LambdaTest shifts into high gear with better pipeline visibility in Drivetrain

Over the past two years, LambdaTest has experienced meteoric growth. In June of 2021, the company raised $16 million in Series B funding. Less than a year later, in March of 2022, they had raised another $45 million in a Series C funding round, making LambdaTest one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in its market.

This is the kind of growth every startup aspires to. However, when looking at a successful company like LambdaTest, you rarely see challenges that it’s had to overcome to get where it is today.

For LambdaTest, one of those challenges was the growing pains inflicted by a reliance on technologies that couldn’t keep up with the company’s rapidly changing needs, especially in its revenue operations.

Prior to Drivetrain

The Challenge

In the beginning, LambaTest was using a combination of Zoho CRM and Google Sheets to track  its revenue generating activities. But as the company quickly began expanding into new markets, Kushank Poddar, Lambdatest’s head of Sales Strategy, said he could never get a comprehensive view of his sales funnel with the reports available in Zoho CRM.

For Poddar, the moment he realized it was time to find a new solution came when he was getting ready to prepare the company’s annual plan. Before any actual planning could begin, he would first have to configure and run a massive number of customized reports in Zoho CRM to get the data he needed.

With multiple sales channels and several teams operating in each, he had dozens of funnels, each of which had to be evaluated against 6-8 different metrics.

Still, faced with the prospect of pulling all those reports and then on top of that, having to do all those calculations across a bunch of different spreadsheets, Poddar knew something had to give.

The Solution

How Drivetrain Helped

Fortunately, Poddar didn’t have to look far for the answer to his problem. About six months earlier, he met up with Drivetrain co-founder Alok Goel to get a demo of Drivetrain’s capabilities.

At the time, LambdaTest was just beginning to see the need for a better way to manage the complexities of LambdaTest’s revenue operations at scale. Just six months later, when LambdaTest’s growth trajectory quickly accelerated, Poddar didn’t waste any time in reconnecting with Drivetrain.

Poddar said that since becoming a customer, Drivetrain’s support has been instrumental in giving LambdaTest better visibility into its revenue operations and finding new ways to analyze the data quickly. “Whatever we needed, they were able to help,” he said.

As a fast-growing SaaS company, LambdaTest’s needs continue to evolve, and Drivetrain has been there to support them every step of the way, developing new features and building out customized dashboards to serve the different data users within the company.

Today, the company has about 30 people across departments who use Drivetrain in various ways. LambdaTest’s sales leadership can log into Drivetrain to take the pulse of the business at any given time. Product teams use it to see how their products are performing in terms of the number of leads that are coming in, close rates, and ticket sizes. Channel leaders for the SDR and BDR teams and sales team leaders also use the platform to make sure they’re on track to meet their targets and if not, to more quickly figure out where they’re falling short.

Poddar said all of this is possible because Drivetrain makes the data very understandable, making it easy for anyone on any team to find and work with their data to gain new insights.

Tracking actuals against the annual plan for faster intelligence

With Drivetrain, LambdaTest was able to create their annual plan in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken. Now, they’re using Drivetrain to track it.

Poddar said Drivetrain is essential for monitoring and tracking actuals given the complexity of LambdaTest’s sales operations. With Drivetrain, he’s able to quickly compare actuals to the plan for multiple metrics and in any dimension, which can include multiple channels and teams. He can also compare the actuals in any of those dimensions for any time period, including weekly, monthly, quarterly, or for the half-year. This ability allows him to identify and respond quickly to problems with any aspect of his sales operation as well as to changing market conditions.

Tracking actuals against the annual plan for faster intelligence

For Poddar, Drivetrain has enabled him to meet his company’s needs better and faster. He said,

He’s also now able to bring more cross-functional teams into the conversation.They no longer have to ask him where to get the data they need because he can simply give them direct access to Drivetrain, which gives him back even more time.

Eliminating hidden opportunity costs

Poddar noted that there are significant opportunity costs when you continue to use technologies that can’t keep pace with changes in your organization and the market. When it takes too long to get answers to your questions, he explained, there’s a natural tendency to just quit asking them, or to ask them less frequently. The end result is that you can miss opportunities that may be right there in front of you.

With Drivetrain, Poddar is now able to indulge his curiosity and thirst for insight into his business any time he wants. He said whenever he wants to take a deep dive into his data, “just 30 minutes on Drivetrain will give me an answer.”

Given its rapid growth over the past 18 months, LambdaTest certainly has plenty of data to work with. And now, with Drivetrain the company is stomping on the accelerator to turn insights into action even faster.