For Osso VR, a virtual reality company focused on providing cutting edge training programs for surgeons and other clinical professionals, visibility is key. And not just virtual visibility for their end users. A fast-growing startup with big ambitions, they were on the hunt for a software that could not only keep up with their ambitions, but bring some serious muscle to their reporting.

Salesforce was the answer, but Osso VR knew from the start that they needed some help. Mary Coppola, Director of Client Services, had experience working for businesses that had implemented Salesforce on their own. It wasn't a situation she was eager to find herself in again.

"To do this right, you have to become a product expert," she said. "You need to do ton of research in order to understand the tools, and then also have that perspective where you can separate what you think it should do from what your options are in reality. I can't even really fathom doing this on our own, honestly."

When Osso VR landed on using Salesforce for their business, they turned to Kicksaw for help with implementation.

"The problem that we were having was that, at least from the project management perspective, but also from the sales side, we had a bunch of different places where we were storing data, and they didn’t speak to each other," explained Mary.

"When I was running deep analysis for our executives or the investors for our Series C, it was incredibly manual for me to pull all of that stuff together. It was all stored in Google Sheets. Our project dates, project statuses, and everything else was all just manually updated."

Google Sheets is obviously not an ideal way to manage data — it's easy to irrevocably delete critical information, and managing permissions and access credentials is often a headache.

"Our Sales team was operating in HubSpot, and that system was totally disconnected from anything else that the rest of us were doing," continued Mary, "so we didn’t have visibility into that. It wasn’t connected into where our contracts were. We just needed to implement a solution that could pull it all together, and that was a one-stop shop that could talk to everything, and that we report out of as well."

Kicksaw helped Osso VR stand up their initial Sales Cloud instance and unite Osso VR's disparate data locations. Once the initial implementation was complete, Osso VR engaged Kicksaw for a second implementation, this time for TaskRay, a Salesforce-native project management solution.

"VR projects can take up to a year," Mary explained, "and sometimes more, to develop. There are a lot of different steps that need to happen. The team at Kicksaw helped us think through the best way to create these TaskRay projects. They helped us determine the best way to organize it all, and guided us through to the reporting piece, which is super critical for us. We need executive visibility for different stakeholders and different groups, and we need the ability to report out on that. Everything that they helped us create was with the lens on, 'How do we share this data outwards to other parts of the organization?'

"For my work in particular, TaskRay has been extremely helpful. I'm so excited for how it's going to propel us forward, and I really see it helping with our reporting. Being able to quickly push out status updates for different stakeholders in different parts of the company, without having to rely on that manual tracking or those spreadsheets that I have to slice and dice, is a real game-changer.

"Kicksaw implemented Salesforce so that it could easily hook into our other technology solutions. That initial work with Sales Cloud gave us a solid foundation for moving forward. I’ve come from organizations where we built super customized Salesforce solutions that were very difficult to maintain, or hinged on just one engineer who knew some very nuanced customization. Then, when they left, it broke and we didn't know what to do. I have a very high level of confidence that what we’ve built with Kicksaw is something we’re going be able to maintain and use. We don't have all those crazy things in there that are going to be difficult to maintain in the future."

Mary went on to express appreciation for the Kicksaw team's transparency around scoping, setting expectations, and communicating next steps throughout the entire implementation process.

"The thing that I appreciate most about the team is that they have not been shy about providing recommendations. When we would throw out an idea about how we’re doing something today, they helped us think through, 'OK, this is the way to build it that will be most sustainable for the future, that is leveraging out-of-the-box technology, and that is not going to make modifying or updating your process super cumbersome at a later date.' They really paid attention to what we were trying to accomplish, and how the set technology tools work and how to best leverage them so that we have fewer headaches down the road.

"I wish we could work our Kicksaw team forever. I feel very confident that if there are new solutions in the future that we want to build, or if we want to modify what we've worked on, of course we're going to partner with Kicksaw, because they've been such great partners to work with."