How Saleswhale used HeadsUp to identify the customers their reps should be focusing on

About Saleswhale

Saleswhale is a conversational marketing platform that offers an AI Assistant to follow-up, engage and qualify leads at scale. These assistants serve as virtual sales reps, working in tandem with actual salespeople to convert leads that often otherwise lie neglected.

Saleswhale was started in Singapore by CEO Gabriel and his two co-founders Venus and Ethan. From being the first YC startup in the country, Saleswhale grown to 30+ employees spread across the US and Singapore. Today, Saleswhale serves hundreds of customers and is also product-led.

As it grew, Saleswhale felt a stronger need to use product usage data to understand which customers its reps should focus on. The goal was to increase upsell and mitigate churn. “Our customer success and sales reps felt like they were flying blind,” remarked Gabriel.

Saleswhale’s journey to using HeadsUp

This need to better surface its product usage data for its reps led Saleswhale to try out several different solutions. Initially, the company experimented with customer success platforms to allow its CS reps to monitor user engagement. However, Saleswhale found the implementation process long and tedious—the six-month-long timeline didn’t align with the fast-moving startup.

The team then turned to build a tool in-house. This tool would connect to Salesforce and pipe key product usage metrics in for reps to consume. Although they were prepared to dedicate more than two months of engineering to the project, the prospect of continuously maintaining the tool felt daunting to Gabriel.

“We knew that we would likely have to tweak the product usage metrics we measure down the road. Each time, that would mean more engineering work. Besides, who is going to maintain this? No engineer wants to be stuck maintaining an internal tool.“

When Gabriel connected with HeadsUp co-founder Momo, he immediately became interested because HeadsUp provided the exact solution Saleswhale planned to build.

How HeadsUp works with Saleswhale today

Creating the right product usage metrics

Saleswhale used the HeadsUp product to select and configure key product usage metrics from their cloud data warehouse. These metrics tracked key user behavior that Saleswhale knew was a strong predictor of customer health. Examples include the number of qualified leads a user received from Saleswhale within the past two months. Measure customer value by displaying these critical metrics that next to each account in Salesforce would help reps decide which accounts need their attention in one glance.

Mapping of product usage data to CRM records

HeadsUp then helped Saleswhale map the user groups in their product data to accounts in Salesforce. This was necessary as product data collected by companies often do not correspond 1:1 to accounts in Salesforce. In this way, HeadsUp saves companies like Saleswhale from having to utilize data science resources when aggregating product usage and CRM data in one single view.

Syncing product usage data to the CRM

Saleswhale was then able to sync product usage metrics it created directly into Salesforce using HeadsUp. This process didn’t require Saleswhale to write any SQL or build its own data pipelines.

Impact of adopting HeadsUp

Don’t just listen to us – hear it from Saleswhale:

“HeadsUp is a game-changer in the way we approach customer success. Being able to pull up product usage data in Salesforce allows us to quickly diagnose issues with data. No longer are we relying on anecdotes!”

“It’s really effective for our reps to be able to see everything we want to know about a customer in one place.”

“We are also looking forward to the additional functions you have planned and can’t wait to expand the use case to our Sales and even Marketing teams.”

Looking forward

Saleswhale is anticipating features that HeadsUp has planned. For Saleswhale and Gabriel, HeadsUp isn’t another tool; it allows its revenue teams to perform better while its engineering resources can focus on their core specialty – building its product.

Features Saleswhale is especially looking forward to includes:

• An easy way for sales reps to see where each user is along the customer journey and whether they are stuck at a stage in the funnel
• The ability to segment users by their product usage so that marketing can run automated campaigns to drive conversion or upsell
• Intelligent identification of further usage KPIs and metrics that indicate a customer is ready to be sold to

In the future, as HeadsUp develops its user interface, reps will also be able to consume its metrics directly within HeadsUp.

“For me, it’s a no-brainer if you’re a product-led company and you’re considering using HeadsUp. It saves you time, and more importantly, produces better results for your revenue teams than anything you could build yourself.”

Gabriel, CEO and Co-Founder, Saleswhale