How Vertex Got a Clearer Picture of Its Pipeline

Vertex, Inc., the tax technology leader of nearly 50 years, had run Salesloft with a single Inside Sales team for years. As the go-to-market org grew, a familiar problem crept in: reps across AE, Sales Engineering, and Indirect Sales were hunting for information in too many places, and CRM data depended on whoever remembered to log it.

Karen Knobel, Senior Director of Global Inside Sales, built the case to expand Salesloft org-wide, weighing it against building in-house before deciding Salesloft was the stronger long-term bet. Emily Sollenberger, Senior Manager of Inside Sales, then led the rollout in regional waves, driven by office hours and peer champions rather than a top-down mandate.

A few months in: open rates are up sharply, CRM data is cleaner, and leadership finally has a consistent view across the pipeline.

The challenge

Before the expansion, Vertex's visibility into the pipeline varied a lot depending on which team you asked. Some of the friction points:

• Pipeline health looked different depending on which team or region you asked
• CRM hygiene was inconsistent, since reps were entering data by hand
• Deals stalled or fell out early, often without a clear explanation
• Forecasts leaned more on individual reps' read of a deal than on consistent evidence

Leadership's read on the situation was straightforward: too many calls were being made on instinct because the underlying data wasn't reliable enough to trust. They needed one platform that could give every team the same visibility into pipeline and deal activity.

The solution

Karen led an RFI built around two questions: how do we get a real read on sales velocity, and how do we give stakeholders visibility across the whole funnel, from prospecting through call analysis and deal management. That framing mattered, because it kept the evaluation focused on what teams actually needed to see, not just which features looked good in a demo.

Vertex also considered building something in-house. But months into that effort, the team couldn't get a straight answer on what the tool could actually do today versus what was still on the roadmap, and sales reps never fully trusted it. That distinction, between present-day capability and future promise, ended up being one of the clearer signals in the decision. Salesloft won out on five years of track record as a partner.

As Karen put it: "Every interaction with Salesloft, our trust went up and up and up... I stood deeply behind my decision to select Salesloft, and felt very strongly that it was the right one..."

The Salesloft team really felt interested in helping us solve a problem rather than just selling us something. It's a true partnership.

The rollout

Emily led the global enablement effort in regional waves, starting with Inside Sales and expanding outward to AEs, Sales Engineers, and Indirect Sales. From the outset, the message to reps was that Salesloft was core tech stack, not an optional add-on.

Two things drove adoption more than anything else:

1. Speaking the rep's language. Emily ran open office hours, translating platform value into the daily reality of a sales rep's workday.

2. Peer champions over top-down mandates. Instead of leading with rules, Emily joined team calls and let power users show, not tell, how they were winning with the platform.

Emily emphasized that having champions at every level, from the VP down to the peers, was essential for overcoming resistance and driving usage.

The results: from opinion to evidence, in months

A few months into the global launch, Vertex is already seeing a shift:

• 3x open rates: Better insight into messaging, and the ability to keep refining emails based on what's working, has pushed open rates up two to three times.
• Cleaner CRM data: Emails and activities now log into the CRM automatically, so there's a real system of record instead of one that depends on manual entry.
• More consistent visibility into deals: Conversation intelligence lets leaders spot recurring themes and likely blockers, and automated follow-up summaries mean reps spend less time reconstructing what happened on a call.
• Less time hunting for information: Reps used to have to look in several places to find what they needed. Now more of that surfaces directly inside the system they already work in.

Reps had to look all over the place for information. Now, Salesloft is  handing them key information in their system of action. It's going to make such a big difference in their day-to-day,

What's next

Vertex sees this as a starting point rather than a finish line. Karen is looking at expanding Salesloft further across the organization to extend visibility across the full customer journey. Emily is focused on pushing adoption even further and is exploring the Research Agent and agentic SDR capabilities to put more of the information reps need directly in front of them inside Salesloft.

For Vertex, the shift has been about grounding decisions in evidence instead of individual read on a deal, and building the habits and tools that make that possible.

If you're considering something similar

A few parts of Vertex's approach are worth borrowing if you're evaluating a similar expansion:

• Frame the evaluation around visibility and velocity, not features. Karen's RFI centered on two concrete questions, how fast are deals actually moving, and can stakeholders see the full funnel. That kept the search focused on outcomes instead of a feature checklist.
• Push vendors to be clear about what's available today versus what's on the roadmap. Vertex's internal build effort stalled partly because that line stayed blurry. Whether you're evaluating a vendor or an internal build, ask for that distinction explicitly.
• Roll out in waves, not all at once. Starting with one team and expanding outward gives you a chance to fix problems early and build a case study internally before you scale.
• Pair office hours with peer champions. Translating the tool into day-to-day language matters, but having respected reps show their peers how they use it tends to do more for adoption than any mandate.

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