Context
Adtrak is a performance marketing agency based in Nottingham that specialises in SME businesses. They provide a full range of digital services that focus on accelerating business growth, as well as offering a variety of branding and creative services these types of organisations wouldn’t ordinarily have.
Challenge
Adtrak’s business had grown significantly over the last few years as more services were added to their offering. However, they’d reached a point where they needed a major rethink as their existing systems and processes hindered their ability to scale the business, and no longer worked for them, or their clients.
As their COO Ian Cromie explains, “The different skills we had were siloed across the agency and needed to be brought together, allowing us to refocus the business around our customers. It was quite clear that we needed to change how we used Salesforce alongside the latest plugins and enhancements to transform our business operations.”
Concept
Adtrak, brought in ThirdEye to build a system that not only gave them greater control over the sales process, but once a client was on board, help them to efficiently manage the workflow as new services were upgraded, and finally integrate it with a new finance system.
ThirdEye started by building a customised tool which allows Adtrak’s sales team to configure the initial website to the client’s specification, build in any ongoing marketing support packages, then provide the customer a quote. The tool also included pricing approvals to ensure that the correct margins are maintained, and integrates with HelloSign, allowing the customer to e-sign the contract.
Once the contract was signed the tool automatically created a list of deliverables. The system also automates due dates for each task based on known project timelines, ensuring that everything was delivered by the deadline. As their COO Ian Cromie points out this has been invaluable as “it’s given us a massive insight into a simple question – have we got the right number of the right skills to do the work we need to do for our clients?”
As Adtrak customers are serviced on a monthly basis they required ThirdEye to develop a solution that allowed flexibility to vary the services that were right for the clients needs in that month. That has freed up the delivery teams time to be more productive and deliver solutions that reflect their customers needs at that point in time. It also allowed for more effective account planning – with goals, key strategies and results being tracked and recorded, as well as ensuring what was being delivered was accurately captured, and billed to the client.
The final part of the puzzle was integrating the system with a new online accounting service, Zoho Books. With so many customers having flexible plans, this was key in ensuring that each month’s billing reflected the work delivered to the customer. The new system has also equipped the management team with the ability to track margins and identify their most profitable service lines and clients. As Ian Cromie highlights “by integrating Salesforce and Zoho Books, it has saved us a tremendous amount of administration time and significantly reduced human error.”
Conclusion
- Adtrak increased margins by controlling pricing through a quoting tool
- Enabled the business to identify blockages in the production process and take control of delivery times
- Automated billing system replaced a manual process that used to take two days
- Provided insight into work load by individual skill set so we could effectively resource to match workload levels. These insights have been a game changer in regards to the business org chart
“Any system is only good as the engagement of the users, ThirdEye as an implementation partner focused on designing from the view of the user, ensuring individuals immediately saw the value to their role and bought into Salesforce as a platform . Their viewpoint absolutely connected with how we wanted to transform our business operations. Their focus on training and support, once we’d gone live, has ensured that the system could cope with and deliver the nuances required by individual users across the whole of our business, including the management team. The system has allowed us to focus much more on the customer, more consistently, which drives business success for both Adtrak and our customers.” Ian Cromie, COO, Adtrak