Paving the way for global success
Unifiedpost Group goes from start-up to scale-up
Going paper-free is fast, efficient, and good for the planet. But for some companies, it’s not that simple to achieve.Pan-European Unifiedpost Group specialises in making document processing easy for customers, from large corporations to SMEs, helping them to manage invoicing and contracts with seamless digital solutions.
With the implementation of Salesforce, Unifiedpost enhanced efficiency and opened the door to new opportunities.
Acquisitions accelerate company growth
Unifiedpost was founded in Belgium in 2001 and grew rapidly from start-up to public listed company. Following a series of acquisitions, the Benelux-
based business achieved pan-European reach across 26 countries.
To further grow within the SME market, Unifiedpost launched an innovative application called Banqup. The application gives customers a secure, cost-effective platform to manage and pay bills with minimal in-house resources. It also connects SMEs with Unifiedpost’s enterprise customers, such as energy companies, so they can make payments with just a few taps.
While the company had evolved at a rapid pace, it needed to maintain high levels of service and 360-degree visibility across the organisation. In 2018, the decision was made to centralise and standardise commercial operations on a single platform to streamline and accelerate growth, which is crucial in the complex landscape of acquisitions. Salesforce was rolled out to the Banqup sales team in 2018 and the rest of the sales team the following years.
Salesforce as accelerator for growth
In the summer of 2019, Unifiedpost reached out to Deloitte to review the Salesforce environment. By January, its business processes had been redesigned and optimised and implemented in Salesforce by using as many out-of-the-box functionalities as possible.
“We had experienced rapid growth and launched our new product, Banqup. With Salesforce, we were able to give customers a seamless, consistent experience across 26 countries at scale,”
said Hans Jacobs, CMO at Unifiedpost.
“We went from working in Excel to an ERP system with limited CRM functionality. With a new product to promote, we needed more from our technology. Rolling out Salesforce was a game changer. Deloitte was the best placed partner to bring true transformation expertise and help us harmonise our business processes across the group.”
Hans Jacobs, CMO at Unifiedpost
Bringing sales and marketing together throughout the customer journey
“My role is to align sales and marketing to improve our competitive edge when it comes to winning new business,” said Jacobs. “Having a platform solution is a huge advantage. We use Sales Cloud and Pardot to bring sales and marketing teams together throughout the customer journey.”
The customer journey begins when a lead or opportunity comes in via a partner, the website, or the marketing team. Corporate customers have a lengthy sales cycle, but with Salesforce, the team can stay close to them at every touchpoint,and monitor the whole pipeline through custom dashboards.
“Before Salesforce we didn’t have enough data to proactively reach out to prospects, they were just figures on a spreadsheet. Now we have full visibility of both prospects and existing customers and can have better conversations about how we can support them,” added Jacobs.
Deloitte understood the importance of making Salesforce fit for Unifiedpost’s fast-growing and expanding business. Creating better visibility is helping to maximise opportunities brought in by acquisitions. For example, if Unifiedpost shares a global customer with a company it has acquired in a new region, the teams can work together to try and win more business within that group or company.
Trigger-based marketing journeys simplify campaigns
To streamline email marketing and lead nurturing, the marketing team is using Pardot to send prospects and customers on trigger-based journeys. For example, when a new Banqup customer only has a premium subscription, meaning that customer only manages invoices in the application, they soon start triggering this customer via a flow of communications to upgrade to the Optimum subscription, which also includes the payments. When the customer upgrades, the flow automatically stops.
“We’re really excited to start automating more processes with Salesforce,” said Jacobs. “We automated the monthly newsletters telling Banqup customers about the latest features we’ve released, and that’s been a huge efficiency win for the marketing team.”
To make sure messaging is as effective as possible, leads are segmented by sector and language, so customers only receive the most relevant information. The team does AB testing and tracks engagement rates to see which communications are the most successful, and even has insight into which customers to target with personalised cross-selling campaigns.
“With Salesforce our data becomes actionable. For example, if we see many doctors using the platform to send invoices, we can tailor our messaging with more testimonials from clinicians to try and increase our reach in that sector.”
Hans Jacobs, CMO at Unifiedpost
In just seven months the marketing team grew from seven people to 25 in 2022, with regional marketing managers in each country and teams growing all the time. Together with Deloitte, Unifiedpost developed training manuals for new hires to get them up to speed quickly, but Salesforce is so intuitive it doesn’t take much time for team members to start adding value, and many come to the company with existing knowledge of the platform. Where needed, Deloitte is available to plan ad-hoc training or working sessions on more strategic topics or specific campaign setup needs.
The future is looking bright
Today, the group employs 1,300 people, processes more than half a billion documents every year, has a reachable network of 900,000 SMEs, and there are more than 150 users working in Salesforce across sales and marketing.
And as the company continues to grow, Salesforce helps to simplify onboarding and maximise cross- and upselling opportunities with existing customers as part of the company’s strategy to become a leading global player.
“We’re getting smarter with Salesforce all the time. Next we’re going to explore artificial intelligence, and keep automating more processes across sales and marketing to be more productive without increasing headcount,” said Jacobs.
The company is even thinking about building a partner community for resellers who offer Banqup to their customers. They’ll be able to log into Salesforce to track how many leads are converted and to manage their customer relationships.
And that’s not the only exciting plan in the pipeline. Banqup will soon be available on AppExchange to help other trailblazers streamline invoicing and payments. “Salesforce is all about community, we love being part of that ecosystem and hope other Salesforce customers will benefit from Banqup,” concluded Jacobs.
