Dynamic Yield is a Personalization Anywhere™ Platform working with industry leaders across eCommerce, finance, iGaming, travel, and publishing to deliver individualized experiences at every customer touchpoint, be it web, apps, email, kiosks, IoT, call centers, or any other digital interface. The company’s website lists renowned enterprise brands such as Urban Outfitters, IKEA, Brooklinen, and Hallmark. Understanding each business has its own unique set of needs when it comes to the customer experience, the Sales team at Dynamic Yield believes in leveraging the entire organization’s braintrust to help close complex deals.

When we started Troops, our original goal was to make business software easier to use. We spend so much of our lifetimes at work that the tools we use to do our jobs shouldn’t be cumbersome or confusing. They should look and feel like the applications we use outside of the workplace, which are easy, intuitive, and mirror our natural human behaviors like conversation (in the form of messaging).

Lucid is a market research platform connecting companies like Verizon, HubSpot, LiveRamp, and BCG to consumers. They take a hands-on approach to helping their customers target the right audiences and understand what their survey insights mean.

Scout RFP is a strategic sourcing solution that’s dedicated to giving companies like Biogen, Levi’s, Netflix, and Uber the visibility they need to make better decisions and get better results.

Stack Overflow is the largest and most trusted online community for developers and technologists, with more than 50 million unique visitors each month. Stack Overflow’s products include a core SaaS knowledge management and collaboration tool called Teams, an advertising business, and a hiring and employer branding tool called Stack Overflow Talent.

With a massive online presence and three lines of business, it’s no wonder that they’re serious about pushing the boundaries of what they can glean from their data and processes.

Recently, Stack Overflow made massive improvements in their data visibility and process efficiency using Troops. Troops workflows helped them. . .

Frontline managers have some of the most difficult jobs in sales.

You manage anywhere from four to eight sales reps on a day-to-day basis, helping them win deals and grow their careers. Meanwhile, you’re handling exceptions, monitoring the pipeline, reporting sales forecasts up to executives, and bringing new initiatives back to the team.

Exceptional frontline managers do all of that and more, all while hitting their numbers. But we know from experience that it’s not easy.

To help sales management get ahead, we talked with customers and our own frontline leaders about their challenges. Then, we brainstormed some tactics you can use to:

You dedicated your 2020 sales kickoff to rolling out MEDDIC. Everything went off without a hitch. Your sales team hit the ground humming about the new sales methodology. Then, one month out . . . crickets.

Or perhaps you spent over $30,000 bringing in a sales trainer to get your team up to speed on MEDDIC. The trainer was a big hit with your sales reps and managers. Yet, three weeks later, only a handful of your reps are filling out MEDDIC fields, and managers are back to their old ways. Sound familiar?

It doesn’t matter how you roll out MEDDIC to your sales team. If you ignore these oft-overlooked challenges (and how to sidestep them), your MEDDIC initiative will inevitably fail.

*Note: While this article focuses on implementing MEDDIC, the challenges and recommendations we bring up also apply to many other sales methodologies.

In the past few years, Zendesk brought its sales forecasts from 25% accuracy to beat the 5% industry standard and achieve an astonishing 1%. How?

The company owed the improvement in large part to implementing MEDDPICC, a variation of the MEDDIC sales methodology. Along with a second variation, MEDDPIC, each methodology provides a powerful foundation and common language for qualifying sales opportunities.

All three methods help sales teams home in on the best deals and make sure they close, but in slightly different ways.

The word that keeps coming up again and again on every leadership call I’ve been on is “agility.”

"You can only manage what you measure” - Peter Drucker

Companies everywhere are trying to get a grasp on how—and how much— the coronavirus pandemic is impacting their business, so they can make short and long term adjustments.

And though this quote might feel a bit cliche, it has never been more true!

One of the amazing aspects of working at Troops is that we’re able to see how some of the top companies in the world are instrumenting and operationalizing their go-to-market (GTM) motions.

In this post, we’re going to cover various ways we’re seeing teams adjust their CRM to capture information related to COVID so they can remain agile, coordinated, and productive during this crisis.

“Another COVID-19 email…”

Like many of you, I continue to receive emails from company leaders about what they are doing about COVID-19.

For internet companies, we’re hearing about people working from home.

For local stores, we’re hearing about businesses completely closing.

In all cases, there are people like you at every one of these companies trying to figure out how to navigate this new world.

Outside sales reps deal with challenges on the road that most office-bound reps rarely think about — what to wear, where to go, how to get there, and when to report back add multiple layers of complexity to sales.

