People.ai Acquires ClosePlan to Reinvent Account Planning & Strategy

Integrated Solution Addresses Key Challenges of Current Sales Environment

People.ai, the leading revenue operations and intelligence (ROI) platform, has acquired ClosePlan, the top-ranked app on Salesforce AppExchange for deploying deal qualification methodologies such as MEDDIC, mapping account relationships, and implementing sales playbooks. Together, the two companies will enable smarter account planning and strategy. The integrated offering will maximize account executive productivity at a time when face-to-face interaction and coaching isn’t feasible.

The whole space is ripe for reinvention, and together, People.ai and ClosePlan will enable smarter account planning and strategy.

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“While account planning and strategy is one of the most important elements of enterprise selling,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, “it’s arguably the most antiquated–an amalgam of slides and spreadsheets that are out of date as soon as they’re delivered. On top of that, we’re about to go into the biggest account planning period of the year and teams can’t even huddle in conference rooms to plan or walk the clients’ halls to put the plans in motion. The whole space is ripe for reinvention. By bringing People.ai and ClosePlan together, we’ve combined business activity data from email, calendar, Zoom and CRM, with machine learning and ClosePlan’s native Salesforce experience. That’s exactly what sales teams have been demanding for decades.”

ClosePlan is the top-rated Sales Intelligence and Productivity app on Salesforce AppExchange.  They’re also ranked #1 by G2 Crowd respondents for Customer Revenue Optimization. Its Relationship Maps help account teams identify and engage champions by assessing relationship strength, reporting structure and common connections. And, its scorecards and playbooks allow companies to embed leading sales methodologies such as MEDDIC directly in Salesforce. Combined with People.ai’s patented predictive algorithms, the solution provides an automated, intelligent experience that integrates directly into the sales team’s weekly account planning and review cadence.

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“Our outstanding customer rankings reflect the importance we place on responding to the needs of our users,” said Seamus Devine, co-founder and CRO of ClosePlan. “One of their top asks has been to deliver a ‘smart’ product that automatically populates and updates relationship maps based on what’s going on in systems like email and Zoom.”

“This acquisition hits the nail on the head. Together with People.ai, we’re delivering a value proposition unlike anything else out there,” said Scott Johnson, co-founder and CEO of ClosePlan.

“As a customer of both ClosePlan and People.ai,” said Kishen Mistry, Director, Sales Strategy & Technology at TIBCO, “we immediately recognized that no other company is delivering what People.ai offers. Marrying the two solutions will deliver a lift to sales productivity at a time when macro trends are creating incredible headwinds for sales.”

The acquisition closed October 19, 2020 and all personnel and its current offices in San Francisco, London and Prague will be retained. This is the latest in a series of ongoing company developments for People.ai. This summer the company released its new Sales Solution and received patents for AI-driven intelligent matching and contact generation (known as “SmartMatch” and “SmartContacts”).  This month, the company also received Comparably Awards for Happiest Employees, Best Compensation, and Best Perks & Benefits in 2020.