How GuideCX Transformed Deal Prioritization with Engagement Data and Automation Using Nektar

Every company wants to squeeze out every drop of revenue from its active pipeline. Missing out on achievable quotas and letting potential revenue slip away due to inactivity and poor engagement have become the biggest sins in Sales. But what if there was a way to bring these dormant deals back into the spotlight for the sales teams?

This is the scenario we explore—a practical challenge met with a pragmatic question, setting the stage for the journey ahead. This is the story of GuideCX and how they transformed deal prioritization using process automation, powered by customized rules that considered the engagement data that Nektar captured in their CRM. This helped GuideCX gain instant visibility into $1.7M worth of inactive deals, which otherwise would have been lost forever.

The sales team at GuideCX has been fortunate to have sufficient pipeline coverage. Every sales rep has enough deals to work on and they are focusing on squeezing every drop of revenue from the pipeline. But there’s a catch.

An average sales rep at GuideCX owns north of 10 deals at any given time. A natural problem is that a majority of the deals get pushed into the shadows due to inactivity. Inactivity begins with the buyer but eventually creeps into seller activities because other deals start gaining momentum.

This is where the challenge starts for the GuideCX sales leadership team. They did not have real-time visibility into deal engagement. Their Salesforce data was missing a majority of activity data across opportunities. So the revenue operations team could not generate accurate engagement reports either. Chandler Olsen, Revenue Operations Manager at GuideCX, sensed that this lack of accurate visibility into deal activity and buyer engagement could result in poor deal prioritization, and eventually poor predictability.

In August 2023, GuideCX decided to invest in a contact and activity capture solution, and so GuideCX implemented Nektar.ai.

Chandler led the implementation of Nektar.ai. Upon going live, Nektar plugged all the historical data gaps – contacts, emails, meetings across accounts, and opportunities, in their Salesforce. While this solved the challenge of visibility into deal activities, the underlying challenge of attainable revenue slipping away, persisted. Inactive deals continued to remain inactive. That’s when Chandler came up with an idea that would eventually help squeeze every drop of revenue from the pipeline – Opportunity Temperature.

Chandler wanted to measure the ‘temperature’ of an open deal. This temperature was calculated based on buyer-seller activity in the deal. Upon discussing his idea with Nektar’s Customer Success team, Chandler was convinced that only Nektar could provide a low-lift automation solution to bring his idea to life.

Chandler created a custom field in the Opportunity object on Salesforce. This was a dropdown field with 5 values:

Nektar was already capturing every email and meeting with the buying committee and adding it to their Salesforce. Next, Chandler made use of Nektar Smart Fill. Smart Fill is a fine-grained data automation capability offered by Nektar. By defining a custom logic, Revenue Operation teams can accomplish complex data and workflow automation in Salesforce.

With Smart Fill, Nektar.ai automatically updates this custom field called Opportunity Temperature. So every week, Chandler and the sales leaders are able to make data-driven decisions on which deals must be reallocated.

GuideCX instantly identified $1.7M worth of inactive deals and is targeting to attain 20% additional revenue from this set of deals.