Atrium leans on Kicksaw for help with Salesforce optimization

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Overview

Atrium creates data-driven sales management software that helps sales organizations, along with those organization’s sales managers, sales leaders, and reps, use metrics and data to improve their team’s performance. Atrium’s software integrates with their customers’ CRM solution through a read-only connection. From there, customers can take advantage of Atrium’s 100+ pre-baked KPIs that are ready to go out-of-the-box. Atrium then continuously monitors those KPIs in order to tell managers and leaders what’s working well and what isn’t. This means that sales managers and leaders can spend their time changing rep or SDR behavior to chase further improvement rather than digging around in a bunch of dashboards to figure out what’s going on. Atrium employs about 40 people, and they work with a few hundred customers, mostly organizations that have between 10-300 salespeople.

Introduction

For Atrium, time is of the essence. They’re a fast-growing company with big ambitions, full of ideas on how to improve their processes. There are only so many hours in the workday, though, and only so many hands to put on keyboards.

Atrium knew what they wanted and what was possible, but they also knew that they didn’t have the time or staff to devote to it. So they came to Kicksaw.

Challenge

Pete Kazanjy, CRO and one of Atrium’s founders, explains that Atrium came to Kicksaw simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day.

“We’re a little unique because, since we sell to sales organizations, specifically in the data-driven sales management space, a lot of our staff (such as myself) are actually pretty solid Salesforce admins. So we can do things — it’s not like we’re incapable of setting up what we want, but it’s just one of those things where there aren’t enough hours in the day to execute on all of the different things that need to be done.

“Particularly when a Salesforce task takes longer than, say, 15 minutes, it’s probably something that might be within the realm of possibility for my team, but…where do you find the time in the day?” continued Pete. “Especially if you’re a sales leader or customer success leader and your calendar is riddled with meetings and whatnot.”

Solution

Atrium reached out to Kicksaw for help and signed up for our AOD service. AOD stands for “admin on demand”, and it’s the perfect fit for Atrium’s needs. Kicksaw provides Atrium with a dedicated Salesforce expert to handle those tasks that Atrium simply doesn’t have capacity for.

“We’ve been working with Kicksaw for about a year at this point,” Pete explained. “And it’s been absolutely fantastic. Not only are we able to identify things that are maybe a little fussy, things that might take a little bit of time, where it’s like, ‘Ok, we want to create a formula field over here, then some sort of automation that stamps this thing, etc.’ It’s not a ton of time and it’s not sophisticated Salesforce administration, but it’s enough work that it’s easier to specify it in an email for Kicksaw to hammer it out in a few hours. It’s absolutely fantastic.”

Not only is Atrium able to lean on Kicksaw for those tasks that they know they need but just don’t have time for — having a Kicksaw AOD at their fingertips has unleashed their imagination. Knowing that they have the expertise of the Kicksaw AOD on their side, Atrium has found new and exciting ways to leverage Salesforce’s capabilities.

“As a very tactical example, our customer success function has benefited heavily from Kicksaw. When a customer creates an Atrium account, they use a pilot account first, and it’s important for our account execs to be able to see how much the customer is engaging with our product, and the same is true on the customer success side.

“We’ve done a bunch of work with Kicksaw to get usage data onto contact objects in the CRM. Kicksaw has helped us, through a variety of enhancements to the contact object and the account object, to make it much easier for folks to make use of this data. And in that regard, we’ve been able to really heavily extend our use of Salesforce as both a selling platform, a pre-pilot selling platform, and a post-success platform in a way that probably would have required us to buy ancillary software otherwise. Without the help of Kicksaw, we would have had to buy a customer success platform software, or maybe pilot management software. We’ll probably have to eventually buy those things, but because of the enhancements Kicksaw has been able to bring to our Salesforce instance, we’ve been able to kick that can further down the road. That’s helped us forgo 20 or 40k worth of software expense, and also just made our team way, way more effective.”

Atrium’s excellent working relationship with Kicksaw has greatly enhanced their ability to streamline workflows within the company. The answer to, “Would XYZ be helpful for our business?” is no longer, “Yes, but who’s got the time?”

Pete elaborated with, “It’s at the point where if we’re in a meeting and somebody mentions something like, ‘Hey it would be great if we could do XYZ,’ I can respond with, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a great idea — we should just have Kicksaw do that.’ And it gets done.

“What that does is it opens up the ability for people to think about ways to solve problems faster. Having that external Salesforce capability through Kicksaw just empowers that.”

We’re thrilled at the improvements Atrium has implemented with the help of Kicksaw, and eager to continue to watch them grow.

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We’ve been working with Kicksaw for about a year at this point, and it’s been absolutely fantastic. It’s not a ton of time and it’s not sophisticated Salesforce administration, but it’s enough work that it’s easier to specify it in an email for Kicksaw to hammer it out in a few hours. It’s absolutely fantastic.

Pete Kazanjy, Co-Founder and CRO at Atrium