This blog is a guest post by Phillip Schöne, Solutions Architecture Team Lead EMEA at Workato.

My name is Philipp Schöne, and I’m proud to lead the Workato Solutions Architecture (SA) team in EMEA. My team helps prospects get to know and fully understand Workato, the leading Enterprise Automation Platform.

Workato is the only platform that listens to your applications for critical events, and then drives real-time outcomes. Our customers are able to revolutionize their business processes with a single platform for integrating anything and automating everything.

Managing and scaling our Solutions Architecture team with Vivun

My team uses Hero by Vivun® on a daily basis to manage their opportunities, log product and opportunity gaps, and document where and how they spend their time. This gives me and my peers exceptional visibility into SA activities, and it helps us identify winning patterns.

Trying to do all that without Vivun is extremely painful, because my team is spread out across multiple countries. In addition, Vivun helps us partner with sales in a positive way to help drive better collaboration and assignments on opportunities.

While Vivun is our operating system for everything related to SA opportunities, we also use Slack to foster collaboration and communication across teams. This opened up the issue of how to involve the Solutions Architecture team in opportunities at exactly the right time, and that’s where teaming up Vivun with Workato became an exciting possibility for us.

How do Vivun and Workato work to involve Solutions Architecture in opportunities?

With the help of our own Workato platform, we automated the involvement of Solutions Architecture in our opportunities. It works like this: If the opportunity reaches a certain sales stage, a Team Member Request for an SA is created, and posted with all relevant details of the opportunity into a Slack Channel.

The SA Manager is able to see all details of the Team Member Request on a single screen, and is able to understand if an SA was engaged with earlier or parallel opportunities on the same account.

All this is done with Workato’s Workbot, which displays the information clearly in Slack and lets me as an SA Manager easily assign an SA to the opportunity team. 

Workato is in the background orchestrating these procedures. It updates Vivun and sends an email and Slack message to both the opportunity owner as well as the SA.

If stakeholders have doubts about the assignment – for example, if another SA had already been involved in the same opportunity – this can be discussed in the Slack channel with full visibility to everyone involved with the opportunity.

How has the Vivun and Workato integration helped?

As a result of this process we’ve seen less friction between SAs and AEs, and increased collaboration across the board. It has resulted in a high degree of transparency in regards to what’s happening across the business, and allowed more opportunities for SAs to get involved at critical stages in the sales cycle.

So what’s the plan going forward? We intend to add more intelligence to this solution by creating Google Drive Folders for the Team to share their assets. This will provide a way for SAs to import the latest templates into important opportunities and enable them save additional time when getting engaged with prospects. We also plan to automatically create individual Slack channels for these opportunities and accounts, and fire off notifications as soon as an SA joins the Deal Team.

And the big vision? Use AI to do auto assignments, taking into account current opportunities in the pipeline, previous win rates, Vivun’s AI-powered Hero Score, and more.

We love Vivun – and being able to leverage Workato to assist with SA assignments enables us to leverage even greater time and productivity savings!