The Two-Sided Problem No Sales Tool Has Solved

The average sales rep uses 13 tools. None of them work for the rep.

Let's start with an uncomfortable truth: the modern sales stack was not built for salespeople.

It was built for managers who want dashboards. For ops teams who want clean data. For executives who want forecasts. The rep — the person actually closing deals — inherited a pile of software that demands their time, fragments their attention, and gives almost nothing back.

Think about what a typical enterprise rep's day looks like. They log into Salesforce to update opportunities. They check Gong for call recordings. They pull up LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting. They use Outreach or Salesloft for sequences. They glance at Clari for pipeline numbers. They flip to Slack for internal chatter. They open their email. They check their calendar.

That's seven tools before they've talked to a single customer.

Each of these tools generates data. Lots of it. Call transcripts, engagement scores, intent signals, email open rates, deal stage changes, stakeholder maps. The problem isn't a lack of information. It's that no tool takes responsibility for turning that information into action.

The rep is the integration layer. The rep is the one who's supposed to synthesize signals from a dozen sources, figure out what matters, and decide what to do next. Every single day. For every single deal.

That's insane. And it's the status quo.

Two broken halves of the same problem

If you look at the sales technology landscape with fresh eyes, you'll notice something strange: every tool solves exactly half of the problem, and nobody acknowledges the other half exists.

Half one: the signal problem. Your CRM and connected tools are capturing thousands of data points — emails sent, calls made, deals moving, champions changing jobs, competitors showing up in transcripts. But that data sits in dashboards, waiting for someone to go look at it. The information exists. It just never reaches the rep at the moment it matters.

Half two: the research problem. When a rep needs to prepare for a call, draft a follow-up, or understand a competitive situation, they're on their own. They Alt-Tab through five tools, Google the prospect's company, scan old email threads, and piece together context manually. It takes 30-60 minutes per meeting. Multiply that across a pipeline of 40+ opportunities and you've eaten their entire week.

Current tools address one half or the other. Never both.

The dashboard camp

Clari, People.ai, and the analytics layer of platforms like Gong give you gorgeous dashboards. Pipeline trends. Rep activity metrics. Deal health scores. Revenue forecasts.

These tools are genuinely useful — for managers and ops teams. But ask a rep when they last opened Clari proactively, unprompted, just to check on their deals. You'll get a blank stare. Dashboards are pull-based: the information is there if you go looking for it. Reps don't go looking. They're too busy selling.

The data decays into a management reporting tool. The rep keeps winging it.

The automation camp

On the other side, you've got Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, and the sequencing/automation crowd. These tools are built around action — send emails, make calls, run cadences. They solve the "do stuff" problem.

But they're dumb. Not in a pejorative sense — they're sophisticated engineering. But they automate without intelligence. A sequence fires whether or not the timing makes sense. An email goes out whether or not the prospect just had a negative interaction with your support team. The automation doesn't know what's happening in the deal. It just executes.

You get activity without insight. Volume without judgment.

The gap

Nobody has built the thing that sits between these two worlds. The tool that:

1. Proactively watches the firehose of CRM and tool data, distills it into signals that actually matter, and pushes those signals to the rep before they think to ask.
2. Gives the rep an intelligent partner they can talk to — not a dashboard to stare at, not a sequence to configure, but an AI that knows their deals, their accounts, and their pipeline and can actually help them work.

Both sides. Together. That's the product that doesn't exist in the market.

Or didn't, until we built it.

What happens when you solve both sides

We didn't set out to build Pingd as a thought experiment. We built it because we were living the problem.

The first version was simple: take the signals buried across a sales team's tools, figure out which ones actually mattered, and push them to reps in Slack — the one place they already live. No new tab. No new login. Just a message that says: "Your champion at Acme Corp just changed roles. Here's what that means for the deal and three things you should do today."

That alone changed behavior. Reps started acting on signals they'd been missing for months. Deals that would have stalled got attention at the right moment. But something interesting happened — reps started asking for more.

"Can you tell me what happened on the last call with this account?"

