Tag: Battle Cards

Corporate Visions Acquires Primary Intelligence

Sales Research and Advisory firm Corporate Visions acquired win/loss analytics firm Primary Intelligence.  Primary Intelligence’s TruVoice platform conducts surveys, online interviews, and live phone interviews.  In addition, buyer feedback is displayed in Competitive Intelligence platform Crayon and available in battlecards, newsletters, and dashboards, providing “more depth, context, and insight from the buyer’s perspective.”

TruVoice can also be used for customer experience, competitive analysis, and churn analysis.

Primary Intelligence has collected win/loss intelligence through manual post-mortem deal interviews for twenty years.  Automating the process both lowers the cost of intelligence collection and widens the scope of intelligence collected.  Survey response rates are between 25% and 35% due to the request coming from the sales rep.  Online surveys run ten to fifteen minutes and are dynamically adjusted based on the responses.  TruVoice collects both qualitative and quantitative responses.

Primary Intelligence Buyer Insights provide a roll-up of win/loss insights at an account. Users can drill down to “direct evidence” from the interviews.

“We’ve taken the live interview model that we have honed over our entire existence and turned it into an online experience, where we call it an online interview.  But it really is something that a respondent can do in ten minutes on a mobile device.  There are some quantitative questions for them to record voice responses, which we then transcribe and…publish that data.  And then we still do the live interview.”

“The value of win-loss-no decision analysis at scale is that you have continuous, near real-time feedback on a higher percentage of accounts for improved insights and confident strategy adjustments across all of your revenue teams,” said Primary Intelligence CEO Ken Allred.  “But the biggest breakthrough is having the ongoing rep-by-rep, deal-by-deal intelligence to drive situational training and enablement.  This eliminates the bias of reps providing their own feedback or requiring managers to review hundreds of hours of call recordings.”

Gong and Crayon Partnerships

Primary Intelligence recently partnered with conversational sales platform Gong to integrate in-cycle deal intelligence.  Primary Intelligence delivers a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard links and links to call transcripts that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements.  The Gong integration ensures that conversational intelligence from deals is available alongside post-deal analysis, providing a clearer view of why deals are won or lost, comparative strengths and weaknesses versus competitors, and improved messaging.

“Our approach in the last five years or so has been [asking] ‘How can we take the operational lift and automate as much as possible?” explained Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway to GZ Consulting.  “Now it’s a process that begins in Salesforce or whatever CRM you’re using.”

The Performance Gaps view displays competitive strengths and weaknesses as seen by buyers and displayed by priority.

Primary Intelligence also recently partnered with Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon, marrying competitive and win/loss intelligence in a common platform.  The joint solution “helps teams better understand their competitors.”

“In today’s competitive climate, competitive intelligence and win-loss analysis are essential for B2B companies looking to increase win rates,” stated the firms.  “While win-loss interviews and surveys with buyers are filled with critical competitive insights, getting these insights updated into competitive intelligence deliverables, such as battlecards, has traditionally been a slow, manual process — until now.”

Crayon and Primary Intelligence highlight competitor offerings’ relative strengths and weaknesses, providing improved positioning for sales and marketing teams.  A separate pricing module helps debunk sales rep claims that deals are regularly lost on price, providing a more accurate view of deal loss.  By helping differentiate offerings and identify why deals are won or lost, vendor offerings become less price sensitive. 

Primary Intelligence also provides views at the rep level, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of reps and where they would benefit from coaching.

“The future of sales enablement is providing custom, rep-specific coaching in the flow of work.  Ideally, those recommendations are based on actual performance feedback from real customers,” said Erik Peterson, Chief Executive Officer of Corporate Visions.  “The acquisition of Primary Intelligence will enable us to make invisible problems visible and then provide personalized coaching to individual reps and revenue teams based on how buyers and customers respond.”

“What better evidence that your strategies and spend are actually working as intended than actual customer feedback connected to wins, losses, and no decisions, as well as renewals and expansion cycles?” Peterson added.

