People.ai vs. Sales Performance Management solutions from SAP SuccessFactors

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

SAP Sales Performance Management from Success Factors works great if the incentive calculation is simple. However, if it contains a lot of constraints and filters or is dynamic, it is not friendly to changes or complexity in terms of configuration and time to calculate the incentives. The advantages of using SAP Sales Performance Management are that the process is controlled, the data is in the cloud, and the roles and permissions make it more secure.

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

• Configurable out of the box.
• Allows for complex compensation rules (Rate tables, MDLTs, etc).
• Has the ability to build cross-channel (non-hierarchy) relationships. For us, this is very powerful.
• Can build a large data warehouse of commissionable data.
• Speed to market can be as fast as minutes.

• 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.

• Using names to reference payees in the compensation platform, instead of their ID
• Allow an Advisor to see their compensation as well as how their employees compensation without requiring to proxy
• Expose all variables within the application to the dashboard, to allow them to be used for data insights, without requiring any extra work.

Incentivized

I would use this product if it were needed due to very complex plans/organization

My rating is because even though the system works well and has many good features as far as the regular hierarchy, ability to enter fixed variables and the use of rate and lookup tables, there are few sticking points. The custom hierarchy is not easy to use as it is not just point and click. Also, the rule writing is difficult and requires a lot of testing to ensure the results are what you are expecting to calculate or pay.

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

SAP SuccessFactors is better than the Accord Sales Execution Platform because the automation it provides is something out of the box for us. Which was very much less with Accord, and customization according to our need is better than that also. So we can focus on sales and do not need to worry about anything else.

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

• The efficiencies gained by moving from reports and spreadsheet alone has earned us a positive ROI.
• SAP Commissions speed to the market allows us to quickly and cheaply change our direction to meet market demands.
• Our sales force's engagement has drastically improved. We are now paying monthly instead of quarterly and have earned their trust.