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This post is an excerpt from Ambition Case Studies: Peek.
The team at Peek wants to change the way you book activities and experiences while visiting destinations. For many, traveling to a new city is an exciting, nerve-wracking experience. You want to get the most out of your visit, but you don’t know the lay of the land and you have a limited time to see all the city has to offer.
If you’ve experienced that kind of travel anxiety, you’re exactly who the people at Peek.com are looking to reach. The growing e-commerce site connects travelers with a curated list of tours, landmarks, hot local destinations and other activities in the cities it services.
From a sales standpoint, Peek's Account Executives also focus on selling the Peek Professional, a SaaS reservation system which helps activity providers by powering their websites with online booking, and serving as a robust back-office engine for managing online, offline, and third party reservations all from one central location.
Founded in October 2012, Peek has enjoyed tremendous growth in a very short period of time. The company now totals over 50 employees, and has come to dominate the small and mid-market vendors it serves. Think of Peek as your vacation broker, with a helpful, friendly sales team driven by Ambition.
The Problem: Salesforce.com Adoption & Visibility
After adopting Salesforce as their company CRM, Peek began running into recurring issues regarding user adoption of Salesforce and team visibility on where reps stood. Thomas Watanapun, Peek’s Sales Manager, explained the challenges that led Peek to seek out Ambition as follows:
“We were encountering two problems: Number one: Our Account Executives weren’t inputting information in Salesforce correctly and didn’t have consequences for not doing so. Number two: There wasn’t an easy way for reps to gauge where they were in relation to their peers.”
Concerned that a lack of accurate Salesforce data would prohibit Peek’s ability to make data-driven decisions regarding its sales operations, the company's executive leadership team began looking for a solution that would personalize the Salesforce experience for his reps.
Buying Process: Cost-Benefit Analysis
Peek eventually narrowed its focus to two options:
- Hoopla (which Watanapun had used at a prior company)
- Ambition.
After consulting amongst its executive team, Peek ultimately chose to go with Ambition. The rationale had two parts. First, the company had to assess the cost/benefit of investing in gamification. According to Watanapun, the primary question for Peek’s executives during the decision-making process went directly to a cost-benefit analysis: Is the cost of gamification worth the benefit of better data and motivation?
Next, the company had to assess Ambition versus Hoopla. Per Watapunun, despite his prior experience with Hoopla, it was an easy decision: "Ambition’s UI and UX all beat Hoopla by a mile."
Onboarding and Implementation
Peek’s success with Ambition began with their initial onboarding, which Watanapun found to be refreshingly easy. “It was so much easier to setup [than Hoopla] and reliability is much better,” Watanapun said. “Implementation was very smooth, and if I had any questions, it was very easy to get answers.”
Watanapun was particularly effusive about his experiences with the Ambition Customer Support team. “As far as support goes, Ambition is amazing. They gave me a full on training from front to back of all the features and tips they had in making the best use of [Ambition].”
Watanapun also praised the flexibility of Ambition. “We also have metrics that some businesses track differently but we needed them tracked a specific way. The Ambition Customer Support team had multiple consultation calls with me to brainstorm the best way to track the metric.”
At the user level, Peek Account Executive David DeWahl explains in our case study how Ambition's Customer Success goes beyond software adoption and optimization to include weekly email newsletters from Ambition with "helpful sales tips and interesting articles."
User Adoption
In implementing Ambition, Watanapun focused on one key area: how his Account Executives were engaging with Salesforce. According to Watanapun, the key was setting up metrics that would "motivate simple KPIs our Account Executives were held to. We’re tracking pretty common metrics: Calls, Meetings Set, Meetings Completed, Deals. We also play around with the weighting [benchmarks] from time to time.”
From there, he set up other features such as the Ambition Score, Ambition TV and Ambition Anthems, to recognize Account Executives who were meeting and exceeding daily benchmarks in each of those metrics. While Watanapun was a fan of Hoopla’s TV and Walk-Up Music features, he's been very impressed with Ambition TV and Ambition Anthems.
“Ambition TV is the biggest piece of Ambition that we use. We have one TV setup for our sales team and another for our software integrations team. And one thing everyone really likes is the Ambition Anthems (custom songs they can set) those have taken their motivation to the next level because they want everyone else to hear their song.”
Return-On-Investment
So how did Ambition impact Peek in terms of data accuracy? In 2014, Peek’s Account Executives input an average of 497 total SFDC activities, per month. In 2015, those same Account Executives input an average of 1204 total SFDC activities, per month. All told, Peek increased their monthly average SFDC activities by 142%.
Watanapun attributes these drastic increases to Ambition: “Ambition pushes Account Executives to log their activities correctly in Salesforce or their Ambition score will suffer. When reps don’t see metrics changing on Ambition, they immediately think that it’s the system. I learned quickly that it’s a mistake in their data entry most of the time - it’s helped train reps on the behavior I need them to have for better data in SFDC.”
At the user level, Peek Account Executives like David DeWahl give Ambition rave reviews. “Ambition is awesome -- the user interface is excellent and easy to use.” Account Executive Gabe DeRita gave a similarly glowing review: “Initially, I was skeptical of 'gamification' for Salesforce, being innately wary of all buzzwords and their associated gimmicks. But Ambition is not a gimmick. It gets the fire lit on the whole team in a fun and competitive way. I love the victory songs, the leaderboards are great to watch. I even take screencaps of Ambition days when all my KPI fields are full and green. Thanks, Ambition, for actually making task management in Salesforce fun.”
January 2017 Update: Two Years of Ambition
As of January 2017, Peek is still a highly active Ambition customer with 43 users on the platform. Watanapun couldn’t be happier with Ambition, finding that it is still accomplishing both objectives Peek was looking for: ensuring Salesforce.com data accuracy and keeping sales team members motivated and invested in their own success. Accurate Salesforce.com data has enabled Watanapun to "make better decisions using data that we're a lot more confident is correct."
At the end of the day, Watanapun sees Ambition helping lead Peek into the future. "The people at Ambition have been nothing short of amazing to our company. I highly recommend Ambition over any product out there - my reps are obsessed with it."
Ambition: Track Salesforce Activities. Keep Reps Accountable.
Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs every sales organization department, data source, and performance metric on one easy system.
Ambition clarifies and publicizes real-time performance analytics for your entire sales organization. Using a drag-and-drop interface, non-technical sales leaders can build custom scorecards, contests, reports, and TVs.
Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for managing millennial sales teams. Hear from our customers below.
Watch Testimonials:
- FiveStars: Adam Wall. Sr. Manager of Sales Operations .
- Filemaker: Brad Freitag. Vice-President of Worldwide Sales.
- Outreach: Mark Kosoglow. Vice-President of Sales.
- Cell Marque: Lauren Hopson. Director of Sales & Marketing.
- Access America Transport: Ted Alling. Chief Executive Officer.
Watch Product Walkthroughs:
- ChowNow. Led by Vice-President of Sales, Drew Woodcock.
- Outreach. Led by Sales Development Manager, Alex Lynn.
- AMX Logistics. Led by Executive Vice-President ,Jared Moore.
Read Case Studies:
- Clayton Homes: HBR finds triple-digit growth in 3 sales efficiency metrics.
- Coyote Logistics: Monthly revenue per broker grew $525 in 6 months.
- Peek: Monthly sales activity volume grew 142% in 6 months.
- Vorsight: Monthly sales conversations grew 300% in 6 months.
Contact us to learn how Ambition can impact your sales organization today.
