The challenge: your established company just launched a brand new product. You have roughly 1,500+ leads to sort through, prioritize, and call every month. What do you do? Jane Riley, Sales Executive at eHarmony, turned to the AppExchange and Salesforce for help.

In this edition of the AppExchange Connected Leaders series, we talk to Jane about her decision to implement Salesforce Sales Cloud and Velocify, an AppExchange app. Both solutions helped her team manage leads more efficiently and increase sales dramatically for eHarmony’s new line of business, eH+, a service that blends eHarmony’s traditional online dating services with offline matchmaking expertise.

Salesforce: Can you give us an overview of how eH+ works?

Jane Riley: eH+ is a premium matchmaking service for clients who haven't had satisfactory results with traditional online dating. It's a combination of eHarmony's Compatibility Matching process and one-on-one personal matchmaking. Our eH+ Matchmakers all have advanced degrees in relationship psychology so they work very closely with our clients as their relationship guides. Our clients fill out the Relationship Questionnaire online, then talk via phone, Skype, or in person if they’re in Southern California, with a matchmaker about their specific preferences. The matchmakers then hand select and vet their compatible matches for them from eHarmony’s large pool of great singles.  It’s a very personal and bespoke service.

SF: Tell us about the specific business challenges that led to your relationship with Velocify.  

JR: I was hired to build the eH+ clientele, and from day one I was already drowning in leads—there were around 1,500 per month. My first order of business was to 1) get Salesforce and 2) find a way to efficiently call through those numbers. Initially, all our leads came into a database then went into Excel and we exported them all into a phone burner app and used a dialer function to make calls. There was a lot of time spent dialing and not having actual conversations, so we knew we wanted a solution that had click-to-dial functionality. Once we saw Velocify’s intelligent call routing and robust reporting features, our decision was made.

SF: Let’s talk numbers. Tell us about specific results you saw after implementing Velocify.

JR:  We increased sales by 58% within two months of implementing Velocify, and from implementation to now (six months later) we’ve increased sales by 158%. We’ve only had an 89% increase in leads in that same amount of time, so basically we’re more efficient with every lead that comes in now.

SF: That’s an amazing increase. How did Velocify help get you there?

JR: One big thing is we are able to prioritize leads with Velocify’s sales activity prioritization functionality. And we’ve integrated lead scoring into our program, so we can focus on the higher quality leads that are more likely to close. We can also record a voicemail ahead of time, so if the prospect the salesperson is calling doesn’t pick up, the system leaves a message and starts dialing the next number. It’s made our sales team much more efficient.

SF: How did working with Velocify change the game for eHarmony and eH+?

JR: We broke even halfway through last year, when eH+ was only six months old. That’s a huge win for us. We’ve kept our team pretty lean to see how technology can help us increase the margin, and so far it’s had a huge impact.

SF: What advice would you give to peers facing similar growth challenges?

JR: The sooner you make the decision to implement solutions like Salesforce and Velocify, the better. You’ll get insight into your actions that you may never have had before. You can take what you learn from the data and optimize so that you’re more efficient. Plus, it helps you make more money—for you and your company. It’s a win-win all around.

The AppExchange Connected Leaders Series features conversations with forward-thinking Salesforce customers and leaders in their fields who solved a complex business challenge with an AppExchange apps.