How Switching from Pipedrive to Close Streamlined Sales for ResQ Club

Each month, ResQ Club saves tens of thousands of meals from ending up in the trash bin, helping to reduce thousands of tons of carbon dioxide emissions. 

How? 

This Finnish company connects sustainable restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores with consumers who appreciate eating affordable, quality food.

When food service providers have a surplus of food, they sell it on the ResQ Club platform, creating a win-win solution that prevents food from going to waste and gives those businesses an additional revenue stream. 

ResQ Club has used Close to streamline its sales operations for the past six years. In that time, it has seen a 50% increase in customers and is currently expanding into exciting new segments and territories. Learn how finding the right CRM helped this small, scaling business speed up its growth faster than ever before. 

How ResQ Club Sells

The ResQ Club sales team's goal is to attract new business partners. So far, 3,000 sustainable food businesses have used their platform, and new partners are added daily.  

Their sales process is powered by inbound signups from their website, which keep most of the team busy. These leads sign up on their website as new partners and the goal of the sales reps is to get these new signups to start using the platform consistently.

The team also has an outbound focus, building awareness among new businesses about their platform and signing them on as partners.

Whether inbound or outbound, ResQ Club can nurture these relationships using Close. But it wasn’t always so easy. 

The Problem: The Multi-Tool Sales Shuffle

Venla Wiik is the Country Director for Germany at ResQ Club and was previously Head of Sales. When she joined the company six years ago, they used the CRM, Pipedrive. The hope was Pipedrive would solve the pain of managing a sales process, but using an underpowered CRM just introduced different problems.

First, they needed to use a separate project management software, Trello, to plan their different sales processes. Then they would use Pipedrive to manage their customer data. 

Pipedrive also couldn’t make calls directly within the CRM. Eventually, the decision was made to switch to a CRM that could streamline operations and allow their sales team to move faster. 

“Once we switched from Pipedrive to Close, the biggest difference was that we could do everything within the same tool. We couldn’t make the calls directly from Pipedrive. It made our sales process a lot faster-paced compared to what it was like before.”
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– Venla Wiik 
Country Director, Germany, ResQ Club

The Migration: From Pipedrive to Close

Let’s face it: no one looks forward to switching tools in business. The idea of migrating your entire customer database from one platform to another would cause anyone to wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat.

But Venla says the support her team received from Close kept the switch from becoming a nightmare and made the migration as painless as possible. 

“We were able to easily import all the old leads from Pipedrive to Close. There was some data that wasn’t immediately updated, but we had support from Close solving that for us.”
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– Venla Wiik 
Country Director, Germany, ResQ Club

Venla keeps it real and says not everything went perfectly with the data migration—for example, there was an error in which the country prefix codes weren't updating correctly. But she says, “Whenever we noticed something was a bit off, we notified Close about it. It was resolved really quickly.”

She also offers these words of encouragement to other businesses dreading a CRM switch: “You might think that it’s going to be time-consuming and not easy, but in the end, if all the work is done in the background together with the company, you’re doing the switch with, I think the end result is good. [It helps] when you have the support from the company you’re doing the switch with.”

Once everyone on the ResQ Club team had been onboarded to Close, Venla says, “All of our sales reps were very happy with Close just after a couple of weeks.”  

Awww, shucks. 🥹

How ResQ Club Uses Close

Their seven-person sales team finds the most value in these Close features:

• Built-in phone call functionality 
• Call recording and AI note-taking
• Unified inbox (email, call, and SMS messages all in one view)
• Custom fields
• Integrations to their internal tools make automation seamless 

They also find a ton of value in Close’s Workflows. In the Before Close (B.C.) days, Venla and the team would use Trello to plan their sales process and then use Pipedrive to find customer contact info. But Close’s Workflows replaced the need for two separate tools. Now, they can combine sales process management with customer data—all in one place.

With Close, ‎sales teams can build different sales processes in Workflows to create customized multi-channel sales outreach. You can trigger automated email, SMS, and phone call steps on your Workflows—tailored to as many different sales processes as you can dream up—to make sure all your leads are moving along at exactly the pace you need. 

For leads that have been in their CRM for longer periods of time, ResQ Club has Workflows customized for follow-up actions like calls and emails. Venla says, “It ensures that you go through the whole process with the lead to follow the lead from the beginning to the end. The Workflow makes it smooth and easy to make sure that you do all the needed actions in the order that you planned to do them.”

Scaling Beyond Food and Finland

In the past six years, ResQ Club has increased the number of businesses on their platform from 2,000 to 3,000—an impressive 50% gain while retaining a small, nimble team. They’ve found so much success in their mission to reduce food waste that they’re expanding into a new segment: flowers. 

The carbon footprint from surplus flower waste is huge, so ResQ Club has its sights set on tackling this challenge next. They’ve already partnered with 50 flower shops and hope to grow that number in the next year. 

Venla is also overseeing an expansion into the German market, which will bring sustainable dining solutions to a whole new territory. 

We predict a lot of growth in ResQ Club’s future, and we’re excited to watch this team achieve its mission of reducing waste and making the world a better place. 🌎