Case Study: Unicorn Go1 leverages Salesforce to support global expansion

Online marketplace for workplace training courses Go1 has invested in CRM and collaboration tools to support its global expansion.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Vu Tran, co-founder of the Aussie unicorn about the benefits of the Salesforce CRM system in supporting Go1’s growth.

“One of the big challenges for us, like any company that's growing in our rate is being able to manage that growth. In our world growth is sales. So having a really effective CRM that can help us track sales, track opportunities, track leads, but also do that across multiple different localities is really important,” said Vu.

According to Vu, Go1 chose to implement Salesforce as its CRM knowing the organisation’s plans to scale.

“We need something that was scalable, that could be used across multiple different regions and was something that would be able to plug into either existing or future platforms that we might use that might complement out your traditional CRM as well.”

While Go1 considered other martech providers, including Hubspot, Close.io and even open source CRM platforms, Vu said that choosing Salesforce came down to salespeople's familiarity with the product and its clean integrations with other tools.

“That sales stack is evolving all the time and making sure you've got something that's going to be able to integrate with a future sales stack, not just a current one is incredibly important,” he said.

Go1 was already using Slack as its key collaboration tool before Salesforce acquired the company last year, said Vu.

“What was really interesting with Slack is we organically grew into it. So, we used a communication tool called HipChat really early on, which was a product that came as part of the Atlassian suite for project management.

"If you've used JIRA or Confluence before, HitChat then merged with Slack and so we became Slack users and customers, and the experience increased from there,” he said.

Slack’s CTO Cal Henderson told Digital Nation Australia that email is still dominant, and Vu agreed that Go1 employees use different communication tools for different purposes.

"There are some places where you need to use an email, say for example, important policies and those sorts of things versus Slack communications. Live communication has been really useful for our global calls and our global standups to be able to get the feedback from people in real-time while we're having these conversations or doing these presentations live,” said Vu.