ClosePlan + People.ai: The Future of Revenue Operations and Intelligence

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired ClosePlan - A strategic account planning application that allows sales teams to map out and execute sales strategy with tools embedded directly in Salesforce. ClosePlan extends the value of People.ai’s Sales Solution by automating sales playbooks, deal scorecards and relationship maps. Now, reps and managers can create and implement strategies that accelerate revenue growth and predictability.

Adding To The Momentum of the People.ai Sales Solution

In September we announced the launch of our New Sales Solution to provide a completely new experience for sales teams that leverages the rich automation and insights from the core People.ai platform to help sales teams anticipate risks, improve coaching and drive more predictable growth for the business. Year to date, we’ve seen usage triple, validating that we’ve addressed a core set of needs among sales managers and reps.

While we’re pleased with the traction, we recognize that there’s an even greater opportunity to help sales organizations transition from an analog to a digital world--especially as remote work becomes the standard. In particular, we’re excited about the prospect of bringing even more automation and AI-powered insights to reps.

The Story Gets Even Better With ClosePlan!

ClosePlan has been recognized as a leader in its category, with a #1 G2 Crowd ranking for Customer Revenue Optimization and a perfect 5 star rating on Salesforce’s AppExchange. ClosePlan has invested significant resources in understanding and responding to the needs of its customers and the effort has clearly paid off.

"As a customer of both ClosePlan and People.ai," said Kishen Mistry, Director, Sales Strategy & Technology at TIBCO, "we immediately recognized that no other company is delivering what People.ai offers. Marrying the two solutions will deliver a lift to sales productivity at a time when macro trends are creating incredible headwinds for sales." By combining the power of People.ai’s patented Revenue Operations and Intelligence (ROI) platform with ClosePlan’s suite of strategic account planning tools, we’re able to deliver an even more compelling experience for Sales execs, managers and reps. Here are some of the things that get me most excited about our newest acquisition: Focus on Deals You Can Win  Pursuing unwinnable deals is one of the biggest reasons sales reps miss quota. They consume valuable time and distract from opportunities with higher potential. But, during the early stages of a deal, reps struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff. And mid stage, it’s easy for reps to get emotionally invested and miss signals that indicate the need to change strategy or cut bait. These issues are particularly acute for new reps who lack the experience to separate real buyers from tire kickers. With People.ai and ClosePlan, every sales rep can consistently use their company’s opportunity qualification methodology. This provides reps and their managers with an objective standard they can use to prioritize deals, evaluate deal progression, and jointly determine how best to proceed.

• Identify your most winnable deals using sales methodologies such as MEDDIC. Use engagement data sourced by People.ai from calendar, email and collaboration systems to get unprecedented visibility into deal quality and progression.
• Increase close rates by identifying factors that might derail deals and using People.ai’s AI-powered insights, get things back on track
• Improve revenue predictability by quantifying deal and pipeline health and sharing it with all levels of the organization

Mobilize Influencers and Champions

In enterprise sales, the size of the buying committee gets larger by the year. When sales reps rely on a small number of relationships to close a deal, they undermine their chances to win.  Champion turnover, eleventh hour objections, and unforeseen steps in the sales process are only a few of the issues that derail deals when reps haven’t engaged all of the influencers and decision makers in the buying process. When companies deploy the integrated People.ai-ClosePlan solution, sales reps will understand who the buyer committee is and how to most effectively engage them during the initial sales process and in subsequent deal cycles.

• Automatically generate “smart” relationship maps in Salesforce with auto-populating contact and activity data from People.ai.
• Accelerate sales cycles by identifying the champions, influencers, and budget owners who can expedite the process.
• Improve the effectiveness of cross-functional account teams by defining relationship owners, coordinating and automatically capturing contact engagement, and capitalizing on existing peer connections.

Run Flawless Sales Cycles

Virtually every sales organization requires enterprise sales reps to invest in some kind of account planning process. But it can be painful, involving manual data pulls from different systems, cutting and pasting, and lots of back of the envelope calculations. And worst of all, as soon as the plans are complete, they’re out of date. People.ai and ClosePlan address these challenges by delivering context sensitive playbooks within the Salesforce interface.

• Improve win rates with playbooks populated with activity data sourced by People.ai.
• Consistently and predictably close deals using proven sales motions tailored to various scenarios including enterprise, commercial, new acquisition, and renewals.
• Ramp new reps faster and increase productivity of struggling reps by providing AI-powered recommendations on how to advance deals from one stage to the next.

ClosePlan fits perfectly with People.ai’s vision of digital sales--it’s automated, smart and connected. We’re excited to welcome them to the team and look forward to helping our customers operationalize strategic account planning and execution in a fully-remote world.  

Interested in learning more about People.ai’s Sales Solution? Request a Demo.