Challenge:
The sales team at this smart home technology provider struggled to collect, share, and verify data, resulting in too many decisions being made by instinct instead of insight. 

Solution:
Thanks to Domo, sales leaders and field staff now have a single source of data they can use to project business results and staff commissions.

Impact:
Management and sales staff can spend more time selling instead of chasing down and arguing about data. 

Vivint sells smart home systems smarter with Domo.

If your home is your castle, Vivint provides the 21st century equivalent of a moat, drawbridges, and guards patrolling the walls. As one of North America’s leading smart home companies, their sensors, cameras, and smart locks keep families safe and sound, while smart thermometers and lighting keep them comfortable.  

Vivint’s success is based on the hard work of field sales staff who go door-to-door in communities throughout the country to pitch the company’s products and provide consultations. To ensure their team of 5,000+ direct sales staff work at peak effectiveness, Vivint uses Domo to measure performance and provide data-driven motivation.  

Outgrowing gut instinct.

While its products are intelligent, Vivint’s use of data before Domo was anything but. “When I joined Vivint, I was shocked at how sales leaders ran by their gut,” remembers Josh Crittenden, SVP of Direct Sales at Vivint. Part of the problem was that the sales team would often get their data from Excel spreadsheets that were difficult to parse. While created with the best of intentions, Crittenden would often leave a meeting only to find these printed excel reports piled in the trash can outside the conference room.

“I felt bad for the BI team that put in all that work, just to see those hours and hours of effort sitting in the garbage. I knew our sales leaders were doing nothing with that data to impact their results,” Crittenden said.

In addition, Crittenden found it increasingly difficult to trust the numbers he was being provided by sales staff. “Adding everyone’s claims together, it was mathematically impossible for us to grow by what each person was saying they produced when added together. People were using their own numbers and metrics for how they determined success. It wasn’t necessarily the way the company determines success.”

“As the company grew, our needs got too big and messy for spreadsheets,” added Kayden Dastrup, Director of Sales Operations at Vivint. “Things didn’t match; you could ask a simple question about something like the number of sales we had the day before and get five different responses.”

Thanks to Domo, the company now has an easily-accessible single source of truth that standardizes data and empirically shows the impact each sales staff member has on the bottom line.

Taking care of a sales staff.

A sales leader carefully tracks their sales staff for one simple reason: they want to know how much revenue the business can expect to book at the end of the day. But this works both ways. Sales staff are keen to know exactly what to expect in terms of commissions, especially if their pay structure includes bonuses for hitting specific metrics.

To keep staff motivated, Vivint built an intelligent app within Domo that shows each sales rep their specific sales performance, along with what they need to do to hit specific goals that trigger bonuses or higher levels of commission. Before Domo, it could take hours for a sales staff member to pull this information together to figure out where they stand; now that information is a click away.

“Every minute they’re not talking to a customer is a minute wasted, so their time is super, super valuable. Domo lets staff self-serve this data so they don’t have to spend time emailing or calling managers to track down information. At the same time, it gives them more visibility into what they will be paid and why,” Dastrup said.

The custom app has also helped improve staff morale and relationships with management by providing a trusted source for the data that impacts their livelihood. Before Domo, sales staff would often complain that they weren’t being paid the commission they thought they were owed. With Domo, sales staff have complete transparency into how their paycheck was calculated. Reps can also use an in-built calculator to project their earnings should they hit certain pay tiers, adding extra motivation to close those last few sales before the end of a sales period.

“It’s important to me that our reps understand every single penny they earn and make sure they feel confident that we fulfill everything we promise them,” Crittenden said. “Domo has dramatically simplified how we pay and how we explain pay to our sales reps.”

In addition to taking care of reps’ commissions, Vivint uses Domo to ensure reps are taken care of in the field. The company uses a dashboard to see where reps are throughout the country so it can exercise its duty of care.

“If there are hot spots impacted by natural disasters, we can use the data inside of Domo to make sure we contact the sales manager and their teams to help them out,” Dastrup said. From localized events like hurricanes and tornadoes to COVID-19, Vivint has used this dashboard on multiple occasions to evacuate staff or find them new housing as needed. Even when everything is going well, this dashboard is critical to ensuring traveling staff have appropriate housing, uniforms, and anything else they need to focus on their jobs.

For Vivint, Domo is more than just a business intelligence tool. It’s the operating system of its entire sales organization.