How Calixa’s Custom-Built Sentry Integration Improves Sales/Engineering Collaboration

Calixa is a product-led GTM platform that gives sales teams insight into account engagement, usage, and company data, to convert free signups into paid or upgrading customers. With a single dashboard view, sales teams can see how new customers are using their products, how existing customers are progressing, and which accounts might be at risk.

Normally this level of behavioral data would require engineering resources to collect, but Calixa unifies all that data, including insights into product errors, for sales and engineering teams to collaborate cross-functionally.

A key part of their architecture relies on API connectors and webhooks to 3rd party applications that pull customer data and display it in a unified account dashboard. Sales teams monitor for potential errors on the customer side, but without context into issues they’re essentially flying blind. This creates challenges when sales teams have to work with engineers to resolve issues, but don’t have the detail that would help speed up the process.

From a product perspective, it’s better when sales can talk to customers without being alerted of issues by them. The real challenge was that customers might have issues and not reach out but simply stop using the product. Thomas Schiavone, CEO and Co-founder, Calixa

Getting proactive

For sales teams, understanding which of their accounts are having product issues and how to help them is key. Thomas knew they needed a way to equip users with a solution to monitor product errors within their accounts and set out to build an integration that could make that happen.

Calixa already saw value as a Sentry customer, and speaking to their own users found that “9 times out of 10 people mentioned Sentry.” The team was also uniquely placed to build and test a new integration. Their engineers could look at the Sentry API and prototype and build it as an internal app, before rolling it out externally. So they kicked off the project with some key requirements:

• They needed true, real-time error data.
• The platform had to be stable and reliable.
• Connecting a customer’s Sentry and Calixa accounts needed to be easy. An application is only as good as it can be installed - can people connect the two in just a few clicks?

Platform stability + great engineering = happy teams

Straight off the bat, the team found the Sentry Integration Platform “super easy” to get started on, with clear, easily understood documentation. The Example App repository serves as a demo app that can bootstrap the development process and within a month they had an integration ready for prime time.

Sentry’s public APIs made it super easy to get started, we built a prototype in just a couple of days, and it took about a month to finish a hardened, production-quality app.

Calixa considered other platforms for building the integration, but their authorization processes were too manual and required some effort from customers. With Sentry they could set up the integration on either side, making it easy for accounts to grant permissions to vendors like Calixa.

When an error happens it fires a webhook through a designated URL. After that our team collects it, adds it to a queue, and processes it. This gives us the ability to get the data we need with the right SLAs to power our product. Sentry’s platform stability and Calixa’s good software engineering made it possible.

How does it work?

Calixa pulls data from a customer’s different products and data warehouses, processes and presents it in a single account dashboard. With the Sentry integration, account overviews also show the number of errors, with the ability pull specific error data.

Teams can also see a full timeline of everything happening across an account’s products, with insight into specific errors from a simplified view, without having to log into Sentry. With this data, sales can reach out to engineers by product area, already equipped with relevant context.

Calixa’s users also have the ability to set custom alert thresholds so they’d get notified either through Slack, email, or webhooks when errors cross a certain threshold.

For sales teams, the integration means that their account troubleshooting overview now comes with true 360-degree customer context grafted into the console. They’re able to look at an account’s timeline and see actual issues in Sentry, hand this info off to their engineering counterpart with details on where the error occurred, which product is being impacted, with the ability to investigate further if they need to.

Sales, support & engineering in lockstep

Since rolling out the integration, Thomas’ team found that they now have the ability to alert their customers internally when key accounts are having error spikes in real-time. Their users are then able to manage the issue themselves and reach out to their engineering teams if needed.

Teams no longer have to try and figure out why someone is writing in about an issue and ask engineering to help figure it out with a vague idea of what happened. Now they can pull the full context of an issue, which has greatly improved coordination and collaboration between sales and engineering teams for our customers.

Key results:

• Detailed context for faster sales/engineering handoff
• True 360-degree account visibility
• Real-time alerts for account errors + usage trends
• Improved sales/engineering collaboration