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written by
Mateusz Pliszka
Customer Consulting at SoftwareSupport
Effect: 2x more businesses onboarded every month
Cinch is the New York-based application featuring local businesses, including restaurants, cafes, barbershops, bars, bakeries or pubs.
Cinch allows you to use a built-in wallet when purchasing items at local businesses at the same time offering in-app discounts for multiple products.
With Cinch, you will:
a) save time thanks to discounts
b) pay for everything with one wallet/app
c) easily search for local businesses/cafes/restaurants
The company has raised $2.4m of funding so far, investing heavily in building a desktop/mobile application and the product/sales team.
Running this kind of company comes with many operational challenges, including:
1) Onboarding new businesses
2) Handling customer support queries
3) Reaching out to potential customers/businesses
This type of operation requires a system to manage and handle all the customer and business queries in one place, commonly known as a CRM system.
Cinch decided to use Pipedrive as their main system. But without a proper CRM integration, the company’s data, communication, customer service, sales, and marketing processes were acting as an individual, separate divisions. Simply speaking, they were pure chaos.
So, the Cinch team reached out to us to support them in the database structuring, CRM integration, sales process design and team training to help them manage the company in one place to grow sales and save time spent on manual tasks.
Let’s look at how we helped Cinch set up a proper CRM system including:
Cinch had a really tough time managing their database. Basically their CRM was overloaded with custom fields that were not used by the team during the sales and marketing process.
One of the first tasks when working with customers is clearing and structuring the database which involves:
1) exporting the database from the current system
2) configuring a new CRM account to reflect on the target system’s structure
3) managing/optimizing records in Excel/database
4) uploading the database to the new system
5) testing and checking on the data structure by selectively looking at the new CRM’s records
After completing this process, Cinch was ready to work on the next steps including the sales process redesign or system’s integration with other solutions.
Another problem of Cinch was that their sales process was not designed and prepared based on their team’s needs and specific processes taking place in the company.
Before integrating the CRM system, the team did not handle leads coming from specific sources like website, mailing campaigns or calls through the structured and planned process.
As a result, the leads haven’t received proper support from the sales/onboarding team, they didn’t get actual information about the time needed to process their request and the sales team didn’t know which leads and customers to focus on.
Some of the strategies we’ve introduced at Cinch to make sure the team is able to handle sales more effectively include:
As a result, Cinch is able to organize the way they handle leads in a systematic way guiding them through the sales process, onboarding on the platform and passing to the customer success team.
Cinch was looking for ways to acquire leads for their business through the website. But having a website presenting a value proposition for potential partners/customers is not enough. You need to collect the information from your website to guide them through the sales process in your CRM system.
Consequently, one of the first integrations we introduced for Cinch was setting up a web form on their website, collecting information from their visitors and automatically adding this data to the CRM system.
This kind of integration can be set either by a built-in CRM form generating feature or using a 3rd party solution like Jotform or a landing page builder like Instapage.
As a result, Cinch is now using a form collecting all business partners’ information interested in joining the platform through its website. Additionally, all the companies filling in the form receive an automated response with details about the next steps in the sales process.
This is done through an integration with the Woodpecker email system, so let’s look into more details about how Cinch is using mailing integrated with a CRM to handle communicating with the customer in a structured way.
In today’s world, including Cinch business, we use multiple channels to communicate with potential prospects at once (this includes social media, email, calls). Still, email remains one of the most important ones.
Before integrating a CRM system, Cinch was running email campaigns rather independently, not looking for ways to make this process seamless and structured.
Thanks to proper CRM & email system integration, Cinch is able to monitor the outcomes of its campaigns in the CRM but most importantly, act on them faster.
A natural way to onboard new local businesses to the platform is by running outbound campaigns. With easy access to potential leads, e.g. by using already existing Yelp database, Cinch is able to target specific leads in New York and specific neighborhoods.
