Looker is a Business Intelligence and Data Visualization software company that helps businesses make smarter, more informed decisions. With offices in the US and the UK, their sales team is spread across two continents and multiple time zones, creating unique challenges in working from one source of truth in configuring pricing and quotes.
The Challenge
Looker was facing the challenge of version control with a growing sales team downloading and creating multiple versions of price quotations. They needed guardrails around best practices to maintain the integrity of their pricing, streamline communication, and maintain their unique selling process amidst a complex pricing model.
The Solution
DealHub’s team was responsive to Looker’s unique needs and quickly implemented a CPQ solution built around best sales practices, configured to their pricing model. Within the first week of rolling out the software, their staff had an 80% adoption rate. Because DealHub lacks a heavy footprint, it allowed flexibility in the integration with Salesforce CRM. Implementation was simple and did not require a lot of consulting and coding.
[Video Transcript]
I’m Teresa Swart and my role here at Looker is the Senior Director of Executive Operations.
How did you create quotes before using DealHub (formerly Valooto)?
We were previously using the Salesforce embedded quoting tool. We had lots of people who provided quotes from everything on a napkin, to a Word document, to an Excel spreadsheet. Behind the scenes, we had a very complex pricing model that was built on a Google spreadsheet with tons and tons of tabs that people could alter. The challenges that we had with that method was, of course, training new sales reps to use these tools, which had become embedded urban legend at best.
Version control was a big challenge. And of course as soon as you have people who feel comfortable downloading things onto their desktop, it was impossible to ever pull those back and make sure that we give them the right information. So, from all of those pieces, we really needed to find a tool that could allow us to streamline the communication to put some guardrails around it and make sure that our customers got the right information on what we were selling.
What has it been like working with DealHub?
DealHub has been amazing to work with. The team has been responsive to any changes that we needed or feedback that we had on the product. We’ve had a lot of support just in terms of making sure that our implementation was done well enough and experienced all of the best practices. Of course everybody has a unique selling process, but we did too and we wanted to make sure that we were able to replicate that. And DealHub was very helpful in making sure that we were able to do that effectively.
What was the adoption like with DealHub?
Sales teams are a little bit of averse to change, but they’ve come along. From the first week that we rolled out DealHub, we had almost an 80% attach rate from people who had gone in and tried to use the tool. We also had a really big beta group, which helped make sure that people adopted it later on. So the feedback over time has been, what more can we do? How much easier can we make it? But overall, it been really positive.
What has been the best thing about working with DealHub?
The best thing about working with DealHub has been our ability to share our feedback very openly on the product and make sure that we had help and support if we needed it. And that goes from having people come onsite to help us out with specific issues and also when our Salesforce admin was on vacation and I needed immediate help to help some of our sales reps, DealHub jumped right in and they’ve always been there for me.
How is DealHub different from other CPQs you’ve used before?
I have used SteelBrick and BigMachines, which is now owned by Oracle, in the past. The benefit of DealHub is how easy it was to implement. And of course a lot of that has to do with how well you have your price book and your process nailed down before you start looking at any of these tools, but the actual programming of DealHub was much simpler than it was with some of those other options. There’s also not a big heavy footprint that gets installed with sales force when you roll out DealHub. So we were able to do that really flexibly.
Our Salesforce CRM instance has a lot of customizations that we’ve built in the past, so if we had done something like BigMachines, which requires a lot of triggers and Apex programming to make it work together, I think it would’ve taken us a very long time and a lot of consulting hours to make that actually functional within our system. DealHub, we just rolled out. It just worked.
What added value does DealHub offer?
We are starting to look into using DealHub’s (Sales Engagement Platform) and make sure that that becomes part of our sales process. I think we’ve found that DealHub becomes such a flexible platform that it can help guide the selling process in a way that’s a little bit deeper than just a configuration pricing tool. It allows us to really help people think through what’s the best way to put together a contract? What’s the best way to get the information out to a customer as quickly as possible? So we have and we will be looking forward to using DealHub more in the future.
Would you recommend DealHub?
I would definitely recommend DealHub to other companies.
We’ve enjoyed working with Looker in building out a flexible CPQ solution for their Salesforce CRM that helps guide their sales team to success. It’s exciting to see their sales organization thrive using a streamlined, agile quoting solution.
Learn how DealHub can transform your sales process and help you achieve your revenue goals. Schedule a live demo to see DealHub in action.