"Can you draft an email to their VP of Engineering?"

"What's the competitive situation with this deal?"

They didn't want just a notification system. They wanted a partner. Someone who knew their pipeline as well as they did and could actually help them do the work.

So we built that too. Every rep gets their own AI agent — one that knows their accounts, their deals, their communication history, and their style. They can ask it anything, and it responds with context no generic AI could have.

The combination turned out to be the unlock.

The evidence

We ran Pingd internally with 20% of the sales workforce for nine weeks. No fanfare, no mandates — just "try this and tell us what you think."

That group generated $6 million in pipeline directly attributable to signals and actions surfaced by Pingd. Deals that would have slipped. Accounts that would have gone cold. Opportunities that nobody was tracking.

When we rolled it out to the full team, the remaining 80% generated another $3 million in pipeline within two weeks.

$9 million total. Not over a year. Over weeks.

But the number that actually mattered wasn't the pipeline figure. It was this: reps asked to keep it. Not tolerated it. Not grudgingly adopted it because management said so. They asked for it. They gave feedback. They wanted it to do more.

If you've ever tried to get a sales team to adopt a new tool, you know how rare that is. Reps are the most tool-fatigued people in any organization. Getting genuine pull from them — not compliance, but pull — means you've built something that actually makes their day better.

Why both sides matter (and why one alone fails)

You might wonder: couldn't you just do the push side? Or just the pull side?

You could. And it would be mediocre.

Push alone gives you a smarter notification system. Useful, but incomplete. The rep gets a signal — "your deal at TechCo is at risk because the economic buyer hasn't engaged in 3 weeks" — and then what? They still have to figure out what to do, research the account, draft the outreach. The signal identified the problem. It didn't help solve it.

Pull alone gives you a chatbot. The rep can ask questions and get answers. But they have to know what to ask. The biggest risks in a pipeline are the ones reps don't know about. If a rep has to proactively think "I should check on that deal," you've already lost. The deals that slip are the ones nobody was watching.

Push catches what you'd miss. Pull helps you act on what you've found. Together, they create a closed loop: the AI surfaces the signal, the rep engages with it, the AI helps them execute, and the outcome feeds back into better signals.

That's not a tool. That's a teammate.

The real competitive landscape

Let's be direct about where the market stands.

Apollo is excellent at top-of-funnel prospecting. Finding accounts, building lists, running outbound. But once a deal is in your pipeline, Apollo has nothing to say about it.

Clari and People.ai are excellent at giving revenue leaders visibility into what's happening across the team. But they're built for the manager's view. The rep is a data source, not a beneficiary.

Outreach and Salesloft are excellent workflow engines. They make it easy to execute sequences at scale. But they don't think. They don't know your deals. They're power tools, not partners.

Gong has built an impressive platform around conversation intelligence. But conversation intelligence is one signal among many, and Gong's primary value still flows upward — to coaching, to forecasting, to management insights.

None of these are bad products. They're just not solving this problem. Nobody has built the AI teammate for the individual rep — the one that watches everything, knows everything, and is always available to help.

That's the gap. That's Pingd.

What this means for sales leaders

If you run a sales team, here's the hard question: what percentage of the signals in your CRM and tools actually reach the rep who needs them, at the moment they need them?

For most teams, the honest answer is single digits. The data exists. The insights are theoretically derivable. But the last mile — getting the right information to the right rep at the right time, in a format they can act on — is completely broken.

And the second hard question: how many hours per week does each rep spend on research, prep, and administrative work that an AI could handle if it actually knew their pipeline?

The industry average is 65% of a rep's time spent on non-selling activities. That's not a productivity gap. That's a structural failure.

Pingd exists because both of these problems are solvable — but only if you solve them together. Push without pull is a notification. Pull without push is a chatbot. Both together is an AI teammate that fundamentally changes how a rep works.

$9 million in pipeline from internal testing wasn't a fluke. It was the predictable outcome of giving reps what they've needed all along: an intelligent partner that watches their back and helps them do their best work.

The two-sided problem has a two-sided solution. It's about time someone built it.