Just Eat boosts productivity with Salesforce.com

Automating reporting and making sales team more mobile have allowed takeaway website to become more productive

Takeaway website Just-Eat.co.uk is to build on its Salesforce implementation, as it looks to make its sales team more productive.

In an interview with Computing, the company's group business development director, Giorgio Pontielli, explained that Just Eat selected Salesforce in December 2011, ahead of other CRM offerings, which he declined to disclose.

He said that the company had initially had an internal system that was developed in-house that provided Just Eat with basic functionality, but as the company was fast-growing and becoming a global company, it wanted to move away from simple spreadsheets to a more sophisticated tool.

"We wanted to check which restaurants we were signing and where but to also have a much better picture of their history, their needs, our history of contact with them, and so we needed a tool which could create much better profiles as well as having a CRM function," he said.

"Our tools were quite limited and if we wanted to develop something similar [to Salesforce] it would have taken ages, we needed something off-the-shelf," he added.

Salesforce beat the competition because it was easy to use and did not require a huge learning curve, Pontielli explained.

Leigh Phillipson, Just Eat's international sales director, added that this was crucial for the firm's sales teams.

"If you're a sales person you've got to get out there and spend a lot of time with the customer and a sales person is inefficient if they are behind a desk doing administrative work, and that has an impact on productivity. With Salesforce, you quickly understand how things work so it lowers the amount of initial training necessary: things like Chatter are very similar to Facebook or Twitter so people felt comfortable using it straight away," he said.

Just Eat boosts productivity with Salesforce.com

Automating reporting and making sales team more mobile have allowed takeaway website to become more productive

Chatter is an enterprise social networking tool, and Phillipson believes that it has helped with the company's trading.

"It's highly unlikely that a member of the sales team in São Paulo would call their colleague in London to give them a high five for a new win. But Chatter makes this possible. It breaks down geographical boundaries, making it easier for the team to share best practice," he said.

Just Eat did not want to introduce all of Salesforce's features to its staff at once, so it started with lead management, commission and planning on Sales Cloud. It has gone on to add more features, such as tracking opportunities, contacts and accounts as well as generating analytics.

It has also increased the number of its employees using Salesforce from 100 to 250 across nine countries.

Productivity is one of the biggest benefits of the solution for Just Eat: it's reduced the administration overhead and automated reporting.

"Salesforce has freed up our sales teams to spend more time talking to customers. Managers no longer have to spend several hours a week generating reports, which means they can focus on growing our restaurant network and improving the takeaway ordering process," Phillipson said.

Phillipson said that the introduction of Salesforce has also made the sales teams more mobile, using smartphones and tablets to log information. Following on from that, it has started to complete all of its contracts on an e-signature basis, as well as exploring other ideas such as Salesforce apps that are available on mobile devices.

"There are apps available that show all of the leads around you, which is a really exciting opportunity for a sales guy," he said.

At the moment it uses Sales Cloud to ensure it has got the right selection of restaurants for the consumer.

"We have to ensure we get the right quality of restaurants, so for example if a consumer logged on and only saw pizza restaurants and was looking for a Chinese restaurant then we would be doing something wrong. So we've started to use Salesforce to make sure sales people are going to the right restaurants, and using the right leads for the right places to ensure we have the right mix of cuisine types in different areas," Phillipson explained.