Reev launches calendar and email features 12x faster to improve sales productivity for end users

The Nylas Email and Calendar APIs helped Reev build communication and scheduling functionality within its platform, increasing roadmap velocity and revenue.

Reev is a sales engagement platform designed to make the sales process more efficient. The platform is integrated with some of the top tools on the market including: Salesforce, GSuite, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. The company believes that sales is about people and its mission is to provide sales engagement tools for Brazilian and Latin users. Reev streamlines areas of the sales process, including daily tasks like sending emails, in order to help teams spend more time selling and less time on administration. Through automated outreach cadences, salespeople are able to be more effective in following up – converting more leads faster.

Challenges:

To support its mission of streamlining the sales process, Reev wanted sales teams to be able to send emails and schedule meetings within the platform and needed a simpler way to build out this functionality. The first attempt at incorporating email was with a well-known mass send provider, however it resulted in problematic deliverability and open rates since the provider could only deliver messages through a proxy server–NOT from users’ own IP addresses. The product team at Reev knew they needed to give users’ the ability to send and receive messages from their own accounts to improve open rates of sales prospects, leading to closing more deals.

The initial implementation was focused on Gmail sync, as nearly 90% of Reev’s users leverage GSuite. Then the company started testing with other providers, including Microsoft Exchange and custom requests from users. Since Reev is located in Brazil, it was very common for users to be leveraging custom email providers. Trying to support such a diverse array of providers resulted in configuration issues and a suboptimal user experience leading to numerous support tickets.

Solution:

Reev knew it needed another way to address these challenges. Undertaking the build themselves would have involved adding massive scope and nuance to the integrations, working with multiple APIs across multiple service providers. So, the company started looking for alternative solutions that they could implement. Reev found that Pipedrive and other customer relationship management companies use Nylas for their bi-directional email and calendar integrations.

“When it came to the build vs buy evaluation, it didn’t make sense for us to try to reinvent the wheel. Why make something in-house when we can leverage Nylas’ expertise? Now Nylas does the heavy lifting for us. It’s a huge advantage to not have a dedicated team in-house maintaining our integration. The infrastructure they provide makes the partnership hugely beneficial,” said Daniel Gherard, Head of Technology at Reev.

With the Nylas Email API, all of Reev’s users have the ability to sync their email to the platform in real-time, including those using custom providers. By unlocking email communication data, Reev was also able to automate email sending, follow-up tasks, and other sales touchpoints. Now all emails that are sent or received are shown within the application in the history for each sales contact, helping their users streamline email communication and avoid context switching across applications. Reev is also using the authentication pages powered by Nylas, rather than making its own custom pages.

Calendaring was another key feature that was requested by Reev’s users. They wanted the ability to track meetings that were scheduled and have access to historical data for how these meetings progressed with each lead – all stored within the platform. Now with the Nylas Calendar API, Reev’s customers can schedule meetings with potential clients within the platform and see users’ availability on-demand.

Semi-automatic tasks – such as scheduling phone calls, email sends, and posting social media messages for example – can be created at specific times and dates within the sales process. By unifying communication data across channels, salespeople juggling multiple conversations with multiple leads now have access to all the historical data of those conversations within the platform. All of the information is grouped by specific sales leads, so the information is easy to utilize. This helps them pick up where they left off and be more efficient in their next steps with prospects, reducing context switching and improving the sales process.

Results:

With Nylas, Reev was able to get calendaring functionality built into its platform within a week – 12x faster – speeding up its roadmap significantly. In contrast, attempting to develop this themselves would’ve taken the team over three months, and certain features would’ve only been rolled out to specific segments of customers at different times. Taking this approach would have meant different pricing structures for different customer segments – adding significant complexity in billing and support for Reev. They also realized significant time savings for email, as Nylas was able to provide guidance for any API changes that arose.

For email, users are now able to share best practices among their sales teams, providing guidance on what has been working and improving the overall sales experience. There is a dedicated section within the Reev platform that has pre-populated email templates and tasks. Salespeople across the organization can view the analytics on which of these approaches have been most effective – including open rates, reads, and replies. This insight enables them to implement best practices in their own workflow. By having email and calendar features built within the platform, the workflow for the sales team is much smoother and has resulted in increased revenue for users.

“It’s amazing the work we’ve been able to do by relying on Nylas’ expertise. We’re excited for this partnership and where it continues to go,” said Gherard.

In the future, Reev is interested in an AI-powered API that enables users to unlock insights within text across communication channels. The sentiment analysis feature would enable Reev to help its customers gain even more insights into the sales process.