How Fundbox improved sales productivity by 20% and efficiently scaled the business by automating data flows

Basile Senesi, VP of Sales and Operations at Fundbox, realized he needed to improve the team’s infrastructure to keep pace with increased demands from the sales team for fresh, reliable user data.

Basile’s team was swamped with manually updating data in Salesforce to mirror data found in their data warehouse (Snowflake). The sales team uses Salesforce as their single source of truth; stale data risked poor customer interactions, missed upsell opportunities, etc. Since the sales team didn’t have the technical expertise to sync data between Snowflake and Salesforce themselves, engineering was tasked with maintaining this data pipeline.

In short, it was taking engineering talent away from innovation and directing their valuable efforts toward fulfilling data requirements.

Basile sought out a way for the sales team to take ownership over this data pipeline. The goal was twofold: one, reduce the time that the sales team spent waiting for its data requirements and two, reduce the time that the engineering team spent overseeing this process.

With Workato, Fundbox was able to implement an automated data corridor from Snowflake to Salesforce. Now, the data warehouse was synced with their CRM and connected to Slack, and a requester could simply type a Slack command and receive a tailored report.

With automatically synced data between Salesforce and Snowflake, the engineering team no longer had to selectively pick out specific fields in Snowflake to Salesforce. Instead, the sales team could simply retrieve the fields that they wanted via Slack—no manual manipulation required.

After connecting Salesforce to Snowflake and creating automated data transfers, the engineering team no longer needs to push data from Snowflake into Salesforce. Plus, the sales team has immediate access to customer data without delays.

Additionally, Sensi found that people who aren’t engineers, but have a basic background in systems administration or are somewhat proficient with SQL can quickly pick up and understand the underlying structures of Workato and create recipes to execute additional tasks in the organization.

By freeing up their engineering talent, Fundbox is spending more time on customer innovation. In fact, since implementing Workato, Fundbox shipped a rebrand of their product. Senesi notes that Workato was key to their rebrand: “That would not have been possible had our engineers been tied up in items that weren’t their highest and best use like tasks required to power operations.”