Element Connect by Elements
External Data in custom fields
Elements Connect By Elements External Data in Custom Fields
In sales, the fine line between success and failure is often measured in how well opportunities are qualified. Is the prospect likely to buy? Is it worth the effort or should you disqualify them, right then and there? These aren‘t straight-forward questions, but insight-based prospecting can make a turbulent sales journey a bit more predictable.
Open minded is one of the leading independent pure players in cybersecurity in France. Its services entail tailor-made security and network activities, from defining defense strategy to technical implementation and operations management.
Realizing the impact of opportunity qualification, Open minded used Jira with Elements Connect integration to manage the qualifying process. The app allows Openminded to fetch data from an external ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system into Jira, and seamlessly connect the operational teams and support function teams throughout the prospecting pipeline.
The challenge: organizing the opportunity qualification process Before using Jira and Elements Connect, Openminded relied solely on Boond Manager. The tool’s fundamental limitations, especially the missing custom fields, make it difficult to validate critical prospect data in the system. It also lacks workflow configuration for progress tracking, which means poor visibility of responsible individuals for each prospect as well as lead statuses
Account managers and business developers sometimes failed to close deals simply because the quality of data in the ERP wasn‘t as good as it should be
“We knew we needed to move away from Boond Manager at some point,“ says Tsuyoshi Shimabukuro, CTO at Openminded. “We looked for a solution that would allow us to capitalize data so we can improve the quality of data in Boond Manager before migrating to another ERP.
Rather than recreating the wheel, they turned to Jira to optimize the opportunity qualification process. As the company is already managing their ITSM processes on Jira and the team‘s adoption of the platform was solid, extending the power of Jira to better manage opportunities seemed logical. That‘s where Elements Connect (formerly nFeed) comes into play.
Bringing data from the ERP into Jira After some research, Shimabukuro decided to use Elements Connect (formerly nFeed) to simultaneously enforce the opportunity qualification process and enrich the ERP database.
Here‘s how it works. When users configure a new process in Jira to track opportunities, the data from Boond Manager is made available in Jira via Elements Connect. It will then populate various fields regarding the prospect’s background. This process is built internally, with a Elements‘ Atlassiancertified consultant assisting the configuration of Elements Connect
For each opportunity, account managers select the customer and their requirement. The custom Elements Connect fields are connected to the ERP database. Users can also define a dependency between the “Customer“ field and the “Requirement“ field. By customizing Elements Connect fields display via HTML and a scripting app, users can view the account’s information from the ERP in read-only model.
Centralizing information in Jira to facilitate interactions between stakeholders Once the opportunity ticket is created, it becomes the single source of truth where business teams qualify customer data and operational teams manage tasks. Both teams will have a 360° view of the opportunity. Users do not need to toggle between tools or different modules in the same tool.
All the required information is made available from within Jira thanks to Elements Connect. “nFeed is a versatile app,“ says Tsuyoshi Shimabukuro. “One of the product‘s key strengths is the ability to manipulate data from several sources to enrich Jira issues.
You can customize the way you display this information to your users, which is a real bonus as using industry jargon within issues strengthen the adoption of Jira overall.“
Leveraging Elements Connect even more Feedback from management and users has been very positive for Openminded. They also enjoyed increased productivity and higher quality of data in the ERP. This encourages Tsuyoshi Shimabukuro and his team to hone data quality improvement initiatives as part of the migration from the legacy ERP to a new one in the future
Openminded has more plans for Elements Connect. They want to leverage the versatility of the app to enrich issue tracking for security incidents, with information from in-house databases and indicators of compromise (IoC) data sources.
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