The 2016 CRM Market Elite Customers: Doblet

THE CHALLENGE

Like many businesses today, Doblet, a San Francisco start-up that provides a network of Internet-connected phone battery chargers for consumers to rent, has a sales team that is constantly in the field signing up new accounts and servicing existing ones. And like many sales teams, Doblet’s found that to sell smarter and faster from anywhere, it needed a CRM system.

Using Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud (which brings all customer information together in one integrated platform), the Salesforce1 Mobile app, and Data.com for access to company and customer contact information, Doblet grew its revenue by 845 percent and increased its user base by 240 percent from September to March. Those numbers have only been increasing since then, reports serial entrepreneur Doktor Gurson, Doblet’s cofounder and CEO.

The company’s customers are the thousands of cell phone users who routinely charge their cell phones at the more than 1,000 bars, restaurants, cafes, hotels, and malls in the San Francisco area where Doblet’s devices are housed.

Doblet uses Salesforce.com to track those locations and see what types of venues make the most sense going forward. Salesforce.com also helps Doblet keep track of the thousands of devices it already has in circulation.

To use the devices, customers need to download a mobile app to their phones. The app is compatible with Android and iOS mobile devices. Once the app is installed, the user gets the first charge for free. After that, he can pay $3 per charge or sign up for a $30 yearly subscription.

Doblet offers the chargers to participating venues for free. The app lets users know when their phone batteries are running low and plots a course to the nearest location where Doblet chargers can be found.

Doblet’s sales reps typically deal with the venues where the chargers are located. The Salesforce.com apps provide the reps with insight into those locations and organize it in one database that can be accessed from anywhere. Reps can track customer contacts, capture conversation details, and find new customers to target.

THE SOLUTION

Doblet first implemented the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud and mobile app in August 2014 and upgraded to the latest versions a year later. It deployed the Data.com platform in January.

Under its old system, Doblet relied on Excel spreadsheets and RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce.com for about $390 million in mid-2014) to capture and store venue data. By the time Doblet was in 100 venues, the company realized this system couldn’t provide the scale it needed, which was important looking ahead: Gurson plans to expand the Doblet service beyond the San Francisco Bay Area, with the ultimate goal of making the service available nationally.

Another problem: The spreadsheets and RelateIQ required a lot of manual data entry, which can introduce errors. Since the Salesforce.com implementation, error rates have dropped to almost zero.

“We have a very specific process for distributing our portable batteries to participating venues,” Gurson says. “Each serial number needs to be tied to a specific venue. Using Salesforce, we can do that very easily.”

That has “saved reps a ton of time,” he adds. “They can concentrate on other, more important things.”

Doblet’s six sales reps spend 80 percent of their time in the Salesforce1 Mobile app, according to Gurson. Arrowpointe’s Geopointe for Salesforce add-on provides the reps with proximity searching, optimized routing, territory management, boundary layers, demographics, check-in, and more. The reps check in when they reach their desired locations, and the app gives them a checklist of things to go over while they are there.

“The beauty of Salesforce is that it is very flexible,” Gurson says. “You can customize any aspect you like however you want it. And the more you can customize the solution, the more time your reps can spend in the field.”

Real Results

• Revenue has increased by 845 percent.

• The customer base has increased by 240 percent.

• Data entry error rates have been cut to practically zero.