The Challenge

Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center and customer service software company headquartered in San Francisco. Their customers include well-known brands like Accenture, Tuft & Needle, and Zumiez, and span industries from government and education to retail and consumer products. 

To set their sales representatives up for success, Talkdesk’s Professional Services Architect team is responsible for gathering and documenting key business requirements about prospective leads and current customers. This extensive pre-sales process includes technical design sessions, benchmarking current workflows, data gathering, and other activities aimed at helping Account Executives define a smart sales pitch and deal strategy. 

“A big focus for our Solution Architects is on the pre-sales motion of Professional Services. Specifically, we work with our prospects to understand their business goals, objectives, and requirements to identify how the Talkdesk platform can map to their needs with the goal of receiving the“vendor of choice” designation. We do a lot of information gathering. Documenting all these requirements is a really important aspect of our work. It’s what allows us to learn and collaborate through our pre-sales conversations.” says Matt Turner, Talkdesk’s Global Director of Professional Services. 

When Matt Turner and Mike Klas, currently the Director of Services, joined Talkdesk in 2018, the company had about 300 employees, and the Professional Services team only included 8-10 individuals. However, the situation quickly changed as the organization underwent massive growth. As the company scaled, the PS team’s methods of storing all of the pre-sales data could no longer keep up.

“We had all of that information in spreadsheets and shared drives and notes we passed back and forth,” says Matt. “To really scale sales and professional services coordination, we needed to move away from spreadsheets and into Salesforce. That way, we could give data access to all pre-sales stakeholders.” 

Reporting was another concern, as key details lived in many different systems. “We wanted to be able to run reports around things like ‘How many prospects are asking for X feature?’” Mike says. “Then we could use that information to tailor our product and sales plans.”  

The Solution

Matt and Mike were tasked with creating a custom professional services application that would bring all pre-sales information together, and whatever they built would have to live entirely in Salesforce. So, they got to work designing a Lightning app but soon found themselves hitting a few snags. 

“We built some basic objects to start. But as we got deeper into our requirements, we discovered we’d need to do advanced UI work,” says Mike. “With Lightning, we could get to about 50% of what we wanted. To get to 100, we’d need to go the custom route. And we had limited resources to do that.” 

During their research into additional Salesforce packages, they came across Skuid. They discovered that Skuid could help them accelerate their app development, make the best use of their time and resources, meet their technical requirements, and keep everything in Salesforce. 

“Plus, Skuid was a helpful partner,” Mike says. The team leveraged Skuid’s support services from the initial implementation, which went seamlessly. “We could succeed on our own for the most part, but having support there was really helpful. We were still working on requirements even as we were building, so it was good to have extra hands.” 

The Result

The custom professional services pre-sales application Talkdesk built with Skuid has already seen strong adoption from the PS team. “This new app represented a major process change that affected hundreds of people, but we saw very little pushback,” says Mike. “People just started using it and were really impressed by the speed of automation.” 

Having all of their data in one place has tremendously impacted their ability to expand. “You can’t scale a business with spreadsheets,” Matt says. “We can now do everything in Salesforce. The change has also driven important process questions, specifically around how we run our pre-sales discussions.” 

And that’s just one of the many projects the Talkdesk team is excited to work with Skuid on going forward. “We have tons of ideas,” says Mike. “One is bringing in data from multiple systems into Salesforce dashboards. We’ve got just about every BI tool on the market — JIRA, Salesforce, Zendesk, Looker — and now we want all of that information in one spot.” 

“I feel like Skuid and Talkdesk align in many areas,” Mike adds. “We needed a partner that could support us through uncharted waters and build new stuff, right? So we very much look for people that have the same type of mentality as we do. You know that this partnership is actually a partnership. It's not just us buying a product. So, that's been huge.”