Forto is “Building the Backbone of Global Trade” and transforming the freight forwarding business with an intuitive platform to book, manage and analyze global transports easily. Demodesk helped Forto's Inside Sales team to increase productivity by 10%. The team was able to completely automate cross-team scheduling, improve local attribution of leads to decentralized sales teams, and significantly reduce no-shows for their product demos. Read in the case study how Forto uses Demodesk to scale inside sales.

Forto drives digitalization in freight forwarding

Forto is Europe’s fastest-growing digital freight service provider to manage global transports. Their vision is to “build the backbone of 21st-century global trade.” To achieve this goal, Forto offers its customers an easy-to-use platform solution with that customers manage the entire supply chain from instant quotation, online booking, document management, track and trace all the way to proactive exception handling and supply chain data analytics.

Just recently, Forto closed a Series B funding round. One of their key investors is Maersk, the world’s biggest and most future-focused sea freight carrier. In addition, Forto has now its own IATA license and a solid partner network that consists of more than 200 shippers, evolving them to the leading European digital forwarder for sea and air freight between Europe, Asia, and North America. Founded in Berlin in 2016, Forto now has offices in Hamburg, Cologne, and Hong Kong as well as a tech hub in Porto to develop best-in-class freight-forwarding services for more than 1,500 global customers like Miele, Viessmann, or home24.

Digital startup meets old-fashioned industry

Today, the logistics industry is still characterized by offline operations that rely on outdated, manual, and paper-based legacy systems. Forto tackles these challenges with a seamless digital solution. In addition to offline sales meetings, Forto leverages Demodesk as a key tool to introduce its platform and onboard new customers.

Prospect customers receive an online demo of Forto’s platform via Demodesk. Their platform combines a vast number of features in one tool to tackle individual customer needs. Additionally, the freight forwarding process requires different steps and documents depending on the customer’s individual circumstances. A personalized demo is crucial to emphasize those parts of the product that are most relevant to the customer’s individual needs.

Challenge 1: Technical issues with joining and running the demo

Before using Demodesk, Forto’s sales team was frequently facing technical issues during product demos. Next to lags in video and audio transmission, the biggest issue was that the majority of buyers were non-technical and very often had difficulties in joining the demo with traditional online meeting tools. When finally in the meeting, connection issues gave the sales team a hard time delivering a professional product demo. This was critical because customers immediately associated a bad demo experience with Forto’s software and questioned the reliability of Forto’s platform.

"We’ve tried many different screen sharing tools but we weren’t happy with any of them. Demodesk finally solves the screen sharing pain. My sales reps are now 5-10% more productive each day. And Demodesk took our product demos to a more professional level."‍

Michael Wax, Co-Founder, and COO @ Forto

‍When Forto switched to Demodesk for its online product demos, those problems were eliminated. With Demodesk’s innovative Screen Sharing technology, Forto’s sales team is now able to deliver frictionless product demos and convince customers of the product and its reliability. The time saved through preventing technical issues allows the sales executives to be more productive and focus on what they can do best – consulting customers to face their challenges and demonstrating a great product.

Challenge 2: Manual and time-consuming scheduling and hand-off processes

The expansion of its partner network and customer base required Forto to grow its sales and customer success departments as well. When scaling sales, Forto’s sales team quickly ran into issues and limitations.

Forto structures its sales team in two sub-teams: Business Development Executives (BDE) and Account Managers (AM). BDEs establish the first contact with potential customers. When a prospect shows interest, the BDE schedules an online product demo with the respective AM. However, this process used to be tedious. First of all, the responsible sales executives were manually selected from a list containing all AMs at Forto based on numerous variables such as company size, language, location, etc. Then, the BDE manually sent a scheduling link accessing the calendar of the AM to the prospective customer. In addition to the correct area of responsibility, a balanced workload of all sales executives needs to be ensured. When done manually, this process did not only require a lot of time but also came along with human errors, imbalanced utilization, and inefficiencies.

"With Demodesk, it became much easier for our BDEs to schedule product demos and allocate prospects to the right AM based on their location and other variables. Besides time savings, Demodesk saved our AEs thousands of kilometers when traveling to offline meetings. We're able to save time, increase efficiency and eliminate human errors.”‍

Matthias Stammen, Sales & Growth Operations Manager @ Forto‍

‍Demodesk fully automates the scheduling process. The integration into Salesforce allows us to schedule an appointment in just a few clicks. Taking into account relevant company variables and workload of the AM, the Demodesk algorithm automatically hands-off the prospect to the right AM via intelligent round-robin scheduling - i.e. automatically assigns the meeting to an available team member. A personalized email invite is automatically being sent to the customer from the respective BDE’s account and custom reminders ensure that the prospect shows up for the demo. When the AE starts the demo, the relevant presentation content - including a customizable sales deck and Forto’s web app - is automatically loaded on the virtual display.

Particularly important to Forto was the ability to automatically segment customers and AMs into territories. Since AMs periodically also visit their customers in person, they need to be located in regional proximity to extensive traveling.

‍Results: Demodesk helped Forto increase conversion, efficiency, and accountability for Inside Sales. With Demodesk, the sales team’s productivity has increased by more than 10%.

Get in touch with one of our team members to see how much time we could save your team, giving them more time to do what they do best.