From 20% Adoption to Full GTM Engine: How PTC Put Salesloft to Work
Published:
When Adelle Bonavire joined PTC to lead sales strategy and GTM execution, Salesloft was barely a footnote in the revtech stack. Years later, it’s the connective tissue of PTC’s entire go-to-market motion — and the clean data foundation that makes their AI ambitions real.
The challenge
Blind spots, low adoption, and a platform treated as a “nice-to-have”
PTC had Salesloft when Adelle joined, but it was barely used. Adoption hovered at about 20% — mostly Cadences — with little visibility into rep activity, coaching data, or deal risk. Many leaders had been at PTC for decades: the business was performing, so why change?
Adelle didn’t even own the platform at first. For nearly two years, Salesloft sat under another team that saw it strictly as a cadence tool and resisted expanding its use. Leadership treated it as a nice-to-have, on par with LinkedIn or ZoomInfo — useful, but not essential. It would take Adelle almost four years in total to bring Salesloft to where it stands today at PTC.
We were only using about 20% of Salesloft’s potential. Once we forced daily use — 120 phones through the platform — we finally saw the full picture.
The approach
Start where you can prove it, then expand
Once she gained control of Salesloft, Adelle didn’t try to win the whole org at once. She used PTC’s global inside-sales revamp as a proving ground: make Salesloft indispensable there, and the rest of the business would follow.
The most decisive move: removing 120 corporate cell phones across EMEA and North America so every call had to run through Salesloft. Overnight, the platform became daily infrastructure. From there, she layered in cadence committees, activity KPIs, comp alignment, and coaching frameworks — until the data was clean, visible, and trusted.
With proof in hand, skepticism softened. A wave of new leadership — including executives from Microsoft and from ServiceMax, a longtime Salesloft customer PTC had acquired — brought fresh eyes and accelerated momentum, just as PTC’s AI moment created the opening to expand well beyond sales engagement.
I don’t call it a sales tool anymore. It’s our go-to-market engine — the more teams use it, the smarter it gets.
On AI in sales
AI isn’t magic — it needs clean, connected data
PTC has no shortage of AI options: Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Copilot, and the ability to build their own agents. Adelle’s litmus test is pragmatic: which tool surfaces the right data — last meeting, open items, engagement signals — without making sellers stop and think about which button to click?
Her answer: use Salesloft where its out-of-the-box agents are already wired to PTC’s first-party data. Complement where it makes sense. And make the workflow decision map so clear that there’s no decision paralysis.
AI isn’t magic. It needs clean, connected data — and Salesloft already wired that for us. I just pick the agents I need and start using them.
The results
- Full pipeline visibility. Daily platform use created the ‘digital exhaust’ leadership needed to finally see performance, risk, and coaching opportunities clearly.
- Cross-functional adoption. Pre-sales, customer success, marketing, and sales now all participate in the same platform — turning Salesloft into shared GTM infrastructure.
- AI without the build cost. Out-of-the-box agents natively connected to PTC’s data deliver immediate value — no custom builds, no IT dependency, no time-to-value delays.
- Ecosystem integration. Salesloft plays alongside Seismic, Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce — teams get the best of all tools without duplication or decision paralysis.
What's next for PTC
Adelle’s two-year horizon: broaden participation further, codify the AI + workflow decision map, and make Salesloft the shared place where GTM work actually happens — inside and out. More teams in the loop, more first-party data in the system, and a go-to-market engine that gets smarter with every interaction.
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