How SlapFive Shortened Sales Cycles and Implementation Timelines with Workato

Two years ago, SlapFive faced a significant challenge: how to efficiently integrate with the various systems its customers relied on. Many of SlapFive’s customers required a Salesforce integration, while others needed connections to HubSpot, Asana, Gainsight, Vanilla, among other various platforms.

These integration demands slowed down sales cycles, as SlapFive couldn’t provide immediate answers on feasibility and timelines, and delayed implementations by requiring engineering resources for custom builds. This bottleneck threatened company growth and customer success, which were critical to their advocacy-driven strategy.

SlapFive had a pivotal decision to make: build vs. buy. The decision was made with the realization that an embedded iPaaS solution would make SlapFive more agile in both pre-sales and post-sales.

Selecting the Right Integration Platform

To determine the best platform, SlapFive partnered with Logan Data, an integration-focused professional services firm, and evaluated multiple vendors, including Workato, SnapLogic, Boomi, and Prismatic. They conducted a hands-on comparison, building identical Salesforce integration scenarios in each platform to assess ease of development, flexibility, and scalability.

Workato emerged as the clear winner. It provided:

• An extensive library of connectors covering SlapFive’s key applications.
• A user-friendly interface, allowing non-technical team members to manage integrations.
• The ability to automate complex workflows beyond simple data synchronization.

With Workato, SlapFive could empower its customer success managers to handle integrations independently, eliminating the need for engineering intervention and accelerating implementation.

Building an Automation Engine

By embedding Workato, SlapFive transformed its integration approach. Instead of building custom solutions for each customer, the company developed a standardized directory of pre-built automation templates covering over 35 applications. This shift allowed:

• Shorter sales cycles.
• Faster onboarding and implementation timelines.
• Customer success managers to activate integrations and perform field mappings without engineering support.
• A more scalable and flexible way to meet customer needs.

Beyond simple integrations, SlapFive quickly realized that Workato could serve as an automation engine to optimize internal and customer-facing workflows. One example was automating the customer referral process by integrating Marketo, Salesforce, and a gifting platform. This allowed the system to track referrals, update lead statuses, and reward advocates—all without manual intervention.

How SlapFive Customers Are Leveraging Workato

SlapFive’s customers quickly recognized the value of automation. While some initially requested access to the Workato connector to build their own workflows, most lacked the internal resources to do so. Instead, they relied on SlapFive to provide the automations, allowing them to focus on their core business objectives rather than technical integration.

Social Media Advocate Identification

One customer, focused on call listening and social media monitoring, needed a way to identify potential advocates. In response, SlapFive designed a workflow that:

• Monitored LinkedIn activity to identify engaged customers.
• Automatically enrolled them in a campaign.
• Validated their customer status.

This feature, which traditionally would have taken months to develop as a built-in product capability, was created in under 15 minutes using Workato.

Tracking Advocate Job Changes

Another common challenge for advocacy teams was tracking when their advocates changed jobs. Previously, this required manual effort and often resulted in lost engagement opportunities. SlapFive solved this by developing the Advocate Job Change Tracker, which combined Workato’s automation capabilities with an external API to monitor LinkedIn profile updates. This automation allowed companies to:

• Detect when an advocate moved to a new company.
• Check whether the new company was already a customer.
• Trigger appropriate outreach—either re-engaging the advocate or creating a high-value lead for the sales team.

Given the high turnover rates in today’s job market, this functionality has been a game-changer. Instead of losing track of engaged champions, companies can immediately act on job transitions, ensuring continued advocacy and new business opportunities.As customers continue to explore automation possibilities, SlapFive has seen an acceleration in innovation cycles. What once took months to develop as custom features is now accomplished in days or even minutes with Workato.

The Key to Success: Future-proof Integration with Embedded iPaaS

SlapFive’s experience with Workato has solidified a clear conclusion: point-to-point integrations are a thing of the past. As businesses evolve, companies that persist in building custom integrations from the ground up will struggle to keep up, falling behind those embracing modern integration solutions.

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the key to success will be flexibility, speed, and scalability in integrations. By adopting Workato, SlapFive has not only streamlined its internal processes but also enhanced customer experiences and established a powerful, scalable automation framework. This approach sets a new standard for businesses seeking to future-proof their integration strategies.