PersistIQ (YC S14) Hopes to Remove Excel From the Outbound Sales Process

[btrautsc]

This is the type of product that immediately makes my life and the lives of my sales people easier (Its very rare you can say that in SaaS/ sales software).

If SDRs/ BDRs execute multiple follow ups (now automatically with this) you're more likely to get lead lists to conversation. This is awesome... not to mention, totally "guilt free" for SDRs which is a huge issue. We will be implementing sales-team-wide asap.

[lanstein]

We use Yesware's mail merge for the same thing, and you can set it to execute subsequent stages only for folks who haven't replied. It's really stupendous.

[zefi]

This product looks great. I think that automating the sales process, from prospecting to closing will be a vertical that'll see huge growth over the next few years. Anything that helps companies make money faster and integrates with salespeople's existing workflows is an obvious winner. That's the good news, the bad news is how low the barrier to entry for this market is right now and will continue to be with the current business model. The company that becomes the leader in this will work out how to make something that is seemingly highly commoditisable (email sending and read receipts) solidly defensible so the next startup down the block can't just undercut you on number of prospects contacted per pricing tier. I suspect the answer will have more to do with more impressive mass personalisation rather than any network effects these companies can create. Fascinating space, this is a growth sector without doubt. The companies I recommend checking out: Stacklead, AutopilotHQ, Yesware, Streak and Docsend among others.

[rapcal]

Really interesting. I'd love to see it (and RelateIQ) integrate with a more complete sales solution, like close.io (which I love).

PS - just saw that RelateIQ has an API and PersistIQ has an out of the box Salesforce integration. Looking good :)

[dantiberian]

This looks really interesting, I've done some outbound sales using Salesforce and it was pretty painful. I wonder if their name will be too close to RelateIQ, an intelligent CRM in the same market as PersistIQ.

[theporpoise]

We've used Sendbloom for this, they have an automated response system with the ability to bump previous conversations and a programmatic funnel that solves these same problems.

[amartya916]

Thanks for the shout-out :) (am part of the Sendbloom team). I wish the PersistIQ team well, it's really exciting to see other entrants in this space, especially one that's backed by YC. Verifies that there is a demand, or at least a projected demand for this sort of an application.

[_sentient]

Awesome product from a great group of guys. Definitely check this out of if you deal with outbound sales of any variety.