XANT Announces PeopleFinder a New Buyer Intelligence Feature That Recommends Additional Contacts in the Buying Group
The landscape of modern enterprise sales is undergoing a fundamental shift as organizations move away from manual prospecting toward intelligence-driven engagement models. On May 11, 2021, XANT, a prominent leader in the Guided Sales Engagement sector based in Silicon Slopes, Utah, announced the launch of PeopleFinder. This new feature, integrated into the company’s Playbooks suite, is designed to utilize artificial intelligence to identify buyer behaviors and recommend ideal contacts within an organization’s buying group. By automating the discovery process, XANT aims to eliminate the guesswork traditionally associated with B2B sales outreach, allowing representatives to focus their energy on high-value interactions rather than administrative lead research.
The Evolution of Sales Intelligence
To understand the significance of the PeopleFinder launch, one must look at the historical context of Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs). Over the last decade, the sales profession has been plagued by the "data entry paradox." While CRM systems were designed to house customer information, the burden of data enrichment, lead validation, and contact discovery has historically fallen on the individual sales representative. Industry studies have consistently shown that the average B2B sales representative spends less than 35% of their time actually selling, with the remainder consumed by research, internal coordination, and manual data updates.
XANT’s history as a pioneer in this space—formerly known as InsideSales.com—is rooted in the application of predictive analytics to sales processes. By evolving into a Guided Sales Engagement provider, the company has sought to bridge the gap between static CRM records and the dynamic reality of modern buying committees. The release of PeopleFinder represents the latest iteration of this strategy, leveraging years of interaction data to create a proactive rather than reactive engagement framework.
Technical Architecture and Functionality
PeopleFinder functions as a core component of the Playbooks Buyer Intelligence suite. At its technical foundation, the feature aggregates vast amounts of interaction data generated across the XANT platform. By analyzing historical outcomes—such as successful deal closures, renewal patterns, and engagement levels—the system builds comprehensive buyer profiles that extend beyond simple contact information.
The process is multi-layered:
- Behavioral Analysis: The system tracks how various stakeholders interact with content and communications.
- Predictive Modeling: Using these behavioral cues, the platform identifies individuals who occupy similar roles or have been involved in analogous deal cycles.
- Third-Party Validation: To ensure accuracy, the platform cross-references internal data with verified third-party sources.
- Privacy-First Processing: A critical aspect of the feature is its commitment to data security. Insights are anonymized and encrypted, ensuring that while the platform provides actionable intelligence, it adheres to rigorous data privacy standards, a necessity in the post-GDPR regulatory environment.
Perhaps most notably, PeopleFinder identifies contacts that may not yet exist within a company’s CRM. By scanning for gaps in a rep’s current account coverage—such as missing decision-makers or stakeholders involved in similar enterprise deals—the tool essentially serves as an automated account mapping assistant.
Executive Perspectives on Sales Productivity
The introduction of PeopleFinder reflects a broader industry mandate: to increase "speed-to-lead" and improve the efficacy of outreach. Chris Harrington, CEO of XANT, emphasized that the primary goal of this feature is the reclamation of time. "PeopleFinder saves reps from wasting valuable selling time looking for prospects or targeting the wrong ones," Harrington stated during the launch. He noted that the friction of manual searching often leads to "analysis paralysis," where a representative is unsure which stakeholder to engage next. By automating the surfacing of contacts relevant to specific targeting criteria, renewals, or committee expansion, XANT aims to streamline the workflow from discovery to conversation.
Mark Littlefield, VP of Product Management at XANT, highlighted the practical implementation of the tool within the existing Playbooks interface. "We saw a need in the sales industry to connect reps to buyers faster," Littlefield observed. The integration is designed to be seamless, populating the Playbooks menu with names, titles, roles within the buying committee, and verified contact information. For the sales representative, this reduces the "context switching" that occurs when moving between a CRM, LinkedIn, and email tools to gather basic information.
Broader Industry Implications
The release of PeopleFinder occurs at a time when the B2B buying group is becoming increasingly complex. Research from Gartner indicates that a typical B2B buying decision involves six to ten decision-makers, each armed with their own set of information and requirements. As the number of stakeholders grows, the probability of a deal stalling due to a lack of consensus increases.
By utilizing intelligence to identify members of these committees, XANT is addressing a critical failure point in enterprise sales: the inability to map the entire decision-making unit. If a representative is only engaging one or two stakeholders, they remain vulnerable to internal organizational shifts or competing priorities. PeopleFinder’s ability to suggest "additional members of the buying committee" helps reps build a more resilient deal structure.
Furthermore, this development signals a shift in the competitive landscape for Sales Engagement platforms. The race is no longer just about who can automate email sequences; it is about who can provide the most accurate "next best action" intelligence. Companies that fail to integrate these types of behavioral insights risk falling behind in a market where data quality is the primary competitive advantage.
Fact-Based Impact Analysis
The introduction of automated contact discovery has several implications for the future of the sales profession:
- Reduction in CRM Decay: Customer data within CRMs degrades at an estimated rate of 25% to 30% per year due to employee turnover and role changes. By providing external verification and recommendations, tools like PeopleFinder help mitigate the impact of stale data on sales performance.
- Shift in Sales Skills: As the "research" phase of sales becomes increasingly automated, the value of the sales professional shifts toward high-level consultative skills. The ability to manage a buying committee and articulate value becomes more important than the ability to locate a phone number or email address.
- Operational Efficiency: For sales leadership, the primary metric impacted is "Time-to-Value." By shortening the time required to map an account, organizations can potentially shorten their sales cycles, improve forecast accuracy, and increase the return on investment for their existing sales tech stack.
Conclusion and Outlook
The launch of PeopleFinder by XANT underscores a pivot toward intelligent, guided sales processes. By embedding complex data analytics directly into the daily workflow of the sales representative, XANT is attempting to solve the long-standing problem of low representative productivity. While the effectiveness of such tools ultimately depends on the quality of the underlying data and the willingness of sales teams to adopt new methodologies, the move aligns with a broader technological trend: the replacement of manual, intuition-based prospecting with automated, insight-based engagement.
As the industry continues to mature, the distinction between a "Sales Engagement Platform" and a "Buyer Intelligence Platform" will likely blur. XANT, through its focus on deep integration and behavioral analytics, is positioning itself at the forefront of this convergence. For the sales teams currently struggling to navigate the complexities of modern enterprise buying groups, the promise of PeopleFinder is clear: less time searching, more time selling, and a significantly higher probability of reaching the right person at the right time. As organizations continue to digitize their revenue operations, the role of AI-driven recommendations in the sales cycle will likely transition from a "nice-to-have" feature to an essential component of any successful enterprise sales strategy.
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