Better collaboration between sales and marketing – Visma Talent Solutions uses Salesforce to bring down silos
Visma Talent Solutions
Visma Talent Solutions provides all the essential tools, knowledge and resources to support their clients in delivering a great employee journey. They specialize in everything related to recruiting, hiring and developing talent.
Visma Talent Solutions provides HR tech for the entire candidate and employee journey. Their marketing and sales departments previously worked on different platforms, which made it difficult to collaborate smoothly and efficiently. Now with Salesforce they are able to provide better experience and content for leads, customers and potential customers.
With the help of Biit, Visma Talent Solutions’ marketing team switched to using Salesforce for email automation and customer engagement data. The results are still to be seen in their entirety, but the marketing team is already saving a lot of time daily and co-operating with the sales department more seamlessly than before.
“The change is mostly about what I’m not doing”, marketing director Amanda Lindberg sums up. “Manual tasks, such as updating or downloading lists, are gone. Now when we get a lead, I can just ask sales to look at the engagement history.”
Lindberg has worked in Visma Talent Solutions marketing for nearly three years and has seen the entire project with Biit. In the beginning of 2022, the marketing team started to move into the MCAE (formerly Pardot) and in 2023 they were already building scoring and profiling tools with.
When operating on separate platforms, silos are formed and data does not travel
Marketing departments everywhere are struggling with the same problem. Co-operation and communication with sales is difficult and time consuming.
“It’s easy to say that sales and marketing should collaborate more”, Lindberg describes.
“Even if sales and marketing communicate on a daily basis, it is difficult to collaborate when you work in silos.”
The different systems at Visma Talent Solutions meant that a lot of data had to be moved by hand. Marketing imported and downloaded contact lists manually, and looked up and delivered data for the sales department. Marketing email campaigns also had to be created message by message.
All this took a lot of time that could have been spent working on more productive and crucial tasks. Lindberg started to look for a solution and asked around within the organization for similar experiences. They needed to bring sales and marketing to a common platform that would serve the both teams, their collaboration and daily needs for customer data.
“Turned out other Visma companies also had had the same challenge that sales and CRM were in one system and marketing in another one”, Lindberg describes how they started to close in on the solution.
“So we listened to what they had done and why. We got introduced to Biit from another Visma company that had been working with Biit with the same kind of project.”
Integrated platform frees up time and increases collaboration
Visma Talent Solutions implemented MCAE (back then known as Pardot), which especially helps sales and marketing teams to collaborate more effectively.
Now both teams can see the engagement, marketing actions and contact points for each customer. Sales can see marketing actions and their impact, and marketing on the other hand gets prospect lists automatically from sales. Customer information is better organized and it’s easier to plan both marketing and sales actions and campaigns.
Lindberg also points out that they now have a fuller understanding of the state of each customer and potential customer. With the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement it is possible to nurture leads to be sales ready. Before the data about the customer’s actions and engagement wasn’t collected in one place and the marketing team had to manually gather details for sales.
Now everything is visible at all times to both marketers and sales personnel, and it enables both teams to work smarter.
“The prospects that we get from sales are automatically added to the prospect list. Even if the sales don’t talk to them that often, we still want them to have us “top of mind” so they get our inspirational content anyway”, Lindberg brings up a concrete example of a smarter process.
Next up: personalized experiences and engagement studios
Lindberg says she and her team already have more time to create content. They can build whole email campaigns in 2 to 3 hours and automate the messaging. They can create rules based on customer activity and scoring tools that send them down different content paths, not to mention that the contact lists are updated automatically for both sales and marketing.
“We have been very consistent for the last couple of months, and we have our marketing activities that go out every other week”, Lindberg states. “We can already see that we have an increase in engagement.”
Biit and Visma Talent Solutions hope to continue their collaboration, as Lindberg has been very pleased with the project management
“Biit is very, very organized and I like that. I don’t have to be the project manager in this and it is great”, Lindberg sums up the working process with Biit.
Lindberg wished to bring more Salesforce tools to use and to develop their processes with the platform even further.
“I hope that we can build personalized experiences and make sure that we create engagement studios for all different parts of our offering. We have 6 different product tracks, so we will need to create content for all of those.”
“We will see if that is a project that is coming up next year”, Lindberg concludes hopefully.