How better Salesforce data hygiene elevated Blockaid’s pipeline visibility
In summary, Blockaid faced the following challenges:
- Einstein Activity Capture did not permanently store activities in Salesforce. Activities were not reportable.
- Deal hygiene suffered as a consequence of missing activity data and insufficient attribution.
- Due to poor deal hygiene, visibility into pipeline health was low, leading to slipped deals and delayed onboarding for AEs.
Blockaid is a cybersecurity company that prevents malicious transactions, protecting Web3 users from scams, phishing, and hacks.
The Challenge
Blockaid faced multiple challenges that severely impacted their Salesforce data hygiene and visibility into opportunities.
Activity Capture
Using Einstein Activity Capture (EAC), Blockaid struggled with poor activity attribution.
“I want to relate activities to the right contacts and opportunities reliably. Our solution is not doing that at this point.” - Alex Knechtl, Director of Revenue Operations
Additionally, activities like emails and meetings were not permanently stored in Salesforce, leading to two fundamental problems:
1) Blockaid was not able to run activity reports in Salesforce.
2) Blockaid needs a complete and reliable storage of account, contact, and opportunity activity history to ensure any new joiners quickly understand the full context of an account.
Alex Knechtl, Director of Revenue Operations at Blockaid, quickly faced EAC’s limits when he started looking for a solution that answers seemingly simple questions:
“What did the team do? What has the team booked for next week? With Einstein Activity Capture, I was trying to report on how many meetings we have. I got on a call with Salesforce support, who was just as confused as I was. I also learned that activities are just temporarily stored on Salesforce's side. It’s actually not even my own data.”
Blockaid experienced severe ripple effects from the lack of reliable and reportable activity data, directly impacting team performance monitoring, pipeline hygiene, and visibility.
Deal Hygiene
The lack of activity data on the opportunity level implied that managers relied on 1-1s and hearsay instead of conducting data-driven deal inspections.
Is the deal multithreaded?
Is a next meeting scheduled?
What is the deal velocity like?
When was the last touchpoint?
Which buyer & contact roles are involved?
Do prospects reply promptly (or at all) to the reps’ emails?
These were the essential questions that Blockaid struggled to answer.
With low visibility, staying on top of the pipeline has been challenging.
Pipeline Reviews
With poor deal hygiene, problems aggregated to misleading reports and metrics.
Consequently, assessing pipeline health in a data-driven way was nearly impossible for revenue operations.
The VP of Sales and Founders lacked reliable data to understand how the team was performing in aggregate and relied on anecdotes and intuition, leading to misdirected attention.
Even if they had the right data, Blockaid would not have the visibility into pipeline changes and at-risk opportunities: native Salesforce kanban boards and reports weren’t enough to surface critical signals, warnings, or insights about which deals were at risk and why. Additionally, the inability to configure warnings in Salesforce has made it harder to identify deals at risk.
Moreover, the entire GTM team frequently requested RevOps’ support just to filter views or pull reports.
This inefficiency reduced productivity on all ends.
The Solution
Blockaid.io turned to Weflow to streamline Salesforce data capture and enhance pipeline visibility.
Activity Capture
Starting with Salesforce activity capture, Alex and his team enjoyed Weflow’s easy, low-lift implementation.
Just like Weflow’s other customers, Blockaid could choose between:
- One-by-one sign-ups from reps (using only their email addresses) or
- Weflow’s admin console for a central user set-up, using the Google Workspace App
Given that Weflow has seen hundreds of activity capture set-ups, the implementation was straightforward, and Blockaid used Weflow’s best practices to create a robust set-up.
Blockaid opted for an automatic background sync of emails and meetings. This way, Weflow auto-attributes activities to contacts, opportunities, and accounts.
In addition, Blockaid decided to use Weflow’s Chrome Extension for more flexibility. Reps can see how Weflow would attribute emails, and if necessary, make changes with one click right in Gmail.
As a result, Blockaid combined higher productivity with full control for the extra bit of improved data quality and completeness.
“I’ve implemented countless solutions in the time I’ve been in RevOps, and this was the smoothest rollout I’ve ever done,” says Knechtl.
To round it off, Blockaid applied the following activity capture settings:
First, Weflow creates new Salesforce contacts if no contact with the exact email address exists yet.
Second, Blockaid excluded e-mail domains to prevent emails and events between employees from being added to the activity timeline of related Salesforce records.
Reporting & Pipeline Reviews
Once set-up, it was time to put the clean activity data to use.
“I’d like to set up an event logging report in Salesforce of the events. That's a use case that I was slamming my head against the wall before. I was just trying to get a list of events for the next seven days.” - Alex Knechtl, Director of Revenue Operations
An easy case with Weflow.
Blockaid’s RevOps team quickly set up views to report on activities.
In addition, creating quick reports in Weflow allowed for data-driven deal reviews.
Managers gained access to Weflow’s 50+ deal signals and warnings, enabling them to identify opportunities at risk quickly.
By auto-tracking activity KPIs like time in stage, next scheduled meetings, and reply rate, managers had the insights to understand deal velocity and risks quickly.
But Weflow doesn’t stop at activity insights.
Managers now have the ability to understand deal and pipeline changes with Weflow’s automatic opportunity snapshots.
- Amount changes
- # of times the close date was pushed
- Gap to revenue targets
And more.
Blockaid has the visibility into pipeline health to make better decisions.
The Outcome
With Weflow, Blockaid.io saw immediate improvements in deal hygiene, pipeline visibility - and eventually in win rate.
The automated activity capture ensured all emails, meetings, and contacts were permanently stored as records in Salesforce and reportable.
“We saw value within the first two weeks. Our Salesforce data has become much cleaner and reporting is extremely easy,” Knechtl reported.
With activities tied directly to accounts and opportunities, Blockaid’s revenue team has visibility into deals to assess and mitigate risks.
Weflow’s focus on pipeline hygiene led to a cleaner, more reliable pipeline, with managers having a better understanding of deal health.
1-1s and deal inspections no longer rely on hearsay but on hard, reliable data.
"Weflow provides extraordinary visibility into pipeline health and progression, allowing us to act on risks early and make the right decisions. ” — Alex Knechtl, Director of Revenue Operations
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