Belly, a Chicago startup, replaced paper loyalty cards with a smartphone app. Early sales struggles with untracked contacts and duplicate pitches led them to use Salesforce for automated call queues and lead logic, setting benchmarks like day-15 activity targets to prioritize which merchants to reach.
Open your wallet. Do you have a paper punch loyalty card in there? Chances are you carry a few ones from a deli, a hardware store. Maybe you've got one from a coffee shop. Now ask yourself, do those loyalty cards make you feel anything about the companies they're from, or do they just make your wallet fat? Well, there's a little company out in Chicago that's out to change all that, and their name is Belly. Founded in 2011, Belly lets customers throw those punch cards away by giving them a loyalty app for smartphones that can be used at all of their favorite shops. While delivering data to businesses, they can see what loyal customers love most and create better marketing and return business. I talked with Belly here in the studio to learn about their early challenges and see how Salesforce helped them keep up with growth by giving them power to organize sales, track deals, and drive customer success. Talk to us about some of the early headwinds you ran into, some of the early challenges you ran into, and how you overcame them.
The early sales process was like, let's just go, go out and sell. Go into a business, sell. If you don't get the deal, go into the next one and go into the next one. We started running into situations where someone in sales would go into a business and they said, well, someone just came in here yesterday and we're still out there pitching you. And so I think those were some of the main issues was just not knowing which businesses we contacted, what the status was, how we were going to track that, and really for the company and team scaling who's going where.
So for our sales, we wanted to build, build an automatic call queue and build some lead logic into how our inside sales are using the platform day to day. We tried calling it, this time they didn't answer. We called it, this time they did answer. We can get as granular. So this vertical, their contact rates are best for Belly during this time. Those are really great insights that help us make incremental changes and close more deals. We know by day 15, there's a certain benchmark we'd like to see our merchants hit in terms of activity. So new users and visits. If we see that a merchant is trending below that, we create a case for our merchant success managers to reach out and work on the account.
And so the system informs the human being. I should contact this customer. That's great.
Yeah.
And that's where we talk about technology. Plus, I mean, we certainly have a human element to our business, but ultimately a loyalty program is about data collection of data and now being the largest loyalty program with the activity that we have on a daily basis, we understand how you're trending, what's working well, how vertical in a specific market should be performing. And so ultimately, when we can use cases like Jeremy said to trigger these activities, it's not just triggering the activity, but it's helping our team prioritize and effectively manage their day.
You guys have such a powerful out of the box solutions, but you guys have amazing third party applications that are on your app exchange that enable us to be far more efficient than we could ever do on our own. Since so much of our company is using Salesforce, it becomes like a hub and how people stay connected.
Where do you see the company in the next few years?
Our platform continues to evolve from the functionality that we provide for our merchants on things like campaigns and running back end email marketing, all of our analytics making it easier for customers to check in and increase our levels of engagement. But really right now we are very much focused on doing what we do best and ensuring that it's giving customers the option to use Belly at all their favorite places.
Well, there you have it. Belly, a company that's making a big impact connecting to their customers in a whole new way. No punch card needed. To learn more, visit salesforce.com smallbusinesssolutions.
