180% sales growth at software house Escola

Challenge: three sales departments after acquisitions

Escola, a software development company, is always looking at ways how to increase software sales and their company footprint. A major part of this growth strategy is to use mergers and acquisitions as a key lever for expanding their technology portfolio. In 2019, as part of their strategy, the company acquired two software development agencies. As the companies merged, Escola realized that they needed to consolidate the existing three sales departments into one – all of which had different sales processes and tools. They knew that this was the only way to increase their revenues from software development projects and get a return on investment.

Solution: one CRM for the whole team

Having previously worked with Livespace CRM, Ilona Leoniewska, Chief Revenue Officer at Escola, knew that Livespace would help organize and unify the three sales departments. On top of Livespace's customizable nonlinear sales process feature, which would reflect Escola's sales process accurately, Livespace offered more essential features than other CRMs — features she knew were essential for team alignment and to increase sales in a software company, including:

• A news feed to keep everyone in the team informed and on the same page
• A fully configurable multi-stage sales process, with activities and tasks customizable to stages and steps in the process
• An extensive and powerful reporting functionality with in-depth statistics on tasks, funnel effectiveness and sales results, along with goal setting and monitoring capabilities per team and team member

Result: faster response and better qualification

Within a few months, the statistics available in Livespace allowed Escola to verify the effectiveness of their sales activities and to optimize them accordingly. Using Livespace helped to highlight that involving clients within the sales process more deeply and improving customer service directly increased conversion. As a result, the team significantly reduced the time between the initial inquiry submitted by the client and the preparation of their initial offer. Now, clients are contacted within just 15 minutes of submitting their query, with the initial offer being sent to them within two days of that. The data showed that an additional driver to significantly increase conversion were discovery workshops. They are now an essential part of Escola's software development sales process and customer qualification. New clients are strongly encouraged to participate in a paid workshop, as a supplement to their initial offer, during which the scope and project requirements are mapped out. Clients who participate in these workshops tend to purchase software development services more often. Additionally, customer qualification improved significantly. The software development sales team started to be able to identify precise client segments and profiles within their sales process, as well as within the customer relationship management process itself. This allows them to identify the best sources of potential orders, and calculate and understand the conversion rates per source, thereby increasing sales.