How OWOW agency plans to use a CRM to reach 1 billion lives

‍Meet OWOW

• OWOW, a digital product studio
• Based in Eindhoven, Netherlands
• Interviewees Co-founders Robin and Pieter-Jan, and Elliott and Roshni from the Growth team

Seeking a sales machine that doesn’t sacrifice relationships

‍

‍This year we've set a new mission to touch the lives of one billion people by the year 2035. To reach our goal, we needed to do everything at scale. But we’re in a people’s business and doing personalized stuff at scale is hard. We had to find a way how to automate it.

‍

To reach their ambitious goal, OWOW needed to understand what set them apart from competitors so they could replicate it. They knew they won deals by establishing strong relationships early, sending custom pitches that reflected their ability to create custom software, and doing it faster than any other competitor. But to scale this effectively, the team needed a CRM they could collaborate on without killing morale. Easier said than done — until now.

OWOW’s Director of Growth, Elliott, set out to find "a CRM that's wasn’t soul-destroying.” He knew if he could get the team to actually use a tool, it would free up the founders to focus on building new relationships while enabling the growth team to automate and accelerate their sales process, especially when it came to creating proposals. So he set out to find the right one…

Their exact process for personalizing at scale

‍‍

Relationships matter, no matter what industry you're in, but it's like times 10x in the agency world. It's amazing how many times our clients say they chose us because they just trust us, like us, and believe in us. It's been a really key understanding to spend less time working on the tiny little details and more on improving our relationships.

OWOW has been able to streamline their sales process — without compromising on personalization — by leveraging clever automations and delegating specific parts of the sales process to different parts of the team. Everybody focuses on building trust, first and foremost, but each team member contributes in their own way. Including folk.

Here’s the sales process that’s worked for the agency:

• The Co-founders focus on running discovery calls with potential clients. Usually 8 per day! They use that time to focus on nurturing authentic connections.
• These meetings are then automatically recorded and uploaded to folk, via integrations, enabling their Growth team to access the discussion immediately. The GTM is also notified on Slack that there’s a new proposal to work on.
• Within 24 hours, the Growth team analyzes these conversations and customizes their pitch deck to reflect each client's specific needs.

This efficient process allows OWOW to maintain a high-touch approach to their relationships while serving a growing client base. It’s as simple as effectively combining the personal attention of their founders with the systematic execution of their growth team.

‍

folk favorites that are anything but boring

‍

Strongest connection — Elliott

"For me, the ability to be able to see who has the closest contact to each client is really amazing. It's not just what you're selling, but who's actually selling it. It's undeniable how much our win rate increases when the person who has the best relationship presents a proposal. That's when we close deals. That used to be a gut feeling, but now we have a metric which proves us. That's so valuable to us."

‍

Messages & Sequences — Robin

"I understood that it wasn't just about bringing in leads, but also about managing relationships. After looking at all the features, I knew I’d be able to use this to reach out to all of our existing clients and be able to get closer to them. So now on a regular basis, we send a newsletter to our alumni program. But a lot more personal. We offer them workshops, conference tickets, invitations to parties. All of these kind of things that allow us to just get closer to our clients."

‍

Enrichment — Roshni

"There's not one extra button than there needs to be in folk and my favorite button in folk is the 'Enrich' button. My main task is making sure that all the information that my team needs is available in one big dashboard. As soon as I have a client's LinkedIn, then I have every other information: where they’re based, what position they're in, what their emails are, sometimes their phone numbers. It’s very helpful. It makes my life very easy."

‍

Now their CRM works for them, so they can get back to creative work‍

‍

A future-proof CRM should operate and do tasks on the background. I'll go to folk to get my insights, look at my boards, see how my pipeline is doing, but I don't have to go to folk to tell it stuff to do. That's the beauty of it.

‍

‍

Sure folk helps OWOW systemize and scale their sales process, but what first attracted the team was how simple, beautiful, and enjoyable folk was to use. It’s what initially set folk apart from other “soul-destroying” CRMs they’d tried and failed to maintain in the past.

But what keeps them coming back, day in and day out, is the impact they’re seeing after rolling out folk. Recent launches of proactive features like AI Follow-ups and Dashboards are perfectly aligned with OWOW’s expectation of a future-proof CRM. The team is successfully managing high touch sales with more and more clients — whilst taking back time for the creative work. Ultimately, making great progress on their wild dream of positively impacting 1 billion people’s lives a reality.

‍

Try folk for yourself