Most companies use Pipedrive for managing sales, but many have found other clever uses for it. When we found out our software is used for managing customer success, we wanted to find out more — especially since this was coming from Falcon Social, a fast-growing tech company with more than 100 Pipedrive users. We chatted with May Laursen, the company’s marketing operations manager.
What is Falcon Social, and what’s the story so far?
Falcon Social is a social media management platform that enables enterprise teams to work together to achieve better business results. With a highly visual, user-friendly approach to workflow management, the Falcon platform includes products to listen, engage, publish, analyze and manage — as well as custom onboarding and strategic integrations. Falcon Social is the digital partner of choice for Carlsberg, Pandora, Orangina Schweppes, Mentos, TomTom and many more.
The success of Falcon Social impressive. What has worked well for you in growing sales?
From the very beginning, the product has basically sold itself — even before it was officially released, we had onboarded major customers like Carlsberg and Pandora. The key to our rapid growth is our unified approach to social media management as well as multicultural team representing more than 33 nationalities. We are experiencing a very low churn rate and a customer satisfaction level at 98%.
What kind of tools do you use for sales, marketing and social media management?
Besides our own platform for social media management, we use a variety of tools to manage, optimize and measure our activities across and within departments. To us, the most important features in productivity tools are the ability to collaborate in real time as well as the possibility to integrate with other tools in our stack.
We have been using Pipedrive from the very beginning, and we now have over 120 active users and are adding more than a hundred new leads a day. In the early stages of the business, Pipedrive was solely used by the sales team, but we have now expanded the CRM to include our customer success, accounts and marketing teams too. Additionally, we use Zapier to connect Pipedrive with our other web apps like MailChimp, ORBTR and, most importantly, Google Docs, from which we monitor all day-to-day operations.
We hear you recently extended Pipedrive use to your customer success team. What led you to this, and how has this worked out?
For us, it made sense to profile the customer journey right from its inception as a lead/prospect in our sales funnel.
Rather than build an elaborate CRM system from scratch to map out our customers and engagement strategy, we decided to continue in Pipedrive, taking the “won” deal, with all of the golden nuggets from the sales cycle, and use that to map out each customer’s specific “success” criteria, together with the key financial/invoicing information. The project was conceived and run by Toni Hohlbein, our special operations manager
Since our customer success team provides a lot of support to prospects during presales, using Pipedrive helps us speak the same language as our sales colleagues, bringing our teams closer together. In the end, it also brings us closer to the customers, understanding their needs, as well as mapping their relationship with us. Win-Win. It’s early days, but so far, it’s working out really well.
While your social media management platform is for large companies, are there social media strategies or tips you’d recommend to startups and smaller businesses? What can almost anyone do better with social media?
Social media is a great way to interact with your target audience and engage as well as educate existing customers. We believe in original content and honest engagement. Here are a couple of tips from Mary Liebowitz, our own social engagement manager:
- Define your objectives and how you will measure the performance.
- Use clear and intriguing images in your social posts.
- Implement an editorial calendar for a manageable overview.
- Devise a plan for off-hour and holiday social media coverage.
- Practice genuine engagement – have real conversations.
- Approach brands politely when interacting.
What’s next for you and Falcon Social — any news to share?
We’re constantly releasing new features and updates to our platform. At this stage we’re really excited about is the Falcon Priority Inbox that will enable community managers to monitor and prioritize incoming messages even more easily.
The Priority Inbox is designed using a “machine learning” algorithm to recognize patterns and classify new data points. Falcon uses this information to predict social interactions based on a customer’s previous activity.
Once collected, they can calculate the probability of a string of words belonging to a specific category — for example, “important” or “influencer.” The category is based on the previous behavior of the user and does not depend on the output from sentimental analysis, which can be inaccurate.
Pro tip: you can get lots of great social media advice on Falcon Social blog, starting with this post about time management.
