About CommandBar

CommandBar is a fast-growing software startup based in San Francisco. They offer a no-code searchable index of your app's features and content. This simple idea drives step-change improvement in UX, from new users to power users. They’ve been named one of the Forbes’ Cloud 100 Rising Stars list in 2022, working with user-obsessed organizations like Gusto, Shortcut, Freshworks, Hashicorp, Netlify, and many more.

The Challenge

Following their Series A, CommandBar has been in growth mode. They’ve been expanding their sales team and with it, came growing revenue targets. The productivity of their sales team became a top priority.

Wasted time ⏰

Knowing how clunky Salesforce can be, account executives wasted their time ensuring that all their sales tools were updated with the latest information. This is time they weren’t spending following up with a prospect, preparing for a demo, or researching a new hot lead.

Because of the effort required to keep Salesforce up-to-date, account executives do the bare minimum. This means that data hygiene is pretty bad - a nightmare for RevOps and management.

Less visibility 🔭

As a result, Joe Skupinski (CommandBar’s Sales Lead) doesn’t always have an accurate view of the status of their pipeline - it’s like flying a plane without your instruments.

This means that he spends more time of his already busy day chasing down his team inquiring about deal progress and looking for the latest information. Consequently, he spends less time coaching his team members, reviewing calls, or actively supporting on-going deals. No one wins.

How Pod helps

After a brief discussion between Joe and Patrick (Pod’s co-founder & CEO), he decided to try out Pod’s sales workspace. He believed Pod could improve his team’s productivity - a catalyst for their efficiency and effectiveness. The objective was to:

1. Get his team to spend less time updating Salesforce;
2. Give management better visibility into pipeline progress.

By leveraging Pod, account executives at CommandBar have been able to reduce the amount of time spent on updating their Salesforce and Joe could run a tighter sales ship.

Pipeline visibility

With Pod’s pipeline view, the team can have easy access to all their record information: opportunities, accounts, contacts, and leads. They can configure their dashboard to be able to see the exact field relevant, search for a specific record, and narrow down their list of records based on multi-logic filters.

This allows account executives better to understand the open opportunities on everyone’s plate and better prioritize their time.

Updating Salesforce in seconds

Account executives at CommandBar can update any Salesforce records faster than ever. Whether they want to change a stage, assign a new contact role, or update the next steps ahead of a pipeline review, they can do it in seconds, saving them a tremendous amount of time daily.

They also had the option of making updates from anywhere in their browser, using Pod’s Chrome Extension - the chaos of having 25 tabs open simultaneously is over.

Tracking deal progress

During the weekly pipeline reviews that Joe runs, he’s been able to leverage Pod activity timeline to see the different customer touch points (i.e., meetings, emails, phone calls, deal stage change) for the opportunities. This information is directly pulled from his Salesforce and Google Suite - he has a clear view of what progress has been made in the past week and what is the plan for

Joe can spend more time during deal reviews to problem-solve the right sales tactics, help to prepare for the demo, or escalate an issue with another team - rather than inquiring about what happens.

Pod's made it easier to understand where our team’s focus needs to be by allowing us to quickly review our opportunities and ultimately boost productivity.- Joe Skupinski, Sales Lead of CommandBar

A two-way street

While supporting the CommandBar teams, we realized we could benefit from their product to improve our user experience in the application. We’re excited to have recently launched a universal search bar, powered by CommandBar.

Users can now leverage Pod’s universal search bar to find any record or perform a quick action.

Navigate through different modules (i.e., Pipeline view, Calendar View, Document Hub, and more)

• Create a new Salesforce record
• Open an existing document
• Access quick actions
• Access user settings & sign-out
• Much more…

The same Pod experience - even faster and simpler to use!

CommandBar is elevating the user experience in Pod, allowing for our users to navigate through the application in a frictionless way. It has generated better engagement from our users across their user journey. - Patrick Monnot, Founder & CEO of Pod