Scaling sales: How Usado reduced their sales ops costs by 25%

A high-volume/low-margin business

All those creative companies coming up with surprising solutions to improve otherwise stagnated industries through digital technologies is what makes the tech industry so fascinating these years.

One of those companies is Usado. 

They’ve created a digital P2P car trading platform that gives you the security and convenience of a traditional car dealer while keeping prices competitive. 

With Usado’s digital platform, customers don’t have to pay for fancy glass buildings, sales commissions and Italian coffee machines. Instead, Usado has created a scalable, digital model for trading cars. The buyers receive all the same guarantees of quality and conditions as they would otherwise, while the seller gets to keep more money for themselves. That’s the beauty of a digital solution. It’s simple and efficient.

Since Usado is a high-volume/low-margin business that earns less per sale than their analog competitors, they must optimize their processes to ensure their business is scalable and efficient. 

That’s why they turned to Contractbook. Their goal was to reduce man-hours spent on manual tasks in the sales process. 

Efficient sales workflows

The solution looked something like this:

When a prospective seller contacts Usado via their website, a deal is automatically created in their CRM system (in this case, Pipedrive), and a welcome email is sent to the seller. 

From then, the deal moves through the stages outlined in Usado’s CRM. Each stage is associated with either an automation or a simple drag-and-drop action in Usado’s CRM. 

After the completion of the first task, the seller needs to provide some data about the car and agree on a fair asking price. Then the deal stage is updated in the CRM, and a power-of-attorney is auto-generated for the seller to sign. The signature triggers two new auto-generated contracts with some further formalities around tests and mortgages. When those agreements are signed, the deal stages are automatically updated in Pipedrive, and Usado is ready to trade the car. 

Once a buyer is found, new buyer and seller agreements are auto-generated through Contractbook based on Usado templates. When they are signed, the deal is marked as done in their CRM, the bank receives the notice it needs, and the change of ownership executes. 

It sounds complicated, but in reality, it’s pretty straightforward. 

To put it in simpler terms: Through integration with their CRM (in this instance Pipedrive, but it also works with HubSpot and Salesforce), the creation of new contracts is automated through a chain of triggers. And once the contract is signed, we automatically update the deal stage in their CRM.

In that way, Usado can manage their sales operations workflow with very few manual touchpoints while keeping a complete overview of the process. Around half of the tasks associated with a deal are automated. The rest of their workflow is narrowed down to drag-and-drop tasks.

Saving time and money

As mentioned above, the goal was to reduce man-hours spent on manual tasks in the sales process. According to Lennart Fenger, the founder and managing director of Usado, they managed to reach that goal. 

Usado has calculated an astounding reduction in working hours and costs associated with each sale. Working hours have been reduced by a 30%, which has led to a 25% reduction in costs associated with each transaction. This has enabled them to increase their profit margins in a very competitive market. 

In addition, this automated flow reduces the risk of human error. There is no risk of typos or oversights when there is no manual data entry. 

Last but not least, this professional and digital setup also reduces the effort for Usado’s customers, which increases their confidence and trust in the company.

As Fenger puts it: “It is a very nice customer experience that gives them peace of mind.” 

Fueling sales with automation

Usado’s setup is pretty advanced. The principle, however, has shown to be brilliant for companies with all sorts of needs. In fact, this type of automation is the most popular and widely used contract automation setup on Contractbook. 

We specialize in creating tailored workflows that enable sales teams to auto-create contracts from templates and CRM data in seconds. We can also give you a real-time data flow between your CRM system and your contract management. Whether you use HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce, you can minimize the time spent on data input, copy/pasting, contract drafting, and other tedious manual tasks. 

Contractbook also integrates with the communications tools of your choice, so you get the chance to celebrate deals and inform all the important stakeholders about the next steps. 

Usado saved 30 % of the time spent on sales processes—time they can spend optimizing their business. How much can you save? 

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