Salesloft Review in 2024: The Right Sales Tool for Your Business?

Vlad Oleksiienko 22 Aug 2024

Welcome to our brand-new series of sales software reviews!

Today, we’re covering a well-known player in the sales automation game—Salesloft, an AI-powered sales engagement and acceleration platform.

Like many other reputable sales engagement platforms, Salesloft offers users much more than traditional outreach campaigns, having become more and more consolidated over the past few years.

In 2024, equipping your business with the right sales software will directly impact how well your sales team finds, engages, and converts prospects in an increasingly digital market.

And considering how important this is, we encourage businesses to take their time and make an informed decision, outlining their biggest sales challenges and needs, and only then deciding on the ‘best’ solution.

Now, back to our topic, what does Salesloft do, how much does it cost, what users love and dislike, and how does it measure up with other alternatives like Reply.io? Stick around and get all those questions answered.

What is Salesloft? Product overview

Salesloft describes itself as an “AI-powered revenue orchestration platform”. Quite a statement!

Well, the way it ‘orchestrates’ sales processes is by leveraging AI to better understand and anticipate customer needs and behaviors, helping sales teams focus their engagement and nurturing efforts around the most effective strategies.

interface of Salesloft review

In theory, Salesloft gives sales teams a bird’s-eye view of their prospects’ buyer journeys, allowing them to not only engage prospects through multichannel sequences but also manage the entire pipeline from top to bottom.

The target user audience for Salesloft are SDRs, BDRs, and AEs, as well as marketing and revenue teams, suitable for both small and large businesses.

Salesloft has recently acquired Drift, a popular inbound lead-generating solution, and integrated it into its platform. While pretty impressive, there are several other cold outreach tools offering both the power of outbound and inbound, some (like Reply) with even more impressive features like an AI Chatbot.

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What are the main Salesloft features?

We’ll now cover the main features that Salesloft offers users, which together make up an almost complete sales automation stack, though the available Salesloft integrations can make up for any other tools or features your sales team may need.

Without further ado, let’s explore the 6 top Salesloft features:

Sales campaigns

Salesloft’s outreach campaigns, or as they refer to them, sales cadence automation, is pretty solid. Users can create tailored and automated multi-channel sequences for each unique prospect or buyer persona, leveraging a mix of emails, cloud calls, and social touches.

Salesloft reviews on sales campaigns

Like with other sales engagement platforms, these automated sales campaigns reduce the tedious, manual process of writing messages and staying on top of follow-ups.

At the same time, Salesloft’s cadences can be personalized with templates containing dynamic fields, as well as AI insights into the prospects’ messaging and behaviors, helping sales teams craft the most relevant message at the best time.

Salesloft then accurately tracks the performance of your engagement campaigns, providing actionable insights into which steps are most effective, what’s working, and what isn’t.

These engagement features are solid, but pretty basic considering that all outreach tools provide automated sequence creation and monitoring. For reference, Reply.io makes sales outreach even more effective with a dedicated AI SDR agent that also handles responses on your behalf—handling objections and even booking meetings on your behalf.

Conversational intelligence

While several sales engagement platforms include cloud call features in their multichannel campaigns, Salesloft takes it a step further with native conversational intelligence.

It has the ability to transcribe sales reps’ calls with prospects and clients, and analyze them by extracting the most important crucial insights that can influence deal outcomes.

Conversational intelligence by Salesloft reviews

On top of that, it provides sales professionals with real-time guidance and suggestions, enabling SDRs to make smart decisions during the call.

Due to its nature, this feature also acts as a coaching tool considering that sales managers can then rewatch and analyze the call recordings on their own to identify areas of improvement for the reps. Similarly, it will help sales teams see exactly what kinds of value propositions, CTAs, and behaviors most often result in a successful deal.

Recordings can be easily shared with the entire team, fostering training and collaboration for the whole department, while helping sales leaders refine the general sales strategy.

Pipeline management

Now, the phrase ‘pipeline management’ is a very broad term, so let’s break down what the feature actually does.

For starters, Salesloft provides a detailed overview of the entire sales pipeline, helping sales teams effectively manage and track opportunities through a simple dashboard.

Sales teams can then monitor the progress of each unique deal, helping them prioritize their workload, plan out their next steps of action, and identify any hurdles in their campaigns.

Pipeline management in salesloft review

With this pipeline management feature, sales reps can sort their deals by their stage in the sales process, along with all the activities associated with each deal.

Salesloft uses special algorithms to determine the ‘health’ status of each deal, taking into account previous interactions, and behaviors, predicting potential risks, and offering data-driven recommendations for the next steps to take.

