SalesMaple tries to distinguish its new sales opportunity platform in a sea of competitors

With salespeople needing to sift through so many tools to help them enable, accelerate, or predict their sales opportunities, it’s a wonder they have time to get anything done.

The latest — a sales analysis, pipeline management, and predictive B2B platform called SalesMaple — launched this week.

The idea came “from my own challenges of managing a sales team [while] looking around for a tool that could give me a pipeline view,” CEO and founder Steve Thomas told me.

There are “lots of platforms out there,” he acknowledged. But, he said, they are “extremely complex, require a high level of statistical knowledge from the user, rely almost entirely on static analysis and prediction, and build models for entire companies, not individual sales people.”

By contrast, he said, SalesMaple builds prediction models for individuals, refines those models with usage, allows a sales manager to compare individual salespeople’s approaches in a kind of A/B testing, and offers a dynamic sorting of opportunities.

If three opportunities are at one stage in the sales cycle, for instance, but one of those is determined by the platform to be lagging behind, SalesMaple automatically moves it to a different stage.

Above: A sales pipeline screen in SalesMaple.

Image Credit: SalesMaple

The platform does this, Thomas said, by comparing the opportunity’s factors to the average opportunity at that stage, thus helping salespeople to sort their priorities.

When a salesperson can figure out which opportunities are more likely to result in sales, they can better focus their efforts. But there is no shortage of standalone tools to help them do that, as well as sales analysis, management, and prediction functions built into various customer relationship management tools, like Salesforce.

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Thomas described SalesMaple as “easier to set up” than high-end sales/business intelligence platforms like Tableau or SAP’s Business Objects. InsideSales, he said, is not salesperson-specific like SalesMaple, Salesforce’s Predictive Decisions uses B2C customer tracking instead of SalesMaple’s B2B sales predictions, and 6Sense relies on buyer tracking instead of the kind of sales data analysis that SalesMaple performs.

Available only in a desktop version, SalesMaple is targeted toward inside sales operations at small- to medium-sized businesses with 10 to 20 sales people. It is integrated into Salesforce, or sales folk can manually enter their data. Pricing is $25/user/month.