“We’ve improved our overall customers’ experience by collaborating on everything through Salesforce.”

– Michelle Lanter Smith, CMO

EPAY Systems is a leading provider of a cloud-based time and attendance system that allows companies with distributed workforces to reduce labor costs, improve control and mitigate wage and hour lawsuit risk through flexible time tracking and labor management tools.

CROSS-TEAM COLLABORATION AT EPAY MAKES DOLLARS AND SENSE

To deliver an extraordinary customer experience, you need to start looking at your business in an extraordinary way. That was Michelle Lanter Smith’s approach when she took the helm as Chief Marketing Officer at EPAY, a cloud-based time and attendance system provider that helps companies track their workforce with a uniquely flexible time tracking engine called Blueforce.

Smith refocused the Marketing department to encompass everything from lead generation and marketing communications all the way through technical support and customer care after the sale. That’s because, as Smith explains it, “it’s the customer’s entire experience that really builds your brand. We use to continue to manage our customer relationships well past the initial brand experience to foster a deeper level of trust.”

To successfully deliver an integrated end-to-end experience, EPAY has to be more in sync than the average company. However, when Smith first arrived, they weren’t quite there. They had a CRM, but it was so full of inaccurate data that the team wasn’t even using it.

Pardot was being used for marketing automation, but without the CRM to back it up, marketing practices reverted to spreadsheets. Fortunately, given this productivity challenge, it was easy for Smith to forge a new path; “we were able to show the business that this was no way to do marketing or store customer data.”

EPAY made the jump to Salesforce so that everyone from sales to development to marketing could be coordinated on one platform. Marketing could move out of spreadsheets, sales finally had a pulse on leads and the pipeline, and even developers were tracking their work in Salesforce for the whole company to see.

That visibility led to a better understanding of their prospects and customers and brought with it more leads and higher revenue.

SALES AND MARKETING, IN IT TOGETHER

Using Pardot in conjunction with Salesforce and Data.com, EPAY’s lead nurturing could really take off, and marketing and sales could work in tandem.

The process begins with marketing doing an analysis of EPAY customers. By cleaning their accounts, they have the information to see which prospects will have the most impact on sales. Marketing provides a list of top accounts by territory, and then each sales rep uses Data.com to find key contacts at those accounts.

Smith explains how the partnership works: “The onus of owning the territory is on sales, and they have the information they need to prospect in Data.com. We’ve found it’s the most effective way.”

Sales provides those contacts to marketing, who nurtures them through targeted Pardot drip campaigns, based on the prospect’s industry and position. This way, marketing can stay in front of prospects and sales can focus on finding new leads and closing deals. Says Smith, “Data.com has helped to bring the two worlds together; it’s given us the ability to embrace our sales team. They’re more engaged in the process now.”

TRACKING NEW LEADS WITH PARDOT

Along with their outbound efforts, EPAY has a continual stream of inbound leads, and they’ve integrated Pardot with their website so they can track visitors’ activities. Each inbound lead is cleaned with Data.com and gets a score based on the activities Pardot tracks on the website.

When activity patterns indicate the lead needs more time, they go through one of the Pardot nurture tracks. When they’re ready, they’re assigned to a rep to close the deal. “We know so much about every prospect because of Pardot. We see who’s on our website, and we go get them!”

COLLABORATION IS KEY

Nothing tells EPAY’s story better than the reason they do all this in the first place, the end-to-end customer experience.

From the time they’re identified by the sales team in Data.com or tracked on the website by Pardot, a customer receives relevant, targeted content from the Marketing team. The sales team tracks their conversations in Salesforce, giving the CSO a clear view of the business.

Once the deal closes and they become a customer, they interact with the customer service team, who is tracking cases in Salesforce and monitoring a dashboard that shows case trends and case count.

For any issues, customer service can see updates from the development team, who is tracking the status of their work in Salesforce. And when that customer is ready to add more employees to the system or add new features? EPAY is all over it.

From start to finish, the exceptional brand experience is ensured by EPAY and powered by collaboration in Salesforce — which ultimately has translated to driving pipeline and revenue.

“There’s this ability that comes with everything being connected,” says Smith. “Salesforce has helped us streamline our workflows and provided us with a strong foundation to foster the entire customer experience.”

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