Puppet Puts the Solutions team at the Center of Influence

"Vivun has become an integral piece of our sales fabric at Puppet, and in turn has empowered PreSales, R&D, and Customer Success."

Martyn Storey, Worldwide Vice President, Solutions Engineering

Download PDF

About

Puppet is an automation company which delivers, secures, and operates infrastructure and applications via infrastructure-as-code.

Challenges

  • Puppet’s global sales engineering (SE) organization needed a consistent and effective PreSales process across regions.
  • Puppet’s SE leadership wanted visibility into what was successful and to be data-driven in coaching the team.
  • Puppet SEs lacked a quantifiable way to show their perspective in the forecast. Martyn: “Puppet has highly technical products—we needed to raise the strategic profile of our SEs and make their voices heard.”
  • Providing R&D teams at Puppet with insights on product gaps and their commercial impact was time-consuming: “Rather than having product discussions be led by the loudest voice in the room, we wanted to provide better data back to the Product team on product gaps.”

Vivun Benefits

  • Automated activity capture in Hero provides Puppet with a real-time view of SE involvement:”We can now clearly see the POCs and pilots the SE team is running, and how much time the team is spending across internal and external meetings.”
  • PreSales-specific stages and the Hero score enable Puppet SEs to bring technical perspective to the sales forecast. “We discuss Hero Scores from Vivun alongside CRM scores during the forecast to ensure our SEs and AEs are aligned on every deal.
  • Integrations with Salesforce and Jira enable customer feedback to be efficiently circulated across Puppet: “Our Product, Engineering, and Customer Success teams all review product gaps logged in Hero.”
  • The revenue impact of product gaps is clearly visible to Puppet’s SE and product teams. “Before, product feedback was anecdotal, and now it’s real. Tracking product gaps with Vivun gave us a level of detail we simply didn’t have before.”

“By capturing product gaps with Vivun, we discovered that a single feature request was impacting $1.1M in revenue across three customers. We raised this to our product team, and R&D agreed to close the gap.”

Business Impact

“Having regular conversations around the data we’ve gathered in Vivun has been unbelievably helpful for us—it’s brought the sales engineering and R&D teams closer together and yielded an immense amount of actionable insight.”