SmilingNotDialing

Account Executive

If satan sold software he’d sell People.AI

Anyone else's company use People.AI to micromanage your activity? Any tricks on how to hit unrealistic "cold email" metrics?

My region has recently started micromanaging activity like crazy because all of our inbound leads have dried up. We use a tool called People.Ai that tracks how many emails we send (cold vs blast), how many meetings we have, etc and anyone in the company can view another person's stats (basically a sales person's nightmare).

I keep getting hounded by management that I’m not sending enough "cold emails" per month (aka emails to someone you've never emailed before, and it also excludes emails with similar bodies and subject lines so "cold emails" literally have to be hyper-personalized). To top it all off, my VP literally sends out a bimonthly email to the whole region with reports of everyone's activity stats and highlights you in red if you don't hit the cold email goal (and yeah, I’m usually in red).

Anyone have any tips or tricks for hitting these metrics? SOS!

💌 Cold Emailing

☁️ Software Tech

23

18 comments

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Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

6

Sales Rep

At first I thought the subject line for this post was a little extreme, but I get it after reading this.

coletrain

Politicker

6

Account Executive

Vanity metrics being lauded for their own sake is a bad take by a sales org and seems to be done by struggling orgs to show effort to investors. How is quota attainment?

SaaSsy

Politicker

3

AE

Completely agree - have you asked for stats on translation of those activity metrics to deals closed? Are the top OB activity KPI top of the leaderboard? Demand correlation proof and then decide.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

5

🦊

This gave me anxiety for you. Yuck.

jefe

Arsonist

1

🍁

Yuck is right

antiASKHOLE

Tycoon

4

Bravado's Resident Asshole

I am not a fan of this at all. :/

Sunbunny31

Politicker

3

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I have to ask if you are beginning to look externally for other positions.

Once a company has an inbound problem and is looking at stats for the sake of stats, there's a bigger issue at stake here.

Is anybody who is meeting these metrics having success with quota attainment coming out of the outreach?

butwhy

Politicker

2

Solutions Engineer

"because all of our inbound leads have dried up."

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER. Just a heads up you should also be worried about this. It does not correct with in 6 months, in my experience, even with hard work and resources.

Rallier

Politicker

1

SDR Manager and Consultant

Yikes, this sounds like such a toxic place. The micromanaging is next level. I understand the need for monitoring activity, but that seems excessive

jefe

Arsonist

1

🍁

This sounds AWFUL and is the worst kind of sales 'management'

How is the organization overall? The sending stats thing is kind of toxic.

Dezzy

Contributor

0

Internal Service Manager for Dealership

This sucks hard! So they want you to compete with a computer? Also has anyone been in the green for stats?

Pachacuti

Politicker

0

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

you beat those metrics by leaving your company. Seriously. No one has time for that kind of micro-management.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

0

Rolling 20's all day

Focus ALL of your time on emailing. and then when you hit your email metrics but not your sales say "IDK what happened? I've been emailing."

Epictetus

Valued Contributor

0

SaaSy

I feel like if people.ai was acquired by Pinterest, the end of the world would ensue.

KendallRoy

Politicker

0

AM

Ah, the classic sales management approach of focusing on inputs rather than outputs. My current company is the same, albeit less extreme with emails. Sales management just looks at raw email volume rather than cold/personalised, as well as a bunch of other KPIs pulled from thin air that range from difficult to impossible (without gaming the system at least) based on our small territory sizes.

Deal with it the same way I did. Get a significantly better role with significantly better pay and resign.

TennisandSales

Politicker

0

Head Of Sales

ive never heard of people.ai but this is for SURE a sales persons nightmare and a micromanagers dream come true 😂

if my company started going to this type of activity tracking i would seriously think about leaving.

BlueJays2591

Politicker

0

Federal Business Dev Director

What is the cold email metric you have to hit?

ChickenWings

Opinionated

0

Tom Callahan's Son

Our company uses it.

This seems like more of a leadership issue than the platform ratting you out.

They are leaning on it too much.

People.ai gets pulled out in 1:1’s with us if there is a clear trend that has changed. Then a conversation about what the change was occurs.

no activity leaderboard BS

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