more insights and efficiencies. “Salesforce helps us constantly take the pulse of our business,” said Hadlow. “It enables us to act as partners, not providers, to our merchants and deliver innovative solutions to power payments in a digital world.”