The challenges don’t stop there, however. Many reps struggle to get quality sales information into their CRM during the day (and the last thing anyone wants to do is spend the evening in Salesforce). What’s more, they work apart from the rest of the sales team and miss out on the same progress reports and motivators their peers get in the office.

It’s also difficult for sales managers who are trying to give them guidance from afar.

Spotinst automates cloud infrastructure to improve performance, reduce complexity, and optimize costs. The company has a consumption-based revenue model that can offer customers significant savings when compared to traditional cloud infrastructure costs.

When it comes to sales forecasting, people usually talk about the big five forecast data points: forecast category, stage, amount, next step, and close date. Problem is, while these data points are enough to create a sales forecast, they’re not enough to ensure the forecast is realistic.

Companies spend a lot of money on sales kickoff meetings. They often drop $1,000-$2,000 a sales rep on the event alone. Add in travel and entertainment and that cost increases by at least $1,500-$2,000 per rep.

It’s no surprise then that companies seek a return on this investment. They want their SKOs to rally the troops around a new product, new pricing, new packaging, or a new sales process that’s going to make 2020 a massive success.

The problem is while SKOs are great for building excitement and initial momentum, they’re not so good at teaching and reinforcing new, long-lasting behaviors.

Imagine going to college for two days and expecting to learn everything you need to know for your degree. Then add bright lights, emotional speakers, a whirlwind of new information, and an array of food and drink. It’s a miracle you get out with the knowledge you need to immediately start executing on a big, new initiative.

Now consider the abysmal statistics for retaining what you were able to pick up. A whopping 85%-90% of training just floats away after only 120 days, sometimes sooner. Where does it go? Who knows.

So, you’re about to announce a major initiative at your SKO, and you 100% need your sales team to execute on it when it’s over. How do you make that happen?

You reinforce it.

Reinforcement ensures your sales team takes the things they learned at SKO and executes on them even after the event becomes a distant memory. Here’s how you can use Troops to create sales reinforcement that helps your team adopt the very behaviors they need to make your 2020 sales initiative a success.

When we started Troops we told people we wanted to make work easy. Turns out, when you’re building a company from scratch, it’s anything but easy. But over the past year, the Troops team kept marching on towards our mission and we’ve made great progress with hundreds of partners and thousands of people using Troops each and every day.

At Troops, we still want to make work easy and make work more human. As we enter a new decade, more than ever, the tools we use at work and the software we interact with to do our jobs should adapt to humans instead of requiring humans to adapt to outdated, hard to use software. 

In October 2019, at Slack Frontiers London, Slack and Salesforce announced availability of a deeper integration between Slack and Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds.

Frustration with pipeline updates

Like most reps, Nick Pompeo, an Account Executive at Looker, found updating his opportunities a burdensome and time-consuming task. There was often a batch process of updating his forecasts at the tail end of every quarter, leading to a spike in close date movements that made it difficult to make accurate predictions on whether or not deals would close at a stated time.

Many sales organizations spend a small fortune implementing a new sales process. For example, expect to pay a trainer $10,000-50,000 to teach the new process to a team of about 25 people for a few hours over a couple of weeks.

Once training’s over, it’s not uncommon for everyone to get excited about the new things they learned, only to eventually revert to their old ways without the sweeping changes you hoped for.

Sound familiar?

In speaking with our customers and other industry leaders, we discovered that getting sales teams to effectively adopt the new sales methodology once it’s rolled out is one of the biggest challenges sales leaders struggle to overcome.

Thankfully, there are ways to make adopting a new sales process easier for teams and leaders alike.

Proper documentation, proactive prompts, frequent inspections, leadership oversight, and automated workflows help ease some of the most common pitfalls that come with transitioning to a new sales process.

We’ve discussed this in previous posts, but the average discovery meeting costs over $700. In some enterprise environments, this number is a lot higher.

In the tech industry, we’ve seen plenty of absurd job titles such as “Full Stack Magician” and “Chief Heart Officer.” And let’s not forget copious use of the word “Ninja.”

Today, we’ve mostly outgrown titles such as the above. But new ones still continue to emerge often due to the requirements of the market and new functional skills.

Ask any sales rep on your team about validation rules, and they will probably start rolling their eyes.

2018 was a milestone year for Troops with tremendous year-on-year growth.

Companies that are winning are about delivering the ultimate customer experience.

Using a sales deck to present your product or service seems like a tradition as old as time. 

But recently, I've noticed a trend of reps diving straight into the product on the first call – without me asking.

