December 19, 2022 | Andrew Lawlor

Databook knew it had a powerful application for enterprise sales. The challenge was getting that application to the people who needed it, where they needed it: in Salesforce. 

To accomplish that goal, Databook had to find a partner with Salesforce development expertise, both in building Apps for the AppExchange and navigating the arduous security review process that goes with it. 

Those are areas that Aptaria excels in. So I’m pleased to report that as of December 2022, our partnership with Databook has enabled them to release their strategic enablement solution on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Founded in 2017, Databook had an immediate impact in the enterprise sales space. They use artificial intelligence to glean insights across tens of thousands of companies and deliver those insights to enterprise customers.

Databook’s insights engine provides higher-quality information in mere moments than could be developed from a much longer, traditional sales discovery process.

“We help sellers identify new opportunities to add to their pipeline, increase deal sizes, and close deals faster,” Databook co-founder Alex Barrett said.

When Aptaria and Databook first talked, Databook offered a web app for its customers. But Salesforce was on Databook’s mind, understandably — the technology giant has more than 150,000 customers and is a partner and investor.  

So Barrett and his team knew they needed a Salesforce AppExchange app. That would make their product available to all of those Salesforce customers.

“It’s really paramount that we make sure that our users get value from Databook,” Barrett said. “We want to do anything we can to reduce the friction and make sure that Databook is more and more embedded into their day-to-day sales activities.”

Aptaria’s development work with Databook was truly collaborative — Databook engineers developed an original design in house, for instance, and our team applied its Salesforce platform development expertise, especially using the platform’s Java-like programming language, Apex.

We are proud of our commitment to agile development at Aptaria, and this work highlighted our ability to respond to change sprint by sprint and work as a cross-functional team to create a truly innovative product.

“We’re obviously a fast-growing startup and things change quite quickly, the landscape moves quickly,” Alex said. “Aptaria were very adaptable, offering suggestions about best practices for Apex development and how we could most effectively build the app.”

As the development process neared the end, we focused on Salesforce’s security review. The review is notoriously arduous, as Salesforce must ensure that Apps listed on the AppExchange don’t introduce vulnerabilities to Salesforce, protecting customers and their data. The review process can be an impediment to rapid release on the AppExchange. 

And Databook faced the additional burden of creating a product for large enterprise customers. Those customers have thousands of accounts and millions of opportunities in Salesforce, so security — and scalability — were important priorities.

We were able to get Databook’s app through security review quickly — it was approved six months after development started, which is noteworthy for such a feature-rich App. 

Development process and security review aside, it’s important to note that Databook had high standards for their app. They wanted to release a game-changer — and that’s what they have done. 

“There’s a rich feature set for an initial release,” Barrett said. “A lot of work went into trying to make sure we could offer real value to our users from this app to make it worthwhile going through a deployment and testing process for a large enterprise customer, which we know can take a long time.”

The Databook Sales Cloud App brings Databook’s insights to the opportunity view in Salesforce. This constantly-updating intelligence highlights actions a seller can take to keep an opportunity moving forward, as well as risks regarding a particular opportunity based on in-depth knowledge of the customer. For instance, if a key executive has departed or an earnings report is about to drop, Databook’s customers know immediately.

That kind of insight is why some compare Databook’s service to a McKinsey strategy report, except that it is replenished with the latest data in real time. And now Sales Cloud enables Databook to bring that level of focus to individual opportunities in a customer’s CRM. 

With the app, “we have Databook intelligence where they need it — where they’re working — so they can make use of it,” Barrett said.

While the app just became publicly available, Databook has been rolling it out on a customer-by-customer basis recently, adding hundreds of users each month. 

Next, Databook is planning to build more functionality for customers within their Salesforce-powered CRMs. And they will also be looking to their customers to help determine priorities for future developments in the Sales Cloud.

“We see this as a starting point,” Barrett said.