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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Xactly AlignStar
Score 5.9 out of 10
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Xactly AlignStar® utilizes a map-based interface to enable territory planning that equips sales organizations to build and optimize balanced territories that align with company goals.
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.
If you have reps and need territories assigned geographically then AlignStar is a great option. While we do not have reps in the field, I can see how powerful it can be in aligning territories not only based on estimated revenue or some other metric but also with rep location and driving in mind.
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
Detailed label options by ZIP code. I know the immediate impact of moving a single ZIP code.
Territory Optimizer. If we are having trouble figuring out the correct configuration for a particular area, its helpful to see what the program suggests. It may come up with something we hadn't thought of yet.
Custom layers. I am able to mark the previous territory boundaries, so if we want to undo a change, I know exactly where we started from.
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.
Easier functionality to label the territories. We currently still use the desktop app and labels for any feature are rather small and not intuitive.
Speed of the application. The desktop version we currently use tends to be a bit slower and runs into the "application not responding" issue quite often.
Ability for the desktop version to automatically update Salesforce. It would be nice if I could have Alignstar update a field on an account record in Salesforce when I make updates in Alignstar.
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
Easy to continuously plan forward for any potential changes by playing around with the optimization software. Able to more easily adapt our sales team and plan forward
