Technology

Shippit: A different kind of shipping network

Solution

Custom Integration Managed Service Marketing Cloud Pardot Sales Cloud Sales Process Design

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Shippit offers smart shipping solutions for hundreds of retailers across the Australia Pacific region, sending thousands of deliveries every single month. Their innovative, cloud-based shipping platform enables easy booking, simple tracking and is trusted by retailers of all sizes and formats. Shippit is responsibly carbon neutral, saves time, money and keeps customers happy. Put simply, Shippit is for businesses that are going places.

Shippit goals

In January 2020, pre-pandemic, Shippit approached Fluent Group to help improve their customer journey, visibility over their customer lifecycle and achieve sales and revenue growth. They had an existing tech stack and some defined sales processes but wanted to introduce a more sophisticated sales methodology that would set them up to be able to scale rapidly.

Fluent Group undertook a comprehensive discovery phase to reaffirm the challenges raised by Shippit and ensure a strong understanding of all underlying challenges and opportunities. The discovery phase allowed both parties to scrutinize the existing sales and marketing process, gave all stakeholders an opportunity for input, and provided the foundation for Shippit’s tailored optimization strategy.

The following goals were collaboratively unearthed during the discovery phase:

Better define the customer journey and connect multiple entry points for accurate attribution.
Leverage the sales team to maximize resources.
Improve segmentation between genuine customer inquiries and end-customers tracking parcels.
Define customer segmentation that distinguishes between self-service and sales-supported journeys while ensuring ongoing visibility of customer journeys to enable sales to support blocked customers and increase conversions.
Create automated nurturing programs to develop inquiries early in the decision-making process, to focus sales resourcing on the right leads at the right time.
Introduce customer journey automation, from pre-qualification nurturing to complete customer journey automation, to enable self-service and Shippit-led customer onboarding processes.
Connect customer journey milestones in the customer-facing application with the sales and service teams to integrate the complete journey between the customer and all internal teams.
Fully integrate sales and marketing efforts through the adoption and delivery of an account-based marketing paradigm.
Identify opportunities to predict lead indicators of churn to focus customer success teams on proactive customer retention activities.
Refine sales processes and automation to support scalability.

Fluent Group solutions

After completing the discovery phase, Fluent Group devised a step-by-step strategy to future-proof Shippit’s growth with a combination of custom-built and off-the-shelf solutions. The emphasis was to allow customers to self-manage their journey and the sales and service support team to focus on the right-sized customers as and when required to give Shippit greater efficiency and scale. With the end goal in mind, Fluent Group worked to implement the tailored optimization strategy utilizing the following solutions.

Customer segmentation and sales process design

Initial efforts were focused on creating sales processes and segmentation that would set Shippit up for success. Customers were segmented by self-service or sales-supported journeys to focus sales team resources. Fluent Group defined tailored sales processes for inquiries in each of the customer segments and created a direct sales path defined by event-driven marketing recommendations. This ensured ongoing visibility of a customer’s location within their journey to allow sales teams to provide customized support for their specific stage of the journey. The introduction of segmentation and processes meant the successful set-up of customer journey tracking and attribution, including customers who arrived at multiple entry points.

“Fluent were great at understanding complexity of business products/services but also struggles of a hyper-growth business.”
– Ron Makins, Head of Strategy and Business Operations

CRM implementation

Once the customer and sales process design was established, Fluent Group worked with Shippit to implement Salesforce Sales Cloud to capture all relevant customer data and create a full 360-degree customer view. Fluent Group also leveraged Salesforce’s powerful integration abilities to seamlessly integrate their in-app customer journey and create a single source of truth for all customers and their respective journey stages. Salesforce’s account and contact hierarchy capabilities also meant Shippit could represent the right information at the right contact level and allowed them to ensure a consistent customer service experience, including set-ups, follow-ups, and escalations.