B2B DecisionLabs

The acquisition provides Corporate Visions with 100,000 buying decisions spanning twenty years, which will be incorporated into its B2B DecisionLabsresearch and advisory business.  Corporate Visions, which positions itself as a Decision Science company, calls Primary Intelligence its “fourth lab.”  B2B DecisionLabs incorporates behavioral research, brain studies, and field trials, alongside customer feedback.

TruVoice customer feedback is Corporate Vision’s latest B2B DecisionLabs laboratory.

“We will engage our B2B DecisionLabs research director, Dr. Leff Bonney, co-founder of the Florida State University Sales Institute, to effectively leverage the incoming data points into insights using all applicable and appropriate academic research-based approaches, tools, and techniques,” explained Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions and Chief Visionary at B2B DecisionLabs, to GZ Consulting.

“Our expectation is that this steady flow of buyer-driven deal insights will completely distinguish B2B DecisionLabs among other research and advisory firms who rely on their subscriber clients to provide data snapshots and self-reported survey responses to formulate their industry insights,” continued Riesterer.  “This will be in addition to our completely unique brain study lab and ongoing field trials with actual clients.”

The Primary Intelligence dataset provides a deep set of historical and cross-industry data that captures deals both in progress and after closing.  This research complements its other three research laboratories.

“This will give our advisory clients even more confidence in the B2B DecisionLabs recommendations compared to opinion surveys and moment-in-time snapshots of data,” said Riesterer.  “It will also mean we can provide more reliable tools than you otherwise get from peer communities that only curate unexamined personal experiences and unsubstantiated claims of expertise.”

“This ongoing flow of customer-sourced data will also be used to continually expand and enhance our revenue growth services to ensure Corporate Visions’ clients always have access to the industry’s best and most updated intellectual property,” Riesterer added.

Corporate Visions offers science-backed revenue growth services for sales, marketing, and customer success.  Along with hosting conferences and training, Corporate Visions helps firms “articulate value and promote growth” in three ways:

  1. Make Value Situational by distinguishing your commercial programs between customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
  2. Make Value Specific by creating and delivering customer conversations that communicate concrete value, change behavior, and motivate buying decisions.
  3. Make Value Systematic by equipping your commercial engine to deliver consistent and persistent touches across the entire Customer Deciding Journey.

By April, Corporate Visions plans to combine automated win-loss-no decision customer feedback with automated skills coaching and customer messaging content from Corporate Visions.  Riesterer intends to launch the “first fully automated, situational enablement solution that identifies rep-by-rep weaknesses based on actual customer feedback, to direct specific, custom coaching videos to help address these challenges – in the rep’s flow of work.”

This vision shifts sales rep training from “just-in-case” event-based generic classroom training to “just-in-time” situational coaching and enablement that is customized to each rep and deal.  This training will be “always on, deficit-based situational coaching and enablement” that does not require managers to “listen to a bunch of calls or read a lot of feedback and then formulate a custom coaching plan.”

Data Anonymization

Corporate Visions has already considered which data can be employed for aggregate analytics.  Research protocols are subject to Institutional Review Board (IRB) review and approval.  Data will only be available for aggregate analysis with the consent of customers.  Unique identifiers are stripped from the data and replaced with arbitrary data identifiers, and no individual customer’s data will be published. 

B2B DecisionLabs has “partnered with Florida State University as the primary means of data analysis and have taken the steps as outlined in GDPR protocols regarding ‘Information Processors’ to ensure that data is passed to FSU without any unique respondent identifiers,” explained Bonney.  “To decrease any risk of inadvertent identification of a customer in the data, Primary Intelligence will assign the ‘ID number’ to customer data and then pass [it] to the B2B DecisionLabs and FSU research team, who will have no input or insight into how data ID numbers are assigned.  Additionally, Primary Intelligence will remove any data fields that may be used to ascertain the identity of any one customer.”

The FSU IRB will review Primary Intelligence’s anonymization protocols.

