“The before and after was so dramatic that it’s almost hard to say it was an optimization. It [sales data] didn’t exist, and then it existed.”
About Moogsoft
🏢 Headquartered in San Francisco, California.
💡 Moogsoft’s AIOps platform takes the guesswork out of the incident lifecycle.
⛵ Partnered with SetSail in April 2022.
📈 Moogsoft has grown revenue by nearly 200% year over year.
Picture this.
It’s your first day on the new job. You’re leading the go-to-market organization for a fast-growing company. You get Salesforce access, log in, and start clicking into your biggest customer accounts.
What do you see? Blank fields. No activity. How can you build a growth strategy with little to no insight into past and current sales activity?
There are many reasons why a revenue leader might come up against the missing data problem – and it’s quite common.
At Moogsoft, Mike Cabot, Chief Revenue Officer, and Nathaniel Kobza, Director of Revenue Operations, faced a sales data visibility challenge, and they started tackling it by focusing on three major problem areas.
Three roadblocks to complete, accurate sales data
Problem #1: No Salesforce data meant no source of truth.
Mike and Nathaniel’s original focus was making sure things were logged in Salesforce.
But there was a secondary issue that compounded the logging problem. They needed more information sharing across the entire go-to-market team.
“We had a lot of different people in the company interacting with customers, and not necessarily talking to each other about it. How can we make sure that, even with executives, things are getting logged? It's not about just sales people logging things, or account managers, or customer success, or support.” said Mike.
“There were a lot of challenges in getting insights into account activity – not only for our customers, but for our prospects too,” said Nathaniel.
“Which prospect has been reached out to? What was the engagement? We needed to know what’s going on, know the history, and get the actual details of these relationships.”
They knew the only way to start investigating accounts effectively and to truly figure out what was going on was to get the data right.
Problem #2: Managing team performance without a source of truth was nearly impossible.
“It’s really difficult to manage someone if you don’t know whether the data you’re relying on to manage them is accurate. That was sort of painful,” said Mike.
Mike would want to talk with a rep about their activity (or lack thereof), but would question whether the information he was seeing was accurate. Had they really not engaged with an account in months, or was Salesforce just not updated?
“I remember in the past trying to manage someone against it. And then we’d figure out that the data was totally wrong. I’d call someone out about something and it wasn’t even true,” he said.
Problem #3: No one had answers.
This lack of visibility didn’t just affect managers like Mike – it was also causing stress for the people at the forefront of account relationships.
“People were just frustrated internally, saying, ‘Hey, I need to know if people are talking to my customer,’ and pushing to figure out what was happening. So it was a lot of stress internally, and it would flow up to me,” said Mike.
As the team worked to organize sales operations, they were also continuing to grow the team. And Nathaniel’s role was to make all the systems run in support of that growth. But the lack of insight was a major issue.
“Mike would ask these questions, and we would have no way to answer them. We had no place to look,” said Nathaniel.
How Moogsoft gained visibility into rep activity
Step #1: They established an accurate historical data foundation first.
Moogsoft used SetSail to run a historical lookback across their go-to-market tools to capture all relevant sales data. This included adding missing contacts, updating stale contacts, capturing activity, and mapping everything accurately within Salesforce.
That meant the days of empty Salesforce records were gone. “I remember saying, ‘Wow, okay, we were talking to that person. We did have a relationship. It just fell off.’ The person existed in Salesforce, but there was no activity on them. There were many, many occasions like that,” said Mike.
Mike also noted that many times a critical stakeholder should have been in Salesforce but was missing. SetSail solved this. “These people were really important, and we didn’t even know about it.”
The amount of historical sales data that SetSail was able to capture shocked both Nathaniel and Mike.
“The idea was - can we go back in time? Can we actually do that? But then, my gosh, we can go back and look at this stuff that no one ever logged, that we had no record of. And that was a win. That was really cool,” said Mike.
Step #2: They configured the data to fit their unique sales process, roles, and SFDC setup.
SetSail’s custom configuration options gave Moogsoft control over the data they wanted to see.
Nathaniel said, “The team helped us walk through different scenarios and use cases to refine the accuracy of the data, which is why we have such a really good set in our system.”
Mike pointed out that not all sales data was useful, and being able to pinpoint exactly what they wanted logged was vital. “The ability that we had to configure and control and filter was really important for us,” he said.
Step #3: They’re using the data to get better as a go-to-market team.
“Logging is one thing, and accuracy is one thing. But then, why does it matter? Why do we really care?” quipped Mike.
His response? “We're all looking at this data. We're making decisions. We're managing people. And if it’s not accurate, then it makes the whole thing broken.”
With complete and accurate data in Salesforce, Nathaniel had the foundation he needed to put more structure around the sales process, deal health, and rep performance.
“It shed light on our past. Looking back and seeing what we did, and then just hammering home, ‘okay guys, we need to be taking this approach with our messaging, our positioning’,” he said.
Nathaniel also looks at things like account health. “Getting an idea on how often our reps are engaging with accounts. Just having access to this type of data can broaden our scope of how we use it.”
For Mike, “One of our concerns with our customers is that we don't have high enough reach and we are not engaging enough with these executives.” Moogsoft will be using SetSail to drive this.
“I’m really excited about this new use case, being able to look at every account or a stack rank by some sort of activity level. And now all of a sudden you're like, okay, now we can go manage against that and drive that, and understand what's happening with that, or how's that changing over time,” commented Mike.
Impact: was it worth it?
Once the Moogsoft team had the sales data and visibility into accounts and opportunities, what were they able to do?
“The before and after was so dramatic that it’s almost hard to say it was an optimization. It didn’t exist and then it existed,” said Mike.
“We built out an account management team. We built out a customer success team. We were establishing those teams and then the process around how they work together.”
Moogsoft’s incredible growth trajectory is a testament to the company-wide focus on building a product that drives impact for its customers and delivers value. Six quarters of continual growth is evidence of a go-to-market engine performing at a high level.
Where does SetSail fit in the picture?
“SetSail helps us capture, analyze, and optimize all prospect and customer interactions across our entire org,” said Mike.
Beyond just getting the data complete and accurate, Mike said SetSail adds dimension to the meaning behind the data. “SetSail helps us better understand what our interactions look like – not just counting the number of emails or calls.”
The added visibility and insights from SetSail helped Moogsoft on the new business front, and also with significant expansions at existing accounts.
“This has contributed to our retention rate. We jumped 25 points between Q1 and Q4.”
Nathaniel concluded, “Being able to get the data we need with as little friction as possible is really key and that's what SetSail helps us do. And then from that, it also just helps get the insights that we need for the whole team. All the way down to the individual reps. It’s seamless insights across the board.”
