Oliver James is a global staffing and recruiting firm connecting top talent with leading organizations across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Their reps rely on a heavily customized Salesforce CRM to power their recruitment process and drive revenue growth.
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Oliver James couldn't see how their global workforce was actually using their customized Salesforce CRM, leading to workflow abandonment, inefficient training processes, and missed revenue opportunities across different time zones and regions.
With Pendo Analytics and segmented in-app guides, Oliver James pinpointed workflow friction, personalized training by region and role, and transformed its decision-making culture from opinion-based to data-driven.
With Pendo's behavioral insights and targeted guidance, Oliver James increased workflow completion by 15%, eliminated weeks of manual webinars, and accelerated their recruitment process—realizing revenue faster than ever.
A company’s ultimate asset is its people. A great product, strong intellectual property (IP), consistent business performance—these things matter, but they’re all upheld by a company’s people.
As a global staffing and recruiting firm, Oliver James understands this. Their reps, located in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, work tirelessly to connect the right people with the right companies. And to do their jobs, they use a heavily customized version of Salesforce.
But as any global enterprise knows, employee training is expensive and time-consuming. Should Oliver James gather their workforce into a (virtual) room to talk through 90 minutes of soon-to-be-forgotten content?
Alec Dewell, senior product manager, had another idea—one that would help them increase Salesforce adoption, workforce productivity, and revenue growth.
Oliver James’ CRM platform is the backbone of their recruitment process. It’s built on Salesforce, with homegrown developments to support bespoke workflows.
As Dewell put it, “Our CRM tool is the digitization of our entire sales process. It’s guiding people to work in the Oliver James way.”
But improving CRM adoption has long proved challenging. They didn’t know how reps were using Salesforce or where they were getting stuck. Thankfully, Pendo Analytics shed light on employee usage, workflow adoption, and the paths users were taking.
“In Salesforce, you can’t see what happens after reps create an opportunity. With Pendo, we could map out workflows and see what employees were actually doing,” Dewell explained. Dewell’s team uncovered points of friction in workflows, including a major drop off in a key workflow.
After gathering in-app feedback and speaking to users, Dewell got to the root of the problem: The form required information employees didn’t have yet, so they were abandoning workflows. By fixing this, Dewell increased workflow completion by 15%, sped up the recruitment process, and realized revenue faster.
Another core challenge Dewell’s team faced was the ability to effectively communicate with their global, distributed workforce. The team couldn’t automate and scale onboarding and enablement, and they were stuck taking a one-size-fits-all approach to sales support.
“We released training resources to all of our reps exactly the same way,” Dewell explained. “We couldn’t base training on employee location or role.”
“We'd add a really valuable feature, and reps would give us good feedback. But trying to get the entire team to adopt that feature or change that workflow was an around-the clock-effort,” Dewell said.
Pendo changed all that with its powerful, segmented in-app guidance capabilities.
“Before Pendo, communicating and enabling change would take me two weeks of hosting seven or eight webinars across different time zones.”
-Alec Dewell, senior product manager
To help their recruiters best use Salesforce, Dewell’s team used in-app guides in three ways: segmenting guides by use case, promoting compliance, and highlighting new functionality.
“We built an onboarding walkthrough that shows new users key features and functions. We also personalized guides by region to support users with unique workflows,” Dewell explained. “Both our sales team and operational teams work in Salesforce, so it’s really important to tailor the guides and communication style to suit.”
They also created guides to promote compliance and reduce risk. “One major way this shows up for us was around AI features. We remind our employees to check AI-powered summaries,” said Dewell.
Gone are the days of weeks-long, rolling manual webinars. Now, sales support and enablement is not only quick and scalable—it’s targeted.
As Oliver James continues to use Pendo, they’re turning to other areas of the platform to guide its internal product roadmap. Dewell’s team even gathers feedback from reps and runs tests to gauge if they’re focused on the right work.
“If we've got a potential solution—like a UI layout—we're not 100% sure about, we can use Pendo to get feedback with in-app guides. It's helped us generate ideas, and then validate potential solutions,” Dewell said.
They’re also using Pendo to gather a wide range of feedback informed by in-app behavior, like adoption. “If we launch a new feature, we check in and see what can be improved or what they love about it,” Dewell said. By segmenting in-app feedback requests based on usage data, the team can understand the behaviors of superusers, while also tapping into pain points they might not have noticed.
Pendo has proved invaluable thanks to its rich analytics and behavioral insights—from seeing which employees are engaging in different processes, to where they’re getting stuck, to how long workflows take to complete.
While Oliver James used to rely on a team of business analysts to manually pull usage insights, Pendo gives Dewell’s team critical data almost instantly.
With actionable insights at their fingertips, the company has been able to change its culture around decision making and prioritize data over opinions when it comes to deciding what actions to take.
“If we've got a data-related question, we'll just go in and check Pendo. Often when I'm working with a colleague, I’ll find myself asking, ‘What does Pendo say?’ That's the phrase we use quite a lot: ‘What's Pendo saying?”
For the Oliver James team, the value of Pendo is clear: Speeding up onboarding, lowering training costs, and getting more ROI out of the software they invest in.
“People used to complain about the amount of change,” Dewell recalled. “With Pendo, we're releasing more features, but it doesn't feel that way to employees. We can be really targeted with how we release things, and use guides to engage the right people.”
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