Tag: L2A Matching

Chili Piper Distro for Salesforce

Calendaring vendor Chili Piper released its Distro app for Salesforce, providing revenue teams with automated lead routing and assignment.  Automated lead assignment improves speed to lead and bypasses spreadsheets, APEX code, and manual routing.  Marketing Qualified Leads can be distributed to sales reps when leads hit score thresholds or following events such as webinar attendance or downloading gated content.

Lead assignment details are synced with Salesforce, and users are notified via Slack or email.  In addition, a broad set of Salesforce record types are supported, including leads, contacts, accounts, cases, and opportunities.

Features include lead-to-account mapping, rule and trigger-based assignments, round-robin distribution, meeting reminders, and automated rescheduling.  The Distro Log provides a detailed breakdown of triggers, actions, and routes.

“Now more than ever, it’s crucial that high-growth companies optimize for efficiency in their marketing and sales processes without sacrificing on customer experience,” said Co-CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe.  “With Distro, revenue teams can effectively cover all of their routing and assignment needs while accelerating speed to lead.”

Chili Piper claims that it doubles top-of-the-funnel conversion rates.

A March 2011 article in The Harvard Business Review (“The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”) argued that speed to lead is critical for inbound leads.  Last year, XANT replicated the study las year and found that 57.1% of first call attempts took place after a week or more, and only 0.1% of inbound leads were responded to within five minutes.  However, firms that responded within those first five minutes had an 8X conversion rate versus later returned calls. 

A Lead Connect study found that 78% of companies that respond first to a demo request end up winning the deal.  Thus, firms that act immediately by returning a call or scheduling a meeting have a clear market advantage over firms with scheduling/call-back friction.

Chili Piper conducted a study earlier this year and found that 28.1% of demo requests submitted via chatbots or webforms to tech firms received no response after a week, and only 45% of requests were responded to within one hour.

Chili Piper studied response rates across technology firms.  Demo requests were placed via chatbots and web forms.

“In the past, marketers at leading organizations such as HubSpot and Vendasta have preached five minutes to two hours as the sweet spot for follow-up.  We, however, disagree,” blogged Chili Piper Content Marketing Manager Kelli Diffenderfer.  “In this day and age, responses should be instant.  And there’s absolutely no reason they can’t be.  If you’re not responding immediately, you’re losing out on a significant amount of revenue.”

Automated lead distribution and routing allows prospects to go from buyer research to an inbound inquiry to a scheduled meeting with a few clicks on a landing page or the corporate website, bypassing the delays inherent to traditional lead routing.

Yet, eleven years after the HBR first published its research, inbound response rates remain slow, with 26.8% of tech firms taking one to twenty-four hours to respond and 28.1% failing to respond.

“Distro for Salesforce is a welcome addition to AppExchange, as they power digital transformation for customers by simplifying lead management, improving conversion rates, and accelerating speed to lead,” said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to connect customers with the right apps and experts for their business needs.”

Distro is priced at $20 per user per month.  Chili Piper does not offer any discounts.

Distro supports automated lead routing and distribution based on triggered events including Lead Score thresholds.

Additional information about Chili Piper is available on the GZ Consulting blog and the Chili Piper website.

Openprise $16M Series A

RevOps Automation Platform Openprise closed on an oversubscribed Series A last month.  The $16 million round was led by SIG Asia Investment, an affiliate of the Susquehanna International Group, with new investments from Banyan Pacific and Citta Capital.  Existing investors Alumni Venture Group and AI List also participated.

Funding will accelerate development on the Openprise RevOps Automation Platform and scale up the sales and marketing teams.

Openprise supports data management, enrichment, and hygiene across sales, marketing, customer success, BI, and analytics platforms.  Features include data deduplication, data onboarding, lead-to-account matching, lead routing, attribution, and account scoring.

Openprise RevOps automation capabilities.

Openprise cited a recent Gartner forecast that 75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025.  “A move from sales enablement to revenue enablement is needed in today’s rapidly shifting buying and selling dynamic to support this RevOps imperative.”

“Openprise is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the momentum in companies moving to a RevOps model,” stated Anne Marie McCallion, its PR rep.

