Virtual Sales Talks: How TrustRadius Uses iSEEit to Overcome The Lack of Insight from Custom Fields and Rapidly Increase Alignment in a Sales Team

In this episode of our Virtual Sales Talks, we sit down with Alex de Mocskonyi, Sales Operations Manager at TrustRadius. We find out how iSEEit has enabled his sales teams to overcome the lack of insight due large amounts of data entered into custom fields on Salesforce, to help them draw meaningful conclusions to plan next steps.

Watch the video below and find out how the iSEEit Opportunity Management Tool has facilitated quick alignment between sales reps, managers and executive management at TrustRadius, allowing them to call their opportunities and deals with greater confidence. A full transcript of this interview is also available.

In today’s episode we cover:

• Introduction to TrustRadius
• What is the Main Challenge of Building Custom Fields in Salesforce
• How has iSEEit Changed Your Teams’ Working Habits?
• Conducting Win-Lose Analyses with iSEEit
• How does iSEEit Benefit Executive Management?
• How does iSEEit Benefit Sales Reps and Managers?
• Advice to Companies Evaluating iSEEit
• Conclusion
• Implementing iSEEit on Salesforce

Introduction

Alex de Mocskonyi: My name is Alex de Mocskonyi and I am currently leading sales and business operations at TrustRadius. TrustRadius is essentially the Yelp of enterprise software. It empowers buyers and sellers by helping buyers make educated decisions on software to source enabling sellers to understand better and have more transparent feedback on their products.

What is the Main Challenge of Building Custom Fields in Salesforce?

Alex de Mocskonyi: In the past, what the sales teams were doing to operationalize MEDDPICC in Salesforce was to build a handful of custom fields where they would try to gather the information for all the elements of MEDDPICC on the opportunity records. It just didn’t have any valued-add for management or for the sales reps.

The more rigid you go with rules in this kind of information system, the more you’re gonna see data being thrown in there just to meet a requirement. At that point, it’s a waste of time and a headache down the road because you don’t have good data to analyze.

Salespeople just want to close the deal and make their money and I get it. So, I wanted to hand something to the VP of Sales that would let him better evaluate pipeline and forecast health but also something that the Account Executives and Account Managers can look at and understand the true pulse of their deal.

How has iSEEit Changed Your Teams’ Working Habits?

Alex de Mocskonyi: What happened on a weekly basis was that we would do a forecast and pipeline review with our AEs and AMs. In the past, we would take all these different things that they were filling out on Salesforce. Each rep had a copy of an Excel sheet that they filled out with a new tab for each deal to calculate the MEDDPICC score of that deal. It really was the clunkiest way to do this. The worst thing about it to me was that there was no way to track and see progress week over week.

The kind of prep work that you would anticipate having to do without a tool like would be as follows: I need to look at their notes, I’m going to go through the opportunity and look at all the notes, view the past activities and events that are logged in Salesforce and maybe even go into Chorus and listen to the call that they had before. You have to do some homework before you get on this call (forecast and pipeline review) right?

This (iSEEit Opportunity Management Tool) gives us a way to accomplish that a lot quicker. We’re able to jump in there and see ok here’s our champion, whom I know I can talk to a little bit more freely on the phone. Or, this is our point of contact but they’re really skeptical so I need to be a lot more conservative there. It gives us the ability to all be aligned and lockstepped before we get on those calls.

Specifically for us, identifying more of those contact roles and getting more clarity into that has been the biggest win for us. You could do it before with the built in contact roles but with the Org Chart in the iSEEit Opportunity Management Tool and the additional information that can be added to those contact roles – the pulse of each contact, how they feel about us, whether they’re neutral or they’re a champion etc.- that has been one of the biggest value-adds for us.

Conducting Win-Lose Analyses with iSEEit

Alex de Mocskonyi: We can look back and we can see Closed-Won versus Close-Lost. We can see the reason that this deal was torpedoed was because we had this contact role on this opportunity that was really against it. On the flip side, we can also see this is why we’re winning here. We have this champion who has this role and seniority in the company, who sees the value and buys in quickly and we need to focus in the future on doing things like this and avoiding things on the flip side.

One of the big things that I really try to drive in Salesforce and in operations is making sure that we leave a really good paper trail. If we have to look back, we can learn from it because there’s a lot of ways that you can look back without a tool like this that aren’t going to give you a whole lot of an idea of why things went wrong.

How does iSEEit Benefit Executive Management?

Alex de Mocskonyi: Forecasting. Before, it was really tough for him (VP of Sales). On a weekly basis and sometimes even more, he would have to go back and forth with his AEs and AMs to ask about deals and the pulse of those deals. Now, it’s as easy as him getting a report that I’ve put together for him that is powered by iSEEit. He can go through that prior to the weekly forecast call with the AEs and the AMs and reference it anytime he wants to and see where things are at.

How does iSEEit Benefit Sales Reps and Managers?

Alex de Mocskonyi: Forecasting. I love Salesforce. But there’s just not a lot that they give you out of the box that allows you to have not just the granular view of a deal, but also see how that translates into your total pipeline and forecast. This (iSEEit Opportunity Management Tool) really helps us do a sanity check on these deals. For example, if an opportunity is sitting in legal, that’s going to be a probability of 90%, which would place the opportunity in the “Commit” forecast category. What’s the iSEEit score? Let’s do a reality or a sanity check. If the iSEEit score is less than 7o%, no we’re not going to have that in “Commit”. We need to bump that back to “Best Case” or just back to “Pipeline” in general. We need to be able to call what we’re calling with confidence and iSEEit gives not just the reps, but also the sales leader the ability to call stuff with confidence.

Advice to Companies Evaluating iSEEit

Alex de Mocskonyi: What I would say to other operations leaders is if you have any hesitations or reservations, look at what potential value this tool could add to your business and think about if it’s really worth trying to put everything together custom – all the time that that could take, all the trial and error – when you can source a tool like this at an excellent price point that’s easy to set up. This was done over the weekend. We had this up and running literally over the weekend.

Conclusion

Alex de Mocskonyi: What you get for what you give is going to be the biggest value proposition. It’s not an unreasonable price point and you get so much out of the tool. I can’t stress that enough. That’s not something that’s always the reality for someone in my seat. Typically, you’re always going to be looking at a massive project to get something like this up and running. The ease of use not just for the end user, but also the admin, is unprecedented. You want this kind of tool to be a value-add to both the manager and the subordinate. if either one of those parties is not benefiting, then it’s not worth it. But the iSEEit Opportunity Management Tool benefits both.

Implementing iSEEit on Salesforce

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