The average first meeting for a B2B SaaS company today costs over $700. At many enterprise companies, it often costs a lot more.

About a month ago, I posed a (controversial) question on LinkedIn: 

Here at Troops, we’re always looking for new ways to optimize our own workflows to drive better sales processes and improve the way we coach our reps.

A rapidly growing team and traditional email alerts meant big communication gaps

Axiom Law, a leading tech-enabled legal services provider, certainly has had no problem growing. From a founding home base in New York City, Axiom has since opened 17 offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. While the growth has been exciting, communicating key business data - particularly Salesforce data - became a big challenge. “Teams were getting over 100 CRM emails a week for meeting and Opportunity notifications. It became incredibly cluttered and inefficient” said Ops team member Dylan Hofstetter. Because of this, important changes were being missed or ignored and kudos and shout-outs were clogging up inboxes.

LaunchDarkly, one of the fastest growing SaaS companies (according to the Cloud 100’s Rising Stars), found themselves running in circles in Salesforce. They desperately needed a better way to work together to close their most important accounts as quickly as possible.

Last year, our Co-Founder and CEO, Dan Reich, joined Harry Stebbings for an episode of the SaaStr Podcast. In the episode, Dan talks about how he found his way into the world of SaaS, ended up starting Troops, and built the ultimate Slack bot for sales teams.

Successful sales strategies require the right tools. That’s why we’ve created a step-by-step guide on how to implement Account Based Collaboration.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about what Account Based Collaboration is, why it’s important, and what type of companies should use it.

Previously, we talked about what Account Based Collaboration is and why it’s important.

Account Based Collaboration is a transformative approach to selling that has emerged in the last few years among forward-thinking B2B sales teams.

We’re excited to announce an additional $12m Series B funding round led by Aspect Ventures. Since closing the round, Troops has focused on R&D to build products that help sales teams work better together. Today we’re proud to introduce a new way to sell as a team by using Troops Deal Rooms to help win and expand your biggest accounts.

Dry sales pitches that list product features don’t close deals. Because people don’t relate to features—they relate to stories. And that’s why storytelling is such a powerful sales tool.

Sales teams are collaborating more than ever on Slack. But to get the most out of Slack for revenue generating teams, you need to leverage the full power of the Slack platform beyond just conversation.

As the Head of Customer Success Operations at Dynamic Yield, Rona Yang’s job is clear: equip her team with the tools they need to keep the clients using their personalization platform thriving. After joining the company in March of 2018, she realized much of her time would be spent building out processes to improve the reliability and performance of her team.

Manuel Harnisch is Head of Customer Success at network analytics provider Kentik. His team handles onboarding, continuous outreach, and renewals, with only about 10% of their time going to reactive support.

When executives assist on a deal, good things happen. People love to talk to someone in power and often they are able to elevate the conversation to the right people, with the right talk track.

Troops friends, family, partners, customers,

Salespeople are notorious for having rose-colored glasses and happy ears. Many think every deal will close—and at the highest possible number.

Any salesperson will tell you that being single-threaded is one of the biggest risks you subject yourself to in any given deal.

We revealed recently that 70% of sales teams using Slack have dedicated Slack channels to organize communication around specific accounts.

When you’re working a high-quality B2B deal, the biggest enemy to success is time.

Following up quickly with an inbound lead can make or break your deal.

Top organizations are using Slack for sales now more than ever.

We wanted to see in detail how — exactly — top sales teams use the platform, so we recently analyzed Slack sales usage at hundreds of B2B and B2C companies, including leading teams like HubSpot, WeWork, Slack, and Intercom.

Below, we dive into our findings, including 10 specific takeaways for any sales team using Slack.

Of the takeaways, this is the big one:

Some say a remote sales team can't work, but they're making it work at InVision — makers of a product design platform with a team of 190+ customer-facing employees spread across the globe working in sales, customer success, and enablement. And they’re constantly hiring.

Our Co-Founder & CEO, Dan Reich, has been interviewed for the SaaStr Podcast.
Here's the link to the iTunes SaaStr podcast. You can listen to Dan on Episode 195.

Five years ago, no one had ever heard of Slack.

Greg Merson has been working in Sales Operations at Contently for a year and a half and has been involved in sales operations a lot longer than that.

When Craig Rosenberg conducted training for sales reps at an enterprise software company, he pushed them to consider alternate points of contact to fill their sales pipeline.

If you’re like most sales professionals, you could probably describe your ideal customer profile in your sleep. And you know who is buying your product and why.

How much do top tech companies structure their sales compensation plans? The answer, it turns out, can vary widely.

