How Inkwell doubled the size of their pipeline in a year
Inkwell specializes in creating written, video and audio content to help companies market to small business owners. As well as producing content, they also run The Pitch, a competition that brings together small businesses and helps them hone their pitches and deliver them to potential investors.
- Industry: Agency/Consultancy
- Location: UK
- Key feature: Deal management
By moving to Pipedrive, Inkwell was able to store information on leads they needed while still maintaining a clear workflow.
167%
Year-over-year revenue grew between the 1st and 2nd year
35x
How much the company has grown this year
2x
The amount their pipeline grew this year
The challenge
Inkwell works with hundreds of entrepreneurs around the UK and provides them with various types of mentoring and coaching, but they also work with much larger companies to help fund their events and provide specialist judges and speakers on related topics.
Even in their first year of operation, Inkwell found that having to keep tabs on all their entrants and sponsors was a challenge with a spreadsheet tool. Since spreadsheets aren’t designed to handle various points of contact for each company and personal details about each contact, CEO, Chris Goodfellow found he would need another solution.
Chris GoodfellowCEO
Chris GoodfellowCEO
The solution
Thanks to custom fields for contacts, leads can be filtered for their content and The Pitch leads. Inkwell can also search their database for contacts who they’ve flagged as potential speakers or investors within each region of The Pitch’s semi-final heats.
Using Pipedrive’s pipeline overview, Inkwell can label their sponsor leads for The Pitch by priority and track them through the sales process. They’re able to easily see where each deal is in the pipeline and use automated reminders to schedule follow-ups so that deals don’t go cold.
By using sales metrics such as leading goals, Inkwell knows what activities they need to be doing to reach their targets, ensuring they have enough tasks at each stage of the pipeline to fund each cycle of The Pitch, as well as the sales process and their constant outreach for the content side of the business.
The results
Chris says Pipedrive has provided a consistent user experience for his team, encouraging everyone to use it to gain maximum value from the information they gather.
When it comes to his experience with Pipedrive, Chris is clear: “I’ll always recommend Pipedrive—we talk to a lot of start-ups and it’s a brilliant tool for that kind of company.”
Chris GoodfellowCEO