The onboarding experience was awesome! Everyone had tracking set up within one hour and were fully trained in a few days. The team really, really enjoyed the experience of receiving a new tool and it running smoothly for them immediately. Yesware keeps [our team] organized and lets them multi-task by offloading things to autopilot.
Emily Radkowski, Senior Manager, Sales Enablement
Background
Placester is a marketing platform for the real-estate industry. The company makes it simple for real estate professionals to streamline how they engage buyers & sellers through a simple, all-in-one digital marketing platform.
While the sales team handles personas at companies that range from small to large accounts like Keller Williams, it has a transactional business model for small-sized brokerages and independent agents, typically closing a sale in 5-7 days.
Placester wanted a tool to help close smaller accounts faster and smarter. For lower-count purchases in which sales representatives typically connect with the decision-maker or CEO on the very first call, the sales team needed a tool that automated personalized lead nurturing while also removing manual processes like data entry to CRM.
Challenge
Previous provider’s features were faulty and support was time-consuming
The company had been using a different Gmail plug-in solution, but with frustration. Usability was bad. There were problems with the integration to Salesforce and email tracking notifications were not alerting users in real-time.
“On top of this, the vendor’s customer service was not great, and the installation and onboarding was challenging,” says Emily Radkowski, Placester’s Sr. Manager, Sales Enablement.
“It was costing our team a lot of time. The product wasn’t fluid or intuitive.” Which is why Placester started looking at other email productivity and sales enablement vendors.
Solution
Yesware comes in with strong customer support and simple features
Placester’s sales team first heard of Yesware through word-of-mouth referral. Post-demo, they chose Yesware for its straightforward interface, product intuitiveness, and promise to get the team up and running quickly.
That promise did not disappoint.
“The onboarding experience was awesome,” says Emily. “Everyone had tracking set up within one hour and was fully trained in a few days. The team really, really enjoyed the experience of receiving a new tool and it running smoothly for them immediately.”
The Placester team also liked that the tool worked right out of the gate and that it lives within Gmail.
Here’s are the Yesware features Placester users love most:
- Email Tracking — to see when brokers are opening emails from their desktop, for reps to call when they’re top-of-mind and the broker is available and in the mode to talk;
- Mail Merge — to set up multi-stage campaigns for lead nurturing (with automated follow-up based on reply tracking);
- Templates — to save company messaging in reps’ inboxes, where it can be customized in 5 seconds;
- Salesforce Sync — for sales managers to rest assured that reps are pushing activities to CRM (automatically) and that Salesforce data is clean and up-to-date.
Benefits
Yesware saves time, increases conversions, and is adopted by other departments
Placester’s Account Executive team is the biggest group of Yesware power-users. The team leans on Yesware for its fast and comprehensive Salesforce sync, its reliable email tracking notifications by desktop, and the automation that it adds to the email sending process.
Users of Yesware create an average of 80 templates per month. The team also uses Mail Merge to send initial emails and automated follow-ups to no-replies en masse, making a major difference to their bottom line quickly. One rep explains that he uses Mail Merge to start conversations with highly qualified leads, garnering clicks on a new ebook offer.
Over the past year, Placester’s customer success team has also adopted Yesware.
Courteney McDonnell, Director of Customer Engagement says:
“Yesware has easily saved each CSM 30 minutes each day. Before Yesware, we had to bounce between Salesforce, Google Sheets, and a customer’s account just to identify which would be most relevant. Yesware’s Salesforce sync reduces the number of clicks we need to review a customer account and send up-to-date information.”
These users also set up Touchpoints drip campaigns to manage follow-ups to Placester customers, ensuring that future tasks pop up when they’re due and that automated emails go out when they need to.
“The Customer Success team is responsible for onboarding and engagement, account management, and various additional services, so Yesware has been instrumental for them,” says Emily.
“Yesware keeps them organized and lets them multi-task by offloading things to autopilot. They also use templates to create nice customer-facing emails about product updates.”
