LinkPoint Connect vs. People.ai

LinkPoint is well suited to any situation where Outlook is used for email correspondence and calendar items and there is need to have a record of those items and/or perform connected actions (schedule tasks, follow up reminders, etc.) in Salesforce. Automating this process and removing as much duplication of work as possible is the primary goal and the primary benefit that LinkPoint provides. In addition to efficiency, automating the process also provides a pretty substantial increase in accuracy, removing ca. 50% of the chance for human error. It's pretty simple functionality in concept, but extremely valuable in execution.

Incentivized

I've been using People.ai for a bit now, and I've been consistently impressed. I use it to track how my team is doing, how my clients are doing, and how I'm doing. I can create custom dashboards with any metric I want to see. I can set goals, and they'll track my progress towards those goals. I can set up competitions between my team, and they'll tell me who's winning and who's losing. You can share these dashboards with your team, which means that everyone can see how everyone else is doing.

Incentivized

• Adding emails is a breeze.
• Creating contacts/leads from outlook is as simple as highlight, drag and drop.
• Additional customization to allow you to bring in associates custom objects.

Incentivized

• Their Deal Room presents times when you are multi-threaded, engaged with executives, and have an upcoming meeting scheduled rather than stalking your reps calendar and salesforce activities.
• They allow you to create areas performance dashboard with custom KPIs you want to measure

Incentivized

• The plug-in for Outlook needs to be reset every couple of months.
• It does not tag e-mails sent from mobile devices (or we haven't figured out how to do that yet).

Incentivized

• People.ai has a robust platform, however, this requires sales reps to log into one more platform and the People.ai platform is not customizable for selecting what can be viewed by users. If People.ai were to make the features in their platform available in Salesforce it would be a huge win for leveraging the data they aggregate. Hoping an API will soon be on the Roadmap
• Time Spent. People.ai uses some logic to attribute values on the "time spent" on the activities being captured. They did improve their meeting aggregations so that they were not "double counting" time when multiple meetings were booked in the same time slot for a rep. Email time spent still seems to have some errors as the time spent on emails can show in excess of the weekly working hours of the reps.

Never had to use the support team, which probably means the product works well!

Incentivized

Prior to our move to LinkPoint, we used the Salesforce add-in for Outlook. This required manual syncing of email and calendar items and no easy to use interface between the two programs. It was very cumbersome for me to use, to the point where I quit using it altogether some time ago. I found it far less frustrating to just switch back and forth between Outlook and Salesforce and manually perform the requisite actions, create tasks or other items, enter the required data, etc.

Incentivized

The easiest comparison would be to email automation vendors like a SalesLoft, Outreach, or Groove. But People.ai doesn't have a template email send like a sequence or cadence feature you would find with them. It is more of a compliment to the email automation vendors than a competitor in my opinion. We want our SDRs to have the ability run sizable outbound campaigns so they still use Outreach. However, we deactivated the Outreach activity sync and run activity syncing through People.ai. If someone gets added into the email CC, People.ai will grab that person and create them as a contact against the matching Salesforce account. For our Sales reps, we want them to have the ability to track opens, link clicks, and send templated emails so we have them use Groove. Again, we deactivated the Salesforce sync and use People.ai syncing. This is a great way to automate the pain away from creating Opportunity Contact Roles and create all relevant contacts in Salesforce from CC's on emails to people added last minute on a calendar invite. My favorite part is how it ingests data directly from Google and doesn't allow a Sales Rep to not to sync an activity to Salesforce, it happens automagically

Incentivized

• Activity history tracking. Our users send most of their emails from outlook.
• Contact and lead creation.
• Visibility of all associated records.

Incentivized

• Time back for the whole team. We don't log calls anymore, we just work.
• Great insight into who on your team may be wasting time with low-impact customers. This is near impossible to measure without this tool.
• Marketing data is always current so we email the right people vs relying on my teams (Sales, Marketing, anyone) to be data stewards.

Incentivized