Boosting Sales Productivity through Data Automation: A Pluralsight Case Study

Pluralsight is a technology workforce development company that helps businesses and individuals benchmark expertise across roles, speed up release cycles, and build reliable, secure products. The company was facing challenges with lower than expected growth due to issues with rep productivity and data quality. Despite having access to data on win rates and pipeline coverage, they struggled to identify the behaviors that led to consistent, predictable revenue. As the company rapidly expanded its sales force, rep productivity declined, leading to longer ramp times, lower pipeline generation, and lower billings and ARR growth than expected.

Pluralsight, a technology workforce development company, was grappling with lower growth than anticipated due to issues surrounding rep productivity. Despite having access to data on win rates and pipeline coverage, the company struggled to identify the behaviors that led to consistent, predictable revenue. Two key challenges stood in the way of Pluralsight’s growth targets: the quality of CRM data and inconsistent execution from their reps. The data in Salesforce, their 'single source of truth', was often biased or incorrect due to human error in data input. As the company rapidly expanded its sales force, rep productivity declined, leading to longer ramp times, lower pipeline generation, and lower billings and ARR growth than expected. The company had several hypotheses for these challenges but lacked concrete sales engagement data to validate them.

To address these challenges, Pluralsight partnered with People.ai, a data automation platform. People.ai automatically captured business activity and contact data from reps and intelligently matched it to the associated Opportunity, Contact, and Account records in Salesforce. This not only freed reps from having to manually enter that information but also removed any doubt on the validity of data flowing into Salesforce. With real sales engagement data now flowing into Salesforce, Pluralsight could test their theories on account coverage, productivity, and buyer engagement. The insights gained from this data allowed Pluralsight to make structural changes to their GTM strategy, transform coaching sessions and rep leaderboards, and develop a data-driven sales culture. The company also used the data to provide reps with prescriptive recommendations and create leaderboards that actually moved the needle.

• The partnership with People.ai and the subsequent data automation led to a significant transformation in Pluralsight's sales operations. The company was able to identify key issues and take actionable steps to address them. The insights gained from the data allowed Pluralsight to make structural changes to their GTM strategy and transform coaching sessions and rep leaderboards. The company was also able to develop a data-driven sales culture, providing reps with prescriptive recommendations and creating leaderboards that actually moved the needle. Looking ahead, Pluralsight aims to operationalize the data and insights provided by People.ai to support a number of initiatives including reducing top of funnel spend, increasing pipeline and new logo acquisition, and increasing AE participation while driving down ramp time.

• Reps were found to be spending a third of their time working Tier C accounts that produced less than 25% of their billings

• Reps spent two-thirds of their time on small deals that only generated 24% of ARR

• High performing reps spent 50% more time in prospect meetings than low performers did