by Jim Lundy

On October 20^th, People.ai announced its acquisition of ClosePlan, a provider of customer revenue optimization solutions otherwise known as guided selling. This blog discusses some of the aspects of the deal and why the CRO market is heating up.

Why ClosePlan?

The race for guided selling is on, and by acquiring ClosePlan, People.ai has improved its capabilities in customer revenue optimization. As the top-ranked app of its kind on the Salesforce AppExchange, ClosePlan is a natural choice for a provider hoping to elevate its offerings in an era of remote work and digital selling. Adding guided selling to the portfolio will make People.ai much more sticky in accounts as it expands the provider’s addressable market.

What Is the Current State of Custom Revenue Optimization (Guided Selling)?

The new race is to automate sales so salespeople can close deals faster and with a higher success rate. Customer revenue optimization links sales to marketing and customer service, providing a more detailed customer profile enabled by intelligent analytics. Customer revenue optimization has been shown to transform the sales process by giving associates a more detailed and actionable understanding of their accounts supported by an underlying relationship that is more active and dynamic.

Also known as guided selling, customer revenue optimization enables a series of support systems for sales associates that help them approach their accounts with more knowledge and more specific customer understanding. Equipped with guided selling systems, salespeople will be better positioned to succeed in an era of digital selling.

ClosePlan's revenue optimization software addresses the objectives of revenue management through a suite of guided selling tools that will help sales people that work remotely from home to conduct virtual work and address the challenges of working remotely more generally.

The Rise of Digital Selling and the Remote Work Era

Since the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the organization of the workplace, salespeople have found themselves scrambling to adjust to new methods of digital selling that will help them adapt to the rise of the remote work era. As Aragon predicted, many enterprises have shifted towards a predominantly remote workforce, with many of these changes expected to outlast the pandemic itself.

In this context, digital selling practices will be vital to growth, and even to survival, for many firms. Customer revenue optimization will be a vital piece of this puzzle, as salespeople need, now more than ever, new tools to maintain existing accounts and develop new relationships. The fine-grained insights afforded by customer revenue optimization, coupled with its close linkage to other customer-facing components of the enterprise will support this.

Bottom Line

People.ai’s purchase of ClosePlan reveals the rising value of guided selling as a core capability in the enterprise sales toolkit. We expect more sales teams to consider guided selling solutions of this nature as they aim to make a transition towards digital selling in the year to come. Look out for the Aragon Tech Spectrum for Customer Revenue Optimization, coming in early 2021. For a more detailed understanding of how customer revenue optimization can elevate your sales team, reach out to an Aragon analyst for advice.