Will Sales Users Live Inside or Outside of Salesforce?

Salesforce set out to become the de facto CRM for salespeople – feature-rich, automated workflows, accessible from anywhere. Salesforce have worked hard to optimize the user interface, and for the most part it works well. However, over time, some salespeople have grumbled (perhaps unfairly) that the platform can be ‘clunky’ to update, with countless clicks and multiple tabs required, as well as page load lag time. The age-old challenge of getting salespeople to update Salesforce continues. 

We’re all well-versed in the negative outcomes – outdated opportunities, poor data hygiene, inaccurate forecasting, etc. Fixing salesperson Salesforce adoption would solve problems for many others in the organization. So instead of pulling salespeople into Salesforce, how about we bring Salesforce to them?

$150m Funding Injection for Sales Workspaces (Connected to Salesforce)

Dooly, Scratchpad, Weflow – three third-party platforms that are described as “revenue workspaces”, “connected workspaces”, or “sales enablement platforms”. In simple terms, they make it easier to update Salesforce.

Their target personas are account executives (sales reps), plus they also benefit sales leaders, RevOps, and customer success teams.

At first glance, these vendors appear to have little to differentiate them. After my initial research, I wanted to provide some meaningful commentary.

One aspect they do have in common is funding. Collectively, they’ve raised $150m, with all activity happening in the past 12 months. It’s safe to say this space is heating up!

This isn’t going to be a feature-by-feature comparison; you only need to look at G2 Crowd to see that people’s sentiments towards each vary little. If you are looking for a feature and integration comparison, check out this guide on RevPilots.

Let’s start with Dooly. I was lucky enough to see a comprehensive demo which sets the scene for what these three apps do (with some variation).

Dooly

• Dooly helps revenue teams win more deals by improving Salesforce hygiene, running a winning sales process, and eliminating low value work.
• Funding: $20m, Series A (Mar 2021); $80m, Series B (May 2021). (Press release, Crunchbase profile)

…Yes, you read the funding rounds correctly. Dooly has been seeing huge traction within the Salesforce ecosystem. Why is that?

“We at Dooly are creating a platform where salespeople can ‘live’ between the first meeting set, and ‘closed won’ opportunity – the full deal cycle – and don’t have to leave” – Sam Heard, Business Development Representative, Dooly.

Dooly’s three main pillars are:

• Notes
• Playbooks
• Pipeline

Notes

Dooly is especially strong when it comes to note-taking. Customers have called out how effective it is to launch the notes interface from a calendar invite, and for those notes to become immediately shareable.

Starting information for the note is synced from the calendar invite, and can be linked to Salesforce records.

Quick create actions pull up the key fields required – meaning that salespeople aren’t getting trapped by validation rules, etc.

Using the / command, you can pull in different items – the main item is templates. Templates are how managers can enforce sales methodologies and meeting structures. You can even embed Salesforce fields, or sets of fields, into the interface.

I was thinking about “after call handling”, a metric that’s tracked for customer service agents to see how long it takes to fill in all relevant information at the call close. I’ve not heard this referenced as a sales metric but I can’t see a reason why it shouldn’t be.

Playbooks

Playbooks are another form of template that can be applied to the note-taking interface.

Keywords are highlighted with a green underline. Hovering over these brings up tooltips and pop-ups with further information. This is great for embedding cheat sheets, competitor battle cards, or discovery questions on a particular topic. On-call coaching like this can support salespeople in answering technical questions, at least at a high level.

Pipeline

You can update records of any object just like a Salesforce report, minus the hassle of having to even go into the Lightning Report Builder – the order of columns can be switched, filters applied, and of course, there’s fast in-line editing.

Other noteworthy Dooly features include:

• Manually sync information to Salesforce records, but if salespeople forget, the automatic sync kicks in after 12 hours of inactivity.
• Integration with Gong.
• The Chrome extension enables users to complete many tasks, for example, launching a “take notes” interface from calendar invites that feeds notes straight into Dooly.
• A stripped-back, clean interface that looks like Evernote (a favorite among salespeople!). There are no delays when actions/pop-ups are loaded – they appear instantly.