“When companies move to a RevOps model in order to better align marketing and sales, they soon identify huge gaps in their joint processes and data that aren’t addressed by traditional marketing and sales automation solutions like Marketo, Salesforce, and Salesloft,” said Openprise CEO Ed King.  “Openprise is fueling the RevOps revolution by providing a single, no-code platform that can automate hundreds of RevOps processes and deliver go-to-market-ready data for the entire RevTech stack.”

Openprise customers include UI Path, Vimeo, Zendesk, Okta, Nutanix, Freshworks, Splunk, and Zscaler.

Openprise will face stiffer competition from RingLead, which was acquired by ZoomInfo in September.

Chili Distro

Last week I wrote about Chili Events, the new event calendaring service from Chili Piper. Today, I am profiling their new Distro service which acts as a “one-stop-shop for lead qualification, routing, distribution, and booking.”  Distro routes and assigns multiple Salesforce objects in real-time, including leads, contacts, opportunities, cases, and accounts.

Distro expedites the inbound lead process by immediately routing prospects and customers to the correct sales rep. In addition, Distro supports lead-to-account matching so that inbound prospects are assigned to the proper account owner when applicable.

“Whether a lead comes through your organization’s web form or from an offline source, routing can get quite tedious,” explained Chili Piper in the product announcement.  “With the launch of Distro, teams can create intelligent rules to decide which lead gets routed to which rep (or group of reps) on the team. With this intuitive technology, hand-raisers will have the ability to book a meeting instantly, while buyers who need more nurturing are automatically assigned to the appropriate sales rep for follow-up.”

Chili Piper Distro qualifies, routes, and schedules meetings.

If rules do not assign a lead, round-robin assignments ensure that reps receive an equal number of leads.

Chili Piper has been busy with new product releases.  A few weeks ago, Chili Piper announced Chili Events, an Event Meetings Management solution for in-person conferences and trade shows.  The product lets Chili gather engagement data from events and manage pre-conference meetings on the floor as well as post-event meetings with reps. 

The firm also announced a HubSpot integration earlier this month.

“Today, capturing existing demand for a product or service, in real-time, is vital; yet, ensuring each lead is routed and assigned correctly is way harder than it needs to be. With Distro, we can help B2B sales and marketing teams automate the first step in a meaningful engagement and prevent leads from falling out of the marketing funnel. This is a crucial step for increasing inbound conversion rates and boosting revenue generation.”

Chili Piper CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe

Inbound and event lead management address the issue of speed-to-lead with which many B2B organizations struggle.  The average time for lead follow-up is 42 hours.  Automating the process greatly increases the likelihood of scheduling a meeting and converting leads to subsequent stages.

“Chili Piper allows you to connect inbound leads with a rep at the moment they’re interested,” blogged Senior Marketing Manager Maggie Aland.  “This increases your inbound conversion rates and prevents leads from falling out of the marketing funnel.”

Chili Distro is only available for Salesforce.

LeanData Engagement

Operations vendor LeanData released LeanData Engagement, an analytics solution that works alongside its lead-to-account matching and automation tools.  LeanData Engagement is available on the Salesforce AppExchange and associates sales and marketing engagement activity with relevant accounts.  Engagement is tracked along the full account journey and identifies which individuals are engaged in each account along with the sales and marketing activities that drove engagement.

Lead engagement visualization tools identify which accounts have open opportunities and with which teams they are engaged.  Sales Follow-Up Lists help reps understand which buying committee members are actively engaged.

A campaign engagement dashboard within the Salesforce Campaign object displays engagement activity, allowing marketers to evaluate campaign performance and decide if any adjustments are required.

LeanData Engagement “allows marketers to forge greater alignment with their sales organizations to improve campaign-conversion rates, accelerate pipeline growth, and maximize return from sales and marketing investments,” said the firm.

“Especially during times of economic uncertainly, it’s critically important to understand how your customers and prospects are engaging with your company,” said LeanData SVP of Product Hendrick Lee.  “With LeanData Engagement, the interactions of every buyer are automatically connected to the right accounts in CRM, thus unlocking truly holistic account-based marketing analytics.  Engagement is an important addition to LeanData’s revenue operations product family which exists to help companies unlock greater revenue growth, increase performance, and improve customer experience across the buyer journey.”