In a past life, Andrew Berger was a minor-league baseball pitcher with dreams of the big leagues.

Tom Pae knows how salespeople can use Slack to close more deals.

How does Slack use Slack internally?

What does it look like to empower and equip a high-performance customer success team?

A few weeks ago, Troops launched our most anticipated functionality to date: Action Buttons.

In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of how Troops compares to other platforms, including InsightSquared, Clari, and other alternatives, for sales teams and managers looking for deeper insights into their Salesforce data.

“It’s next to impossible to get reps using Salesforce in the field...this has turned into a logistical nightmare”

The head of sales for a well-known, global company hit a major roadblock in summer 2017. He wanted his sales team to grow. At the time, he had around 125 reps on his team.

For Salesforce geeks like myself, building a new dashboard can be a very satisfying feeling.

Looking for a thorough sales plan template to get your sales process moving?

It's great if you can fill the top of the funnel, but you won't get far if your sales pipeline is a leaky bucket.

When your salespeople walk into the office every day do you think they get excited about shifting numbers around in a spreadsheet? Does the idea of building new sales models make them salivate? Do they talk to their friends about the 1 percent improvement in their close ratio? I don’t think so.

When was the last time you made a purchase from a cold call without any prior engagement with that company?

Creating a sales plan from scratch can be overwhelming. This can make it easy to overthink things.

A little over two years ago we were talking about the future of work in a little office on 60th and Madison. It seemed crazy to us that people were still complaining about the software they were using at work.

We’ve all walked into a deal review only to find some of the opportunities on the board have close dates in the past. 

Want to feel great?

Tell a customer that thing they had requested and really really really wanted is now live in your product.

I can’t be on every single call, but I want to know what’s going on!

Whether you’re a sales manager, rep trying to ramp quickly, or c-level executive, the reality is you can’t be everywhere listening to what customers are saying and keeping a tight pulse on the market.

Many companies have instituted a best practice often called “call reports” or “field notes” where they share notes and next steps from their sales meetings across the team.

Today, we’re going to show you how to automate that : )

Why Call Reports Are Huge

There are a ton of reasons why companies institute call reports:

• Management needs to understand what is going on with deals
• Making sure your team is asking the right questions & has next steps
• Collecting product feedback and sharing it with product teams
• Helping sales reps and account executives learn from each other

Asking someone to write a separate email and then put the information in Salesforce is often duplicative.

The additional friction often results in failure for the information to make it into Salesforce or be shared with the team.

With Troops workflow builder, we’re seeing more and more companies automate the dissemination of their call notes.

The outcome is a live feed of call notes that anyone on the team can subscribe to in order to see what is going on with their deals.

How to Get Started

We’ve created a simple template that you can use to get started immediately here.

All you need to do is designate what is indicative that a meeting was completed, select the information that you want to share, and the channel you want it to go to.

We recommend a dedicated #salescallreports for this workflow.

Additional best practices we recommend:

• Designating a certain call “type” in Salesforce to distinguish meetings from other activities
• Having your team highlight feature requests with all caps in their notes - FEATURE REQUEST
• Always finishing the calls with a NEXT STEPS

Pro tip: the notes even respect Slack formatting rules so you can @mention colleagues or bold/underline.

Across the board we’ve seen this workflow help organizations better manage their teams, become more customer driven, and speed up ramp time..

Get started with your own field reports live feed today!

Fact: following up with an inbound lead immediately after they reach out significantly increases your chances of success.

“So what are the next steps?”

At many companies, weekly meetings are dedicated to answering this question!

This is partially due to the fact this information is rarely documented accurately in your CRM.

Holding status meetings is certainly one approach. It just requires a lot of time and operational overhead that could be spent on customer activity - not to mention you can't report on it.

Ideally key details like next steps are updated frequently and stored so that anyone within the organization has visibility into this information at any time.

There are few interesting ways companies are leveraging Troops to ensure that their teams are:

1. Updating their next steps regularly
2. Adding next steps during critical junctures in a deal

Regular Next Step Updates Workflow

For routine next step updates, many companies have been leveraging our actionable Slack Salesforce report workflows.

These not only let you see an existing Salesforce report, but also drill into any record within a report and update it in-line.

By building a report in Salesforce any time a next step date is today, in the past or approaching, Troops can auto deliver this report and allow your team to easily make any required updates.

This concept of “insight + action” underpins everything we are building here and this workflow is a great example of this!

Updating Next Steps At Certain Deal Milestones

Some managers are only interested in next steps when an opportunity has reached a certain stage or milestone in their sales process.

