Last Friday, I began my coverage of Terminus’ acquisition of Ramble. The deal adds in-house ABM chat capabilities to Terminus’ ABM platform. It is a logical platform extension as Ramble’s ABM Chat Anywhere capabilities support both inbound web chat and chat links for social, email, digital advertising, etc. Ramble has also launched ABM chat capabilities within SalesLoft and Salesforce.

“By now, no one needs convincing that chat is more powerful than forms,” said Terminus Chief Product Officer Bryan Brown.  “Data shows websites with sales chat enjoy an 82% increase in conversations over those without it and a 256% increase in outbound email response rate.  There are a lot of terrific chat solutions offered by companies and today, officially, Terminus is one of them.”

“We live in an on-demand society where instant conversation is a new standard for the B2B sales process,” said Ramble CEO Justin McDonald.  “Conversational Marketing and ABM-chat are at the core of what we do, but our vision has taken it further.  We instantly connect buyers with the right sales rep, from the right territory, and the right product line from any online touchpoint.”

Darryl Praill, CMO of Sales Engagement Platform VanillaSoft, is excited about the announcement and opportunity to integrate chat into his campaigns:

“All of these platforms [Terminus, Sigstr, and Ramble] are about three things specifically:

  – Targeting your audience
  – Knowing your target contact and accounts digital ID so that you can recognize them across multiple channels
  – Engaging with them in a live conversation so that you can qualify them

Yes.  You can absolutely do this today by cobbling together different vendors, but you’re limited by their APIs and their roadmap.  By having a single vision and a master platform under the guidance of one development team, ABM is maturing into a beast and Terminus has clearly taken the lead on this, moving much faster and more aggressively and more confidently than the other players in the space.”

Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft CMO

The full Ramble team is joining Terminus with McDonald being named General Manager of Chat.  Both Ramble and Terminus are headquartered in Atlanta.

Terminus has assembled an impressive executive team with deep executive experience in the MarTech space.  CEO and Chairman Tim Kopp was the CMO at ExactTarget which was acquired by Salesforce.  He also is a General Partner and Managing Director at Hyde Park Venture Partners and serves on G2.com’s Board.  Chief Product Officer Bryan Brown was the VP of Product Strategy at SilverPop and the Product Strategy Executive for Commerce Marketing and Analytics at IBM.  Chief Customer Officer Bryan Wade was CEO at Sigstr and SVP and Chief Product Officer for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  CMO Derek Slayton held the GM & Global Leader position in Dun & Bradstreet’s Sales & Marketing division, joining them from NetProspex where he was the CMO.  Chief Evangelist Sangram Vajre co-founded Terminus and heads up the FlipMyFunnel Movement.  He also served as the Head of Marketing at Pardot.

Many of these execs held leadership positions at marketing automation and omni-channel marketing platforms (e.g. ExactTarget, SilverPop, and Pardot).  They well understand the strengths and weaknesses of MAPs.  For example, MAPs are lead-based, not account-centric like Terminus and Ramble.  As ABM continues to ascend and a greater focus is placed on orchestrated communications and attribution across the account, platforms such as Terminus, Demandbase, 6Sense, and Engagio are better situated to meet the requirements of B2B CMOs.