Activity capture, CRM hygiene, identifying revenue risk, standardizing deal reviews
When McCaffrey joined the Acceldata team, the company had been experiencing a prolonged phase of rapid growth. As the leader in the Data Observability category, Acceldata serves complex and demanding enterprise customers and has been growing year over year at a tremendous rate.
In order to meet the market demand for their solutions, Acceldata needed to improve sales team productivity and wanted to leverage AI to gather intelligence about opportunities, meetings, demonstrations, and all of the activity required to demonstrate their solution's effectiveness and return on investment. Many organizations rely on manual updates to their CRM system, but Acceldata knew there was a better way.
By adding People.ai’s patented, AI-based activity capture and matching technology to their tech stack, McCaffrey no longer has to rely on rep manual data entry to get deep visibility into their open opportunities. Plus, People.ai’s AI-powered engagement levels give McCaffrey and his sales leaders valuable insight into the health of a deal, all without having to ask the rep. People.ai allows their sales team to be much more productive and engage with more customers interested in their solutions resulting in more accurate forecasting and increased customer acquisition.
With People.ai automating activity capture, matching to the CRM, and data enrichment, McCaffrey and his sales leaders were able to drastically change the nature of their conversations and meetings with their sellers. People.ai gives Acceldata leadership the need-to-know details around each deal, so they are able to work with reps more strategically. “Now we can go in and have more meaningful discussions,” McCaffrey said. “It can be much more strategic versus tactical.
Historically, the questions were along the lines of, ‘Did you send a follow up? When is the next meeting?’ Now, I already know the logistics, so instead we’re asking, ‘What about this different approach? Have you thought about running contracts this way?’ It’s more along the lines of, ‘Are you being a strategic seller, or are you an order taker?’ which is a far more important set of questions.”
Another major part of McCaffrey’s role is conducting QBRs for the broader revenue team, but without complete and reliable data around sales activities, QBRs had evolved into unproductive storytelling rather than strategic planning and reflection.
Sellers would dedicate a significant amount of time gathering data and creating slideware to prepare for the QBR. “We needed to streamline preparation for QBRs and shift their focus to meaningful customer interactions and strategic planning for future quarters,” said McCaffrey.
Because they utilize People.ai to create a foundation of fully captured, filtered, and matched data in their CRM, Acceldata was able to streamline their QBR process by easily visualizing that data via People.ai’s Engagement Dashboards. Engagement Dashboards are user-friendly dashboards and data tables that provide 360-degree views into a sales org’s GTM motion, allowing Acceldata to quickly answer business critical questions around at-risk deals, pipeline health, rep performance, and more.
By creating Engagement Dashboard templates, the data needed to run an efficient QBR is both trustworthy and readily available to be quickly pulled in for a strategic discussion. Every sellers’ key stats are populated with a few clicks, so reps no longer have to spend hours gathering unreliable data from multiple sources.
“We cut down our sellers’ QBR preparation time from 6 hours to 1 hour with the templated Engagement Dashboard, and because of how streamlined we’d made the process, we also cut down the meeting time from 1 hour to 30 minutes per rep,” said McCaffrey.
From a management perspective, McCaffrey and the sales leader were able to peek under the hood in advance, and focus on having more meaningful conversations. “With People.ai, all the performance and deal information is available beforehand, allowing our CRO to review and guide each meeting in an effective manner. Automated reports enable him to review details before the QBR, helping him formulate questions to better understand the sellers' planned activities for achieving goals in the upcoming quarters. We no longer have to dedicate hours figuring out what had happened that quarter,” said McCaffrey.
Plus, McCaffrey said that these changes have allowed his AEs to feel less micromanaged and more productive, leading to increased confidence and ability to close deals faster. Acceldata’s sellers reported feeling more satisfied with their job and with their performance, with the ability to do more of what they were hired to do—sell.
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