How Brainboard leverages Surfe across the revenue team for higher productivity and faster scaling in B2B. Optimizing processes for Growth, Sales, and CEO
Surfe is really the only tool I know that does the job correctly. There are plenty of LinkedIn tools, but none offer a CRM overlay on top
Cloud services are all the rage, and more businesses are starting to explore the benefits they can reap by implementing these solutions. However, setting up infrastructures brings new challenges.
The process of securely building up infrastructures is complicated due to the fragmentation of the tools involved, which requires cumbersome and time-consuming manual integration, engineering, and management. To top it all off, recruiting qualified professionals and maintaining infrastructure takes a great deal of time and money.
Brainboard was created to solve companies’ trouble of migrating to the cloud, by helping them to visually design, deploy and manage infrastructures collaboratively, without being Terraform gurus. Brainboard cuts delivery time by 50% and reduces 75% of the learning curve to master Infrastructure as code (IaC).
We sat down with Stephane Boghossian, Growth Product Manager at Brainboard, to learn how they were able to implement Surfe across different teams.
Challenge for the Growth Product Manager:
As a growth product manager, Stephane relies heavily on LinkedIn for product discoveries and exchanges with clients. Since Brainboard’s target audience tends to use LinkedIn as their primary channel for communication, it’s where Stephane typically tests value propositions or new product hypotheses.
To ensure all the customer feedback and discovery insights are taken note of and later used for the benefit of product development, they must be recorded in the CRM. This process step is crucial, yet completely manual and very time-consuming. Having to log every customer interaction and conversation inside HubSpot one by one takes up hours, which could have been used for more valuable tasks.
In order to speed up testing and customer discovery, Stephane uses Lemlist for automated outreach. However, the effectiveness of outreach messages has to be tested beforehand. Which yet again means doing it manually on LinkedIn and logging all of the actions into the CRM.
Solution:
With Surfe, Stephane was able to eliminate the manual processes, by bringing HubSpot to the LinkedIn interface.
I really like that there is no additional interface, everything is directly on LinkedIn.
When talking to clients in LinkedIn private messages, he’s able to quickly sync conversations with the CRM to record all the feedback. Since Stephane no longer has to log every interaction into HubSpot, it’s possible to shift focus to the conversations that provide him with the insights he’s looking for.
On top of that, Surfe has made testing much easier, as Stephane can now send out a few outreach messages on Linkedin, record them in HubSpot, see which ones yield the best replies, and then simply take this knowledge and automate the process in Lemlist. This way, outreach becomes more effective at scale, as the messaging has been proven to work. Altogether, the conversation synchronization feature saves Stephane around 12h per week.
Challenge for the Sales Team:
Brainboard’s sales team finds relevant businesses and engages with them on LinkedIn. The platform is where sales reps mainly operate, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have to back data in HubSpot.
Essentially, the team would prospect on LinkedIn, enrich contact data, create lead lists, and start outreach via email. To streamline the unwieldy process, they would often use email automation tools, which meant that data had to make a journey through multiple platforms. Tackling this manually took up a lot of time and left room for errors, typos, or missing values.
What is more, Brainboard’s sales reps often found it difficult to keep track of deal ownership across the team. There was no accurate way to tell if someone had been engaging with a prospect found on LinkedIn, to avoid annoying the lead and scaring them off, or hijacking a colleague’s opportunity.
Solution:
Sales reps have introduced Surfe to their daily workflow to optimize their sales process.
Not only are they now able to quickly add prospects to the CRM, but also enrich contact information without having to leave LinkedIn’s interface. With Surfe’s CRM overlay, reps can easily configure fields, and additional input information, search for professional contact info with Dropcontact, and have all that synced with HubSpot.
No data slips through the cracks, keeping the CRM clean, and saving the team up to 6h per day. With 100% accurate data, Brainboard’s sales team can confidently execute their automated email cadences.
The gained transaction visibility has also improved collaboration throughout the team and eliminated any confusion related to deal status, ownership, and progress.
What is more, the notes feature helps reps jot down information about a prospect that can be referred to during a call. This makes it extremely easy to find icebreakers, and refer to jokes or comments on LinkedIn, for a personalized approach. This has also saved time in preparation for sales calls since all the insights are stored in one place and are accessible.
Challenge for the CEO:
Chafik Belhaoues, Brainboard’s CEO, typically manages the more complex and technical use cases. He would source bigger clients or curate deals of higher technical complexity.
Needless to say, every step from prospecting, finding, and enriching the right contacts, to entering CRM data and engaging with leads would have to be done manually.
Not being a growth hacker himself, and since his leads require an increasingly personal approach and interaction, Chafik tended to spend hours on admin tasks instead of engaging with clients. Not only was this taking up precious time out of his day, but it was also hampering the progress of deals he had in the pipeline.
Solution:
Since implementing Surfe, Chafik no longer struggles with manual data entry and keeping the CRM up-to-date. He has a clear overview of deal stages directly on his leads’ LinkedIn profiles and is able to back all the interactions to HubSpot in one click of a button.
Without the constant pressure to keep up with admin and log data, Chafik is now able to dedicate all his time and energy to his prospects. He can focus on putting himself in his prospect’s shoes and helping solve their pain points while growing Brainboard’s customer base and MRR as their CEO.
ROI:
- 6h saved daily by the sales team
- 12h saved weekly for Growth
- 58h saved monthly by the whole revenue team
- 360+ leads enriched with Dropcontact
- 400 leads updated with Surfe
- 895+ leads added to CRM with zero copy-pasting
Looking for a sales productivity tool that will help you scale? Reach out at [email protected]
Discover Brainboard and start implementing your *Terraform best practices: brainboard.co