Real-time Coaching

Managerial deal coaching “just doesn’t happen and won’t happen at scale,” remarked Riesterer.  Furthermore, “because the system continues to run and generate customer deal feedback, you will be able to monitor, measure, and modify enablement interventions on the fly to see the impact and make continuous appropriate adjustments.”

Thus, the merged company will combine neural research concerning purchasing behavior and buyer studies, with in-the-moment situational coaching tailored to each rep and deal.

Primary Intelligence’s TruVoice platform

Attention Closes on $3.1M Round

Attention, an AI-powered sales assistant, exited stealth mode and closed a $3.1 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures.  Other participants include Frst, Liquid2 Ventures, Maschmeyer Group Ventures, Ride Ventures, and the founders of Ramp, Level AI, Truework, CBInsights, and Zoi.  The new funds will be deployed towards advanced AI capabilities and market growth for the New York City-based startup.

Attention helps sales teams “overcome inefficiencies at every stage of the sales cycle,” including CRM hygiene, sales acceleration, and revenue growth.  Attention accelerates sales rep ramp-up, drafts follow-up emails based on customer statements, improves forecasting, and automatically enriches Salesforce and HubSpot with post-call deal intelligence. 

Attention maps discussions to custom CRM fields specific to standard sales methodologies such as MEDDIC and BANT.

Attention Battlecards

Attention also provides real-time suggestions and question responses, “resulting in all sales representatives having higher rates of success and closed business.”  Recommendations include product responses to technical questions and objections handling.  The Attention AI determines common unsupported questions and builds battlecards based on sales responses.  Battlecards can also be developed or edited by the sales enablement team.

One novel feature is the ability to query the meeting transcript with a question, allowing reps to summarize or revisit the discussion around key topics quickly.

Sales reps can share call snippets with managers or SMEs via Slack, allowing them to forward open questions in the voice of the customer.

“Attention is a game-changer.  We’ve rarely seen any product like this in terms of efficiency gains and ramp-up acceleration.  We’re also blown away by how fast they’ve been releasing new capabilities.” said Peter Santis, head of sales at RocketChat.  Santis both licensed the service for RocketChat and participated in the seed round.

Founders Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg founded competing AI software startups before joining forces in September 2021 to build Attention.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Anis and Matthias as they leverage the latest developments in AI generation and natural language understanding to superpower sales organizations,” remarked Hadley Harris from Eniac Ventures.  “We love working with repeat founders and couldn’t be happier with the strong pull they’re already getting from the market.”

Attention supports communications platforms, including Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Meets, Zoom, and Zapier.

Attention’s initial customers are in the technology sales space, most commonly with 50 to 100 licensed sales reps.

Clari Acquires and Integrates Wingman into its Revenue Intelligence Platform

In June, Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari acquired Conversational Intelligence vendor Wingman, bringing together two complementary SalesTech vendors.  Wingman provided Clari users with additional account intelligence derived from calls, meetings, and emails.  The goal was to provide “visibility plus action all the way from the boardroom to the bullpen,” said Wingman CEO Shruti Kapoor.

Clari recently announced that Wingman is fully integrated into its service.

“The acquisition of Wingman, a leader in conversation intelligence, gives Clari’s category-leading Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversations, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes,” announced Clari.  “Wingman goes beyond the limits of similar conversation intelligence tools by helping revenue-critical teams act in the moment when it matters.”

“A major part of our strategic vision is conversation intelligence, which is why we’re thrilled to announce that Clari has acquired Wingman, a leader in CI.  This gives Clari’s Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversation data, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes.  The full value of conversation intelligence has never been fully realized, until now.  Clari helps your team move beyond siloed, departmental systems and processes that cause endless breakdowns across your revenue process and brings all revenue-critical employees into a unified platform to run revenue.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

“As we think about scaling our impact, it’s clear to us that we want to free up these insights for everyone who’s revenue-critical, from the bullpen to the boardroom,” blogged Kapoor.  “We want to give you the ability to switch between micro (every customer interaction) and macro (the entire revenue pipeline) as easily as toggling channels on television.”

