The Cloud 100 leader was growing quickly. Its revenue team traded ad-hoc deal execution for purpose-built Team Selling.
With demand surging for its innovative feature management platform, LaunchDarkly’s revenue team tapped Prelay to streamline its deal management and reduce friction between RevOps, the field, and internal stakeholders. Now, greater visibility into deal support requests helps managers identify bottlenecks and drive faster sales cycles.
Like many fast-scaling startups, LaunchDarkly was looking to standardize its deal process and overall buyer experience. Previously, deal resource coordination often spilled across multiple emails and Slack channels, with vital information going untracked (and soon forgotten).
As the revenue team prepared a new deal management process, they needed to centralize request intake and collaboration with internal stakeholders.
Capabilities such as Salesforce cases offered one option, but as a tool built for resolving customer issues, it was difficult to configure for internal deal management; it also lacked flexibility around live collaboration or real-time and aggregate reporting. Rather than build a tool in-house, the most viable option was to find a purpose-built solution.
“As our business grew, we lacked good visibility into the status of complex deals, including many six-figure opportunities. We needed to better track and standardize our team activity, and saw a lot of value in Prelay as a centralized deal management platform," says Jennifer C., VP of Revenue Operations and Enablement.
With Prelay, LaunchDarkly consolidates deal communication and coordination in one place.
Reps can request a resource by creating an “Assist” via Slack, Chrome, or Salesforce. The deal management team then aligns with each stakeholder and easily updates Salesforce in real-time through Prelay’s collaboration tracking. The team also saves time day-to-day with Prelay’s flexible dashboards, real-time notifications, and built-in automation, which matches requests with the right team (e.g. legal, finance) and best available resource.
Having a central deal history enables managers to track deliverable SLAs and response time, as well as easily inspect a live deal to review past activity and assess potential risks.
“Previously, all those requests over Slack and email were unstructured data, which means they were unreportable. If someone was tapped with an action, they had to scroll forever to reach the latest deal information, if they ever found it," says David Z., Revenue Systems & Strategy Lead.
“We’ve heard very encouraging feedback that Prelay is easy to use. The platform helps build our relationship with the field, making it easy to be clearer in our communications with reps and increase transparency throughout the deal process," adds Mickey L., Deal Support Analyst.
As more deal activity is tracked in Prelay, LaunchDarkly can use this data to improve its end-to-end execution. Team leaders can evaluate resource utilization throughout a deal’s lifecycle, going beyond high-level sales stage data in Salesforce.
Managers can also drill into deliverables that may span multiple stages, and identify slow turnarounds or pricing trends that routinely block deals. “In the past, there was no way to measure how long it took for deal requests to get picked up. This made it hard to keep anybody accountable to any SLAs.," says Annissa H., Senior Deal Desk Analyst.
“The fact that we can pull Salesforce dashboards based on open deal deliverable bottlenecks solved a lot of visibility issues," adds David Z. "Without Prelay, I don’t think our deal management could have scaled like it did. As request volumes grow, companies will need Prelay to manage resources in a structured & reportable way.”
Overall, LaunchDarkly’s streamlined deal management is improving coordination across teams, helping to close deals more quickly and eliminate potential slippage.