This pipeline management also helps sales managers with evaluating performance, tracking the progress of set quotas, and sales forecasting, helping them set realistic targets. But more on that in our next section.

Sales forecasting

The ability to accurately forecast sales and revenue is a game-changer for sales teams, so it’s no surprise that Salesloft positions this feature as one of its main selling points.

Salesloft’s forecasting feature takes into account historical sales data and pipeline/prospect information to predict future sales and revenue with high accuracy. It uses machine learning to refine predictions in real-time as more data becomes available.

Sales forecasting by salesloft reviews

Bear in mind that this feature is only available in Salesloft’s most expensive pricing plan (more on that shortly), so if this is something that caught your attention—it will cost you quite a bit.

These forecasting dashboards as seen above are highly customizable, allowing sales teams to generate reports with only the most relevant data and test different market scenarios to compare future outcomes.

Sales analytics empowers sales leaders to make informed strategic operational and resource allocation decisions, mitigate potential risks, and compare their team’s quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year performance.

“Rhythm”

A pretty cool name for a feature if you ask me.

Salesloft’s Rhythm is a signal-to-action engine, providing AI-driven action suggestions for each unique deal based on prospect actions, across the entire customer lifecycle.

Rhythm by salesloft reviews

In my humble opinion, this is Salesloft’s most enticing feature and the one that separates them from the crowd.

Rhythm acts as a personal sales assistant (with expert knowledge no less), providing sales reps with actionable recommendations based on customer engagement and historical behavior patterns, empowering them to make not only more effective but also more successful decisions.

Salesloft’s AI-driven recommendations also help sales reps to take the most timely actions, such as call or demo proposals and follow-ups, and deal history, by analyzing the exact level of each prospect’s purchase-readiness, eliminating the guesswork to the fullest.

“Drift”

As previously mentioned, Drift used to be a standalone software for inbound lead generation, offering businesses website pop-ups, forms, and other ways to capture website visitors.

After acquiring Drift, Salesloft further improved its functionality, adding an abundance of new inbound features like ROI reporting, tailored landing pages, and more:

Drift by salesloft review

Drift helps sales teams effectively qualify and engage potential buyers in the early stages of their buyer journeys while providing an exceptional buyer experience during customers’ website visits.

AI-driven real-time engagement answers any queries that potential buyers may have, guides them to the next steps of the buying process, and determines whether they are high-intent leads for the business by scoring them.

If they are—they will be automatically added to the appropriate sales cadence campaigns to begin automated outreach, only now also supplemented with relevant data derived from their interaction with Drift.

Website chatbots come in different shapes and sizes, and truthfully, they’ve become quite oversaturated lately. That’s why we’ve taken a unique approach at Reply.io by releasing an AI Chatbot that comes to life in the form of video avatars.

Fed with the entire knowledge base of your company, rest assured that this humanized and highly intelligent Chatbot will provide your website visitors a great experience!

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What are the Salesloft reviews by real users?

Nothing speaks for the quality and credibility of any software like reviews from real users, and Salesloft has a bunch of them. With thousands of reviews from verified users, it’s clear that Salesloft is much valued among the sales community:

G2 → 4.5 ⭐️/ 5
Capterra → 4.3 ⭐️/ 5

No software is entirely perfect, so we’ve read through hundreds of reviews to determine the most often-mentioned pros and cons:

✅Users often praise Salesloft for its simple and easy-to-navigate UI, which is not that common for such complex solutions with numerous features;
✅The Rhythm and conversation intelligence provided help users personalize their sales campaigns with ease, and report good engagement rates;
✅Salesloft offers seamless integration capabilities with other sales and sales-adjacent tools, making it a relatively easy addition to an existing tools stack;

❎Numerous reports of poor customer service, especially after the initial onboarding and support, with many queries and escalations going completely unresolved;
❎At times, users report dialing issues, repeatedly mentioning difficulties with accurately logging calls;
❎Several occasions of technical glitches have been reported by some users, particularly with data flow from other integrated tools.

Along with some of the most helpful and upvoted user reviews:

“From a sales role perspective, SalesLoft provides an easy to use platform for account management and tracking user productivity. The ability to create effective outreach cadences and having data analytics into testing email campaigns is absolutely crucial.“

“I love being able to track and keep my outreach organized with steps. (e.g. e-mail, calls, Linkedin messages). All my outreach is gathered in one place and creating multiple cadences is very simple. The analytics are easy to understand and well built. It also has integrations with the other software that we use.”

