Gofore - a digital transformation specialist - has grown massively over the past few years. As the sales team grew, the company wanted a cost-effective, “off-the-shelf” solution that could provide effective sales reporting for Pipedrive across the organization.

Gofore Plc, founded in 2002, is a digital transformation specialist that helps its clients create human-centric digital services. Gofore employs close to 600 people across ten offices in Finland, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and Estonia. The company also won the Great Place To Work competition in Finland in 2017 and was number 2 in Europe the same year.

Gofore’s customers are companies in the finance, insurance, services, trade, media and telecommunications industries and include for example Volkswagen, ABB, City of Helsinki and BOSCH. In 2018, Gofore’s net sales amounted to EUR 50.6 million. Gofore Plc's shares are quoted in the Nasdaq First North Growth Market Finland.

We had a chance to talk to Jussi Nurminen, the Head of Growth and Sales Excellence at Gofore. He has been with the company for the past seven years and has seen the company grow from 40 to almost 600 people.

Tell us a bit about your role within the company?

I have been with Gofore for over seven years. I originally joined the company in business development and sales role and at the time, we had about 40 people.

I have seen the company grow from 40 to almost 600 people, and especially the past couple of years have been a time of very rapid growth for us.

Currently, my main responsibility is Growth and Sales Excellence. That involves e.g. sales process development, CRM, digital sales and marketing, and sales enablement.

Describe your current priorities?

The past 2,5 years have been the time for massive growth for our sales team. Even within the past year, the number of CRM users has grown from roughly 40 to over 100 today. My top priority currently is scaling our sales operations.

Why did you start to look for a dashboard solution?

Our main need was to develop reporting to our Executive team and to find an easy way to share the primary data from our CRM system (Pipedrive) as our team was growing.

Earlier on, we had an analyst working with Tableau who produced sales analytics and reporting for sales and the executive team. Creating reliable reports with Tableau took a lot of time and required combining data from our CRM and ERP.

As our financial team started to provide new types of data to us, we realized we don’t really need the BI tool that much to justify the cost, so we started to look for off-the-shelf solutions and components to use instead.

Why did you end up choosing Dear Lucy?

Our company culture is very flat and non-hierarchical and we encourage agile methods and experimentation and also recommend that approach to our clients.

Dear Lucy was a perfect fit for us in its approach: Light and agile SaaS-service that is easy and quick to test and take into use without the need for long specification or implementation projects.

Gofore has a lot of experience in integrations and tech solutions. We could develop a reporting solution or dashboards on our own but it doesn’t make sense to spend the team’s time on that. With Dear Lucy we were able to solve our specific problem with a focused solution and that was perfect for us.

The number one point I would highlight is how quick Dear Lucy is to take into use. It is super easy to get started with Dear Lucy!

Dear Lucy is also really flexible in terms of customizations and it has been easy to get further things done that we have needed.

Communication with the Dear Lucy team has been really easy throughout, and it has truly felt customer-driven. Sometimes things have also been proactively solved even before I have asked for them.

What is also worth highlighting is that Dear Lucy reads the master data directly and only shows the authentic data from our CRM. We can trust that the numbers are correct.

Describe how your team is currently using Dear Lucy?

Our Executive team uses dashboards to follow our overall sales metrics. They use Dear Lucy during meetings and the team members also all have their own user credentials to log-in to Dear Lucy whenever they like to.

In addition, Dear Lucy is set up to provide reporting for each of our business areas (Society, Industry, Business). The business area leads all have access to their own reporting dashboards. Before weekly meetings, Business area leads share a snapshot of the sales dashboards to the wider team, too.

We recently got a new CEO, and he came to me to ask for credentials as one of the first tasks after he was appointed.

How would you describe the impact that DL has had?

We took Dear Lucy to use as soon as we saw the need for this type of reporting tool. If we did not have Dear Lucy, someone in the team would need to provide the reporting to us.

We did try Pipedrive’s own reporting but their current pricing model gets very expensive as only part of our team is using Pipedrive full time and we don’t need all the advanced features across the team.

Only the highest Pipedrive plans include more advanced reporting dashboards and even then it is quite restricted. If we were to get the higher plan, that would cost us roughly 50 KEUR per year whereas we are now only paying our 10 KEUR for our Pipedrive licenses. So you could, in essence, say that we are saving a lot with Dear Lucy.

What type of feedback have you received from your team or stakeholders?

The first feedback was simply “WOW!” I remember sharing the first dashboards to our Sales Director on Slack, and he was immediately impressed. Especially the dashboards with good looking background images and videos made an impression.

What made it even nicer was that I actually did not need to do much to get the first dashboards up and running. I simply added the integration and shared it with our Sales Director and it was immediately great looking and working well.

We spent some further time going through the individual KPIs and choosing what we needed and what we did not. Our Sales Director was then immediately able to share the first dashboards with the Executive team.

Any lessons learned that we can benefit our other customers, too?

I would definitely recommend companies to approach things with a lean approach.

Experiment with things quickly, see how it works, get feedback from the organization and develop it further step-by-step.

What comes to the sales metrics, my key point would be to keep things simple. If it’s too complicated, the implementation within the organization takes too long. Focus on a few key KPIs and stick with those.

Challenges & needs

• Rapidly growing sales team needing structured reporting across business areas

• Existing BI tools cumbersome and taking time

• Missing sales reporting functionalities on existing CRM

• Wanted to find an “off-the-shelf” solution for a focused need

Benefits of Dear Lucy

• Agile, cost-effective SaaS tool

• Really quick to test and set-up

• Attractive UI

• Trustworthy data

• Flexible customization options

Full name: Jussi Nurminen

Title: Head of Growth and Sales Excellence

Company name: Gofore Oyj

Industry: IT consultancy & software development

Personnel amount: 580 +

Revenue: 64 million euros in 2019

Geographic scope: Finland, UK, Germany, Spain, Estonia

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