Pivotree saves hours updating CRM data, boosts employee satisfaction with GridBuddy Connect, from Validity.

Employees at Pivotree relied on their CRM (Salesforce) to guide business decisions, build strong relationships with customers and prospects, and forecast effectively.

But they frequently ran into usability challenges that prevented them from realizing the full value of their CRM software. While users could report on their CRM data, they couldn’t easily update it. This hindered team productivity and frustrated employees.

“Since keeping the CRM updated was such a hassle, it became an ongoing cycle of reminding users to get it done,” explained Kurt Thompson, Sales Operations Manager at Pivotree. These time-consuming updates often fell by the wayside in favor of more high-priority projects.

As a result, CRM users at Pivotree were often forced to work with stale data in fragmented views when forecasting, updating their pipelines, and quoting customers.

These problems became more apparent as Pivotree continued its robust acquisition strategy—acquiring new companies required users to manage growing volumes of data across multiple CRM systems.

“If employees had a slow week they could spend time updating data, but there were cases when they didn’t have enough time to get it done,” explained Thompson. “It didn’t trump closing a deal, for example. Without a tool that made these processes simple, we couldn’t always justify the time it took to keep data updated, and things fell off the wagon.”

As their CRM use cases evolved along with their business, Pivotree employees needed a tool that let them customize their CRM to show streamlined views of the information each team member needed to do their job.

Unfortunately, these capabilities simply weren’t available out of the box with their current CRM. Thompson and the Pivotree team knew they needed a better solution.

Thompson reports the GridBuddy Connect platform saves users hours every week updating data. Since these processes are now much simpler, they’re easier to follow and enforce, which helps Pivotree maintain higher data quality.

“I have a series of data quality checks I run every month or so. I’ve started shifting those from reports in Salesforce into grids in GridBuddy Connect. This allows me to quickly see if there are data entry issues, and then go in and fix them without having to drill into the underlying Opportunity or Customer in Salesforce,” said Thompson. “It’s smoother and faster for me to fix these issues now.”

The solution also facilitates better alignment across Pivotree’s revenue and service delivery teams. To provide accurate quotes to customers—including what services Pivotree can deliver, at what price, and how quickly—the service delivery team needs to know which deals are nearing the end of the pipeline. On their end, the sales team needs to understand the availability of individual delivery teams to set customer expectations for onboarding.

“Having a solution like GridBuddy Connect allows both of these teams to access this information and keep each other updated. In the past, they had to keep these details top of mind or schedule phone calls and meetings to make sure everyone was on the same page,” explained Thompson.

According to Thompson, GridBuddy Connect also improved the CRM user experience for the sales team. Now, sales and account representatives can better manage their pipelines and view deal data in the same format as the managers who evaluate it.

“There’s never a shortage of requests for our sales team to provide more and more details on their opportunities so somebody can evaluate the pipeline,” said Thompson. “Without a tool like GridBuddy Connect that makes it easy to add these updates, the job satisfaction of the sales team can really suffer. So it’s almost like an employee retention tool as well.”

Pivotree’s sales executives also leverage GridBuddy Connect to ensure their reports are accurate. “The solution provides sales executives visibility of the overall forecasts and the option to keep drilling down to see if variances from the expected numbers are justified by what they’re seeing in the data,” said Thompson.

Pivotree’s Vice President of Sales, who is responsible for reporting forecasts to the rest of the executive team, can easily access and filter forecast and pipeline information by individual team, employee, or opportunity.

This increased access, control, and visibility empowers sales leaders to create forecasts they feel confident sharing with relevant stakeholders.

A unified view of data also leads to better coaching within the sales team. Now that Pivotree’s sales leaders see the same data in the same format as the rest of the team, they can train new employees to provide more accurate forecasts.

Thompson reports these features and streamlined workflows ultimately resulted in more satisfied team members—invaluable as organizations across the country face a hiring crunch driven by the “Great Resignation.”