Wingman battle cards are displayed in real-time.

Wingman records, transcribes, and tags calls, storing them in a searchable library by keyword, tag (e.g., Price, Customer Pain, Blockers), or competitor mentions.  Topics may be customized to capture competitors, product names, technologies, etc.  Reps can also set live bookmarks across all supported video platforms.

Wingman also offers real-time battle cards, a set of short suggestions displayed in context during a call.  New sales reps will be confident that they are providing accurate information consistent with company positioning.  Other real-time coaching tools include long monologue alerts, word rate notices, and time-based cue cards.

Wingman game tapes provide a reference library of training snippets.

Call summaries include questions, next steps, pain points, blockers, and topics of interest.  Post-call analytics include call duration, longest monologue, engaging questions that elicited a response from the prospect, and interactivity.

To assist with coaching, Wingman automatically identifies speakers and creates speech tracks, letting managers or reps focus on specific individuals.  It also offers a “game tapes” library for new hire training.  Game tapes provide a set of best-of-breed video samples for pricing, blockers, features, etc.

Wingman also offers Deal Central deal intelligence.  Deal Central identifies deal health risks such as the lack of a decision-maker or pricing not being discussed.  It is this engagement intelligence that will complement Clari’s revenue intelligence capabilities.

“We were looking at all of the signals that are important for…our customers to help them make better decisions in their revenue execution…We have had great success bringing in data from CRM systems, email systems, meeting information for calendars,” stated CTO Venkat Rangan.  “One thing that we also recognized was bringing in conversational data – conversational intelligence analysis of call recordings – whether it’s voice calls or Zoom meeting calls…was going to fundamentally change the quality of the signals we bring in.”

Sales reps can also share meetings or snippets with colleagues, providing access to the customer’s voice.  Reps can also share call URLs with prospects and know when prospects view them.

Wingman is integrated with

  • CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive
  • SEP: Outreach, Salesloft
  • Conferencing: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet
  • Dialer: RingCentral, Dialpad, Fresh Caller, Aircall, FrontSpin
  • Other: Slack, Zapier
Wingman Pricing

Wingman’s monthly pricing starts at $60 per rep.  It has “no hidden setup costs, no minimum seat requirement, and no charges for sales managers & observers.”

In the summer of 2021, Wingman was named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in the Conversational Intelligence category.

When acquired in June, Bengaluru-based Wingman had 57 employees (per LinkedIn) and had doubled its ARR over the previous six months.  It was founded in 2018 and claims to have over 200 customers.

“Clari’s acquisition of Wingman will help customers turn recorded conversations into a strategic asset for spotting revenue leak and driving revenue precision.  At a time when leaders are looking to unify their teams and their tech stacks, adding Wingman solidifies Clari’s position as the only enterprise platform for running the end-to-end revenue process,” boasted Byrne.  “Wingman’s conversation intelligence technology leads the market in real-time guidance and coaching capabilities, providing actionable insights when sellers need them most to help close deals faster.  Revenue leadership can scale teams, methodologies, and go-to-market strategies with confidence knowing that all team members will have the latest messaging and collateral at their fingertips, in every conversation.”

Rangan said that Wingman was a strong fit to Clari across multiple dimensions: technologies, market approach, and culture.

Kapoor noted that the combination allows for conversational analysis at all levels.  Users can Zoom into a single conversation and deal health, while managers and executives can zoom out to pipeline analytics, revenue forecasting, and deals at risk. 

Bringing the organizations together was the “best and fastest way to get there together,” argued Kapoor.

Initially, Rangan would like to focus Wingman enhancements on the emerging and commercial segments due to a strong alignment between Wingman and customer needs.  The Wingman roadmap also lays out steps to make Wingman mid-market and enterprise ready.  Longer-term, conversational intelligence signals will be fed from Wingman into Clari and “serve all of the revenue workflows” across the boardroom, senior management, front-line management, and sales reps.  Conversational intelligence will feed the forecasting and pipeline inspection processes.

Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst at Forrester, was bullish on the transaction, noting that Clari has “stayed away from deeper revenue intelligence capabilities that focus on interaction execution, preferring to aggregate that information from other tools and present it in Clari.”  However, he sees four reasons that the acquisition makes sense:

  1. Adding CI eliminates a key dependency – While Clari had access to 28% of interactions via email and calendaring, it relied on third parties to capture 45% of interactions via phone and web conferencing.
  2. It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
  3. Valuations have come back to Earth – Six months ago, this deal may not have made financial sense, but “with funding drying up, this is the perfect time for late-stage market leaders with large war chests to acquire technology companies at a reasonable price.”
  4. This new capability aligns with Clari’s stated strategy – Deal health analytics derived from unstructured conversations will augment Clari’s vision of “predictable revenue growth.”  It will also capture and analyze internal deal review calls and potentially update deal progress and commit status automatically.  While deal status CRM updates are not a current capability, Marrs has suggested a logical future capability.

Conversation Intelligence is one of several product categories that are being merged into SalesTech platform solutions.  Converging technologies include Meeting Management, Sales Engagement, Conversational Intelligence, Revenue Intelligence, and Digital Salesrooms.  Clari now offers three of these (it also supports digital sales rooms via its 2021 DealPoint acquisition).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Gong Integrates with Crayon

One of the unsung benefits of conversational intelligence is market and competitive monitoring for product and strategy teams.  Vendors such as Gong and Chorus can tag competitors and product requests.  Still, this intelligence needs to be regularly and directly reviewed, making it more of a hit-or-miss proposition.  Furthermore, this intelligence is rarely tied to competitive battlecards for sales reps.

Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon is looking to address these issues.  It now delivers a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard links and links to call transcripts that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements. The mentions are collected from Gong.

“Product marketers and competitive intelligence professionals dedicate a tremendous amount of time ensuring sales reps are equipped with the most up-to-date competitive and market intelligence,” stated Crayon CPO Erica Jenkins.  “However, despite these efforts, there’s still friction around the adoption and use of these enablement materials.  The integration between Crayon and Gong gets competitive intel into an account executive’s hands quickly and easily, drastically improving competitive positioning for reps to level up their game.”

Crayon listed two other Gong-related initiatives on its roadmap to assist CI and strategy professionals:

  • Field intelligence: Your prospects and customers are sharing intel with your colleagues every single day.  Remove the middleman by automatically pulling these insights out of Gong transcripts and pushing them into your Crayon portal.
  • Win-loss analysis: When an account is won or lost, the notes you find in your CRM will only tell one side of the story.  Find out what really happened by pulling Gong snippets into Crayon, where they’ll be matched with the notes that our system pulls in from Salesforce.

These future releases will benefit competitive intelligence and strategy professionals who struggle to gather real-time market intelligence, particularly from remote individuals.  For example, while sales reps are often happy to discuss competitive scenarios, they rarely take the time to record competitive details in the CRM.  Conversational intelligence platforms are an excellent source of this intelligence, which can be automatically fed into competitive platforms such as Crayon, helping to close the loop.

When I was a CI professional at a SalesTech company, gathering competitive intelligence generally involved interviewing customers, prospects, and inside sales reps and collecting and synthesizing this information.  This approach was haphazard and often anecdotal.  Although Competitor fields were added to the CRM, they were rarely populated, and virtually all losses were attributed to pricing. 

A structured set of competitive signals gathered from customer conversations would have been significantly more accurate, complete, and timely.  Furthermore, these signals and comments would have omitted sales rep biases concerning lost deals and enabled competitive coaching on high-value deals.

Crayon supports a broad set of Sales Enablement Platforms, including Seismic, Highspot, and Showpad. The Gong-Crayon integration is immediately available to joint customers.

