Delivering Multiple Dimensions of Value to Unlock Growth Efficiency

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Ellie Fields: You heard from David about the performance force multiplier and how challenging the buying environment is right now. It’s true—things have become more complex. Buyers are operating in many different spaces, and buying groups are larger. But this also brings an opportunity. Buyers now send digital signals in countless ways.

With AI, we have the chance to listen to those signals and prompt actions, so you can respond in the most appropriate way. At Salesloft, we see it as our mission to help you act on these signals and enhance performance through the innovations we deliver.

Today, I’ll share how our platform is uniquely capable of handling today’s buying environment. It’s designed to manage everything from prospecting and closing to coaching, forecasting, and even digital engagement. As you heard from David, it’s critical to have all the core capabilities your sellers need in one place—and that it’s robust.

For us, a platform isn’t just a bundle of products thrown together on a price list. A platform has specific meaning. It involves AI-driven prioritization, bringing together the most critical actions from across the platform—whether in deals, conversations, or cadences—and placing them in front of the seller.

It also includes sales-specific workflows. These ensure that you’re cuing the right actions to achieve the outcomes you’re aiming for. Sales, as we know, is unique. Lastly, a platform is industrial strength, built to serve some of the world’s largest companies. Selling is complex, whether you’re a midsize company or enterprise, with different sales motions across regions, industries, and scales. You need scalability, security, and performance—and we’ve been focused on that for years.

Now, AI is something we talk about a lot. Anybody here heard of AI? It’s essential to a revenue orchestration platform. Why? Because there’s so much happening across so many buyers and sellers that it’s simply too much for one person to handle alone. So, we use AI to help sellers. But at Salesloft, we stay grounded in the fundamentals. We’re not deploying AI just to check a box. We ask ourselves three core questions. These aren’t just for this event; they’re what guide our product teams every day.

First, what can we automate? Sellers often spend time on tasks they shouldn’t be doing, like synthesizing data, reading reports, and typing follow-ups. These are things we can automate, and we will where possible. But you hired people because they bring strengths in areas like connecting with buyers, guiding them, and strategizing. So, we want to keep humans in the loop, letting them play to their strengths.

When we have human-led activities, we look to augment those with AI—providing the right information, data, and context at the right time, enabling sellers to take action and measure outcomes. We’ve been integrating AI into workflows at Salesloft for years, and recently, that’s accelerated. We have experience working with sales-specific data, striving to understand what really works for sellers.

When you see us implement AI, you’ll notice two things: it’s always rooted in real value and addresses real challenges. We don’t create flashy features for their own sake; we solve genuine problems, observing how sellers, managers, RevOps, and others work. We know how complex their work can be, and we’re committed to making it easier.

Another priority for us is trust. If people don’t trust AI, they won’t use it—and they shouldn’t. They need to understand why it’s there. In fact, explainability can help build intuition in newer sellers. One example I love is our AI-assisted coaching scorecards. These were the first in the industry. Scorecards are valuable tools, but it’s not efficient for managers to review and score every conversation. We use AI to identify key moments for managers to focus on, giving them the option to review and edit the scorecards as needed. This lets managers focus on coaching—one of the most valuable uses of their time.

We’re talking a lot about AI, but I’m a data enthusiast, and AI ultimately leads us back to data. AI is only as good as the data it relies on. At Salesloft, we’ve always taken a holistic view of data, which encompasses any interaction between the buyer and seller. Think of it as a vast collaboration—not necessarily through a collaboration tool, but through every email, meeting, and call in the lifecycle of an opportunity. Buyers engage at different stages, and they generate signals along the way.

You may see them on the web, as David mentioned, generating buying signals before they ever speak with you. Maybe they visit your website, initiating a digital experience. They might engage with a chatbot, like Drift’s Bionic chatbot, and you start learning about their interests. You qualify them with this data and move them into a sales-led funnel. But they continue their digital activities along the way, and you can use these interactions to help buyers self-serve. Buyers remain on your website, even after talking to your sellers, and they bring members of the buying group into meetings. We associate all of this activity so you can understand what truly matters to each buyer, build adaptive buying journeys, and even identify new buying group members.

For instance, after a productive meeting, it’s common to see buyers light up your website. We see this pattern across customers due to the Drift and Salesloft integration, where you can even identify important new people showing up post-meeting.

To truly understand the engagement and collaboration between buyer and seller, we must collect all this data. It’s this data that can help you overcome today’s challenges and achieve that performance force multiplier. But you need to be able to act on the data. At Salesloft, we organize it in a sales-specific domain model because sales has unique dynamics—there’s a win-loss outcome, decision-makers, objections. We structure the data this way, layer AI on top of it, and deliver insights that drive action. Data is only valuable if it drives action.

This is where Rhythm comes in. Rhythm is designed to help you see what’s most important in your business right now. While there are other workflows in Salesloft, Rhythm is where you stay up to date with what your buyers are doing and take immediate action. Whether it’s responding to emails, prepping for a meeting, or accessing third-party signals, Rhythm enables action.

We’re excited about this cycle of insight to action to outcomes, and we’ll be sharing more about it today. By bringing these elements together, we’re solving some of sales’ biggest challenges. We’ve reimagined what it means to be a full-cycle seller. Sales managers and RevOps, we hear you, too—it’s a tough job. Typically, you’re swimming in data and reports, yet you still don’t know the most critical areas to coach on or where your business is heading. You can’t see changes quickly enough. With this data, we’re here to help.