Worklife was able to ink deals with companies like Randstad, AstraZeneca & Ubisoft – all online, with help of Surfe.

Cold calling is almost dead.
How can you optimize ‘social selling’, to get the best ROI, from your international team who are located all over the world?

Worklife’s primary goal is to reinvent company benefits. It’s based on both an app and a physical card that allows companies to manage, finance and promote their employee benefits – all in one place. Worklife’s services are used by over 1 million employees, allowing each of them to unlock the full potential of the benefits they’re entitled to and improve the quality of their lives, at work and at home.

The global health crisis that is COVID-19 has shown that many employer-provided benefits no longer suit the needs of today’s remote worker. Employee expectations have changed – and continue to change – rapidly among the crisis.

Worklife’s platform allows companies to stay agile, showing they’re committed to providing for their employees and simultaneously empowers the HR department to achieve its goals relating to recruitment, retention and engagement.

We sat down with Sergio Bellon, COO of Worklife, to discuss the experience his company has had managing leads for potential clients.

He has continually provided great feedback to the Surfe team, and noted his belief that there’s a missing link in the relationship between Pipedrive and LinkedIn, and found that after testing all available tools, Surfe best suited the needs Worklife has to make its business successful.

Challenge 1: Cold calling your prospects no longer works and is too time-consuming with low conversion rates.

Worklife is equipped with a team of powerful Sales Reps but in recent times, Worklife has come to realize that cold calling prospects don’t yield the best results anymore. There’s a simple explanation for this: buyer behavior has changed. Information is more readily available than ever before, so prospective buyers don’t make purchase decisions without first doing their own due diligence.

Many workers/prospects just don’t want to be called during their work day, and find it annoying to encounter a pushy salesperson on the other end of the line. According to Momentumdata, just 2% of people feel it’s OK to receive a sales call. What’s more, just 0.3% of sales calls lead to conversions.

And for business development representatives (BDRs), cold calling is a drain on productivity, as it’s been found that creating prospect lists and finding phone numbers in the customer relationship manager (CRM) system could take a BDR 3 hours or more each week.

Finally, macro environmental conditions finalized the demise of the cold call. COVID-19 forced people around the world to work from their homes. As this happened, offices emptied out of workers who would typically be there to pick up a sales call that came in over an office landline.

Solution 1: Social selling is the future. Surfe makes that easier than ever.

As sales teams move away from cold calling, it is clear that social selling is the future. Instead of making calls that require immediate feedback from a prospect, social selling allows a salesperson to nurture an existing relationship over a longer period of time, taking the “pushiness” out of a sales pitch.

With the changing buyer attitude and exemplified by the pandemic, Worklife had to immediately adapt its marketing outflow, shifting to social selling as the primary way of prospecting for potential clients.

Mr. Bellon originally discovered Surfe through the Pipedrive marketplace, and after trying it out, found it was a great fit for Worklife’s changing sales needs.

First, Surfe’s contact synchronization feature – which allows a Sales Representative to incorporate a prospective customer into the CRM in just one click – proved to save Worklife’s sales team a great deal of time.

The nature of cold calling dictated that Sales Representatives add every possible prospect to the CRM, leading it to be crowded, disorganized and overwhelming. The social selling model enabled by Surfe allows the sales team to be more targeted in their approach to evaluating prospects, as only the ones who react positively to Worklife’s outgoing marketing are added to the CRM as qualified leads.

Once a positive message is received from a prospect, the Worklife sales rep can add qualified leads into the CRM – along with the entire conversation history – directly from the LinkedIn messaging board in just a second.

Challenge 2: Worklife is receiving high demand internationally but managing a sprawling international sales team can be exigent.

In just under a year, Worklife impressively managed to tap into the international market, spreading across many countries and timezones. Worklife sales team is also growing and physically located all over Europe. This makes it even more critical to keep detailed records of their prospects’ interaction in the CRM, to ensure the success of the company’s sales goals.

Like most Surfe users, Worklife’s sales representatives use their personal LinkedIn profiles to prospect & approach potential clients. It would very easily become time-consuming and tedious to transfer every single prospect interaction into Pipedrive for the entire team and sales leader to access the progress of a prospect.

Unlike cold calling where you can get an answer immediately, social selling takes more time to nurture its potential client. If the CRM is not updated or if a sales rep did not check the CRM, a prospect can accidentally be contacted by several sales reps of the same company, from different countries, which may look disorganized and unprofessional.

Another frustration faced by many sales leaders is the sense of distrust, as the data recorded in the CRM is often not accurate. This could be because their sales reps tend to forget to copy and paste conversation or log the data in the wrong prospect page. The solution (before Surfe was for the sales leader to constantly ask the sales reps if the information for a particular prospect is updated, which can give the impression that the sales lead is micromanaging the team.

Solution 2: Surfe makes CRM reporting easier – especially for remote teams.

With a team as spread out as Worklife’s, it’s critical to have all data and contact between a sales representative and a prospective client recorded in the CRM.

Surfe is ideally suited to teams working remotely, thanks to the capability to add prospects and sync the conversation history in one click. This keeps things up-to-date and organized for any member of the team who may be working with a given prospect.

It allows senior leadership, like Sergio in this example, to monitor sales progress across all the countries Worklife operates in. It also eliminates the risk of losing contacts and human errors that could come about from manually inputting data. Finally, in terms of team management, Surfe allows him to trust the CRM more as he knows that the data is accurate and thus giving him a better overview on Worklife’s global sales strategy.

Besides indicating directly on the prospect’s LinkedIn profile page that he/she is already in the CRM, Surfe also highlights them in blue on the search page and side panel.

Surfe also directly displays the contact owner, deal progress and other important information on the LinkedIn profile page. This allows the Worklife sales team to see who has been in contact with a prospect and its progress, all directly on LinkedIn across the countries in which Worklife operates.

By having this perk, it increases the likelihood that a Worklife sales representative could close a deal with the same MNC company, but in a different market.

Mr. Bellon believes the learnings from Worklife’s experience are applicable to just about any company with a remote team. And even as the pandemic comes to an end, remote work will be here to stay, necessitating accurate and up-to-date reporting in the CRM.

The demands of the new work environment make Surfe’s product allowing for deeper collaboration and more autonomy among the sales representatives all the more essential.

ROI from social selling

Amid a global pandemic and a massive shift in the expectation of how sales teams operate, Worklife was able to ink deals with several global companies including Randstad, AstraZeneca and Ubisoft — all online, with the help of Surfe!

Since Worklife joined Surfe, the sales team have synchronized more than 1,500 LinkedIn conversations back to the CRM, making them save more than 300 hours of work.

And of course, there are more intangible ways working with Surfe improves the workflow of salespeople, namely: empowering them in their day to day social selling process on LinkedIn and having real-time, accurate syncing of prospects information in the CRM across all markets in which Worklife functions.