Overview
Datadog has been one of the technology sector’s hottest companies, growing rapidly ahead of their September 2019 IPO. But as Datadog rapidly scaled, it faced a big challenge – managing a growing number of leads.
When Director of Sales Operations, Hacer “Haja” Demiroers, joined the company in early 2016, Datadog had a manual process of distributing leads to sales reps that was inefficient and time-consuming. Also as the business adopted an account-based selling strategy, the sales team struggled to identify key decision-makers within those accounts.
- Industry
- Computer Software
- Location
- New York City, NY
- Interview with
- Hacer “Haja” Demiroers, Vice President of Sales Operations
Solutions
LeanData Matching
LeanData Routing
Results
Enabled Account- Based Strategy
All stakeholders within accounts are now identified to every decision maker can be engaged by the sales team.
Time Saved
LeanData has eliminated 10 hours a week of manual work, allowing the Sales Ops team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Effective Lead Management
Leads are automatically and accurately routed to the right reps, resulting in quicker follow-up response to leads as well as improved data quality and reporting.
Datadog has been one of the technology sector’s hottest companies over the past year – doubling in revenue and number of employees. But as Datadog rapidly scaled, it faced a big challenge – managing a growing number of leads. When Vice President of Sales Operations Hacer “Haja” Demiroers joined the company in early 2016, Datadog had a manual process of distributing leads to sales reps that was inefficient and time-consuming. Also as the business adopted an account-based selling strategy, the sales team struggled to identify key decisionmakers within those accounts.
“There was definitely a lot of confusion among reps,” she said. “There was no way for us to recognize when somebody was already working on an account and make sure that all the leads from that account would go to the right person.”
The problem was a limitation in the popular Salesforce CRM. No natural link exists between leads and accounts in the database. So leads must be converted into contacts before they are associated with corresponding accounts.
“Everything sounds great in theory, but admins have always known that this just isn’t practical in the real life of sales reps,” Demiroers said. “It doesn’t reflect how we deal with customers. We’re selling to a whole company. There’s a lot of complexity there, and Salesforce’s architecture is just not able to replicate what a sales rep’s day-to-day life is actually like. I wanted a way to accurately reflect what a sales rep is doing.”
The LeanData Solution
By automatically matching leads to accounts, LeanData enabled Datadog to design an intelligent routing process best-suited to the expanding business. LeanData routes approximately 5,000 leads a month based on criteria established by Demiroers. For instance if a lead is associated with an opportunity, it gets routed to the appropriate sales rep. Or if a lead is net-new, it’s routed to the correct team responsible for handling those accounts. “LeanData is very customizable and we can distribute leads exactly where we want,” Demiroers explained. Benefits include:
Eliminating 10 Hours A Week Of Manual Work: The time saved has allowed Demiroers’ Sales Operations team to focus on other, more pressing challenges.
Lead Assignment Accuracy: “Every two or three weeks, I’ll get a question about why a lead went to a certain person, and most of the time there is good logic behind it,” Demiroers said. “We definitely don’t get complaints like when I first came here.”
Sales Rep Productivity: Because reps no longer need to search Salesforce for matches, “this is saving us tons of time” and has improved the speed of follow-up response, Demiroers added.
Improved Data Quality and Reporting: Datadog immediately recognizes when a lead is net-new, belongs to an existing opportunity or is from a customer account.
Enables Account-based Selling: LeanData has helped Datadog launch its account-based selling strategy with features such as the ability to mass convert leads.
The Results
Demiroers describes LeanData as one of the most successful and cost effective projects she has implemented at Datadog because it impacts so many aspects of sales productivity and efficiency. “The great thing about LeanData is I don’t have to worry about the ‘scalability’ of this process,” Demiroers added. “It just adjusts to our process as we grow. I know it will work no matter how we may want to change territories or rules of engagement in the future. I think that is the biggest value of the tool.”
About Datadog
Datadog is the essential monitoring platform for cloud applications. We bring together data from servers, containers, databases, and third-party services to make your stack entirely observable. These capabilities help DevOps teams avoid downtime, resolve performance issues, and ensure customers are getting the best user experience.