Sales Cloud helped Shippit build a complete picture of their customers and suppliers to provide transparency over genuine customer inquiries, self-service and supported onboarding, customer satisfaction, account statuses, ordering, parcel tracking, volume, supplier information, and internal resourcing. Further to this, they can now access real-time statuses and updates through custom reporting and dashboards directly from their CRM (Sales Cloud).

Lead nurturing and marketing automation

With the foundational pieces defined and implemented, priority shifted to the sales and marketing functions to optimize lead nurturing and marketing automation in order to achieve Shippit’s goal of implementing an account-based marketing strategy. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) with Einstien Activity Capture was implemented to support enhanced integration between sales and marketing, provide visibility over customer engagement and success and improve the sales team’s responsiveness to genuine customers. Einstein furthered this by applying AI to the interactions to provide campaign insights, prioritization and behavior scoring to help them identify and reach high-value customers through accurate attribution. This intelligent connection between sales and marketing efforts helped the right people do the right things at the right time.

This meant rather than disrupting their customer experience by utilizing traditional outbound marketing techniques, Shippit were able to build out lead nurturing sequences that provided the relevant information to their customers more organically through personalized experiences so their customers could access what they needed when they wanted.

Account Engagement has allowed the team to hyper-focus on their target customers by tracking prospect engagement and success as well as adapting to changing markets (pre and post-pandemic) by establishing new nurture sequences that mold to their ever-expanding market base.

Single customer view

Eliminating tool switching and inaccurate data by getting the newly implemented tools to talk to Shippit’s existing platform was the last piece of the puzzle. To do this and provide a single customer view, Fluent Group worked with Shippit to design a custom integration between Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and their Shippit app. With the support of Fluent, Shippit’s development team then worked to implement the integration design and patterns. This critical step aligned core business data between the Shippit App and Salesforce to help track the customer journey and provide a single view of the customer, enhancing Shippit’s ability to scale by minimizing manual input and leveraging all their business data from a single source.

Sales process optimization and ongoing support

To ensure the continuous improvement of the systems in place and opportunities to optimize their process further, Fluent Group fulfilled a virtual sales operation role to oversee sales operations for a 12-month period. The role also worked to recruit and onboard senior sales operations staff to set them up for success. This virtual sales operation strategy implemented the necessary tools to better automate the business and guide the sales team through the utilization of the newly implemented Sales Cloud, Account Engagement (Pardot) and CRM/Shippit platform integration. With the growth of Shippit they were then able to fill this role internally, and Fluent Group moved to support them through their managed service offering. This service ensures that Fluent Group continuously improves, integrates and optimizes Shippit’s technology and sales and marketing efforts as the company grows and as the cloud-native Salesforce platform continues to release new capability. Fluent Group’s ongoing involvement optimizes revenue growth as Shippit continue to scale and provides the support and oversight necessary to enable Shippit to operate in the most efficient manner.

Outcome

Shippit’s tailored solution developed by Fluent Group positioned them for sustainable growth and scalability, which proved to be perfect timing for the exponential growth they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of a CRM, lead nurturing and marketing automation aligned the sales and marketing teams’ efforts to ensure a defined sales journey, holistic customer view and ability to achieve their growth strategy with minimum friction.

The additional virtual sales optimization service and managed service provided a seamless transition to the new sales process and technology as the business scaled dramatically due to increased demand during the Covid-19 pandemic. Post optimization, Shippit achieved its first profitable quarter since the company was founded.

Results and benefits

Shippit was able to secure funding, putting them on the fast track for regional and international growth¹ ²
Increased their revenue 100% YoY²
Enabled expansion into new, overseas markets
Defined a customer journey and achieved a 360-degree customer view supported by internal Shippit teams
Improved customer satisfaction and retention
Improved inquiry segmentation to better leverage efforts of sales and service team
Achieved integrated sales and marketing efforts by achieving trait definition consensus
Focused sales team on most effective efforts by defining event-driven milestones and introducing automation
Created processes that support the customer journey by automating communications for those who were not yet ready for human interaction
Created a customer data hub that provides a single source of truth for sales and marketing to access