With over 800,000 website visitors each month, many of which act on its free trial offer, PandaDoc needed to automate its processes to better evaluate, prioritize, and assign those leads to reps. The sales organization also wanted to identify the best conversation track for sellers to use, based on the type of opportunity. Using Salesloft, PandaDoc’s sales team created workflows and cadences to manage its inbound sales efforts and grew ACV by ~35% without extending time to close. The company has also discovered unexpected process efficiencies by extending the platform to its Customer Success and Finance teams.
Who is PandaDoc?
PandaDoc is an all-in-one software that streamlines sales workflows for all businesses, with a focus on the SMB market. Using PandaDoc, sales teams create, send, track, and eSign documents to help win more business in less time. On average, PandaDoc customers save 12 hours per week. This equates to a 65% decrease in document creation time, a 28% increase in close rate, and an 18% increase in average sale price.
Challenge: Streamline Processes, Educate and Qualify Thousands of Inbound Leads Each Month
In 2018, PandaDoc combined marketing and sales to form a single Revenue Operations team. Under Denis Malkov, Revenue Operations Leader, the sales and marketing teams now collaborate to align and improve the company’s efforts, focusing on sales across a continuous customer lifecycle.
Improving collaboration and streamlining processes were only part of the recipe for increasing sales velocity. PandaDoc also wanted to make better use of Salesloft.
I inherited Salesloft when I took on the revenue operations role at PandaDoc. I had experience using a different sales engagement solution but was quickly won over by how comprehensive the Salesloft platform is. The quality of our account management impressed me, and I felt the solution was capable of doing everything we needed and then some. — Denis Malkov, Revenue Operations Leader at PandaDoc
PandaDoc primarily targets sales management, sales operations, and marketing operations leaders at fast-growing technology companies. Most prospects believe they’re doing fine with their current processes for producing a high volume of PDFs or Word documents. Therefore, the biggest challenge sales reps face is helping prospects realize their own pain.
There’s also a perception that the company is simply an e-signature service like EchoSign. So, after overcoming the value hurdle, sales must also educate prospects about the comprehensive solution.
The company currently relies on an inbound approach, offering a 14-day free trial to generate leads. They mobilize an inbound team to connect and educate prospects about PandaDoc’s full capabilities during this free trial period. Qualification of inbound leads is a significant challenge for the team. They must also assign qualified leads to the right team members and cadences for efficient engagement and pursuit.
“We currently have more than 800,000 visitors per month, and a large number of those visitors act on our primary free trial offer,” Denis said. “We needed a way to automate our processes to better evaluate, prioritize, and assign those leads to reps. Specifically, to identify the best conversation track for reps to use, based on the type of opportunity. This is the primary challenge we are solving with Salesloft.”
Solution: Team Cadences and Automation Help Reps Connect and Close, Faster
With assistance from Salesloft Customer Success, PandaDoc’s sales operations team created workflows and team cadences to manage its inbound sales efforts. Their goal was to find new ways to connect with prospects and close deals faster.
Before implementing team cadences using Salesloft, reps were using individual cadences. Inevitably, this led to inconsistency in the sales process. For example, some cadences might last two months and have a high volume of touches, while others might last two days and include just two touches. Team cadences based on lead type now help the team manage messaging across the sales cycle.
PandaDoc has also seen efficiency gains with Salesloft’s automation features. For example, the team developed automation rules to evaluate and assign inbound leads to the right cadences and talk tracks for reps. In the past, this was a manual effort by both marketing and sales, with a lot of room for opportunities to fall through the cracks.
Using Salesloft’s automation capabilities, sales and marketing resources now have a framework to guide their collaboration efforts. Working together, they’ve eliminated many of the manual tasks. This has increased velocity for SDRs, helping them follow up on the right leads, with the right message, in a short period of time.
PandaDoc has also found value in the Salesloft Analytics dashboard. The team can now quickly identify areas for improvement using Salesloft’s built-in insights. Leaders can pinpoint areas where sales reps are struggling or where to adjust cadences to create more quality conversations with prospects.
Results: Increased Revenue, Performance Gains, and Team Alignment
Since rolling out standardized team cadences, PandaDoc has experienced three of the top months of pipeline generation. It’s been a significant factor behind the team’s ability to consistently grow revenue.
Now, in a typical month the team pursues more than 2,000 qualified leads with an average of 2,000 manual touches for a single rep (1,500 emails and 500 calls). This equates to a 37% connection rate and 35% opportunity creation rate for SDRs.
“One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen using Salesloft has been improving the volume and quality of our team’s connections and meetings. Efficiency and effectiveness have improved across the board. Our team is currently averaging a 37% connection rate and 35% opportunity creation.” — Denis Malkov, Revenue Operations Leader
Since implementing team cadences with Salesloft, the company considers adherence to stage progression one of its greatest accomplishments. PandaDoc is constantly analyzing cadence performance to identify optimization opportunities. This practice has helped the team reach new opportunity pipeline-generation goals that would have seemed unrealistic before.
PandaDoc continues to gain velocity using the Salesloft Platform. The company looks forward to finding even more ways to improve performance with Salesloft to fuel revenue operation efforts.
We are a velocity-based business, primarily serving the SMB market. Our time to close has been and needs to continue to be very fast. That’s something that Salesloft helps us to accomplish. We’ve grown our ACV by 30-40% and haven’t extended our time to close. Growing contract value, but closing at the same rate. It’s one of the key drivers for me to continue to invest in the platform. — Denis Malkov, Revenue Operations Leader
Unexpected Performance Gains
PandaDoc’s success with Salesloft goes beyond its Sales and Marketing teams. The company recently extended Salesloft licenses to its Customer Success team. Customer Success designed its own team cadences to help drive retention, expansion, and activation efforts. While it’s still early in the process, the team is already realizing success managing its accounts on a one-to-many-touch basis using cadences.
Perhaps the most unique application of the Salesloft Platform comes from PandaDoc’s finance department. The Accounts Receivable (AR) collections process used to be manual and time-consuming. AR was overwhelmed with follow up on 100+ outstanding invoices weekly.
Inspired by the efficiency with which SDRs were managing their communications, the AR team employed Salesloft to help streamline some of its follow-up tasks. A process that used to require many man-hours per week has been reduced to 20 minutes. Outstanding balances have been decreased by more than 40% in three months, and there are now less than 50 outstanding invoices to follow up on weekly.
Denis says, “We’ve expanded Salesloft to now serve three different use cases for PandaDoc: our revenue operations, customer success, and now finance teams. I love it when we find an opportunity in our tech stack to use an existing solution to solve other challenges without needing to invest in yet another product. Salesloft continues to deliver new value for our company in unexpected ways.”
Borderless Team Alignment
As one final example of how PandaDoc achieves operational efficiency with Salesloft, the team uses the platform to coordinate its efforts across two U.S. offices in San Francisco, CA and St. Petersburg, FL. The company has also deployed the platform for its new, growing team based in Minsk, Belarus (home to both of its co-founders).
The Minsk team, which primarily manages inbound lead qualification for its small business prospects, uses the same cadences as its U.S. counterparts. Using predetermined cadences in Salesloft, PandaDoc has been able to quickly train and onboard its new SDRs with ease.
Salesloft gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to building our teams. It really doesn’t matter where our team members are located, because everyone is operating from the same system. We have real-time visibility into how everything is going each day. It’s been a game-changer; helping us develop new growth strategies or experiment with approaches we might not have considered without the right tools in place. — Denis Malkov, Revenue Operations Leader
Get the full picture about using cadences to grow contract value without extending time to close in our ebook Best Practices & Benchmarks for Sales Cadences.