Sales Engagement Platform Groove closed on a $45 million Series B led by Viking Global Investors. Previous investors Capital One Ventures, Level Equity, Quest Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital also participated. The funds will be deployed for international expansion and continued growth in the enterprise segment.
The round brings total funding to $61 million. Groove did not disclose its market valuation following Round B.
“We’re experiencing explosive growth in the enterprise segment of the market,” Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant told GZ Consulting. “This latest round of funding will enable us to invest more heavily in R&D while expanding our operations in EMEA and doubling down on the sales and marketing engine that’s fueling this growth.”
Enterprise ARR is up 114% over the past years. New enterprise clients include Activision, iHeartMedia, LexisNexis, New Relic, TIBCO, Veeva, and Wintrust.
Although Salesforce’s first cloud was the Sales Cloud, digital selling remains an issue for many Salesforce customers. An August 2021 Forrester report on the “State of CRM” found that 57% of respondents struggled to offer solid customer experiences due to poor integration and accessibility.
Groove, a native Salesforce Sales Engagement application, “solves this accessibility problem by meeting sellers where they already work, increasing rep productivity while ensuring over 90% Salesforce adoption,” wrote Groove.
“This notion of the sales engagement platform as a cockpit for sellers is likely to continue to drive further integrations between other sales tech categories and these platforms as the advantages of bringing everything to the seller where they sell (the original vision for CRM technology) become more widely recognized,” said Anthony McPartlin, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research in a recent blog post.
“Our enterprise customers want to enable the modern seller while ensuring the highest levels of enterprise security and compliance. We’re capturing a significant amount of enterprise market share from our competition because our platform was built for the needs of large, complex organizations that rely on Salesforce as their system of record. We bring automation to the seller instead of requiring that they work out of a separate system. This flexibility ensures extremely high user adoption rates, even with technology averse sellers in non-tech industries.”
Groove CEO Chris Rothstein
Groove also announced a pair of product enhancements that meet “the unique needs of complex organizations.” The first new feature is automatic logging to custom objects. The second new capability, OmniActions, “enables reps to complete any sales action without leaving their workflows.”
“By seamlessly integrating valuable CRM data into specialized workflows for different roles, teams, and industries, Groove drives CRM adoption and enables revenue teams to get a more complete picture of all sales activities. The addition of automatic logging to custom objects and OmniActions provides customers even more flexibility for executing, capturing, and properly associating activities with both standard and custom Salesforce objects. With these new features, Groove strengthens its position as the only sales engagement platform that can easily fit into an organization’s complex and dynamic sales workflows.”
“One of the great things about Groove is its ability to flex to any organization’s sales process, regardless of how much they have customized Salesforce. Today, we’ve made it even easier for reps to complete, assign, and track their activities without having to leave their workflows. That means more time for reps to sell, more complete data for managers to manage their teams, and more flexibility for admins to maintain established and successful processes.”
Groove VP of Product Sonia Sarao
Groove’s Advanced Activity Capture now automatically logs activity to custom objects, “minimizing the manual work required by sellers while ensuring complete visibility into account health and opportunities.”
Activity Capture may be configured by profile, allowing for customization at the functional or team level.
OmniActions lets reps manage or execute any activity outside of their regular Flows with automated real-time activity logging. OmniActions is fully integrated with the Groove Omnibar, supporting actions in Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, or the Groove app.
“This combination gives sellers a 360-degree view of their prospects’ and customers’ lifecycle from details and activity to actions – all in their workflow,” wrote the firm. “OmniActions enables revenue organizations to associate all activities with open opportunities, whether they are part of a single action or multi-step Flow. By accurately associating all types of activities, revenue teams can take advantage of more accurate reporting and insights into the sales process.”
Groove continues its rapid growth, making the Inc. 5000 for the past three years. It has over 70,000 users.