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Salesloft: Review, Competitors, and Alternatives

Sujan Patel

Sujan Patel is the founder of Mailshake, a sales engagement software used by 38,000 sales and marketing professionals. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

Read more articles by Sujan Patel →

• February 3, 2020

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that’s designed to facilitate sales activities.

Salesloft’s main selling point is that it integrates prospecting, following up, analytics, cadences, and more into one unified platform. This helps sales representatives and leadership move seamlessly from one task to the next, whether it’s managing a deal, reaching out to a prospect, or connecting with a lead.

The platform syncs usage data across all linked devices, so sales reps can pick up where they left off no matter where they are. This also makes it easier to collaborate across large teams – team members, especially leadership, can quickly check in to see how things are progressing through the Salesloft dashboard. Sales managers can also set tasks for members of their teams.

Additionally, Salesloft provides call recording and analysis features that can help with coaching and onboarding. Conversation intelligence, for example, uses AI to scan through reps’ calls and pinpoints areas where they can improve.

Overall, Salesloft’s strengths shine through particularly when it comes to teams, thanks to its collaboration features.

Salesloft Core Features

While Salesloft comes with dozens of different features, they can largely be broken down into five different products, each of which represents a distinct and useful feature set.

• Cadence + Automation: Salesloft helps sales reps and leadership set up custom sales cadences and playbooks. When done right, this leads to more streamlined sales processes that can reduce close time. Sales reps can also automate certain tasks, like follow-up emails.
• Dialer + Messenger: This product provides a sales dialer so that reps can make calls with a single click. It also offers a messenger feature, which can be used to send SMS messages. Salesloft includes a live coaching, which allows leadership to listen to ongoing conversations and whisper advice to reps without the prospect hearing.
• Deals: Salesloft’s deals product helps leadership forecast deal success with better accuracy. Leadership can use sales opportunity management tools, which allow them to see all their team members’ deal flows and sales pipelines, and step in when necessary to redirect the cadences for deals that look like they may fall through. It can also automate reminders and messages to sales reps.
• Conversations: This set includes call recording and conversation intelligence, a tool that uses AI to scan through recorded sales calls and pickout key turning points based on keywords and other indicators. Leadership can then use these insights to coach reps on how to improve or to build playlists of exemplary calls that team members can learn from.
• Analytics and Reporting: Salesloft tracks data to provide actionable insights to leadership and sales reps. Sales managers can see what top performers are doing differently and build cadences around that data.

Who Salesloft Is For

Salesloft is primarily designed for B2B sales teams and helps streamline workflows between sales managers and sales reps.

It’s designed specifically for B2B sales and can be used effectively by sales leaders, sales managers, sales ops, SDRs and BDRs, account executives, marketing leaders, and customer success professionals.

Each of these sales professionals will use it in a different way but can easily collaborate with other team members to streamline workflows.

What People Don’t Like About Salesloft

Salesloft is a popular product and has several awards – including the title of #1 leader in Sales Engagement for two years by G2 – to show for it. That said, there are several issues that users have with this product.

The biggest complaint from users is that the platform doesn’t work as expected. There have been reports of sudden failures that take hours to fix, as well as features being abruptly removed from the platform.

Overall, performance and user-friendliness is a significant problem with quite a few users complaining that the product runs poorly or has a clunky interface. Some users also complain that the call quality is bad and that their leads can’t hear them during calls, which is problematic for anyone who frequently cold calls prospects.

Finally, Salesloft can be prohibitively expensive for small and even medium-sized businesses. Salesloft requires a demo to see pricing, but their plans range from $75 – $125 per user, per month. However, they require annual contracts and a minimum of 3 users.

That means that new Salesoft customers can expect to pay a minimum of $2,700 up front for a year-long contract with Salesloft.

Mailshake: Your Salesloft Alternative

Salesloft is a great solution for larger, more established sales teams, and funded startups with enough “cash in the bank” to cover the upfront annual contracts and implementation costs.

However, most sales teams don’t need all the features and functionality that Salesloft offers, and don’t have the time (or interest) to spend weeks learning the ins and outs of a new platform.

For folks like this, Mailshake is a perfect alternative.

Mailshake has all the core features of Salesloft, plus a few important advantages:

1. More flexible pricing options – plans start at $59/month per user, billed monthly, and yearly contracts for a 25% discount
2. Much easier to get started and use
3. One-on-one customer success

Mailshake core features

If you’re using Salesloft to automate and scale your outbound sales efforts, Mailshake may have all the features you need.

Let’s start with the primary Mailshake features.

Personalization, automatic follow-ups, and lead management

The most important part of a sales engagement platform are:

1. Outreach automation
2. The ability to manage prospects and turn them into leads

And this is where Mailshake thrives.

With Mailshake, you can create a sequence of personalized emails and automated follow-ups, triggered or paused based on if a recipient opens, replies or clicks a link.

Set your emails to only send during weekdays and business hours, and maximize deliverability by automatically removing recipients who bounce or unsubscribe with trigger words like “remove me”.

And when a prospect expresses interest in your offer, you can reply to them directly from Mailshake.

Keep track of every single interaction with a prospect, including opens, clicks, and even which touch point turned a prospect into a lead.

Take a look at this at the campaign or account level to see which messages are working and which ones need changing, and AB test emails, follow-ups, or entire campaigns to improve your effectiveness.

All this activity can be pushed to your CRM with our native Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Hubspot integrations, or with any other CRM via Zapier. New prospects can also be added to a Mailshake campaign.

And finally, the most effective outreach strategies go beyond email. With Mailshake, you can seamlessly integrate social selling and cold calling into your outreach sequence.

Add a “task” to connect with a prospect on social media phone call to any sequence, just like you would add a follow-up email.

When a sequence reaches that touch point, all your outstanding tasks will be grouped together, allowing you to power through LinkedIn messages or cold calls one after another.

For most salespeople and entrepreneurs doing cold outreach, Mailshake has everything you need to do effective, scalable outreach.

Pricing

Salesloft requires a $2,700 upfront investment to get started. For many salespeople and business owners, this is prohibitively expensive.

Mailshake starts at $59/month, per user, billed monthly. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee. That means if you give Mailshake a try and it’s not a fit, you can reach out to our team and get a full refund, no questions asked.

Mailshake also offers the option of a yearly contract, at a 25% discount. The $59/month plan is reduced to $44/month, and the $99/month plan becomes $75/month.

If you’re interested in investing in a sales engagement platform, but not ready to pay several thousand dollars up front for you and your team, Mailshake is a great alternative.

One-on-One Customer Success

Mailshake’s most popular “feature” isn’t really a feature at all. A quick glance at our reviews on G2 will show a clear pattern; Mailshake customers love how our customer success team makes them better at cold outreach.

If you’re new to cold outreach, or an experienced salesperson looking for feedback from an expert, our success team is here to help.

For teams with annual contracts or on the $99/month sales engagement plan, you’ll receive a 1-hour onboarding session with our success team, to help get you started with the platform, and receive personalized feedback on your campaign copy and strategy.

We also offer one-hour live training and one-hour open office hours twice a week, where you can join and ask questions about the Mailshake platform, or get a live review of your campaign.

At the end of the day, your outreach will only be successful if your strategy is solid and your copy is effective. Our success team has helped thousands of customers do both.

The Bottom Line

Salesloft is a great product for established sales teams ready to make a long-term commitment to outbound sales on a single platform.

For most sales teams, however, Mailshake:

1. Has all the features you need
2. Is much easier to use
3. Is cheaper, and doesn’t require annual contracts
4. Has more personalized and effective customer success

Click here to book a demo or sign up today.