How Informa increased revenue by 73% with Relationship Intelligence

Informa champions specialists working in academic and business-to-business markets, connecting people with knowledge to help them learn more, know more and do more.

They’re a leading international events, digital services and academic knowledge business, headquartered in the UK and a member of the UK’s FTSE 100 group of public companies.

With Ebsta’s Relationship Intelligence Platform, Informa has:

• Improved adoption of Salesforce by 3x
• Led to three Informa SMEs being acquired
  
• Increased contacts in Salesforce by 14%
• Increased high-quality engagement with accounts by 12%
• Increased revenue by 73%

 

“All the knowledge, contacts and interactions that we capture would walk out the door if not for Ebsta.”

Chris Fowles, – Head Of Analytics, Sales Operations & Sales Enablement, Informa

 

Before working with Ebsta, Informa struggled to see who was speaking with which customer. Vital details were being lost along the customer journey as a single customer was often speaking to 20-30 members of the Informa team at one time.

Since helping to track those conversations and hidden relationships, Informa has been able to grow and sell at least three small-medium enterprises (SMEs), in addition to growing revenue by 73% across the remainder of the business.

Most of these conversations are not always with salespeople – it’s these SMEs who they were struggling to track and capitalize on.

“Since buying Ebsta, every business on our platform has grown,” said Chris.

Within Salesforce, Informa found themselves in a situation where they were capturing some customer details in individual records – but they were unable to see how the conversations taking place linked together.

It left them in a situation where client services had no visibility of the conversations taking place between sales and the customer, leading to opportunities missed and sales cycles running longer than necessary.

It also meant onboarding took longer as client service teams spent time getting up to speed with the customer. It also meant ramping up reps took longer as there was no tracking of any previous activity.

The role of Ebsta was to give them visibility of who was speaking to who, what has been said and to provide the insights necessary to understand relationships across Informa.

“Overnight our teams had a 360 view on what’s being said, which brings an element of professionalism, particularly when new to an account,” said Chris.

Working closely with customers is a core component of Informa’s strategy, therefore being able to understand them is crucial to their ongoing success.

Ebsta helps here by capturing all communication and relationship data – giving the team at Informa a 360-degree view of all activity with a customer account.

In addition, Ebsta codifies this activity, enabling Informa to score the strength of their relationships. Using this in tandem with relationship trends enables the team to spot when customer relationships are at risk of stagnating.

“It’s helped our teams’ adoption of Salesforce as they suddenly see the value in it. It’s also helping us make better decisions across the business.”

Building on their knowledge of relationships, the team at Informa now leverage these insights to support multi-threading deals and to ensure they have the right relationships with the right people.

One example of this is building relationship maps of key accounts. Through this, reps can see who reports to who, and ensure they are engaging with the right people and multi-threading at the right seniority. The same concept as CS, if we don’t have an executive sponsor at an account, but really strong engagement with all reps – that’s fine but not going to make or break getting more money from the business or actually progress forward. which are then exported into Tableau to be used in business reporting.