At the core of SalesDirector.ai is the conviction that a good sales stack always starts with good data. Your CRM is only as good as the data that it stores and this is often contingent on how good your sales reps are at logging and inputting the details of their activity. This is why our data insights, sales analytics and revenue intelligence platform all start with capturing email and calendar activity data from your sales reps.
Many times we talk to companies that are already doing some kind of activity capture via tools like Groove.co, Outreach.io or Salesloft. And sure, depending on your use case, these tools can coexist with SalesDirector. The real difference between these tools and SalesDirector is that they are more focused on capturing and automating the outbound prospecting activity for your demand generation team (BDRs and SDRs) while SalesDirector is focused on your selling motion, sales process, pipeline and forecasts. SalesDirector is focused on the sales process AFTER an Opportunity has been created while the other companies are focused on the process BEFORE an Opportunity is created.
Let’s be more specific.
Industry analysts group companies like Groove.com, Outreach.io and Salesloft are grouped into the “Sales Engagement Platforms” category. This is how G2 Crowd describes companies and products in this category:
“This software enables companies to combine their sales and marketing efforts to create personalized and automated sales journeys; these can include emails, calls, social posts, meetings, and text messages. By standardizing both messaging and the overall sales experience, teams can report on the effectiveness of specific messaging and tactics while also reducing administrative tasks for sales and customer success representatives.”
These companies are focused on automating email sequences and cadence outreach across email, phone, text and even social media. They capture activity data from sales reps to track and inform the cadence outreach process. The data they capture is used to remove email recipients from lists and to track when and if they’ve responded to the SDR’s outreach.
How is the Activity Data Capture Different with SalesDirector?
Since Sales Engagement Platforms are primarily focused on SDR/BDR outbound outreach the “Sellers” with titles such as Account Executives, Inside Sales Reps, Account Managers and Field/Enterprise reps are usually not included in their data capture. This results in lots of activity data that helps you understand your outbound sales process but it doesn’t address any of the “selling motion” with your Sellers and Closers.
At SalesDirector, we capture all of the email and calendar activity for your Sellers and provide sales insights that can be delivered directly into Salesforce.com or to BI tools like Tableau, Domo, Google Data Studio or PowerBI.
When we capture the data and analyze all of the email recipients and calendar event attendees we’ll also add those contacts in your CRM to ensure that you know who to follow-up with and market to. This ensures that your sales reps are empowered to have multi-threaded conversations with everyone at the company – not just your champion or main contact.
We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify patterns in your sales rep’s communication and meetings. We identify (and nudge your reps) if too much time has passed since your last outreach or communication. We also leverage sentiment analysis on the email communications to let you know if it was positive or negative.
Does SalesDirector’s Activity Capture Conflict with Outreach.io?
With SalesDirector, we help you understand the selling process after an opportunity has been created by analyzing the captured activity data and making it actionable and meaningful – all without requiring your sales reps to lift a finger. The data capture process is fully automated and seamless to the sales rep. SalesDirector connects at the server level to Microsoft Exchange or Google GSuite eliminating the need for sales reps to install clunky Chrome extensions or Outlook plugins.
If you are using a sales engagement tools that is capturing sales activity you can also use SalesDirector without any conflicts. Just make sure that the reps that you are capturing activity data for are not using SalesDirector and a sales engagement tool as well. In other words, keep using the sales engagement activity capture for your SDRs/BDRs/MDRs and outbound teams – and use SalesDirector with all of your Sellers and Closers.
As your sales organization grows and matures you’ll be continually adding new vendors to your tech stack. The importance of trustworthy and reliable data is critical to a successful revenue operations team. Look for ways to capture activity data from your entire sales organization to ensure that you are “seeing the entire picture” and getting all of the data.