SalesLoft Presents Lofty Ideals for Sales Engagement: The 2020 CRM Rising Stars
Though its original product offering focused on sales development, Atlanta-based SalesLoft has expanded its platform to offer functionality for the entire sales organization. Those efforts were bolstered in November when it acquired Costello, a provider of opportunity management software with quick deal updates, guided selling playbooks, pipeline collaboration, and real-time sync to CRM systems.
With the acquisition of Costello, SalesLoft expanded its user base to revenue professionals at all levels, including sales development reps, account executives, and sales leaders.
SalesLoft, which was founded in 2011, wasted no time incorporating Costello’s technology into its own offerings, and in February it unveiled SalesLoft Opportunity Management to help sales professionals generate pipeline, manage deals and forecasts, and engage customers from first contact through closing, onboarding, expansion, and renewal.
And while many companies act as though sales engagement stops once an account enters the pipeline, SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter takes a different view.
“Sales engagement should not stop at building pipeline. It should serve the complete revenue cycle,” he said, noting that technology should also serve the needs of all revenue professionals.
SalesLoft’s innovation this year didn’t stop there, however. In March the company introduced three new sales applications: Cadence, for prospecting and account management; Deals, for opportunity management and forecasting; and Conversations, for managing customer feedback and recording and transcribing every sales contact to help leaders identify opportunities for coaching.
The products, which the company said form the basis of what it calls Sales Engagement 3.0, further include capabilities that SalesLoft gained during its acquisition of Costello.
SalesLoft also updated its Deals module with a new Deal View feature that pulls together stakeholders and business case data to determine how receptive buyers will be to particular sales messages. A new Pipeline Summary feature then identifies the best fit for sales outreach and the next best actions needed to close deals.
SalesLoft this year also integrated its sales engagement platform with RambleChat to accelerate sales engagement and real-time account-based conversations through chat channels. It allows SalesLoft users to initiate real-time conversations from their websites and embed chat into their SalesLoft email cadences. RambleChat routes real-time sales conversations to account owners in SalesLoft. Sales reps can also use dynamic fields in SalesLoft to personalize chat greetings.
And finally, SalesLoft this year began working with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator Data Validation capability to help sales professionals better connect with their prospects and customers using the most up-to-date data. By leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator Data Validation, SalesLoft users also using Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition through Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM will no longer have to manually search LinkedIn to validate that contacts haven’t changed jobs; the information is now accessible directly within the SalesLoft application.
By its own admission, SalesLoft is on a mission to help entire sales teams save time and increase the quality of each and every opportunity as they progress through the buying cycle, all while helping them set and execute their sales process within a single pane of glass. And though Porter says his company is not a CRM vendor, that was one of the stated goals of CRM right from the start.