In these instances, companies will take advantage of our “is empty” operator within our Slack Salesforce workflow builder to trigger a reminder to update next steps when a deal has reached a certain stage and a next step has not been added.

Both workflows work incredibly well and we're excited to be working with customers in order to provide additional functionality that will make it even easier to accomplish things like always keeping your next step up to date.

Want to learn more about these workflow and others? Send me an email : )

In the days where everyone has outbound automation robots at their disposal, cutting through the noise come down to one thing:

Once upon a time there were no giphys in the workplace...

“My AEs are showing up to calls asking questions my SDRs already answered”

More and more one of the things we've been noticing is how many Troops' power users there are in the C-Suite.

"The amount of Salesforce notifications emails and unnecessary reply-alls was getting out of control."

Meet Mike, a Sales Director at SmartRecruiters

Like a lot of companies, for a long time Mike & his team used email notifications to stay on top of things happening in Salesforce...like when someone closed a deal or assigned an account.

*We'll going to go in more detail below, but in case you want to know what happened you can check out the results here:

[slideshare id=75405189&doc=troopscasestudy1-170425205208]

Mike was frustrated because it seemed that almost 10% of his inbox was notifications from Salesforce accompanied by unnecessary reply-all emails they incited.

Having this in the same place he was trying to talk to customers was incredibly distracting.

"What if we could get these notifications in Slack? Our team was spending a ton of time there anyways."

Shortly after they found Troops, which makes it easy to centralize Salesforce workflow directly into Slack whether that’s notifications, reports, or updating your CRM.

The first place the team started was transitioning their closed-won notifications into opt-in Slack channels.

This way anyone from the company could be a part of celebrating the wins, whether they wanted to join in on the fun real-time or at the end of the day.

The result?

"I probably have 10% less noise in my inbox now which makes it easier to focus on revenue generating activities. The team also loves the gifs!"

Mike and the team were pumped.

The early response to the sales gong got the team thinking...

"We should set up some notifications to see other team milestones."

In fact, one of the challenges leadership had is seeing pipeline movement that needs their attention as it’s happening so they can step in if they need to.

A lot of times, they wouldn’t be notified of a coaching or help opportunity until the end of the week. At that point, it was often to late.

So they created a channel for leadership to show all pipeline movement as it happened using Troops Opp Stage notifications. This way they could view deal movement at any time in order to make sure they could step into when they needed to.

Since integrating this workflow, they’ve found that there’s at least 1-2 deals a week that requires immediate leadership attention that they can now see when they need to.

Being able to catch these has been huge and helped close a few deals they might have lost over the course of a year.

The Takeaway

Using Troops to separate the place where they’re communicating with customers from where they are interacting with their team has increased team engagement & visibility while making it easier to be responsive to customers.

Sound interesting?

This is something you can set up for your team today in just a few minutes at Troops.ai!

We mostly just use Slack for chatting

I hear this a lot when I talk to sales and customer success teams about how they use Slack.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this, but if you’re limiting use to just messaging you’re missing out on a host of opportunities for productivity gains that come from organizing collaboration with signals from your enterprise applications.

A huge focus for Troops is helping our entire team better understand our customers. High customer empathy is critical for our ability to build great product, communicate with customers effectively, and act autonomously.

In this post we wanted to share some unique ways we’ve leveraged Slack at Troops to increase customer empathy and raise the collective intelligence of our team.

Call Reports in Slack

Customer calls are one of our richest sources of feedback. It’s where we learn things like:

What do our prospective customers care about?

How does our product help them?

Where can we improve for existing customers?

Originally, we all just took notes in our respective tools and then logged the call notes in Salesforce...

Sound familiar?

The problem with this system was that collectively, we weren’t actually looking at each other’s notes as often as we wanted to really understand our customers.

To improve visibility, we started a channel called #Call_Reports and just added the extra step of copy and pasting our call notes using Slack’s posts feature.

The whole team can opt-in to this channel to see if they want to see what customers are saying.

BTW Slack posts are basically like an evernote note in Slack if you haven't checked them out yet.

How has this helped?

The increased visibility from the simple step has resulted in some great improvements:

• Growth/CS have an easier time seeing opportunities where we can help each other

• Product has a tighter feedback loop and better understanding of who we’re building for

• Engineering develops greater empathy and it’s motivating for them to get feedback on what they’re building

Our entire company is 15 people, but I can imagine a ton of more narrow instances where a version of sharing notes that get lost can improve team alignment.

