MarTech Interview with Kris Hartvigsen, Founder and CEO at Dooly

Implementing a sound CRM management system that aligns with marketing and sales needs is crucial to ensuring better ROI and value from your CRM system; Kris Hartvigsen, Founder and CEO at Dooly shares some tips in this Q&A:

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Welcome to this martech chat Kris, tell us more about Dooly and the Dooly journey so far? We’d love to hear about your recent funding! 

Millions of sales professionals are sitting around not selling and instead re-entering notes into CRMs, sometimes for hours on end per day. This results in obvious lost income for both sales representatives and businesses — and quite frankly, it’s crazy!

I experienced the pain Dooly solves first hand. As a top performer in sales, I was just about the worst at complying with CRM. Dooly gives sales reps five hours back per day to do what they love: sell. From day one, we have dedicated ourselves to building for and servicing our users. Every person deserves the freedom and space to do their best work, and we’ve decided to take on that fight.

At Dooly, we’re helping our users chip away at all of the things that unnecessarily occupy their time and take them away from the job they signed up for. Dooly gives them valuable time back, so they can work smarter, leave their work at work, and ultimately live better lives.

The shift to remote work has really triggered Dooly’s rapid growth as people look for a simpler way to stay on top of their tasks. 

Last month, we announced we raised $80M, bringing total funding to $105M, just TWO months following the announcement of our Series A: a true testament to Dooly’s out-of-this-world customer love. 

Armed with substantial new capital, we’re committed to continued innovation and scaling faster. Priority investment areas include talent and product, and evaluating use cases for expansion into additional departments.

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How do you feel marketing and sales teams can optimize how they maintain their CRM inputs and data without it affecting their core sales tasks? 

When CRMs get implemented there’s this utopian belief that the only answer to what fields are needed to keep the business informed is “more”. More fields, more validation rules, and more steps inevitably has the inverse effect on teams that “just enough.” 

By making CRMs cumbersome, marketing and sales teams will largely boycott or forgo their usage and resort to their own systems, and the answer as to why they do this is pretty simple: “time is money and you’re asking for too much of my time to do things that don’t earn me money.”

Utilizing CRM automation technology can instantly and seamlessly sync notes and data to Salesforce, Slack, G-Suite, and other tools salespeople use on a daily basis, immediately putting an end to the madness of doing duplicative work. 

People want to do the jobs they signed up for, not spend hours on soul-crushing admin. Leveraging this kind of tech frees up room for people to become the best version of themselves at work by automating workflows that would otherwise prevent them from doing what they love, what they are good at, and ultimately what makes them and their businesses successful.

What are some top remote work / hybrid work CRM tips that you feel marketing and sales leaders and teams need to keep in mind today?

Empathize with your teams and the fact that not everyone has experienced Zoom-like growth through the pandemic, which catalyzed the transition to remote work. Find solutions to the new remote-first way of working that help your rep stay connected with the rest of the team, the resources they need to close more business and the time saving solutions that ultimately allow them to focus on customer facing activities instead of administrative work.

Invest in a connected workspace platform. With sales teams scattered across different time zones or spending alternating days in the office, the need to communicate efficiently and effectively is greater than ever. Salespeople and managers need to be able to collaborate with one another seamlessly no matter where they are in the world. Marketing and sales leaders will recognize quickly that connected workspace platforms become the go-to connective tissue for individual sales teams to take and share notes in a distributed workforce. 

In what ways do you feel CRM platforms will evolve in future and how will AI play a role in changing how CRMs function?

Modern CRMs operate as a filing cabinet of sorts. They’re a great place to store your data, but they don’t really bring anything else to the table. As salespeople navigate the ever-expanding tech stack at their disposal, they’re realizing that today’s CRMs just aren’t technologically up-to-date. CRMs simply weren’t built to make sales reps’ jobs any easier. 

In order to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital sales landscape, CRMs must (at the very least) take advantage of AI technology to automate everything from data entry to quote generation and anything else that feels like manual labour. This will alleviate some of the pains salespeople deal with and help CRMs integrate more smoothly with the other tools reps use on a daily basis. 

For example, at Dooly we use AI to surface real-time battlecards based on the context of customer calls. This type of high-tech analysis is proven to close more deals. 

A few predictions that you have for the future of martech?

According to me, a few trends,

• Tech stack bloat will cause today’s workers to seek sanctuary in applications that reduce their need to context switch.
• Salesforce will NOT be the system of record or system of choice for the SMB market as early as 2023.
• ISVs will focus more on low-code or no-code workflow creation than on custom implementations and rollouts of enterprise platforms. 

A few takeaways for marketing leaders and CMOs/CEOs

Lead generation is rapidly changing from SQL- and MQL- driven to PQL (product qualified leads) with the reason being partly attributed to the already overwhelming tech stack that operations teams are already dealing with. Simply put, they can’t keep up with the needs of their teams and this has been exacerbated by the abrupt shift to a remote-first workforce. 

With end-users needing immediate solutions to the problems they face, end-users are rapidly becoming the decision makers for the technology they choose. It fundamentally changes how you market, how you build software, and how you sell to businesses today.

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