Manufacturing a New Revenue Strategy: How Rattle Became a Verb at Fast Radius

About the company

Fast Radius is a leading cloud manufacturing and digital supply chain company. Fast Radius's Platform and marketplace combines software, data, and a network of factories to help manufacturers design, make, and manage industrial parts.

Challenges

A few weeks into her new role, Lee Tennant, Director of Sales Operations at Fast Radius, noticed an unusually higher than expected forecast when running her weekly review (in fact, their commit for the week was greater than their average monthly revenue attainment at the time). As pleasantly amused as Lee was, it took her no time to realize that the numbers were skewed due to poor data management. Business growth relies on accurate data and when your sales teams run deals externally, your business is left with blindspots.

Lee knew she needed to fix their data management problem and needed to do it fast.

Getting started

After a few online searches around improving data consistency within Salesforce, Lee came across Rattle. She instantly loved how Rattle could help reinforce her new sales processes by alerting sales reps where they work–within Slack.

From sign up to deployment, Lee and her team launched their first Rattle within five minutes - thanks to the simplicity and user-friendliness of the platform. While there was no shortage of celebrations from the team–coupled with genuine excitement and recognition for the sales reps that had closed the deals–the initial Rattle alert for Closed Won deals provided deeper insights to the entire org like never before.

“For me, there was no implementation process - this is how easy it is for someone to get started with Rattle” says Lee Tennent.

Within the first month of (not-so-heavy) implementation, Lee and her team knew that the tool’s capabilities were limitless. Very quickly the conversation went from “Is this possible in Rattle?” to “what teams or processes can we utilize Rattle for next?”.

Favorite use-cases

At Fast Radius, collaboration between the Sales and Engineering teams is paramount to closing deals, as engineers need to be looped in at the right time to review technical requirements and eventually close the deal. 

Previously, communication between their Sales and Engineering teams would happen asynchronously on Slack, and without any data or notes living in their systems, their leaders didn’t have much visibility into this–which led to a lack of accountability in the whole process. 

After brainstorming with Rattle counterparts, Lee and her team had an aha moment on how to make the Sales and Engineering process more efficient.

• Assigning a Salesforce case to engineers. By assigning every rep’s case to the right engineering counterpart, reps knew whom to reach out to, there was transparency in establishing the timelines, and sales leaders could better forecast their deal outcomes.

• Pushing conversations from Slack threads to Salesforce. This is by far the most powerful alert that Fast Radius has utilized. Any conversation that is happening between Sales and Engineering teams in Slack is pushed to Salesforce with a simple click of a button. This resulted in less information getting lost and increased collaboration between Sales Reps and Engineers.

“Our Sales reps consider this frictionless dialogue between Sales and Engineering one of the most impactful business processes that we rolled out this year and now all conversations and activities are getting captured–all thanks to Rattle”

Results

• Better process adoption - Fast Radius utilizes Rattle cross-functionally to drive process automation and introduce new sales processes. With Rattle, users across Fast Radius collaborate on deals using the bi-directionality of Rattle alerts. To date, 100% of support cases are accepted and triaged through Rattle, with 5,683 rattles supported. Overall, this has led to a better process adoption across their company.
  
  
• Improved visibility - Be it celebrating the wins together as an organization or looping in engineers at the right time, Rattle has improved the visibility of what is happening within the company. Now SDRs know what happened to the deals that they got, AEs share their wins, and this gets celebrated by their senior leaders in Slack channels.
  
  
• More knowledge sharing - Be it working on a similar deal or just sharing the best practices, Rattle alerts have been able to elicit knowledge sharing across the Sales Reps. And this has led to not just better wins, but also a better work culture overall.

“The most noteworthy thing about working with Rattle is that it feels a lot more like a partnership!” Lee exclaims.