Whew! 2024 is nearly over.
This year was full of highs and lows for GTM teams.
Initially, many teams struggled to hit quota as the difficult market of 2023 continued on for another year. AI tools exploded, but many proved to be shiny toys that didn’t deliver on their big promises. In April, SaaStr even posed the question, “Is SaaS dead?”
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, and things are clearly looking up as we wind down the year. GTM teams have been seeing incredible success in Q4 - a time of year that can usually be a real slog. A few promising AI tools are standing out as delivering real value for reps. And just this week, SaaStr declared that SaaS is back!
I’m feeling incredibly bullish heading into 2025, but before we dive into the new year, I’m looking back on all of the incredible features and updates we rolled out in 2024. From big launches to small tweaks, I hope you enjoy our annual Shipmas recap. 🎄
🎁 Pocus AI
We’ve officially entered the AI era, helping sales teams get to closed-won faster than ever. We believe that sales will continue to be a fundamentally human profession, but AI can help automate tedious tasks so reps have more time to build relationships and be strategic. With that in mind, this year we released a suite of new AI tools purpose-built to give reps superpowers.
Pocus AI helps reps:
- Prioritize: Combine internal and external data to prioritize the best-fit opportunities without digging for data across multiple tools.
- Research: Understand how to sell your product based on a prospect’s priorities to help with call prep, prospecting, and account planning. Don’t spend hours researching every account and person only for it to go stale as the deal cycle progresses or new insights emerge.
- Action: Find decision makers, understand why they will care about your product, and get their contact info without leaving Pocus. Take quick action in any of your favorite engagement tools.
Custom-built AI for sales
The biggest difference maker for AI is the underlying data. Without good data, AI tools just can’t be effective. When we looked at the market for AI tools we saw a lot of generic, general-purpose solutions. When we set out to build Pocus’ underlying AI engine we knew it needed 2 things to be successful: 1) high-quality data and 2) a deep understanding of our customers' businesses. So we built just that!
Pocus AI Agents find intel from across the internet (10Ks, news articles, tracking job changes) and combine it with rich internal data (call recordings, CRM notes, product usage) to generate the most complete view for every account and person in a rep’s book. Every insight generated is hyper-relevant to each rep and their specific accounts, not the same intel you’d get from ChatGPT or Sales Navigator.
Faster prospecting
Skip the toggle tax! Instead of jumping between LinkedIn Sales Navigator, enrichment providers, your CRM, and more to find the right contacts, Pocus AI connects the dots for you. Simply ask Pocus AI for suggestions like “find me the right decision makers.” Pocus AI pulls from your contacts or from our database of 14+ providers to find the right contacts and their details.
Deep account & person-level research
Say goodbye to generic cold outbound. Now you can get custom-generated insights for every person in your book of business so you can build a strong POV ahead of outreach. Understand your target account’s top priorities, then pair that information with person-level insights to craft compelling messages.
Ask AI
Reps shouldn’t have to be part-time prompt engineers. Our new “Ask AI” chat interface allows reps to interact with the Pocus AI model in natural language. Ask questions to go deeper on specific strategic insights, generate messaging, or find specific contacts for outreach. No special prompts required.
🎁 Playbook builder upgrade
GTM teams need an easy, repeatable way to run their best playbooks. Unfortunately, for many teams the process is spread out across multiple tools, making it hard to scale their wins. We wanted to make it easy to build, test, run, and optimize ANY GTM playbook powered by data, so we added tons of upgrades to our playbook builder in Pocus.
Visual playbook editor
Teams can create any GTM playbook imaginable with our drag-and-drop visual builder. You can go from idea to live playbook in minutes.
Creating complex conditional logic is easier than ever with branching in our visual builder. Test new playbook ideas or filter some leads to automated actions and surface others to reps.
Disqualification made easy
Sometimes a lead just isn’t the right fit. We added a button to help reps disqualify leads from a playbook with a click. You can even add the specific reason for disqualification - info that’s super helpful for iterating playbooks and making them smarter as you learn.
Improved admin controls
The real unsung heroes of any GTM team are the RevOps, Growth, or Marketing Ops teams who spend hours pouring over workflows before setting live. We added safeguards to give these admins more control, including:
- Versioning that allows staging, pausing, or archiving Playbooks.
- Chain actions so they run in a specific order
- Native A/B testing so you can create holdouts to measure lift
Read more about the upgraded Pocus playbook builder.
🎁 Signals, signals, signals
Since 2021 we’ve been helping customers understand and action their product usage and CRM signals and in 2024 we expanded our offering to include new 1st and 3rd party signals. Having access to the most important signals in your GTM in one place makes everyone from reps to RevOps life easier. With that in mind, this year we added two of the most powerful (and most requested!) signals to our platform, in addition to a few others.
Job switchers
Did you know your past product champions are 6x more likely to respond to outreach? It’s no secret that your former customers are one of your best sources of high-intent leads. We launched the Job Switchers signal in Pocus to capture these opportunities and proactively surface them to reps for quick action.
Website visitors
Before a prospect reaches out to you, they do a ton of their own research, including visiting your website. Having insight into who’s on your site can help unlock pipeline of high-intent opportunities. That’s why we added Website Visitors as a key signal in Pocus.
We recommend layering Website Visitors data with other signals to identify your best opportunities. For example, monitor for pricing page visits by current customers to know who might be open to an expansion or upsell conversation.
🎁 Stocking stuffers
On top of all the big launches this year, we released dozens of incremental improvements to make Pocus easier and more enjoyable to use. Sometimes the smallest gifts make the biggest difference!
- Team lists: Say goodbye to dashboard clutter by making lists for specific teams that only they can see.
- Playbook overview: See what you and others have marked done or disqualified within playbooks.
- Hide ‘inbox zero’ playbooks: Get an empty slate when you clear your playbook actions.
- Improved enrichment: Get access to department and seniority-level data for your contacts.
- Reporting improvements: Check out who’s excelling in Pocus and where there’s room for improvement at the team and user level.
- Gong Engage integration: Quickly add prospects to Gong Engage workflows with the click of a button.
🔜 Gifts coming soon
We’re doubling down on how AI can help supercharge rep workflows even more in 2025. Here’s a sneak peek at what we have launching in early 2025.
- AI-powered alerts: Let AI agents monitor your entire book of business and listen for interesting updates that might be relevant to you.
- Even better research: Better insights and new templates that support your workflows (sales methodology, account plans, and more)
- More knowledge agents: Data is the key to great AI insights and we’re deploying even more knowledge agents to go gather the best intel from everywhere across the internet.
Stay tuned in early January for more specifics!
Trying to level up on prospecting before EOY?
Check out some of our top resources from 2024:
- Get actionable tactics from eight top GTM leaders in our free End Q4 Strong mini-course.
- Learn how to turn make your outbound even more effective with our WARM outbound playbook.
- Use our free AI Account Plan Generator to create customized account plans in under 60 seconds.
- Listen to Season 3 of our podcast and learn from leaders who are shaping the future of AI x GTM.