People.ai is a revenue intelligence platform for go-to-market teams. The platform promises to help sales, marketing and customer success teams uncover every revenue opportunity from every customer. Customers include: Lyft, Gainsight, Tanium and Palo Alto Networks. People.ai helps them capture contacts, activity and engagement and drive actionable insights across all their revenue generation. Founded in 2016, People.ai is based in San Francisco and is backed by Y Combinator and…
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RO Innovation
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Upland RO Innovation automatically serves up the best customer references to elevate brand awareness and win more deals.
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.
BL is great is you're going from a manual process to something more sophisticated. I'm not sure what the competitive landscape looks like with regards to Reference Software nowadays, but when we were evaluating a few years ago, BL was ahead of all other vendors in terms of functionality and integrations with SFDC
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
The system provides more visibility into available references and prevents references from being over-used. It allows the client (reference) to choose how often they can be contacted in a given time period and provides a closed-loop feedback mechanism to make sure the client is providing positive responses.
Allows account executives (sales people) to easily request references based on: product Used, customer vertical, location, account size, expertise, etc.
Uses a “Five Star” method to show how relevant the answers are when a results are returned from a search.
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.
The process of asking each reference how often they’d be willing to be contacted was the biggest task. We made assumptions for current clients, and ask each new client once they become a customer. Along with which specific skill-set they’d be willing to be a reference
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
While I was one of the decision makers in this process, I didn't sit on the demos for the other providers (I was brought in further in the sales process). My understanding from my team was that BL was much more configurable and support more robust integrations that the competitors
