How a leading Application Security company achieved revenue data excellence with Nektar.ai

This Palo Alto headquartered application security company was founded in 2020. It offers an AppSecOps platform that reduces application exposure and risk for customers. Its customers use the platform for AppSec Posture, Vulnerability and Compliance Management, and DevSecOps automation.

There were two events that triggered specific pains, which pushed this company to look for solutions.

First, it was moving away from HubSpot to Salesforce as its CRM to support its fast growth.

Second, it had a change in sales leadership that changed how sales processes were being managed.

Pain #1: Data migration

When moving activities from HubSpot to Salesforce, the time stamp was getting corrupted. For example, if something happened on January 3, 2020, upon moving that activity to Salesforce, the timestamp changed to the day it was moved. So a lot of valuable ‘context’ was getting lost. Ultimately, their Salesforce investment would have been wasted if the migrated historical data was corrupted. Additionally, their HubSpot CRM was missing significant contacts and activities (emails, meetings) to begin with (more on this in the next section).

Pain #2: Pipeline visibility

Sales leadership and the CEO started conducting in-depth deal reviews. But there was barely any contact or activity data in the ongoing opportunities in the CRM. The CEO strongly pushed for having all activity on Salesforce. He needed deal and pipeline visibility.

I do think it’s important to have full Account context in the form of historical emails and meetings. As a growing startup, you’re going to have a lot of sales reps coming in and looking at ‘Closed-Lost’ opportunities to revive them. Usually, those opportunities are the easiest conversation since they’ve already looked at your product. So our CEO wanted everything to be accurate to enable our sales reps with context at their fingertips. And secondly, is that whenever we hire new sales reps, they need the accurate history of what actually happened with an account.

– Director, Regional Sales, a leading Application Security Company

When using the HubSpot CRM, it enabled the HubSpot plugin for Gmail for the sales team. This plugin helps sales reps log every email into HubSpot with some manual effort. However, the data problem started here. The Hubspot plugin for Gmail saw very low adoption. A lot of data remained buried in inboxes. More importantly, it could not capture meeting activities in Calendars.

Now that the company was moving to Salesforce, it also decided to implement a Salesforce-friendly sales engagement platform. While it finalized Outreach for sales engagement, it still could not solve the persistent data problem because:

1. Outreach cannot restore historically missing contacts, emails, activities
2. Outreach is a plugin, which requires periodic re-authentication during which time, data is not captured.
3. Outreach cannot capture mobile activity.
4. Outreach is a semi-automatic activity capture that requires manual effort from reps. It cannot auto-create contacts on Salesforce Accounts either.

So while Outreach is being used for sales engagement, they still needed a solution that solved their data problem and their Salesforce migration problem without requiring any manual effort from reps.

The Regional Sales Director led the tool evaluation. As a sales leader at a growing company, he really appreciated Nektar’s following abilities that eventually convinced him to purchase:

1. Nektar’s data capture is automated and API-led. It fits into the existing workflow without requiring adoption or behavior change.

It was basically a no-brainer once it was clear there was no other solution to migrate Salesforce data. The ability to capture historical emails and put those in a CRM was very important because we had this missing data in our CRM. So, from the perspective of getting clean ongoing data and getting the historical data automatically using APIs, Nektar was the best fit. We’re now confident that if something doesn’t exist in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.

– Director, Regional Sales, a leading Application Security Company

2. Nektar can restore historically missing contacts, emails, and meetings that had been trapped in inboxes and calendars. It can go as far back in time as needed. Such restored data can be leveraged to create new pipeline by reviving them through sales and marketing campaigns. This was critical for 2 reasons:

• He hires a lot of new sellers into his team. Most of these new sellers try to get early wins by going after closed-lost opportunities because these prospects are already problem-aware, solution-aware, and product-aware. Working these is low-lift and if the historical activity is missing, these reps would lack valuable context.
• Analyze what worked on deals that they won historically, and what did not work on deals that they lost, historically.

3. Auto-creation of contacts, mainly from calendar invites, was an important capability. Since the entire sales team is aggressively building a pipeline, sellers tend to spend less time adding engaged contacts to Salesforce. So a lot of contacts remain buried in inboxes and meeting invites.

4. Nektar’s ability to auto-associate contacts as Opportunity Contact Roles and auto-assign the buyer role (decision maker, influencer, champion, etc) was a winner because this instantly gave the sales leadership visibility into the buying committee and their engagement.

Upon going live in less than 3 days, Nektar.ai migrated their entire HubSpot data to Salesforce, and also restored all the historical revenue data that had been buried in inboxes and calendars.

• 210+ contacts linked to opportunities
• 1500+ new contacts buried in the inbox and calendar of the users were successfully harnessed and updated automatically in CRM
• 11,500+ activities were added in the process into CRM

Coming to the qualitative impact:

1. There’s more transparency between leadership and the frontline team. They’re both aligned on the ‘If it does not exist on Salesforce, it didn’t happen’ ideology and with Nektar, there’s more accountability on the frontline to drive actions and more visibility for leadership into deal and pipeline progression. This has translated into more confidence.
2. Sellers are more focused on working deals without worrying about updating Salesforce manually or semi-manually.

Today, the team is leveraging a data-packed Salesforce to inspect deals thoroughly and identify what’s working and not working to make data-driven decisions.