Hypergrowth and the Data Challenge
No matter the company’s stage, hyper-growth can leave businesses swirling with an overload of information, as was the case with Zoom.
Facing a ‘sea of data,’ Zoom’s sales team struggled to find a scalable way to digest, analyze, and act on all the information accessible to them, including sales benchmarks. Not only did manually updated spreadsheets not scale, but they also failed to generate their intended response as managers felt more overwhelmed by data than empowered by it.
By partnering with People.ai, Zoom could scale their efforts, automatically capturing, analyzing, and correlating sales engagement with outcomes that otherwise would have been lost. With a more approachable way to see how reps were spending their time, managers could shape coaching sessions into strategic conversations rather than reviewing past activities.
The “40 Meeting” Leading Indicator
What’s the difference between top-performing reps and everyone else? 40 meetings a month. That insight, among others, is what Zoom’s sales leadership uncovered with help from People.ai’s platform. By analyzing the sales activities of 600+ reps, People.ai was able to correlate top performers’ behavior, like the number of meetings they had per month, with hitting or exceeding quota.
“It’s easy to get lost in a sea of metrics. People’s eyes glaze over when you talk about numbers, especially when you start to get really deep into them. For People.ai to be able to distill all those data points down into immediate next steps for managers to coach on is immensely valuable,” says Brian McEnrue, Sales Enablement Analyst whose team was responsible for implementing People.ai.
By emphasizing a straightforward metric that everyone could wrap their head around—40 meetings per month per rep— Zoom could focus manager and rep attention on engagement already proven to work.
The result? An increase of $6M in Year over Year (YoY) bookings, with reps increasing bookings by 21-49% across segments, all tied back to the increase in meetings.
Transforming the Coaching Session
For Zoom, the real value of People.ai wasn’t just surfacing data; it was making it actionable. Rather than more spreadsheets, sales managers received a comprehensive view of Account and Opportunity-level engagement, including where reps were spending their time, the people involved, and the why behind stalled deals.
“People.ai is one of the key tools for managers to keep their finger on the pulse of what’s actually going on with their team,” says McEnrue. “A core part of a manager’s job is to bring the best out of their team. Arming them with ready-made information so they can ask the best questions to get the best answers in their 1:1s—I think it levels up everyone’s game. I think that’s crucially important in sales.”
With a complete view of rep engagement across accounts, opportunities, and contacts came a gradual shift in how managers ran coaching sessions. Rather than asking reps to replay who they spoke to or what happened, managers could now lead sessions with answers in hand. Had deals been stuck in a proof of concept and showed signs of stalling out? Were reps spreading themselves too thin across accounts, or were they leaning on too few to carry them to quota? Among others, insights like these helped Zoom’s team change rep performance and coaching sessions’ expectations.
Sales leader Mark Pickart has made People.ai part of his everyday work routine. “When I sit down at my machine to start the day, I look at the forecast, pipeline, emails, chats. Part of that routine is also to look at People.ai. It’s part of our scorecard. How did we do? Who had a busy day, and why? It helps me to know who to check in with and where to focus my conversation. As I spot check deals, especially the largest opportunities that I don’t know well, it shows me what’s happening and if I’m missing something. It’s a safety net.”
As McEnrue points out, “numbers drive insights, insights drive policy, policy drives results.” By shaping coaching sessions around the insights provided by People.ai, like where reps were spending their time or who they had yet to thread into deals, managers were able to guide reps towards the right kinds of behaviors, increase bookings, and gain a deeper understanding of what engagement was driving wins.
"People.ai is a crucial GTM partner that's helping us shape our future, not simply react to it. It's played a key role in our sales team's success."