SalesHood Coaching Command Center

SalesHood Launches Coaching Command Center for Front-Line Managers to Scale Virtual Sales Coaching

Sales Enablement vendor SalesHood released Coaching Command Center, a set of templates, reports, and prompts to assist front-line managers in elevating the performance and win rates of their teams.  

“We’re excited to release more innovation for virtual sales coaching,” said SalesHood CEO Elay Cohen.  “We’re committed to helping front-line managers be better at developing their remote teams and boosting their win rates.”

In a call with GZ Consulting, Cohen emphasized that SalesHood focuses on productivity and outcomes for both sales reps and front-line managers, looking to raise the bar for all managers.  The new Command Center is a coaching dashboard that analyzes performance and what sales reps are doing.  It fosters managerial actions through celebrations, risk identification, and recommending Next Best Actions.  A meetings-in-a-box feature supports coaching huddles and hands-on training, with recorded calls as input, and coaching to-dos.

According to Cohen, “curated coaching can be prescriptive” and should be performance and data-driven.  It should also be scalable and repeatable, making it easy to schedule classes, coaching, and call reviews.  Templates facilitate discussion and coaching.  Open questions and training sessions are noted, and sales reps are notified if task assignments have not been addressed before the next one-on-one.

Along with templates, SalesHood provides a library of sales training tools, including battle cards, product playbooks, and win stories.  Video recording guidance helps non-training professionals (e.g., product managers, competitive analysts, sales operations) chunk content into modules and cover key topics.

New Command Center tools include programs and coaching activities, team leaderboards, curated team videos, prioritized coaching activities, and coaching templates.

The graphical program tracker displays a data-driven timeline with drill-down tasks, helping front-line managers view programs and coaching activities.  The program tracker assists with one-on-one coaching through automated activities, notifications, tips, and scorecards.  A notification flag appears in the right corner of the top banner, letting managers immediately access pending coaching activities.  For example, if there is a recorded pitch for review, the manager can review the video and offer feedback.

Team Leaderboards summarize team performance across engagement, completion, and performance metrics.

Team videos are submitted and reviewed by managers for comments and celebration.  Videos include pitches, demonstrations, presentation dry-runs, deal wins, and stories.

Prioritized coaching activities are delivered to front-line managers on desktop and mobile devices (iOS and Android native apps) with automated coaching activities for pitch practice, role-playing, quizzing, assessments, and story submissions by their team.

SalesHood is packaged with a set of customizable templates for deal reviews, one-on-ones, and even quarterly business reviews.  Templates are customizable to reflect the industry, markets, and sales strategies of firms.

“Right out of the box, SalesHood provides solutions for more structured, more efficient, and more lucrative sales team management,” claims the firm.

“Sales coaching creates space for collaborative skill and deal development conversations.  Effective sales coaches give sales professionals the responsibility of ownership and accountability for their deal strategies from planning to preparation to close…

No longer will you be in the dark on how your reps are pitching to customers or handling common objections. You’ll be in the know as to how and if they are onboarding effectively.  Are they retaining product knowledge?  Do they understand the crucial competitive plays?  Is their messaging creating interest?  Is it aligned with the corporate message?”

“SalesHood Sales Coaching Demonstration” video

Aragon Research predicted that by the end of 2021, 55% of enterprises will have deployed digital sales coaching and learning.

“High-performing sales organizations are now making sales coaching and learning a daily habit,” says CEO of Aragon Research, Jim Lundy. “Top salespeople are constantly practicing, and the best managers conduct regular coaching.”  Despite the known correlation between coaching and performance, managers and their teams have been unable to embed this practice into their daily workflows.

Aragon Research placed SalesHood in its Leader quadrant for Sales Coaching and Learning (July 2020), scoring the highest on strategy, but below the other leaders on performance.  Aragon listed a broad set of SalesHood strengths, including sales coaching and learning, sales content management, and front-line manager enablement.  However, the firm noted that SalesHood lacks market awareness.