Improving our Sales Processes with Automation

I always preferred The Jetsons to The Flintstones, simply because the idea of going to work, hitting a button, and letting automation run sounded like a really nice gig! 

I've spent most of my career finding ways to automate my job and really anything that seemed silly to do manually more than once. While the type of systems I automate has changed over the years from fleets of servers to business process automation, the principles are still the same. 

At Caylent, in addition to working closely with our sales team as a Customer Solutions Architect (CSA), I've spent time building automation around our sales process that's continued to evolve into a neat little project.

We have a unique Slack bot named after Caylent's favorite mascot, Steve, who plugs into our very heavy Slack usage to make our lives a little easier while maintaining important processes and standards. 

From humble beginnings as a closed-won announcer, Steve quickly evolved to:

• Create purpose-built Slack channels to follow our standard process for our opportunity and project channels
• Remind our sellers of important upcoming events for their opportunities
• Celebrate our sales wins and delivery contributions to sales at the end of the week 
• Improve the workflow for our CSA team while increasing visibility into our proposal review process
• Track legal document approvals and surface any document to our leadership that has sat unaddressed for too long
• Provide our delivery teams with more context about new engagements which sets them up for success in serving our clients

In addition to making lives easier by managing Slack channels and providing helpful information, Steve provides a mechanism for our leadership to gather metrics that wouldn't be possible otherwise. With Steve automating much of our process, we have timestamps of specific activities taking place during the sales process. Using tools like Amazon QuickSight, allows our leadership to use the data Steve collects to glean detailed information about more granular parts of the process. Questions like, what’s the average number of proposals per CSA or a number of proposals per opportunity are now answerable as a by-product of Steve managing the process. 

I'll use our proposal review process as an example, it was a manual process that required a CSA to manually enter data into one or more Jira tickets and then keep track of the progress of those tickets. A typical CSA likely has about 2 - 3 proposals in review at all times that they have to keep track of while often working 4 - 5 opportunities a week, it's a lot to keep track of!

Before our automation:

• Jira tickets were filled out manually, usually in a slightly different way dependent on the CSA
• We had no way to tie a proposal review to an opportunity ID in Salesforce
• None of the process was visible to our sales team
• We didn't have good metrics that we were collecting about the process
• For projects spanning multiple practices, duplicate tickets would need to be created for each practice

The automation provided CSAs with a command in all opportunity Slack channels, that command would require the same information a CSA would normally need to fill out in a ticket. No new information was required from the CSA for this new process and in fact, it is an easier process to follow, even for new CSAs.