Kerry Washington, the Principal Analyst at SiriusDecisions, observed that one of the best opportunities for ABM improvement is identifying when multiple individuals at an account are demonstrating interest in a product or service.  SiriusDecisions emphasizes the importance of understanding and penetrating buying committees, not merely individual decision-makers.

“Because more than 75 percent of B2B purchases are made by groups of people working together – not individuals – the best indicator of a true buying cycle is the engagement of multiple buying committee members,” said Cunningham.  “In the past, identifying that engagement was difficult.  However, modern solutions have emerged that allow B2B organizations selling to committees to more effectively take action on this vital intelligence and thus gain a strong competitive advantage.”

LeanData Engagement starts at $25,000 per year.

Terminus Full-Funnel Marketing

Terminus announced a set of additional “full-funnel marketing” features to its ABM platform.  New B2B account-based marketing capabilities include dynamic web personalization, lead-to-account matching, account engagement scores, expanded ABM reporting, and streamlined workflows.

Dynamic Web Personalization ensures a “consistent and relevant experience” to website visitors independent of their originating channel.  With web personalization, markers can serve up “visually impactful content [that] appears depending on what segment a visitor is in, allowing every page on your website to dynamically deliver relevant information.”  Marketers do not need to build multiple landing pages.  Terminus supports personalization by industry, revenue range, intent, relationship, engagement, CRM stage, or Target Account List in the Account Hub.

The new Lead-to-Account matching ties leads to the appropriate Salesforce Account record.  The Lead-to-Account capability is powered by the Terminus B2B Account Graph that helps marketing “maintain CRM accuracy, enable custom reports and workflows, and keep sales teams organized and thinking about the entire buying committee.”

Terminus, which already provides relationship scores, added engagement scoring to its analytical tool kit.  As engagement varies by company and market, “users can now configure how valuable various digital touchpoints are to better report on what accounts are engaged in the ABM Scorecard.”   The ABM Scorecard is a marketing dashboard that evaluates marketing’s impact on engagement, pipeline, and revenue.  The ABM Scorecard assesses engagement impact across both time and segment.

“If you are struggling to understand how to measure the ROI of your account-based marketing program, the updated ABM scorecard with Trends is a great way to prove that you are driving desired business outcomes.  You can do this by segmenting by your targeted accounts and layering in Terminus firmographics to quickly see pipeline and revenue by industry, revenue range, employee range, etc. to show your CMO how you are driving results over time.  This enhanced scorecard allows you to quickly see how each one of your ABM programs is getting to engagement, pipeline, and revenue goals.  By trending your key marketing KPIs you can see if you’re accelerating or decelerating toward your goals, so you can easily pivot if necessary.”

Terminus VP of Growth and Product Marketing Janet Polyakov

Terminus completed its Sigstr integration following its late 2019 acquisition of the relationship intelligence firm.  Sigstr analyzes communications patterns in employee emails, helping determine both account and contact relationship strength.

“These Relationship Scores are a unique, first-party data source that informs teams how their relationships with specific accounts and contacts are improving or degrading over time by providing buying intent signals, sales coaching opportunities, and more accurate pipeline forecasting,” said Terminus.  “Additionally, Sigstr’s email marketing capabilities enable users to unify messaging across the web, owned websites, and the inbox.  The new capability provides users the ability to centrally control the email signatures of their employees while promoting dynamic, personalized content to the most engaged audiences in the inbox.”

Other new features include a native integration with Google Analytics and enhanced ad campaign reporting with trended advertising metrics.

“With these new capabilities, we’ve doubled down on our effort to be the most complete account-based platform on the market,” said Bryan Brown, chief product officer at Terminus.  “As marketers’ jobs become more demanding, it’s critical that they are able to execute with agility across multiple points of interaction, be it ads, web, or email, all from a single platform.  Terminus enables users to easily measure business outcomes well beyond clicks and leads that facilitate better collaboration across teams and deliver higher quality engagements.”