Wrike finds an operational soulmate for closing the gap between buyers and sellers.

Before Salesloft, Wrike’s tech stack was a collection of single-purpose tools. Every step in the sales journey required jumping back and forth between different applications. Wrike knew that sales reps were losing precious time toggling from tool to tool instead of staying in  a productive workflow to have more time to sell. Onboarding and support were taxing due to the need to be well-versed in so many applications. Visibility was also a struggle, with Sales Ops and Sales Managers having to assemble tiny snapshots from each tool into a (hopefully) accurate approximation of the entire picture. And the inefficiencies weren’t limited to people’s time and productivity. The proliferation of tool subscriptions was also eating up too much budget.

Stephen Clouse, Director of Business Technology at Wrike, paints the picture of sales life before Salesloft. “I looked at the technology stack that I was now responsible for,” he recalls from his early days in the role. ”It seemed like someone had walked through the supermarket and just grabbed one or two of everything off the aisles. Our tech spend was kind of out of control and adoption was low.” Salesloft’s approach was attractively familiar, mirroring the unified, holistic functionality that Wrike uses so successfully for its client’s project management needs. With a single sales engagement platform from a single partner, Wrike is  able to orchestrate every step of the sales journey — from touching leads quickly to accurately forecasting their pipeline — using Cadence, Conversations, Deals, and Forecast. Wrike’s sales team is saving time and effort because it’s easy for them to operate entirely within the platform. Meanwhile, the company is projecting $350,000 in sales tech stack savings through consolidation once subscriptions to other tools expire.

Wrike’s sales support team knew that the only thing worse than having a bloated array of sales tools was having a bloated array of sales tools that no one was using. With no guardrails in place around the content or order of communication, prospects and customers could have an uneven experience or fall through the cracks — preventing a lead from progressing or even killing a deal.

Cronan Guinan-Menton, Associate Sales Ops Analyst at Wrike, explains why the Salesloft platform was a game changer in this area. “Salesloft falls into that nice zone where it has the best bits of a lot of the stuff you’re using,” he reports. “It’s been so easy and helpful to get people actually on board and utilizing it— the usage is very high across the board and across different teams.”

Salesloft users in the trenches at Wrike agree. “When you are working from Salesloft every day, it becomes a single source of truth,” shares Luke Devin, an AE at Wrike. “I’m looking down at the right-hand side of my Salesloft right now . . . looking at my live feed, looking at who’s the last person who clicked in my email, who responded to my email, who watched the recording that I sent over. That has made my life more enjoyable — I have visibility further into my deals than I have had previously.”

For trial-led businesses like Wrike, there is nothing more critical than speed to lead. In fact, they found internally that reaching out to a trial user within 10 minutes of trial activation delivers a 50% higher conversion rate. But acting on that knowledge was proving difficult and costing them valuable revenue opportunities.

“Because of our tech stack, we were only able to respond within 10 minutes about 1% of the time,” reflects Clouse. “The way the previous platform worked, it could have taken up to 45 min just to get [a lead] into a flow. Now, it’s within a minute.”

Cadence is the tool powering  speedy responses for Wrike. Besides automatically putting a new lead into the right email Cadence almost immediately, Cadence also enables the Wrike team to manage, monitor, and keep their pulse on the success of those emails. But Wrike was also looking for timely opportunity identification in order to execute sales plays at velocity and increase the speed of its go-to-market programs. By choosing both Conversations and Forecast functions as part of their subscription, Wrike has been able to not only identify opportunities, but execute against their key target markets in both the new business and the critical renewals segments.

Artificial intelligence is on everyone’s mind, for good reason. It’s a game changer for nearly every industry and role — including sales — and the competitive edge will go to people who use AI as part of their toolbox. Salesloft’s Conversations uses  powerful AI to transcribe, analyze, and summarize every prospect and buyer conversation for Wrike’s team, so they can skip the detective work and sell more confidently. Every seller at Wrike supported by Deals gets a closing edge with advanced deal analytics that identify high-converting deals. And sellers at Wrike deliver more relevant buying experiences when Generative AI in Cadence helps them draft attention-grabbing emails. But the broader picture is this: the AI embedded throughout the Salesloft platform is human-centric and seamlessly integrated in the workflow. AI recommendations for decisions also come with explanations that help teach newer reps — or any user — which insights are particularly valuable in building the intuition that is essential for sales success.

Kaycee Decker, a Wrike Sales Ops Analyst, summarizes the practical benefits of the embedded AI technology for their Salesloft users. “There is a reassurance that your day-to-day and your morning is not so consumed by constantly sourcing, constantly having to keep an eye on your pipeline — and there is a little bit more nurturing that you can do with your existing contacts.” The users she supports at Wrike are enjoying the experience. “People are scared AI is taking their jobs. It’s the opposite with Salesloft. It’s like improving your job and freeing you up to do more meaningful work.” AEs echo this assessment. For example, Devin was notified when a prospect clicked again on an email from him about pricing. “It’s helpful being notified in the exact moment when it is happening,” he explains. “You know when you’re being thought about from a sales perspective; I can send her a quick email in the moment because I know it’s top of mind for her.” The intelligent approach also generates concrete results. Insights generated within the Salesloft platform — such as top-performing subject lines and the timing of emails sent — have elevated email-based Cadence open rates from the twenties to low forties.

 

With all the tools at their disposal, Wrike’s sales managers have become better coaches (via analytics from Conversations) and sales reps benefit from adhering to identified best practices (using content and tempos identified as highest-performing in Cadence). These use cases can be supported or even driven by sales ops — at Wrike, the sales ops team was able to gamify the use of Conversations for coaching by identifying which managers were and weren’t using it, explaining the value of the feature to low adopters, and then creating a competition with a leaderboard to drive increased adoption. The culture of sales excellence built and reinforced by these features leads to better experiences for both Wrike sellers and their buyers.

The end result of improved practices is gaining more business, more efficiently. Chris Mills, VP of Product Marketing and GTM at Wrike, explains: “We’ve had to become much more strategic at how we identify segments that might be ripe for expansion opportunity,” he notes, “and driving more prescriptive expansion conversations to get a referral from one department into another department, where we believe we can add value.”

With everyone able to live inside of a single platform, Wrike’s sales and sales ops teams have something else that is elevating the organization’s sales excellence: more time. Sales Ops has focused on creating new use cases for the Salesloft platform to extend its value and impact on revenue. AEs like Devin are saving time as well. “Being that I don’t have to work from multiple tabs, I would say, that’s really just helped me save overall time,” he shares. “Like when I’m calling my leads. I don’t have to be looking at 3 different screens, right?” That’s extra time that he can use to create more customized and personalized demos for buyers, another of his many responsibilities. And there’s more to come — in the next few months, Wrike’s Customer Success team will join the Salesloft platform as well. 

“It’s been cool to see going from virtually nothing — or even in the case of Cadences, complete chaos/the Wild West — to structured, standardized best practice approaches in several different parts of the process or the business and our processes using Salesloft.”

— Mizelle Hornilla, Business Transformation Manager