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The Internet of Things (IoT) is here. According to McKinsey & Company, 127 new IoT devices connect to the internet every second, and 93% of enterprises are believed to have adopted some form of IoT technology to date.
It’s enabling manufacturers to digitally transform industrial operations. It’s empowering life sciences companies to create devices that predict medical events before they happen. And it’s allowing telecommunications and high-tech leaders to provide solutions that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago (e.g., 5G-powered fleet management).
We’ve been inundated with more data points and points of connectivity than ever before, which begs the question: where is “IoT for sales?”
Most enterprises still rely on humans to connect their sales processes and CRM. We all know that CRM only works with complete, clean, and accurate data. We also know that the data in most CRMs is incomplete and unreliable because reps don’t want the distraction from selling to make manual updates.
It’s 2022. Do we really still expect salespeople to enter contacts and log activities in CRM? There has to be a better way!
Well, there is, and this topic is precisely what we covered in our most recent webinar, “Automating Data Capture: IoT for Sales.” You can watch the on-demand webinar by clicking on the banner below, or read on for a more detailed summary of what our experts will cover.
Incomplete, unreliable, and inaccurate data in CRM leads to a lack of visibility and major information gaps at key handoff points in the sales process. In other words, it is a root cause of misalignment between members of go-to-market (GTM) teams. It also complicates sales leaders’ attempts to guide their teams to success.
Consider these trickle-down impacts of failures to update your CRM:
The good news is that enterprises can automate CRM data capture by taking advantage of the People.ai Data Platform. The platform automatically captures data from inboxes, calendars, and meetings, and then filters and analyzes all information about GTM business activity — no manual data entry or change management is required.
Think of the People.ai platform in the context of the IoT devices that companies deploy on the factory floor, for example. IoT captures critical data, enabling the insights and workflows that drive operations. By connecting multiple machines and production lines, companies glean critical insights and data that pave the way for double-digit improvements.
Similarly, the People.ai platform leverages automation to “automagically” capture data from all the GTM systems in your environment (along with your reps’ inboxes and calendars), and post it in the right places in your CRM. Put another way, the platform connects all the GTM-related signals across your selling environment — from emails, calendars, and video calls — setting the stage for you to bubble up relevant insights. People.ai does this automatically, requiring no effort on your part, and then delivers those insights into the role-based workflows and tools where your GTM teams already work today.
Accurate, timely data informs the forecast and deal health with these types of insights:
This data also provides insight into what’s happened with an account to date:
Perhaps most importantly, unimpeded visibility into prospect and customer engagement helps sales leaders drive the right sales behavior. With easy access to all relevant data, it’s possible to identify “good” behavior, use it to inform benchmarks, and coach all reps to perform better.
The marketing team can only market to known contacts. With People.ai automatically keeping CRM up to date, marketing can reach more prospects and strategic customers with campaigns, offers, and invites. By reviewing win rates across personas, marketing gains a complete picture of the personas that sales is activating. In turn, the marketing team can activate personas in accounts instead of running generic campaigns. Put simply, marketing can spearfish into accounts rather than cast a wide net, becoming a true ABM partner to sales.
In addition, People.ai enables better attribution models. Without knowing who’s involved in a deal, it’s hard to determine campaign effectiveness. That’s the case for many marketing organizations, leading them to run generic attribution models. People.ai delivers buying group attribution. Knowing which personas were involved and associating those with specific campaigns, marketing can determine which campaigns are driving opportunities.
People.ai is a game changer for the operations/enablement team, empowering them to:
Essentially, with data and insights from People.ai, sales operations is able to design a sales process for repeatable, scalable success.
Other vendors focus on solving the surface-level sales productivity challenges. People.ai gets to the root of what’s stalling growth — bad data — and helps organizations operationalize best-in-class performance. Think of this as the equivalent of IoT on the factory floor, connecting machines, automatically gathering data, and analyzing it to deliver insights that power business decisions. People.ai is “IoT for sales.”
People.ai VP of Sales Engineering, Jesse Dailey, and People.ai Senior Director of Marketing, Mark Gallant, recently discussed this very topic at length. Watch the webinar replay to learn more about how People.ai excels at automating CRM data capture and the results this has produced for enterprises like PTC, Zoom, and others.