Case Study

People.ai Powers PTC’s Digital Sales and Marketing Transformation

PTC’s legacy of Sales and Marketing Innovation dates back to the mid-’90s when they introduced MEDDIC, now one of the most widely used sales methodologies in the world. More recently, PTC’s digital Sales and Marketing transformation, powered by People.ai, has set a new standard for how go-to-market teams can generate pipeline, close deals, and deliver ongoing value to customers.

Challenge statement: With a market cap of over $10 Billion, PTC is used to taking big swings to fuel its growth. Emerging markets such as Augmented Reality and IoT represented promising opportunities, but PTC knew it couldn’t scale Sales and Marketing resources in direct proportion to revenue. To generate greater efficiencies, PTC turned to People.ai to build a more robust contact database, establish a more thorough pipeline inspection process, and generate a deeper understanding of buyer personas.

New Challenges, A New Solution

With a market cap of over $10 Billion, PTC is used to taking big swings to fuel its growth. “As an executive team, we saw significant opportunities across several fronts–fully embracing a SaaS model, and positioning PTC as a leader in the connected AR/IoT space, but we didn’t have unlimited resources to spend. My ability to propose a “do more with less” solution got leadership’s attention and earned their respect,” says Cogan. To deploy the ROI Engine, she and Rashid looked to People.ai for help with three initiatives: building a more robust contact database, establishing a more thorough pipeline inspection process, and generating a deeper understanding of buyer personas and buying unit.

Unlocking New Contacts

With over 6,000 employees, PTC had accumulated a wealth of contact information in employee inboxes. Unfortunately, the Marketing and Sales teams had no way to systematically access data that might help generate leads and accelerate deals. People.ai addressed this problem, using its patented SmartMatch technology to mine business activity trapped in the email system, automatically upload it to CRM, and associate it with the correct accounts and contacts. Within a day of launching, People.ai sourced 40,000 new contacts, adding 35,000 in the next twelve months. Rashid calls out the insights that the data unlocks. “This information feeds into our intent scoring model and shapes the way that Marketing and Sales engage. Whereas before we had an incomplete view of our buying unit, now we get a much more robust perspective on who to engage in an account.”

Industry:

B2B Software

Use Cases:

Generate Marketing Compliant Contacts
Enhance Attribution Models with Activity Data
Inspect deals and pipeline health

Key Results:

People.ai technology unlocked 75,000 marketable contacts from PTC sales teams’ inboxes, with a value of $300,000
People.ai automatically uploaded 266,000 activities to CRM, saving 4,700 hours of manual labor, and providing new levels of visibility into pipeline health
People.ai identified the buying group on more than 10,000 opportunities enhancing deal inspection and de-risking opportunities by giving sales managers and leaders visibility into engagement with key personas

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Saima Rashid

VP, Field Analytics & Insights

"People.ai delivers leading indicators to check pipeline health and compare existing deals to what's worked in the past."

Accelerating Pipeline Velocity

Before deploying People.ai, Rashid looked into the root cause behind stalled/closed lost deals. She dug into the numbers only to find that the available data didn’t surface the root cause. “Reps weren’t adding contacts and activities to deals,” Rashid observed. “The digital thread that tied together all of the sales and marketing interactions broke. Without historical engagement data, I couldn’t pinpoint the underlying problem. That said, I knew that asking sales to spend less time selling and more time updating CRM wasn’t the answer.”

People.ai resolved the issue by uploading 266,000 activities into CRM, a task that would have taken 4,700 hours to complete manually. Additionally, the number of contacts associated with deals increased by 800%, and both Sales and Marketing got immediate visibility into where deals stalled and the personas that needed to be targeted to fully influence the buyer group at an account. “People.ai delivers leading indicators to check pipeline health and compare existing deals to what’s worked in the past,” says Rashid.

People.ai also allows sales to improve coaching and pipeline management. Front line Sales Managers can see deals that aren’t tracking based on the contacts engaged and the volume and quality of activities. They can provide specific suggestions to accelerate deals and share best practices with reps who are struggling.

Better Persona and Attribution Data

Thanks to People.ai, opportunity records now include a comprehensive set of associated contacts. For PTC, this data shines new light on personas and buying groups. “The traditional way to define personas is antiquated,” says Cogan. ” With People.ai, we get complete and up-to-date information, both qualitative and quantitative, so that we can make real-time changes to who we target and how we engage with them. That’s critical, especially as the world becomes even more digital.”

These types of insights are delivering tangible value. After reviewing People.ai data, PTC discovered that driving deals through certain personas results in significantly higher win rates. Armed with these insights, marketing teams are focused on driving more opportunities through the optimal path to increase win rates across the board.

PTC also looks to People.ai to enhance attribution models. Since Marketing now has full visibility into who Sales and Marketing touched, and when those touches occurred, deal attribution has become much more manageable. “Marketing is constantly touching contacts,” says Rashid. “But if Sales doesn’t add the contacts they’re engaging to their deals, there’s no way to identify correlation and determine marketing’s influence. People.ai helps address that challenge.”

Standing Behind Results

What started as a vision to drive higher Sales and Marketing productivity has now become a reality. In the first six months of operation, PTC’s ROI engine generated $13.5M in new pipeline for IoT and Augmented Reality segments and surfaced more than 1,200 enterprise white space accounts. In the process, it’s redefined how Sales and Marketing collaborate to drive revenue. “We’ve developed a pipeline printing engine that I hope, one day, will help every modern CMO succeed,” says Cogan. True to its heritage, PTC leads with innovation and adds to a Sales and Marketing legacy thirty-five years in the making.