How Big Shot’s productivity skyrocketed by 10x using workflow automations

According to a recent study, sales reps spend only 33% of their time actually selling, compared to 50% of their time spent on administrative tasks. What if we told you there’s a way for you to optimize your tasks and work smarter using workflow automations.

Meet Big Shot—an organization that offers training programs and professional instruction on how to become a profitable stock trader. Guy Brand is the co-CEO at Big Shot who manages all technology projects and tasks. He’s also the go-to figure for the organization. Brand has been instrumental in automating more than half of the sales team’s tasks using  workflows in Freshsales CRM.

Big Shot let us in on how workflow automations expedites their sales process, and efficiently automates more than half of their manual tasks.

Big Shot—Together, one step ahead

Big Shot educates and trains new investors on how to trade stocks and become successful and profitable at it. They provide programs consisting of theoretical and practical training in the trading room taught directly by experienced traders.

In June 2016, after its launch, Big Shot began advertising their services. Soon, the company started to attract more than 8,000 new leads every month. Over time, managing them became too manual.  So, they decided that CRM system be the way forward to organize their database and automate their tasks.

Finding Freshsales CRM

When Big Shot started to look for CRM system, there were faced with too many choices. They wanted an all-in-one solution that would improve collaboration and build business. They evaluated a few CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Dynamics. But none met their requirements.

Then, the customer service manager at Big Shot found Freshsales and recommended the team to trial the product.

One of the reasons they were immediately drawn towards Freshsales was the user interface and 360-degree view of customer data.

“Freshsales’ simple interface gives us a clean and minimalistic view of customer data. We almost went with Salesforce until we learned about Freshsales. It was incredibly easy to use, and came with all the features we needed.”

Guy Brand
co-CEO, Big Shot

Getting started with Freshsales

Big Shot’s growing number of online leads arrive on their website through campaigns, youtube videos and, advertisements. Contact details are captured from the webform and fed into Freshsales.

It was crucial for Big Shot to manage support tickets inside the CRM software, and solve the disconnect between sales and support teams. So, they looked into our customer support platform Freshdesk. Convinced by its super strong integration with Freshsales, Big Shot signed up for the combination of products from Freshworks.

“It’s now easier than before. We can track the status of our customer, create tickets, view tickets and solve issues inside Freshsales. We use it across our company and there’s total transparency on our tasks.”

Big Shot also integrated Freshsales with their email so the team can email customers directly from the CRM system.

Sales process challenges

Big Shot has a fairly simple sales process. It begins with initiating contact with a prospect and ends with closing the deal.

Prospects typically visit the website to sign up for a course. Freshsales auto-creates a contact record when a prospect registers or submits a query. Next, sales rep creates a deal for the contact and makes the first sales call. After the conversation, the sales rep identifies the contact as qualified or unqualified. If qualified, then deal stage is updated to won, and contact status changes to trial customer.

Big Shot offers the first 28 days of their program for free to customers. After 28 days, the status changes to paid customer and an invoice is generated. The sale is closed and process completed.

Now, imagine four sales reps repeating the process for more than 500 prospects in one month.

The repetitive manual work to close sales sabotaged productivity. Sometimes, sales reps lost track of the next step for a prospect and forgot to follow-up. The result? Lost sales.

Big Shot wanted to nurture prospects and optimize the sales team’s productivity. Using workflow automations, they automated several steps of the process.

3 ways Big Shot uses workflow automations

Workflow to update contact status and create a task

Big Shot uses the auto-create feature to create new contacts in Freshsales. Once that is done, a workflow to update contact status to prospect and add a follow-up task for the sales rep is set in motion. When executed, the owner will receive a reminder and notification to call the prospect and start qualifying. This way no prospect is forgotten, and sales reps can follow-up effectively through tasks.

Workflow to update deal stage to won, status to trial customer and update deal value

After the SDR qualifies the prospect and establishes the interested services, they enter the product course and plan fields in the contact record. When these conditions are met, a workflow updates the deal stage to won, status to trial customer, and updates the deal value automatically based on the selected course and plan.

Workflow to update status to paid customer and to generate an invoice

Once the customer begins his course, the sales rep marks the deal closing date. This practice implies the customer has started their trial. A time-based workflow is set off at the end of the trial period to update the contact status to customer. Workflow also triggers webhook to generate an invoice for the selected course.

Workflows = Workplace productivity boost

Big Shot automates close to 95% of it sales tasks using Workflows and don’t rely on manual processes. Workflows improve the productivity of the team and allow them to work more efficiently.

“Freshsales helps us become better at our day-to-day tasks. Workflows simplifies our process and improves our work performance. In fact, only 5% of our updates are manual tasks. We optimize and manage the large share using workflow automation.”

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See workflow automations in action!

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