How One of the Fastest Growing Enterprise Software Companies in the U.S. Uses InsightSquared

Recently we had a chance to speak with avid InsightSquared user and advocate Christian Prusia, VP of Worldwide Sales at Jama Software and his team. Jama Software provides a product delivery platform that helps companies bring complex products to market. By involving every person invested in the organization’s success, Jama’s platform provides a structured collaboration environment so everyone within a company has instant and comprehensive insight into what they are building and why.

Here’s what Jama had to say:

What challenge did Jama face before InsightSquared?

Jama’s sales staff had recently doubled across 2012, and we needed to create personal dashboards that tracked both lagging and leading indicators across the company, departments and now individual team members to accelerate onboarding.  Doing so in Salesforce would have required countless days to build custom Salesforce reports each month or quarter.

In addition, preparing for Board of Director meetings was becoming more and more time-consuming. Jama had reached a point in time where change was needed.  Our “today” was too painful and wasn’t conducive to our team’s aggressive growth goals.  We needed a better way to quickly review our results and gain an accurate telling picture of our future. Enter: InsightSquared.

How did you decide on InsightSquared?

We had been looking for an affordable out-of-the-box solution for our Salesforce CRM for about 7 months before we found InsightSquared. We had reviewed other options but it clicked when we found InsightSquared. After the demo of its capabilities, we didn’t look at anything else. When we migrated from Salesforce Professional to Salesforce Enterprise, we purchased InsightSquared as well and haven’t looked back.

What results have you seen since implementing InsightSquared for your sales team?

After implementing InsightSquared across Jama (every member of sales now has an active account and every employee of Jama has a read-only view), we’ve achieved the following benefits:

  1. 90% of our desired sales insights are one click away. No more custom reports or dashboard are needed, thanks to InsightSquared’s comprehensive out-of-the-box offerings.
  2. Our weekly/monthly sales recap summaries and Board of Directors preparations previously took four hours to create and package.  Now they take 45 minutes. That is a 3x time savings that adds up to a lot more selling across a month
  3. Each sales person has become more aware of their performance (relative to their fellow peers), which has created a great sense of internal competition thanks to InsightSquared’s strong weekly performance summaries.
  4. Our Board of Directors has stopped asking “how does the pipeline look?” because InsightSquared has created such a thorough analysis set across creation and harvest by time, rep, and so on.
  5. Lastly, we are feeding our product management team with win/loss reports that are effortlessly searched and understood in context to deal size, strengthening our own roadmap and delivery.

In your opinion, what is the most valuable InsightSquared report for Jama Software?

The “Bookings” and “Pipeline” reports are the most valuable. Instead of spending hours in Excel creating these views, we can access up-to-date information almost instantly. In “Bookings” reports the ability to drill down by rep, or to analyze the makeup of a specific deal is invaluable. With the “Pipeline” reports, we are able to quickly look at how much we’re adding to our pipeline daily, and how it’s trending over time.

The Salesforce reporting dashboard in Salesforce.com is very limited and visually misses the mark. One of the most valuable aspects of InsightSquared is to get almost instant visual feedback that allows you to explore and filter analytically to spot trends or explore the difference between reps, stages, or opportunities. Prior to InsightSquared we hadn’t experienced anything close to this.

I think what InsightSquared does well is give you the ability to drill down. If I have a notion or theory I can drill into it quickly here. It was always very difficult to drive a level down in a spreadsheet. We’re now looking at business trends and indicators in a far better manner and depth than we ever would have.

Jama’s Bottom Line Message?

We’re no longer crunching numbers, and have been able to focus on analyzing them instead. We can try to identify problems in advance. We are able to have more fact-based conversations with our team, and decisions we make are based on fact, not gut.

If you value knowing your business and have a need to understand quickly so you can act efficiently, I’d encourage you to consider InsightSquared. If you need to talk to a real customer that went through the same analysis, consideration and justification you’re facing now, feel free to ask the InsightSquared team to set up a reference call. I’m happy to explain what we’ve accomplished in less than one quarter’s use.