“The speed at which I can reach out to multiple contacts drastically helps me and my team. It is a seamless product and having the ability to dial out of my phone while I am working remote has drastically increased the quality and connection of the calls.”

What are the Salesloft pricing plans?

Salesloft’s pricing plans are not transparent, that is—users who fish to find out how much it would cost their business will have to reach out to their sales team. According to Salesloft, their pricing is customized and tailored for each business, based on the number of users and their unique needs.

After some digging, here is an approximate breakdown of the average Salesloft cost in 2024:

around $1,000/user/year for a team with a minimum of 3 seats;
an additional $200/user/year for access to the dialer and additional call-related features like conversational intelligence;
committing to a two-year contract will result in a further discount of around 15%.

Moving away from the actual cost, here is a quick overview of the 3 Salesloft plans available:

“Essentials”

Lightweight option for smaller businesses looking to build a sales pipeline and automate their outreach campaigns. Tailored rep and team insights based on performance analytics are also available, providing guidance to support SDRs.

“Advanced”

Labeled as their most popular plan, “Advanced” unlocks dialing with the power of conversational intelligence, so teams looking to incorporate cold calls into their sales strategy will have to opt for this plan instead of the “Essentials” one.

In addition, users will get a more detailed overview of their sales pipeline from lead to conversion, leading to more data-driven decision-making.

“Premier”

As the name suggests, this is Salesloft’s premium plan for larger sales teams looking to “generate predictable revenue, quarter after quarter”. With this plan, businesses can enjoy advanced forecasting reports supplemented with AI-driven recommendations for the next best actions with their deals.

Unfortunately, Salesloft does not offer free trials to let interested sales and business professionals give it a try before making a purchase (and a substantial one nonetheless).

It’s also worth noting that even on their pricing page, not all of Salesloft’s features are mentioned in the 3 plans, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what plan offers which features, so once again, you’d have to contact the sales team to get all the information.

All in all, Salesloft’s pricing may be a little too steep for smaller businesses and startups, who would be better suited with an alternative like Reply.io while enjoying more affordable and transparent pricing.

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What are the top Salesloft alternatives?

Salesloft is definitely a viable option for some businesses, but may not be the best solution for others.

For starters, sales teams that wish to enjoy cloud calling and AI features in their sales platform will have to go for their premium plan, which will most likely not be affordable for most small and medium-sized businesses.

In addition, even though Salesloft has become more consolidated with the acquisition of Drift, it still lacks in several departments to fully cover all the needs of a modern sales team, such as a lead database, email deliverability features, and so on.

After numerous sales software reviews, we’ve created back-to-back comparisons with our very own Reply.io to show how we remain a strong force in an increasingly competitive market:

In summary, if you’re a business looking to scale and automate your entire sales process, from prospecting to closing deals, there are numerous other, more affordable options than Salesloft out there.

For reference, we invite you to check out how Reply.io compares to Salesloft and see if that would be a better fit for you.

To make things simpler, here are the key differences:

Reply.io comes with a one-of-a-kind AI SDR that not only hyper-personalizes your outreach but also handles responses on your behalf (including booking meetings);
Reply.io also comes with a dedicated AI Chatbot that effectively captures, qualifies, and nurtures inbound leads that visit your company website;
Reply.io offers users a rich B2B contact database to build targeted prospect lists and push them into your outreach campaigns in just a few minutes;
Reply has native Google Postmaster and MailToaster integrations, as well as a dedicated deliverability team at your disposal, ensuring flawless deliverability and compliance with email providers;
Reply.io is significantly cheaper than Salesloft, especially if you’re after a full suite of features;

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Reply.io is perfectly designed to find, engage, and convert your prospects across email, social, calls, and more. Ready to see what seamless outreach looks like?

The final verdict

Salesloft has built up a solid reputation in the B2B software world over the long course of its existence. However, over the years, there have been numerous new players in the market who have created equally, if not more impressive sales tools for a fraction of the price.

If you’re a large enterprise in need of AI revenue forecasting, Salesloft may very well be a great fit for you, but even then, you’d still need to separately take care of your deliverability and prospecting.

The absence of a free trial coupled with an untransparent pricing strategy is less than inviting for new companies, so you’ll have to be 100% confident that Salesloft is ‘the one’ for your business committing to a hefty purchase.

On this note, we humbly invite you to take Reply.io for a free 14-day spin to experience the full power of AI outreach, supplemented with an extensive contact database, top-class email deliverability, and much more.

Perhaps the right tool for your business was right here all along!