People.ai vs. Xactly Forecasting

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

I think TopOPPS is better suited for the larger sales team with shorter sales cycles. We have very long sales cycles and we have not truly seen it impact how we do business in terms of sales. I also think it's better suited for teams that have a true sales manager monitoring the reps and opps.

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

• Clean UI to make data more digestable
• Health Scoring
• Forecasting
• Milestone Tracking on Opportunities

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.

• Wasn't super sticky for our team
• Is not compatible with our main sales outreach tool
• Initial onboarding was challenging

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

The tool was way [more]cost effective than something like Wave which is crazy expensive and not worth it. The other tools we evaluated were: 1. Salesforce's Wave Analytics - Too Expensive 2. Tableau - Not very user-friendly at the time and too expensive 3. Excel solutions - the data would become stale as soon as the Excel was exported.

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

• Honestly, we cannot put a value on it. It's hard to know if it helped or hurt, but don't think it has helped.

Incentivized