• by Ray Schultz , May 12, 2021

People.ai, an intelligence platform that provides insights on the impact of email, meetings and other activities by salespeople, has acquired Hero Research Inc., a Salesforce productivity company. 

The combined firms will provide sales teams with “the flexibility to manage their pipeline, territories, and activities" with a goal of "ultimately closing more deals,” states Oleg Rogynskyy, founder and CEO of People.ai. 

Rogynskyy observes: “Companies run sales on CRM, yet virtually every rep and manager we meet runs a shadow spreadsheet to manage what is actually happening in their territories.”

The purchase follows People.ai's acquisition of ClosePlan in October 2020.

In a related development, People.ai is launching an embedded Salesforce experience designed to give sales reps and managers the ability to incorporate Ai-driven data into their workflows, achieve a repeatable coaching cadence and close deals more quickly, the company says. 

"CRM is the place where most sales organizations want their reps and managers to spend their time. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a rep that isn't trying to fill critical CRM gaps by stitching together a patchwork of other siloed sales tools without a cohesive workflow," says Thomas Wyatt, chief product and strategy officer at People.ai.