This is a Dreamforce demo-style interview (Jan 13, 2020) where Maggie Palmer of Pep Talkher describes moving from spreadsheet-based sales tracking to Salesforce Essentials. She highlights onboarding help/coaching, easy data import, mobile-first workflows, templates/availability features, and the ability to aggregate social communications to scale responses.
All right.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Please come on over.
Thank you.
Super excited. You know, you may not be aware, this is the first Dreamforce for both of us. Yes. How's it going?
Yes, it's a lot, but it's really fun. It's been really fun. Yeah, I'm loving it.
Crazy event, right?
Yeah, it's great to be here.
Great. I want to have you share your story with Essentials and with your business, with everyone. Maybe we could start with what life was like for you before.
Sure. So when I started Pep Talkher, I'd never worked in an official sales role before, so I basically had to create my own system. It was a little old school. I had a spreadsheet and I used to track things with color coding, so you can see. So green were the clients that I was speaking to. Yellow are the ones I had to follow up with, and then orange are the people that weren't getting back to me. So, you know, it's clunky. It works to start with. But as we grew and my sales team grew, it wasn't going to grow with us. So we needed to find another solution. So I looked into it. I did a lot of research and thankfully found Salesforce. And for us, this has been a great option. When I started, though, I had a lot of questions because I'd never used a CRM before. So what I did was I jumped on the website and I connected with one of the business coaches. So they helped me get my data out of the old school spreadsheet and into the dashboard. It was really easy, and we essentially got it to the one click wizard where you can just upload it and everything was pulled into the one place.
I love that you brought up the coaching side of it because that's something that not everyone is aware, but it's one of the things that's unique to Essentials is the help inside the product.
And I needed that help, to be honest, because, as I said, I'd never done this before. And as you know from running your own business, time is money. And so for us, Salesforce has really saved us several hours a week at least. And also it means that now deals don't fall through the cracks, because previously I was missing stuff, and so now it's really easy when I'm contacting a customer, for example. So if we take Tina, rather than having to search through my email and talk to my team to see where we're at, all of those comms are in the one place. So I can see someone reached out to her. I was then looped in at a later stage, and now we're actually at the point where we're ready to follow up. So let's actually give her a call right now. We can call her straight from the interface. Let's see if we can close this deal. Hi, Tina, it's Maggie Palmer calling from Pep Talker. How are you? Hey, Maggie, it's great to hear from you. Yeah, thanks so much for taking my call. Listen, I know we chatted last week about locking in a 2020 brand partnership. Where are your team at with that? Yeah, thanks so much for following up. I actually just want to connect quickly with my managers on this. Can I get back to you next week? No problems at all. I'll give you a call then. Thanks so much, Tina.
So.
So again, I'll just log those comments straight into the dashboard and then I've got that record there ready to go.
Super cool. So you've gone from a spreadsheet to everything in one place. Whole team can see it, always up to date. What are we missing? What else are you using that maybe we haven't touched on?
So I don't know about any of you here today, but I live on my phone, and so I wanted a solution where I could do everything via mobile as well. And so for me, the Salesforce app has been amazing because I'm pretty rarely in the office. I'm, like, out with our Fortune 500 clients or I'm meeting with our developers. So I wanted a system where I could respond to people straight from my iPhone. So if we take Tina, for example, she's come back, which is awesome, so I can reply to her immediately. And rather than stressing out about using the right language, crafting a perfect email, I just insert a template, and all our sales decks are automatically uploaded and away we go. And the other thing that I can do, which I also liked, that saved me time, is I can put in my availability. So. So rather than getting stuck in that cycle of can you do here, can you do there? I just send that availability and then it's all done straight away.
So I love that you brought up mobile.
Okay.
I mean, our lives are so different now because of the mobile phones that we live on. And when we were starting our business, social was becoming a big thing.
Yes.
And we had to deal with that. And it was newer, but now it's really in full swing. How has that impacted you and what you do?
So I founded Pep talkher after my own experience of inequality in the workplace and our mission is really to close the gender pay gap, one pay raise conversation at a time. And so it's grown now into this movement of tens of thousands of people around the world who downloaded the free app and have used it successfully to negotiate. So then they actually reach out to us, telling us that their successes are asking for help via Facebook, via Instagram or Twitter. And so again, previously, we were logging in and out replying, whereas now with Salesforce, all. All of those social communications are aggregated in the one place. And even as a tweet comes in, we can reply to it straight away. So here we go. I've got a response here. I can just send that. And again, it's saving me time and it's allowing us to scale, which is awesome.
I love that you can stay all those channels come into one place. Nothing falling through the cracks. You can respond right there. Very cool. So there's nothing more that I like to do than see customers using the product. So we could do this all day. But I want to thank you for showing up Dreamforce, for taking the time to share your story with everyone. But more importantly, on a personal note, I have two young girls, as you know, and I think what you're doing is going to help them as they get into the workforce, and you are making a difference across the world. So I just want to thank you for that.
Thank you, Paul. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
