Revolut, a fintech company, is one of the most innovative and disruptive businesses in Europe. Founded in 2015, it has grown quickly to more than 25 million customers, including hundreds of thousands of active businesses.
Revolut sees financial services as the backbone of society and its goal is to make managing finances more user-friendly for as many individuals and businesses as possible.
Revolut began as a solution to a critical problem many people were facing—being charged a fortune for currency exchange. It launched as an app with negligible exchange fees and quickly started adding other mobile banking services its customers desired. Revolut’s mission to “unlock the power of a borderless economy for everyone” led to a holistic financial platform that helps users simplify and manage their finances.
While Revolut was streamlining the financial processes of millions of users, it needed a solution to help streamline the remote and asynchronous work processes of a quickly growing company. That’s when they met Slack.
Establishing, scaling and onboarding sales teams with a productivity platform
Interestingly, Revolut didn’t really have a proper sales department until 2020. It decided to establish one right as Covid forced everyone to work remotely.
“We launched B2B sales at Revolut in April 2020, so right at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. And we have onboarded almost a thousand salespeople globally within Revolut—all of them remotely,” says Matthew Acton Davis, the company’s VP of Global Sales.
Slack transformed Revolut’s remote processes. Within its productivity platform, the company created SMB and enterprise sales teams, hired account managers, and established a product sales executive team to optimize product activation.
Onboarding new employees at a fast-growing company is challenging, especially remotely. But Slack helped Revolut onboard new teammates efficiently and cultivate a vibrant company culture at the same time.
“We have a new cohort joining us every two weeks with almost 100 or so people in every cohort at this point,” says Acton Davis.
“We build Slack channels for these cohorts of new joiners so that they can build a culture and connections with their peers. Because, in reality, sales is an emotional role and, if you’re working on a fully remote basis, you need to have these connections with your team. So we really try and push our culture through Slack channels.”
“Sales is an emotional role and, if you're working on a fully remote basis, you need to have these connections with your team. So, we really try and push our culture through Slack channels.”
Moving from calls to asynchronous collaboration
The pandemic forced companies everywhere to re-evaluate their working habits and processes. As people worked from home, it became clear that efficient asynchronous work and collaboration are more important than ever.
“It’s been a struggle for all of us. It’s been a step change for most businesses. In addition, we have a tendency to stack video calls on top of video calls, which is a highly inefficient way of working,” says Acton Davis.
“In fact, we recently did an analysis and for every half-hour all-hands call that we have within the sales function, we lose about 10 weeks of sales time,” he adds.
As Revolut’s sales teams work in a highly distributed manner and have members based around the globe, it was clear that they needed to eliminate as many calls as possible and find a different solution.
Moving to asynchronous collaboration that empowers everyone to work at their own pace while staying in the loop was critical. “Slack has been fundamental in enabling us to do so,” Acton Davis emphasizes. Slack’s multiple collaboration features allowed the team to choose the most efficient way to communicate at any given moment.
“We recently did an analysis and, for every half-hour all-hands call that we have within the sales function, we lose about 10 weeks of sales time.”
Improving operational efficiency and productivity with workflows
“In order to do that, we focus on sales enablement and making sure that all of our salespeople are participating as strongly as possible,” says Acton Davis.
One of the tools they use is a custom workflow in Slack allowing salespeople to raise questions related to products, sales processes, sales skills and more. The sales team then feeds the data from the workflow into their sales enablement process to continuously improve it with trending queries and fresh answers.
Another custom workflow gathers customers’ questions and product queries in its own dedicated channel. This workflow allows Revolut to categorize these issues so the salespeople can spend less time dealing with operational matters and have time to focus on sales.
“The next goal for us is to conflate and centralize all of these different workflows to have one single point of escalation and one single point of truth for all the customer issues our sellers and customers encounter,” says Acton Davis.
Combining Slack and Salesforce to further streamline processes
Revolut’s instance of Salesforce was launched just six months ago, making the company a Salesforce newcomer. When choosing its CRM, Revolut looked at three key areas. Slack played a key role when selecting Salesforce.
1) Customization. Salesforce’s opportunity process can be completely customized for Revolut and the features the platform has.
2) Automation. Sales teams can further streamline work and ensure that sales reps have to do as little process work as possible. Salesforce’s sales engagement products and apps like Einstein (which enables activity capture) fits Revolut’s needs. Slack has already helped the company cut routine tasks with custom workflows and the possibilities become even more flexible and powerful with the Salesforce integration.
3) Integrations. “That’s key with Slack and also with Salesforce. There’s a huge array of partner applications and this third-party network is fantastic,” says Acton Davis. Revolut is integrating its customer onboarding process and its financial crime team with Slack and Salesforce so the team can further streamline processes and take further advantage of Customer 360.
“There’s a huge array of partner applications and this third-party network is fantastic.”
Looking forward to making work even easier with Slack
Revolut has big plans for canvases, a feature in Slack that was announced at Dreamforce 2022. The team feels that the newest addition to Slack’s arsenal of collaborative capabilities will make negotiating large customer deals even more streamlined.
Acton Davis highlights the huge value canvases will bring through enhanced transparency and cross-functional alignment. He is sure that canvases are going to continue to further evolve how people at Revolut engage with their productivity platform. “That there’s a single point of truth for all of these conversations so we’re all aware of what we’re working on is going to change the way we work,” says Acton Davis.
