Intro
Assembled is a next-generation workforce management system that helps companies to scale great customer support, providing them with call center forecasting, scheduling, and analytics, all in one centralized location.
Assembled began their Salesforce journey in late 2021 with an initial implementation of Sales Cloud and Slack. Although satisfied with the initial implementation, Assembled was growing quickly. Scaling support is enough of a challenge by itself, but scaling a company takes a village. The team realized they needed more day-to-day support as well as a longer-term thought partner if they were to fully realize the potential that the Salesforce platform offers.
Wanted: A long-term partner who could hit the ground running
Assembled was introduced to Candybox by an independent Revenue Operations consultant they had been partnering with, who felt that Assembled needed a team who could offer a blend of strategic and technical expertise to take their RevOps to the next level within Salesforce. Assembled were impressed by the team’s experience with other B2B SaaS scale-ups and decided to work together.
One of the key initiatives Candybox was brought in to consult on was scaling up Assembled’s product and pricing strategy within Salesforce. Originally, the company had sold only a handful of products on standard 12-month subscription terms, so the Salesforce configuration had not been complex. Reporting for Net Bookings, a key company metric, could be done simply by summing up all product values.
Scaling up products and pricing
However, as Assembled’s different departments started taking shape and the company really began to scale, the company’s products and deal structure became more sophisticated. New product architecture was introduced with “Core”, “Pro”, and “Enterprise” tiers, along with bundling logic, one-time fee products, not to mention monthly and annual subscription billing frequencies!
Assembled needed a way to both represent and report on these additional configuration options without adding needless technical debt or adversely affecting their sales reps’ user experience. Candybox was able to address Assembled’s unique requirements with screen flows that provided reps an intuitive and easy to use UI to configure, price and quote with clicks not code. This provided the perfect balance between complexity and user-friendliness that the company had needed for quite some time.
"Candybox has built sophisticated Salesforce workflows that handle our increasingly complex deal structures, all while keeping the rep user experience simple and intuitive."
— Annelies H, Head of Sales
However, after a time, the company introduced multi-year deals, which steadily became more common. This was a good problem for Assembled to have, although it also presented several challenges:
- Commissions were heavily dependent outdated fields that were no longer relevant, so the company had to manually reconcile every deal
- The original configuration was designed to allow the company to understand the value of a one-year subscription, rather than subscriptions across multiple years where different products may have different pricing across different years of the deal
- The Net Bookings field was no longer sufficient for reporting purposes, because it was acting like TCV, without showing the timing of subscription revenue
Candybox and Assembled used this change to reimagine the Opportunity, augmenting the original data model to provide more flexible reporting across deals of all sizes, lengths and product combinations. Subscription start and end dates were implemented across the line item level, allowing bookings to be broken out not only by time period but also by subscription vs one-time fees.
A seamless migration and spotless data
The entire data migration was conducted over a single weekend and, come Monday morning, not a single rep reported a discrepancy. Every opportunity now has accurate field level data for all the typical SaaS metrics one would expect like TCV and ACV with additional breakout by year. As a result, this investment has kept Assembled’s historical, active, and pipeline bookings data extremely accurate.
"From day one, Candybox has been instrumental in our Salesforce implementation. Their expertise in building our multi-year opportunity workflow has kept our ARR data clean and streamlined, eliminating the headaches that often come with scaling."
— Megha N, Head of Marketing
Candybox’s impact has been to maintain Assembled’s custom product and pricing methodology into Salesforce through clicks, not code, and helping to keep Assembled’s booking data completely accurate as deal structure complexity matures.
