A sales process held together with post-it notes and binders.
The client is a boutique puppy adoption service in Virginia that prides itself on finding the right home for every puppy, prioritizing the wellbeing of the dog. Their sales team was fielding interest through phones, emails, and in-person conversations, tracking it all across post-it notes, binders, and spreadsheets. They had implemented Salesforce, but that implementation was only a partial solution.
What the client really needed was a way to match customer breed interest and personality preferences to available puppies, automatically, and in real time. The client's Salesforce Administrator and VP of Sales knew Sales Cloud could be customized to solve the problem. But it would require a strong integration with PetKey, their kennel management software. That's where Digital Mass came in.
The WorkA custom Salesforce integration with PetKey.
Digital Mass built the PetKey integration using PetKey's JavaScript API library, pulling available pet data into Salesforce on an automated schedule via Salesforce's batch system. Because dropping the PetKey partner library directly into Salesforce wasn't an option, Digital Mass engineered a suite of custom classes to interact with PetKey in a way that fit neatly into their existing sales processes.
Natural language processing was applied to customer requests to capture breed and personality preferences directly on the Contact object, so when a matching puppy became available, the system already knew who to notify.
The result was a real-time matchmaking system that worked in both directions:
- Pet addedWhen a new puppy was added to the kennel, Apex triggers automatically searched for existing contacts who had expressed interest in that breed, notified the sales team, and created a follow-up task.
- Contact addedWhen a new customer contact was created in Salesforce, the system searched available puppies in the kennel for matching breeds and surfaced results to the sales team in real time.
- Inverse matchingCustomers sometimes inquired about breeds that weren't yet available. Digital Mass built an inverse matching capability that notified the sales team when a matching puppy arrived, so no opportunity was lost to timing.
- License optimizationThe client has an enterprise Salesforce license. Digital Mass built the solution using both Sales Cloud and Platform licenses, extending Salesforce capabilities to the full sales team without inflating the Salesforce bill.
Saving necks from the swivel head problem.
- Real-time puppy-to-customer matching replacing manual lookups across multiple systems.
- Sales team no longer managing multiple sets of notes to track inventory and customer interest.
- PetKey Sales Cloud extension configurable by the internal team; no outside developer needed.
- Automatic outreach triggered when a new or returning customer has a matching puppy available.
The sales process was already relationship-driven. The system just needed to catch up. By connecting Salesforce to the kennel, Digital Mass gave the team real-time visibility into what was available, and who was already waiting for it.
