As the solar market heats up, Skyfri tapped Prelay's Team Selling Platform to align internal and external stakeholders from presales to onboarding and beyond.
As Chief Commercial Officer, Marius Koestler oversees all revenue-driving teams at one of the world’s fastest-growing cleantech companies. Based in Oslo and founded in 2021, Skyfri is building the first SaaS intelligence platform for operators of solar assets.
With new hires and remote deal teams spanning every time zone, there was often a lack of awareness between HQ and global offices in London, Singapore, Denver, and Bangalore. Who does what, and when?
“Our technical solution requires lots of deal stakeholders and resources to get involved for our POCs and Onboarding, and it was difficult to make these processes visible and transparent across both Presales and Post-Sales,” says Marius.
“We also had duplicate work streams that could lead to confusion and slow our sales funnel," he adds. Internal deal support was scattered across Excel, JIRA, or Monday.com, while external presentations and emails to customers were housed in even more folders.
“It was a big challenge to keep deals organized, let alone understand where bottlenecks were occurring. Our technical sales felt like a ‘black box.’”
With Prelay, Skyfri combines all these activities, files, and communications into one view, and invites the customer in to co-drive the deal using a prescriptive agenda.
Plays provide a predefined, interactive template for all deal stakeholders to work through complex sales stages. These workflows can be adapted so that steps are optional, or internal-only, ensuring all activity can be tracked in one flexible space.
“The Plays framework has worked very well for our proof of concepts (POCs) with the Presales engineers and Commercial team, as well as how we run things with Customer Success,” says Marius. “The way you can enrich information together with the customer during calls is such a killer feature. The ‘Presentation View’ is just beautiful.”
Assists quickly loop in the right team or individual for specific deal support needs, such as pricing quotes or feature gaps, with automated routing and notifications.
“Historically, this work might’ve been done in a ticketing or project management tool,” says Marius. “But in Prelay, the Assists are commercially-oriented and it’s a very easy way to ask for help from somebody on a completely different team.”
In just a few months, Prelay has grown into a central piece of Skyfri’s go-to-market strategy.
“The team has adopted it automatically,” adds Skyfri's VP of IoT & SCADA, who leads the Onboarding workflows. “It was as seamless as using Linkedin or Facebook.”
The guided structure of Plays lifts buyer confidence. “When we first show Prelay to a customer, they’re immediately wowed that we have this digital, personalized tracker,” says Marius. “It provides a lot of comfort in an early stage, even before we’ve sold anything, and certainly improves our conversion rates.”
Assists and Play Actions speed up the execution of deal activities, by holding internal and customer stakeholders accountable at every step.
“We’re making everybody’s life easier with these workflows,” says Marius. “In Prelay, you know what to do, it’s quicker to ask for help from another team, and reporting to the customer is automatically updated.”
With its team selling in one place, Skyfri’s leadership can see every team’s backlog and quickly allocate resources where needed to speed up sales cycles.
“I think that’s the biggest effect of Prelay,” says Marius. “We can really see where the bottlenecks are, as well as what’s working well, and adjust accordingly.”
Skyfri evaluated several options for its POC and onboarding workflows.
“We benchmarked Prelay against different types of CRM tooling, but those were either way too over-engineered or the cost-benefit didn’t map out,” says Marius.
“We looked at quite a bit of Customer Success software, too, but they couldn’t cover the Presales part well. I couldn’t find anything else that had such a simple, easy way to invite the customer in and drive the deal together."
"The Play workflow abolishes all of those thousands of Powerpoints that sit in Sharepoint or GDrive folders. No other software simplified all this so elegantly, and that really stood out.”
