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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.

The moment you have more than one or two contact points for someone in a spreadsheet, it gets crazy. Imagine if you have eight points of contact and you’re trying to remember what they all are and the details about the person, all of a sudden your spreadsheet’s running to twenty columns and it’s really hard to sort and see what’s going on.
CG

Chris GoodfellowCEO

A lot of events companies that I’ve worked with in the past have most of that in their heads and they rely on asking each other, and we definitely do that too, but at the end of the day if you don’t put that info into a system, it doesn’t give you long term value. We grew turnover 167% between our first year, when we were using a spreadsheet, and second, when we switched to Pipedrive. We also doubled the size of our pipeline. We've grown 35% year-on-year this year, in spite of the recession.
CG

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.”

I’m quite process orientated, and I love spreadsheets, but that’s not the case for everyone. The move to Pipedrive made it so much more user friendly, so it’s more likely people will use it and use it in the right way, and we’re more likely to get the value out of the work they do.
CG

Chris GoodfellowCEO

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