5P Sees Leads Grow Threefold with Salesforce Essentials

Implementing new technology is often a scary and difficult undertaking, especially for small and midsize businesses that can’t afford to get it wrong.

5P Consulting, a boutique technology consulting group in San Diego, wasn’t as scared as most.

Given its expertise in helping customers optimize technology, company leaders knew firsthand how strategic technology projects can transform businesses. They also knew the benefits that can come with an effective and integrated CRM system.

That was something missing for the first two years of the company, which was founded in 2016. The 5P Consulting team needed a CRM system to help centralize data, create shared dashboards and reports, and support lead-to-cash cycles. But with only five people who would need to use the system, traditional enterprise-built CRM systems wouldn’t work.

Then the company came across Salesforce Essentials, Salesforce.com’s CRM solution designed specifically for SMBs like 5P Consulting. Salesforce introduced Essentials in March 2018, and 5P was one of the first companies to adopt the platform, which is divided into Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials.

Full rollout of the solution took about a week, but the bulk of the work was completed in about 12 hours, and since then, 5P Consulting has seen increased user productivity. By centralizing all data and operations on Salesforce, 5P Consulting reduced duplication of data entry efforts and cut down on time spent searching for account information. These efficiency improvements allowed each of the five users to save four hours per week on average.

5P has also tripled its lead generation rate. Each of 5P’s team members are responsible for bringing in two new leads each week and converting two leads into opportunities per month. They use Salesforce Essentials’ web-to-lead functionality to automatically create leads from inbound traffic to their company’s website. With the Gmail integration, inbound email is automatically populated into Salesforce, which also updates contacts, accounts, and tasks.

5P’s leadership has also increased data transparency and visibility into its sales pipeline and company health. The shared dashboards and reports appear on the Salesforce homepage as soon as users log in. This has allowed the company to reduce the number of meetings needed to coordinate the sales pipeline and increased trust in data companywide.

These improvements allowed 5P to avoid hiring a full-time employee for business development.

Two of the implementation’s most valuable aspects for 5P Consulting have been the dashboards and reports that are automatically displayed to all users from the home screen upon logging in to Salesforce. With them, users always have a single source of truth that accurately displays sales and company performance metrics.

Configuring the Salesforce Inbox plugin was key for the organization as well because it has eliminated data entry for email activity, as it populates the Salesforce system with data from emails automatically. The plugin also helps train Salesforce Einstein, Salesforce’s artificial intelligence technology, which can then surface relevant updates and recommendations for each account to aid in converting leads to sales.

On a high level, 5P was able to automate repeated processes thanks to Einstein.

Y’vonne Ormond, founder and CEO of 5P Consulting, has no doubts that Essentials has helped her business on its path to success.

“Salesforce Essentials has been phenomenal for our business. It’s increased our productivity tenfold and has given us a cost-effective way to operate like a larger organization at the scale of a small business,” she said.

“Small businesses need Essentials so they can work quickly and effortlessly,” she adds. “You can’t afford not to invest.”

The next step for 5P is to implement the customer service component of Essentials. The vision is that when customers call in with requests or questions, the system would automatically create a ticket and log it within Salesforce, allowing for better tracking and visibility to service cases. 

The Payoff

Since implementing Salesforce Essentials, 5P Consulting has seen the following results:

• saved 20 hours per week that would otherwise have been spent on data entry;
• increased lead generation threefold;
• reduced the number of meetings needed to coordinate the sales pipeline; and
• avoided hiring a full-time employee for business development.