How Retool Generated a 25% Pipeline Boost with Koala
Retool is an application development platform that lets developers quickly build internal applications to streamline operations and accelerate growth. They deliver incredible results, shaving weeks, months, or even years off development roadmaps—which can in turn save millions in project costs.
As a PLG business, they rely on their platform to be the primary driver of their sales funnel. Because they’re a leading solution in their market, they get tons of web traffic coming to their site from interested parties. They had a tool in place to ping the sales team when new traffic came to the pricing page, but this anonymous visitor data simply wasn’t cutting it.
Then they discovered Koala 🐨
The Power In Identifying Interested Visitors
Koala gives companies the ability to see and interpret behavioral signals from their website traffic. Retool’s sales team began using Koala on a trial basis, and its impact was felt almost immediately.
“Within the first few days, I knew like, WOW, this is powerful. This is super valuable and super useful,” said Sales Team Lead George Kunthara, who started using Koala to transform the static of anonymous web traffic into clear signals of quality sales leads.
Koala’s advanced intent model quickly identified the traffic patterns that indicated an interested potential customer. The strongest buying signals were when visitors accessed the following information:
- Detailed guides about rolling out Retool more broadly within a company
- Technical docs about SSO and Self-Hosted Deployment (both major features of a paid account)
- Integrating Retool with specific applications, like Databricks
Koala made it easy to track these signals and use them to target visitors who were ready to make a purchase.
"Koala is so important. It tells you the very moment this person went on your website,” says Retool Enterprise Account Executive Adara Parker, “Those leads and prospects are prioritized at an urgency level that my other outbounding work does not get."
Interpreting Signals to Make an Immediate Impact
Parker, Kunthara, and their teams had unprecedented visibility into who was doing what on Retool’s website. But it’s the way Koala helped them interpret these signals that made the biggest difference to their results.
For example, Retool’s previous leads tool sent them notifications for new user signups. These comprised 85% of the MQLs flagged by that platform. But Koala discovered these signups occurred too early in the buying journey to be an accurate sales signal. In fact, these leads converted to SQO at a rate two times worse than the average homepage visitor. This is surprising on the surface, but makes sense when you realize these signups were really people opting into the self-service path.
With insight like this, Koala helped the sales teams to focus on better indications that a customer was ready to buy. Retool was able to uncover prospect-level identities for 85% of the pings that had previously been anonymous visitors, meaning their sales team knew exactly who they needed to contact.
"I use Koala to identify potential new prospects that are reasonable for me to reach out to,” says Parker, “I can just directly say ‘I saw you were looking at our website... I'd love to hear your feedback.’ I can use what they're doing to be more relevant."
The high-fidelity buying signals uncovered by Koala allow Retool’s sales team to not just reach the right people, but to reach them at the right time. Real-time Slack alerts let Parker, Kunthara, and others know when prospective customers were actively trying to find answers on the site, creating organic points of entry into the active sales funnel.
The results are impressive. In less than a year, Koala helped Retool close dozens of won deals and increase their net-new pipeline by 25%.
“If a rep isn't outbounding someone that came on the website that day, they are leaving money on the table,” says Parker, “And that's why you should zero inbox your Koala notifications every single day. That's how important I think it is.”
Getting Started With Koala
When Retool started working with Koala, they initially gave five business development reps trial access to the tool. This quickly spread to putting Koala in the hands of 75 reps across the entire GTM team. Onboarding was easy, and the Koala team provided concierge-type support.
“It was so easy to get up to speed,'” says George Kunthara, “We just had a shared Slack channel, and anything that I couldn't really figure out, I just would ping the Koala team and they'd get back to me right away.”
After the easy implementation, Retool scaled up their use of Koala quickly and effectively.
“I've tried every website and PLG tool under the sun.” says Kunthara, “I didn't quite know what I wanted while trying all of these, but Koala is exactly the combination I needed.”
Retool Head of Sales, Eleanor Dorfman, sums up her company’s experience by saying, “Koala has truly been a paradigm shift for us and how we build a repeatable pipeline — we've found and accelerated dozens of deals in our first six months and the team loves it!”
