Honeycomb closes deals fast and streamlines with Momentum

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Whether you’re a new company kicking off your enterprise sales activities or an established one rethinking how you do business, it’s especially important to have the right tools and processes in place - especially when the old ways of doing sales are undergoing a dramatic shift.

Honeycomb makes it easy for DevOps folks to diagnose problems in their distributed services, and the company has been slowly expanding its technology and team over the past 5 years.

“We’ve got an awesome solution for what we call ‘observability.’ And that helps operators, engineers, and folks supporting production applications to understand how their systems are doing, find problems lightning-fast, keep their customers happy, and keep writing code to build new features.” - Michael Wilde, Account Executive at Honeycomb

Honeycomb’s sales team needed a way to move complex deals forward with as few hiccups as possible. Here’s how Momentum helped their team to streamline their workflow across multiple platforms.

The challenge: coordinating distributed teams and systems without distractions

Chad Malchow has been the VP of Sales at Honeycomb since March 2020, responsible for setting the strategy and direction of the company to ensure predictable and scalable go-to-market revenues for Honeycomb’s investors.

Leading a team of about 16 sales executives and solutions architects, Chad’s challenges center around how to coordinate a distributed workforce in today’s remote working culture - especially as communication forms a huge part of the challenge.

“Being distributed, you have to think about communication. You have to think about tools. You think about time zones, cultures - all those things come into play.” - Chad Malchow, VP of Sales at Honeycomb

Chad wants to build a culture of self-improvement that sees his team optimizing their sales process and selling a better product in an even more effective way.

“Happy reps are productive, and productive reps stay with the company. So anything I can do to provide my reps with the tools they need to be happy, productive, and get results is something I’ll always look at.” - Chad

His colleagues agree. Michael Wilde, an account executive at Honeycomb, worked in the DevOps space for years before recently moving into a sales role at the company. His role involves talking to customers to understand their needs so he can show how Honeycomb can help them reach their goals. Much of Michael’s time is spent updating Salesforce with new and ongoing deals - a previously manual process that could quickly feel tedious.

“As an account exec, there are a thousand distractions. And being able to minimize those so you can move your pipeline deals forward and ultimately help your customers acquire the technology to solve their problems is important.” - Michael

To realize gains from the sales process, sales teams today need to be able to accurately predict each step of the sales cycle - from lead generation to product demos and contract negotiations. Even more importantly, the flow of information needs to be automated, synchronized across platforms in real-time, and easily accessible to all members of a sales team.

That’s where Momentum comes in.

The solution: Bringing in Momentum to turn three processes into one

Momentum played a key role in connecting Honeycomb’s systems, improving its workflows, and coordinating people during the critical deal structuring process. Honeycomb uses Slack for internal and external communication and Salesforce as its CRM, and the native integration between the two platforms proved beneficial to Chad’s team.

“I’ve never seen a tool like Momentum in my 20 years in sales leadership. When I first got introduced to Momentum, I quickly learned that it was native to Slack. That was a key driving point on the technology side for us - a deal winner.” - Chad

A key marker of success for any sales team is its speed and efficiency in closing pipeline deals. Sales automation goes a long way towards achieving this goal, and Chad’s sales team benefited from the streamlined workflow that Momentum brought.

“Instead of having three processes to do something before, it’s now one process - which has made things very efficient. Momentum allows us to collect information within Slack and populate it in Salesforce so we can remember that data for future use.” - Chad

The real-time synchronization between Salesforce and Slack is just one benefit. Momentum’s Deal Rooms are another. A Deal Room is a Slack channel dedicated to an opportunity the sales team is working on, and it allows for faster communication and access to critical documentation for all.

“The deal room enables us to consolidate all the communication internally. For example, I might have an RFP and security document that both need to be filled out. I might have notes from a meeting that I need to have in Salesforce. And Momentum makes it easy for me to easily draw someone else in from the organization, invite them to the deal room, and work with them.” - Michael

This makes updating key stakeholders on ongoing deals a breeze. And because the entire history of a deal is stored in Slack, everyone (including new team members) can review previous deals to understand the context behind the deal.

“I don’t know how I would do all that without Momentum other than through a whole lot of emails, disjointed Slack messages, and no real process to guide where the deal is going.” - Michael

The results: Momentum Brings Speed and Efficiency to Honeycomb’s Sales Process

To illustrate how Momentum’s automation platform has brought change to the Honeycomb process, Michael shared a typical deal workflow that is now handled with automation and collaboration through Momentum:

“To get legal help at Honeycomb, you can run one Momentum command, upload your document, declare what you need - like a contract review - and that goes to our VP of Finance. He then can pull in legal, open up a separate channel, have a discussion, make the approval, and get it all done.” - Michael

Michael says that without Momentum, this process would be trapped in a back-and-forth email dance, which would slow the team down.

”Momentum makes integrations easy. They’ve got a very capable engine on the back end, but it’s so simple on the front end for me to make a quick form, like “‘I need assistance on my security questionnaire,’” or ‘“I need a contract looked at.’” - Michael

After using Momentum for a few months now, Chad recommends the tool unreservedly.

“​​Would I recommend Momentum? Without a doubt. Momentum is a sales productivity platform that connects people, processes, and workflows - and in today’s environment of workforces being distributed, it’s a must.” - Chad

Adds Michael, “The folks at Momentum have really focused on making this a low code platform for sales automation in a way that’s super helpful.”