Overview

Delivered to the Client Sucess organization at Vox Media, who manages customer success and relationships across the company’s eight editorial brands that serve up everything from sports coverage on SB Nation to gaming news on Polygon, politics on Vox to the latest shopping trends on Racked.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

Vox Media’s sales team relies on Salesforce to manage leads and customers throughout the sales process. The revenue support teams needed a way to streamline the tracking and managing of advertising projects, including proposals for sales opportunities, onboarding of new clients, and ongoing management of campaigns.

The team selected Asana and soon looked for a way to link it with Salesforce.  The company first began by manually re-entering data from Salesforce into Asana. A member of the sales team would add data into Salesforce about an upcoming opportunity and then summarize the data and send it to an email alias for the rest of the team. A member of the revenue support team would then create a new Asana card and copy and paste the opportunity information into this new project.

It was a very inefficient process that lacked transparency across their teams, it added an unnecessary layer of complexity to everyone’s jobs, and delayed customer onboarding.

The team knew integration between the two systems needed to be automated so the company quickly chose an off-the-shelf, self-managed integration tool to solve the problem, however, it failed to handle the volume and complexity of Vox Media’s requirements.

The Solution

Using the Tray Platform, the initial integration of the three, disparate systems (Salesforce, Asana, and Google Gmail) happened in a matter of weeks.  The Tray Platform is being used to import opportunity data from Salesforce into Asana in real-time, a 20X reduction in project creation lag time compared to the prior integration vendor. Then Tray automatically assigns users to tasks within the project and assigns due dates, eliminating several duplicative, manual steps to streamline the workflow. 

To create even greater transparency across teams, Vox Media uses Tray to update status fields in Asana automatically as they are updated in Salesforce. Now, everyone on the project is automatically alerted via Gmail when the status changes and the status updates are reflected in Asana.

The results

• Integrated three disparate systems (Salesforce, Asana and Gmail) to eliminate duplicative, manual processes and automate information flow across systems.

• Tray enables better cross-team collaboration, easier sharing of data in real-time, increased integration  stability, and transparency across the client lifecycle.

• Improved transparency and collaboration across sales and design teams

Metrics

• Reduced project creation lag time 20X.
• Solution delivered in weeks

The Technology

• Tray Platform provides low-code integration across Asana, Salesforce, Gmail, and other services
• Drag and drop business process integration
• Out of the box connectivity to over 600 apps, databases, and tools
• Elastic serverless architecture provides practically unlimited scalability

Disruptive Factor

Vox is streamlining and automating steps within the pre-sale and post-sale workflow, to shift team attention away from process and onto more important business goals of increasing close rates and ensuring positive customer experiences to meet account growth and client retention goals.

Shining Moment

Reducing project creation lag time 20X enables Vox to materially strengthen their customer onboarding experience while improving the Vox team's productivity and customer visibility so they can be more responsive to their customers across teams.