A few ideas:

• In customer specific channels where multiple people are collaborating on a deal - i.e. acme_corp

• On certain teams where you’re trying to improve one part of your process i.e. Mid-market qualification call notes

• In pod channels where SDRs, AE’s and CS are working together

One thing I realized in college was that taking a bunch of notes and then not looking at them never really amounted to anything.

The same applies here. Taking notes is only useful if the people who are supposed to look at them actually review them accordingly.

Scheduling Change Reports On Leading Indicators

A challenge many customer success or sales teams running a freemium or usage bases sales motion is understanding how those customers are using the product.

Yes, there are some heavy tools that now make that a bit easier, but many companies don’t have them and we all know what happens when you ask someone to go to another place to log in and look at something….

One investment we’ve made early on is getting our product usage data into Salesforce and then building change reports in SFDC that help us see key engagement signals like when an account turns a few features on or off.

We use Troops Salesforce reporting in Slack to streamline these signals so that they are front and center for everyone to see.

An example of this is our customer health change report pictured above.

This makes it really easy for us to understand variances in product engagement on tiered accounts in order to take action.

The outcome is a tighter customer/product feedback loop as well as improved visibility into expansion opportunities whether that means deeper engagement or a wider footprint.

Change reports we have automatically scheduled regularly:

• Customer health changes
• Feature or metric usage summarized at the account level
• Inactivity reports against certain tiers of accounts or leads

The reason why these reports are effective is that they’re pushed to us in a place where we’re all spending time. This makes it really easy for us to keep each other accountable.

Sharing Customer and Communication Wins

One way we try to raise the collective intelligence of our team is make it really easy to share when stuff is working.

In organizations I’ve been a part of, sharing tribal knowledge has traditionally occurred during a weekly team meeting.

The problem with this methodology is that a ton of learning opportunities slip through the cracks with this level of latency between the learning event and meeting.

You could have had an amazing call with a customer on Thursday where something new you tried worked, and come Monday have completely forgotten what you did, let alone that you wanted to share it.

Additionally, the knowledge sharing that occurs in these meetings is an ephemeral one time transfer vs. evergreen educational content for existing and new employees.

One tactic you can try that we’ve done at Troops is create dedicated channels to share these instances as they occur.

We currently have two of these channels that are slightly different.

Communication Wins

The first is called #communication_wins. In here, we share instances where some type of communication with a customer resulted in a really positive outcome that we want others to learn from.

Most of the time, these are just quick screenshots of email exchanges that showcase strategies that the team can have in their tool belt.

Capturing and sharing these instances takes less than 10 seconds to do and every new team member that joins now has a historical log of different ways to talk with customers effectively. This is a massive advantage when you talk about things like decreasing new employee onboarding time.

Customer Wins

#customer_wins is the other channel we have dedicated to tribal knowledge. This is where we share emails from customers on them having success with the Troops product.

These are really great for the entire team to see not only because it helps us better understand our customer's relationship with our product, but also because it’s motivating to see people winning with what you’re building….

And by moving it out of email and into Slack, we don’t clutter the place we are using to do the customer development and sales in the first place.

Making It Easier to See Key Customer Data Points

At different parts of your sales process or customer journey, it’s important to understand key pieces of information.

For some companies this might be:

• Existing solutions in place
• Next steps
• Product functionality they’re most excited about
• Contact titles
• Compelling events
• Competitors used

In addition to reviewing these things in a regular meeting, we’ve found it really helpful to highlight these data points in real-time alerts as people move through the pipeline.

We use Troops opportunity stage change alerts to accomplish this.

Depending upon the data you collect, this can be really valuable for product and marketing teams to see this information as well i.e. what features do people care about?

At the core, all of this comes back to streamlining workflow in one place so that it’s very easy for people to see the information they need in order to make great decisions.

Implementing This At Your Company

If you’re worried about some of this potentially being distracting, I think you need to view Slack like any source of information (i.e. email).

It’s up to you to continuously curate the experience for your team so that it’s limited to the most high value interactions.

All of the strategies above that extend beyond “chat” have been immensely helpful for helping our entire team better understand our customers. So I ask you…

Can you be using Slack for more than just chat?

Is there information that if people were on top of more consistently they’d be better at their job?

Maybe there’s an opportunity here for you to champion some slack workflow for that initiative...

Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Bots. Messaging. Drones.

Not too long ago Slack released a new feature called Threading.

If you haven’t heard, following up with an inbound lead immediately after they raise their hand vastly increases your chances of success.

We’re making our first marketing hire at Troops, and I gotta say I am pumpedddd.

