Case Study: Whatfix Takes On Global Digital Adoption Platform with Salesforce

Often, enterprise technology solutions that companies implement can be complex to understand and difficult to navigate. And boosting employee adoption of these is a challenge.

Prakhar Jain of Whatfix ,

Enter Whatfix – a digital adoption platform that provides in-app employee training for software solutions across the business. Whatfix modules are customised to customer needs; easy-to-understand contextual guidance and step-by-step instructions help employees understand solution functionalities and on-board quickly. By boosting adoption in this manner, Whatfix helps their customers achieve ROI faster on their enterprise software investment.

“Each enterprise technology implementation is a multi-million-dollar spend for larger companies. We help ensure our customers’ applications are being used in the best possible way," explains Prakhar Jain, Director of Global Sales at Whatfix.

Set up in 2014 with three people in a single office, Whatfix today employs 300 people in six offices across the globe. They service more than 500 customers; 100 of these are Fortune 1000 companies.

Quite early on in their remarkable journey, Whatfix saw the need for a CRM technology to understand and meet the requirements of a wide range of customers.

“Our whole narrative is built around our customers, and customer experience is paramount to us,” explains Rajesh Bhattad, Manager – Global Sales Operations at Whatfix.

The initial CRM system Whatfix used served them quite well for a while. However, as an exponentially growing business that needed to make data-driven decisions, Whatfix wanted a CRM that offered more customisation, integration and reporting. Their hunt ended with Salesforce.

Redefining the sales process with Salesforce

Whatfix’s existing CRM solution was limited in its ability to differentiate opportunities from leads. This meant that sales teams could not make data-driven decisions on how to positively influence prospects. They had to use external aids like Google sheets to collate the detailed information they needed to convert prospects.

Additionally, in the absence of timely, differentiated data, sales teams found themselves spending time in numerous internal meetings to decide next steps. With data residing in silos, the leadership team did not have a clear view of sales activity and was unable to access insights for decision-making.

Whatfix implemented Salesforce in 2017, automating pipeline management – from lead generation to closure – on Sales Cloud.

Buyer journeys are now clearly differentiated, allowing the sales team to approach prospects differently at different stages of their journey.

The automation of daily tasks such as mailing clients and monitoring conversion allows salespeople to focus on core activities. Earlier, when a deal was closed, the sales team had to manually send out a company-wide email, along with separate emails to finance, legal and customer success teams, about the new account. In the current setup, as soon as a deal is closed, automated emails are sent to the different departments.

Bhattad and his team have also created checks and validations that increase the efficiency of the sales process. For example, if a deal which was marked for closing at the end of a quarter is moved to a later date, the overseeing manager is alerted. This starts off a real-time conversation on tackling the delay.

The sales operation team has also built in analyses such as best lead channels, client profiles most likely to convert, and a percentage breakdown of where leads stand in the pipeline. All this has meant higher efficiency and a 20% increase in conversion rate.

 “If we were using a CRM solution other than Salesforce, it would not have been easy to bring together the data we needed for analysis like this. With Salesforce, we have a whole range of out-of-the-box features, which meet a lot of our requirements,” notes Bhattad.

Collaborating to win

All this enriched data flows into Lightning dashboards that present the entire customer narrative to everyone on the sales teams. This equips the sales team with a real-time, single view of the customer journey, allowing them to sell smarter. Streamlined data flows from marketing to sales teams offer a unified view of data, and have increased productivity by up to 40%.

These detailed dashboards have also reduced the need for interdepartmental meetings by almost 80%. As sales teams scale and one-to-one meetings become more difficult, Chatter has also proved a useful tool for collaboration.

“Salesforce offers us scale. For small teams, this is a great asset. My advice to all SMEs would be to invest in a solution that enables scalability to support their future growth.” Prakhar Jain, Director of Global Sales. 

Customer delight from inside to out

The use of Salesforce has led to an increase in efficiency across Whatfix. Automation of invoicing and collection has speeded up these processes, and reduced the account receivables collection period by up to 40%.

Additionally, managers can now access rich, real-time data. Earlier, they exported data from the CRM tool to Google Sheets and Slides, and this would often be outdated by the time it was used. Now, with updated dashboards at their fingertips, their time has been freed up for more value-added work.

“The dashboards are so intuitive that top management needs only about 60 seconds to understand the complete narrative around any deal,” says Jain. “This transparency allows anyone in the organisation with the right expertise to contribute to a pitch or demo, helping deliver more value to customers.”

Further, these data-rich dashboards have also been very useful for data audits by potential investors during the due diligence phase.

“With Salesforce in place, there are no silos of information. Every single piece of data is doing its job. It’s all integrated and sent back to a single repository to provide a 360 degree view for anyone working in the Salesforce solution,” says Bhattad.

Whatfix also runs drip campaigns on Pardot, and is honing its relationships with its partners using Salesforce Partner Relationship Management.

Striding towards the future

Jain feels that Salesforce has empowered Whatfix with the power and visibility that small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) need to build a rapport with large clients.

“Salesforce offers us scale. For small teams, this is a great asset. Additionally, this aligns with what we ourselves aim to do – help our customers scale using our products,” explains Jain. “My advice to all SMEs would be to invest in a solution that enables scalability to support their future growth.

“Salesforce has improved our forecasting accuracy three-fold. It also helps us identify areas of improvement. In an SME environment where every dollar matters, these inputs are invaluable,” he adds.

The digital adoption platform market is on a growth curve as companies increasingly turn to technology to run daily operations and help distributed teams work together seamlessly.

As an early mover, Whatfix is well-equipped to take advantage of this opportunity.

“We will keep on enabling enterprises globally.  We will make sure software applications are easier to understand and that adoption is top notch. That is our core vision,” says Jain.

“Salesforce is helping us be better at our jobs,” he adds. “It gives us speed and agility, and has completely transformed how we look at CRM.”