How Rippling Improved Deal Execution with Rattle: An SE Leader’s Perspective

Whether you’re leading a team of SEs, AEs, or SDRs, your job is to ensure your team does their part to get deals over the line. Their performance is your responsibility. 

‍The pressure. ‍

Zach Lawyrk, Head of Global Solutions Consulting at Rippling, leads a team of 27 Sales Engineers (SEs) across North America, Australia, Ireland, and France. 

That’s right. Twenty-seven SEs, 10+ time zones —and only one Zach. 

As you can imagine, it’s not always easy keeping everything in sync. Especially now. 

‍“It's a tough economic climate…,” Zach explained. “[I need to] make sure my team shows up in a way that exudes confidence to customers, helps customers make a buying decision in the most efficient way possible, and helps them realize the value of Rippling.”‍

Zach was pointing particularly to his SE team. Their job is to help prospects understand how Rippling’s product solves business problems. It requires a lot of collaboration with implementation specialists and AEs. They need to quickly learn about the prospect, their specific needs, and then align technical requirements.

But what happens when…

• The implementation team is busy?
• AEs don’t loop them in on deals? Or,
• They need to run a Salesforce report to find information?

There’s congestion. They get blocked. They don’t have as much time to build a convincing case. And that reduces the chances of winning deals. 

How Rattle’s Process Automation Saved the Day

Those blockers have at least one thing in common: They all rely on manual intervention. ‍

With Rattle, they can easily be fixed — with automation.

For Rippling, Zach said, Rattle’s value really materialized with Deal Rooms‍

Our Deal Rooms tool automatically creates a Slack channel for all deals. It brings in all relevant stakeholders and SFDC data at the right time to both streamline collaboration and boost visibility. 

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Here’s how Zach used Deal Rooms to unblock his team and bring his strategy to life: 

1. Improved collaboration — especially on complex deals

Rippling is a big name in HR & IT. So it’s no surprise they hook some whopper deals. 

But oftentimes in the enterprise space, the larger the deal, the more complex. And the more complex, the more involved SEs need to be. That’s one of the main reasons why Rippling started using Deal Rooms. 

“We wanted to use Deal Rooms in the first place for our enterprise segment,” Zach explained. “Our deals were becoming more sophisticated, more stakeholders, and more people at Rippling were involved in making that deal work and helping to move it forward.”

Before Rattle, a lot of discussion was happening in various threads, he said. Details were getting lost and it was tricky staying ahead — which is crucial for his SE team. Now, when a deal hits Stage 5, his SE and implementation teams are notified and quickly prepped to jump into action. 

It’s been helpful for other leaders at Rippling to support their own teams, too. Zach said having a birds-eye view of all their deals makes it easy to “hop in and make sure that we’re checking all the boxes and be there to support the sales team.”

The true testament that Deal Rooms are valuable? Other teams — those selling global payroll, the mid-market team — are asking for them now, too. 

2. More visibility without having to work for it

We all have a love-hate relationship with Salesforce, don’t we? Capturing and updating data in your CRM is obviously critical for deal collaboration and execution. But the labyrinth of tabs and clicks doesn’t exactly create an inviting experience.

That was a big focus at Rippling. As Zach shared, they needed to get SFDC data in front of their teams “at the right moments so they could actually take action and understand what's happening in deals where they're not involved.”

Well, well, well. We can help with that. 

As you may know, Rattle brings Salesforce and your messaging app (Slack or MS Teams) together. So your team can update SFDC data from Slack. And SFDC updates can be delivered to Slack. 

This immediately boosted visibility at Rippling, saving them loads of time trying to hunt down information and get the context they need to wow each prospect and customer. 

In the past, they’d book hour-long meetings as a team to go through a spreadsheet of all active deals. Now, this data pushes to Slack automatically and they can stay in the loop asynchronously (huge perk for a global remote team!) and reserve facetime for key deals that require more discussion.

More visibility = working smarter. 

3. Process adherence on autopilot

If you're a leader, you likely have a playbook for your team — an outline of what they should do and behave in order to be successful. 

Rattle helps make sure that your playbook is actually followed — and that’s exactly how Zach uses it for his SE leadership playbook. As Zach explains:

“I have a whole playbook where Rattle is sort of like the glue in between my system of record and my interface with the team, which is Slack…I can point out where Rattle plays a pivotal role in accelerating components of that playbook.”

Here’s an example: Before, to track an SE’s path to Solution Win, they would use a spreadsheet or manual checklist. Now, they’re creating a workflow to trigger this Solution Win checklist, so all SEs are following the same steps. Behaviors become consistent. And you, as a leader, can see it all happening in real time — in the Deal Room. 

It’s time to go from tactical to strategic

When you leverage Process Automation, deal collaboration, visibility, process adherence — all these things, they fall into your lap. It becomes ingrained in your day to day. And to Zach, that has given him an edge:

“Rattle gives me a competitive advantage because those alerts that I've built in have now become sort of the fabric for how I run my organization — how I celebrate the behaviors that I'm looking to celebrate, how I surface important data ahead of a meeting.”

As a leader, your job is no longer chasing down people, information, and ETAs to unblock your team. Your job is to get strategic and explore new ways to win bigger and win more.

You go from thinking “how the heck will we manage to hit our quotas” to “how do I tell everyone we surpassed our targets without sounding braggy?” 

And that’s not a bad problem to have. 

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