One way companies accelerate growth is by finding a sales or marketing tactic that works and doubling down on it.

“Congrats on your Series A! What are you going to do with all of that money?”

It’s not often you are in a position to be asked that question and it’s one we’ve been getting a lot recently from friends and family.

Any company that raises money does so because they need it for a specific reason. For example, if you are a t-shirt company, you may need money to buy t-shirts so you can turn around and sell them.  

But what about a technology company like Troops? What will we spend the money on?

The short answer is people and in this post I wanted to talk a little bit about how we think about people and building our family here at Troops.

Troops Values

When we first started the company, we made one thing crystal clear to ourselves: control the controllables. [Click to tweet!]

We realized early on that the only thing we could really control in life is who we spend our time with.

We figured that if we can get amazing people in a room that believe what we believe, and share the same values as us then we would be in pretty good shape. So we started to scribble down some “Troops Values” that we would use as a guiding light to build the team and build the Troops family 

These values are the cornerstone for how we think about our team. We know we’ll add some more over time but this is what is important to us. Maybe they are important to you too.

What are the Troops Core Values?

Positive.

When you consider that we spend more than one third of our lives working, it seemed very obvious to us that having fun and staying positive was at the top of our list of values. People often look forward to the weekends so they can hang out with their friends. But when we started Troops we thought, what if we changed the paradigm so instead of Sunday Scaries we were fired up about showing up (to work)?

It also helps that there is a scientifically proven correlation between stress and performance, and that performance is enhanced under the right conditions which often starts with a positive and optimistic attitude.

World Class.

Specifically, we want to always strive to be world class.

The best analogy for our “world class” value can be found in the sports arena. When Michael Phelps was training for the Olympics he spent about six hours per day, six days per week, swimming in the pool. That’s a lot of swimming and a lot of wrinkly skin.

At Troops, we love people that respect and embrace their inner voice that tells them to go harder and push their limits on the thing that drives them the most. We believe life is more fulfilling when you are constantly learning and growing.

Self Starting.

Having been in and around the startup world for a while, I’ve often encountered Shark Tank Syndrome.

It’s when someone has the world’s next best idea and they want to pitch you on it. What you quickly realize is that ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone at one point in their life had an idea that could change the world in some way.

At Troops, we look for people that took one of those ideas and ran with it.

Whether it’s starting a business or nonprofit to teaching yourself how to code in an entirely new language, we are always looking for people that have an intense desire to learn through trial-by-fire. We love people that have attended the school of Hard Knocks, and better yet, have gotten knocked down and back up again.

Radically Transparent.

We all make mistakes and there is always room to get better. However, sometimes we have blind spots and can’t easily see what others can.

At Troops, I often get called out on things by others on the team. And you know what, I love it! How can you possibly hope to get better as an individual or as a team if you are not honest and transparent with yourself and with others?

This is why radical transparency is so important to us. It’s why we take our team through every board meeting deck and our investors feedback (good & bad) immediately after we have board meetings. This way, everyone knows what is at stake, where we are as a company, and what we need to focus on to be better.

And in the spirit of radically transparency, we thought we’d shed some light on how we think about our team at Troops. These values will surely evolve over time, and in fact they already have us. For example, “Build Elegant Products” was, at one time, a stated Troops’ value. However, we learned that to move faster and get features in our users’ hands, we could not slow down for elegance and perfection. We realized we weren't actually living up to this value, so we shed it for something more fitting.

Having this values framework gives our team a greater sense and appreciation for the DNA of who we are as a team. A team we hope to grow with our new round of financing

What are values that are important to you and to your company?

If you're in or around the world of high-growth technology companies, maybe you've noticed an increasing demand for Sales Operations, and business operations more broadly.

Last week, Salesforce announced Einstein - their upcoming project to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) to their platform. This announcement is significant in bringing AI to the center of the sales ecosystem.

“What if using a CRM was as easy as sending a text message to a friend?”

When chat as an interface came onto the scene and everyone was excited about making it easier to order food or book travel, we were more fascinated about what this could mean for making the systems we used everyday at work easier.

Having backgrounds in Sales and Business Development, our CRM was at the core of our work lives which fostered a deep appreciation for how important it is to a business. At the same time, we saw first hand how challenging it can be for many organizations to use CRM effectively.

It became clear to us that for a long time humans had been forced to conform to software instead of software adapting to how we naturally behaved. This friction makes software harder to use, and as a result, has introduced challenges around adoption and compliance...aka getting people to actually use it!

What Happens When Software is Hard to Use...

