We’ve sat down with Hiresweet team leader Mathieu Marseille to discuss the biggest challenges he faces in sales and in leading his team, and their experience with flows.

Here’s his insights on what sales team leaders should focus on, and how he leverages Flowla to optimize their processes.

Visibility is #1

When asked what the biggest weapon of a sales leader is, Mathieu emphasizes only one thing: visibility, visibility, and more visibility.

And he says it’s required on multiple layers - you need to know:

• What’s happening in your target organization
• The progress with open deals
• What’s working and not working in your current strategy
• All of the actions that your sales team is taking

But reaching this level of transparency is not easy to implement. While CRMs are useful to an extent, at a certain point it comes down to human judgment, which he considers very unreliable.

“Very often I used to find myself having to rely on the words of my sales team. While I do trust them, the line between wishful thinking and reality can be very thin.”

“They will say that they expect a deal to close in a few days, and it can sit in the pipeline for several weeks.”

In fact, data shows that 47% of salespeople are too subjective in their evaluation of close possibilities, which goes to show how important accurate data is for team leaders.

Forecasting better with Flowla

Hiresweet collectively has nearly a thousand flows, and their entire team uses them to manage deals.

They are better able to gauge intent by checking data like:

• Stakeholders who check out the flows
• Frequency of flow visits
• Number of shares
• Time spent on flows

Tracking this intent, and seeing the progress in mutual action plans has been elemental in transforming how Mathieu forecasts.

“I no longer need to rely on my team’s personal feelings when I’m forecasting."

"I can just look at Flowla and understand which customers are interested, who’s engaged, how far along we are with each deal and who’s blocking it."

"There’s so much transparency and it’s made my projections a lot more accurate. We now have solid data we can actually rely on.”

Better time management = more closed won

Mathieu emphasizes that maximizing efficiency and working the right deals is key to closing more and closing faster. 

Because salespeople focusing their time and efforts on the wrong deals is one of the major contributors to wasted efforts. 

To combat this, they leveraged Flowla’s insights into customer activity.

“We no longer waste time on deals that have no heartbeat. With activity and engagement insights, my team has a much more straightforward way to prioritize deals, they know where to focus. We just concentrate on clients who are highly engaged.”

This in turn increased the number of deals they closed. They report that Hiresweet team members on average close 1.6x more deals since they started using flows.

Implementing the playbook

Every sales leader knows how helpful playbooks are when you need to align your whole team around the same message, change your strategy, and onboard new team members quickly.

But making sure your playbook is actually being followed to a T?

That’s another challenge Mathieu has been able to overcome with Flowla.

“The templates were absolutely invaluable for me. I just create separate ones with different use cases and client types, and my team copies and personalizes them for each case.”

“If we’re switching our messaging, or taking a different approach, I know everyone is embracing the changes right away because we handle everything through templates.”

“It’s a wonderful tool to stay on top of my team’s activities and ensure the right actions are being taken by everyone.”

Selling smarter

The final benefit of Flowla for Hiresweet was being able to understand which approaches and materials work the best for their unique target audience.

They use the detailed insights extensively, and particularly love the information about content.

Mathieu says that with email or other methods, having this information on such a granular level is difficult - if it’s even possible at all.

“Seeing number views and time spent individually on each step helped us understand what type of content our customers come back to over and over again, and review in detail.”

“This way, we’re able to craft and shape our sales strategy around what works best, which is something you’re just not able to see and measure in the same way on any other platform.”

The aftermath

Mathieu reports that Flowla and the insights it provides has improved their sales processes on several levels, and now they’re closing 1.6x more deals than they used to.

Here are the key benefits they observed:

1 - Mathieu ensures that his playbook is implemented, and that all team members are taking the necessary actions with templates.

2 - They continuously improve their sales deck and assets based on what’s effective with the help of detailed insights.

3 - They close more deals by tracking prospects’ engagement and focusing their efforts on the most active and interesting deals.

4 - Mathieu is able to stay on top of open deals and other client activity, which increases the accuracy of his forecasts.

Below is one of the flows that Mathieu created for his team for post-demo follow-ups. Check it out from the link, and steal it with a click to use the same outline for your business!