Cinch is running the outbound campaigns through Woodpecker, a software for mailing automation based on personalization.
With Woodpecker, Cinch is able to:
An important element of the mass email campaign is integration with a CRM system, allowing the team to monitor the campaigns’ results and outcomes within a CRM system and acting on leads, faster.
With the outbound campaigns active and a CRM integration in place, Cinch is able to monitor the leads clicking on the emails they received. With the best practice of calling the lead interested in the product within 1 hour from expressing interest, Cinch’s sales team can close the leads faster.
What is more, thanks to integration Cinch’s team gets instant notifications about the leads clicking on the email through a dedicated #CRM Slack channel.
As a result of the CRM-integrated outbound campaign, Cinch increased the number of onboarded businesses every month by +100%.
Apart from sending outbound campaigns and managing the leads incoming through a dedicated landing page, Cinch is also running a newsletter email campaign.
The email campaign is addressed to leads who are not interested in joining the community at the moment but are interested in the value proposition and might be interested to join in the future. Leads can be added to the newsletter campaign through a CRM system (by marking a field or after the deal is lost). Once they join a marketing funnel, they receive a bi-weekly newsletter with updates about changes to the product.
With the newsletters sent through Intercom, recipients clicking on the email are tagged which triggers deal creation in a CRM. As a result, a sales team can handle leads interested in joining the platform from the marketing campaigns.
With the integration in place, the Cinch team can identify and close a few additional leads every week.
One of the main communication channels for Cinch is calling. With the Pipedrive CRM offering a native mobile app and built-in integration with any phone number, the team can easily launch and monitor the calls.
But with Cinch’s extended needs for making phone calls, a built-in integration is not enough. For Cinch, we integrated a separate cloud-based Kixie application integrated with Pipedrive.
As a result, the sales team can use a local, automatically generated phone number based on the lead’s community/location. All the calling, SMS activity as well as voice recordings are recorded in one central CRM system.
One of the Cinch’s sales team goals after the user registers to the platform is scheduling a short training with the training/onboarding team to make sure the business knows how to use and make the most out of the application.
To make it work, Cinch needed a scheduling/calendar system to allow businesses:
With the CRM integration in place, Cinch is able to monitor the scheduled training in the CRM system, get real-time notifications about new training booked, and monitor the team’s training calendar.
As a result, the sales team can use a local, automatically generated phone number based on the lead’s community/location. All the calling, SMS activity as well as voice recordings are recorded in one central CRM system.
Some of the queries related to customer support can end up being actual sales leads. As a result, it’s essential for customer service and sales team to keep at least a basic level of communication, passing any potential customer/partner.
With the customer service/Intercom integration, the support can tag specific customer use cases who are then marked in the CRM system to be handled by the sales team.
Customer service users can also book training with the sales team through a native Intercom and Calendly integration.
With Cinch’s team working partially remotely, communication is an essential part of every day’s operations.
Cinch uses Slack as their main communication channel. With a CRM and Slack’s integration in place the team can stay up to date with the following events:
Thanks to communication and CRM integration, Cinch’s team can stay up to date with all crucial events taking place during the sales process.
With the integrated CRM system in place, Cinch is able to handle its sales process in a structured way, in one place.
Leads visiting the website can leave the information which lands straight in the company’s CRM system.
The company can be more effective in sales activities by identifying clicks and acting on warm and hot leads, faster.
The training team can schedule training with new business partners more effectively thanks to calendar system integration.
The sales team can manage phone calls in scale with a CRM-integrated cloud calling system.
The customer service team can pass leads to the sales team with one click.
The team can stay up to date with new CRM events and communicate faster through a CRM-integrated Slack channel.
However, without a proper team spirit and communication, pure technology will not be enough to turn this company into success. It is up to the way the team uses it every day which will decide whether Cinch will grow from the local New York app to a global platform for local payments.
written by
Mateusz Pliszka
Customer Consulting at SoftwareSupport
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