If you've used any of these systems before, you know that this friction can result in loss of revenue, organizational misalignment, and overall diminished job satisfaction.

Since we started Troops, our mission has been “to make work easier.”

In order to accomplish this, from Day 1 we have worked to bridge the gap between the systems we use at work everyday and the behavior everyone does and is increasingly pervading the workplace in a meaningful way: messaging.

When we got started there were no bots, let alone stores for them.

There was just a mounting body of evidence that the world was becoming mobile and the lines were beginning to blur between the apps we at used at work and in our personal lives.

We just happened to believe that “mobile first” really meant messaging first for many use cases.

Early 2015 before the word "bots" was on every deck, @DanReich @Britton @GregRatner were hustling in the @GreatOaksVC offices. Big progress!

— Henry McNamara (@HenryLMcNamara) May 4, 2016

Introducing Troops

Today, we’re excited to bring a very early version of this vision to the world by making a large portion of Troops’ platform and bot publicly available for free.

In its current form, Troops is a Slackbot for sales teams that makes it easier to use your CRM and configure intelligence so that you can stay on top of your most precious relationships and customers.

The initial integrations that power this experience are Salesforce, Google Apps (mail & calendar), and Slack, along with some pretty sophisticated data processing and analysis technology behind the scenes. We’ve chosen these integrations first because this is where Sales and Customer Success teams are already working.

Our platform, facilitates a highly customized experience that you can tailor specifically for your organization's data, processes and needs.

We understand that every business has very unique information and workflow they care about, so we've built everything in a way that is highly customizable, yet easy to implement.

Looking Forward and Some Funding News...

Over time, Troops’ bot will evolve to work with more systems and platforms, while also becoming more intelligent. This will allow us to support more functions beyond the ones outlined above.

To make this happen, we’re also excited to announce that we've raised a $7 million series A led by Felicis Ventures.

We’ll use this capital to continue to invest heavily in product and engineering, as well as the infrastructure to create and support happy customers.

In this round of financing, we're very excited to welcome some additional new investors such as Aspect Ventures, Slack Fund, Susa Ventures, and Flight.VC to our family - and of course we can’t forget the continued support of everyone who believed in us from the beginning. To everyone at First Round Capital, NextView Ventures, Chicago Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Founder Collective, and Vast Ventures, we are very thankful to have you on our side... angels we love you too : )

If you are excited about our mission to make the systems we use at work easier and more intelligent, drop us a line and/or create a free account at Troops.ai.

BTW we are on Product Hunt today here! Let us know what you think in the comments and upvotes are always appreciated : )

A lot of very smart people believe early stage startups are more poised to succeed if they have a very product-heavy team comprised of engineers and designers...

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch.

Despite what modern screen share jockeys will tell you, sometimes it takes a little face time to get a customer across the finish line.

This post originally appeared on Chatbots Magazine.

This week on the Troops' blog we have a guest post from Walter Chen, Founder and CEO of iDoneThis  Walter dives in on 11 sales rep tools that are must-haves to stay ahead of the competition...

If I cry is this lady going to judge me?

Today there are over 500 bots and slack integrations that teams everywhere are using to level up their business. 

Most outbound email campaigns suck.

How do you tell a prospect something hard to hear without polarizing them...especially if you’re not naturally a “challenger” type person?

When people think startup, they often think gourmet cafeterias, zany office designs, and unlimited perks for their young employees.

There's a reason Slack has skyrocketed from $0 to a $4 billion dollar valuation in a just a few years...

One thing we’re constantly trying to do at Troops is surround ourselves with  people we want to learn from.

Starting something new can be really tough...ask any startup founder.

This is a guest post written by Michael Gilroy, Venture Investor at Canaan Partners. It originally appeared on Medium.

Most people you’re reaching out to are dying to be delighted and entertained.

D’oh.

Slack is the fastest growing enterprise software company of all time for a reason: there is immense value when companies make an investment to streamline communication and workflow by using Slack.

After you've built your lead list, you'll find plenty of advice out there on best practices you should follow in order to be a successful salesperson. These include habits such as focusing on the highest priority deals, conversational mirroring, using the neighborhood technique, spending a majority of their time on revenue generating activities, and educating buyers on their value prop.

In the last post, I described how to scrape LinkedIn to build massive leads lists of companies and contacts programmatically.

Editors Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post on the Building The Sales Machine Blog.

It wasn’t too long ago that my partners and I found ourselves obsessing over an idea for a product that we've always wanted. It would help us be more effective at what we’ve been doing our entire lives: hustling --or in a more traditional sense, “selling.”