“It’s two-fold. The admin is so time-consuming, and even if you were doing double data entry (copying and pasting information into Salesforce fields) it won’t get done 100% correctly. The other side is that you need an element of streamlining, collaboration, and sales process. We aim to solve for both.” – Sam Heard, Business Development Representative, Dooly.

Scratchpad

• The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos. Designed for account executives. There are fewer clicks and it’s free to use.
• Funding: $13m, Series A (3 Feb 2021); $33m, Series B (25 Jan 2022) (Press release, Crunchbase profile)

Scratchpad Command is the Chrome extension – it boasts a large number of commands that can be called from multiple websites and applications. These are shown in the image below, and you can also find short demos of each on their website:

Update your Salesforce pipeline (or any object) with the Scratchpad grid view. Similar to Dooly, you can toggle fields on/off the view, and edit in-line super fast:

Again, you can launch the note-taking interface and insert templates. Note the sidebar that appears, which allows you to launch sales workflows, such as field sets (e.g. MEDDIC) or Salesforce Quick Actions (e.g. Log a Call):

Weflow

• All-in-one workspace to manage your Salesforce pipeline, notes, and to-dos. Designed for sales teams who like to move with speed.
• Funding: $2.7m, pre-seed (12 Nov 2021); (Press release, Crunchbase profile)

The ‘new kid on the block’, Weflow was founded in 2021.

By this point, you will have started to notice the patterns. Weflow also has ‘Pipeline’, ‘Notes’, and ‘Tasks’ functionality, as well as search and quick create (all possible from the Weflow Chrome extension).

Using the Chrome extension, you can update Salesforce from any website. See the example below from LinkedIn:

Notes and templates functionality:

Pipeline management can be displayed as a table or kanban. It also features a Weflow score, a prediction of how likely an opportunity is going to close based on activities, and stage duration, and it will be further enriched over time.

There’s plenty more coming in Weflow’s roadmap!

Is the Future of Sales Actually Outside of Salesforce?

We’ve seen how these three apps are on a mission to transform the way salespeople interface with Salesforce – by providing a whole new interface. But is there still a viable argument for building similar functionality and serving it up within the Salesforce UI?

“There is an urgent need to improve the way Salesforce users interact with CRM. There are great apps in the market that have a revised UI and UX to help users update their CRM.

Whilst these apps bring an improved user experience, they also move the user away from Salesforce.

When choosing the experience you want to give your users (Salesforce versus an integrated external app), you need to make sure that it aligns with your Salesforce implementation targets. Examples include user adoption, record interaction per user, average active users, etc.

If you are looking for a native approach (all in Salesforce) you should explore the Salesforce AppExchange to see if one of the 7,000+ apps can cover your needs. The main advantage is that the user does not have to learn a new UI and the apps will seemingly adapt to your existing business processes.

Ultimately, both an on-platform or off-platform approach will bring tremendous value, providing that your chosen approach improves both productivity and user adoption for your teams.”

– Ben Asfaha, Founder @ Pipelaunch

Final Thoughts

As mentioned at the start, Salesforce set out to become the de facto CRM for salespeople – but is it being used effectively?

Again, is it a question of bringing Salesforce to salespeople instead of trying to pull them in? By asking this question, Dooly, Scratchpad, and Weflow have gained traction, and in turn, attracted funding – a $150m funding injection for these sales workspaces is not to be ‘sniffed at’.

It will be interesting to observe how the “revenue workspaces”, “connected workspaces”, and “sales enablement platforms” evolve. Will more salespeople return to Salesforce if these workflows are embedded into the Lightning UI, or have we found a happy medium?

Regardless, it seems that we’re moving towards a reality where everyone around the organization is happier – account executives (sales reps), sales leaders, RevOps, and customer success teams.

If this article interested you, I also covered the investment buzz around Org Intelligence apps for Salesforce in 2021.