Dun & Bradstreet announced its spring releases and enhancements at Forrester’s B2B Data conference in Austin. Dun & Bradstreet launched D&B Connect for Salesforce, its new data management service, and expanded D&B Rev.Up ABX functionality.
“With more accurate, actionable CRM data, businesses can make more confident decisions, identify more cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and target with greater precision,” blogged North American Sales & Marketing GM Stacy Greiner. “That’s the foundation for strong account-based strategies and digitalization. It’s the foundation for a stronger business, period.”
D&B Connect for Salesforce is the next generation of Salesforce hygiene products, superseding D&B Optimizer for Salesforce. Users have broader control over matching logic. They can employ easy matching based on Dun & Bradstreet Confidence Codes or customize the match logic by leveraging Confidence Codes alongside country/region selects and match quality.
The operations manager can set the importance of individual match grades by field (e.g., street number, name, etc.). Admins can also set match inclusion criteria, defining which fields should be excluded from matching (e.g., Non-Headquarter locations, Out-of-Business locations, Non-Marketable locations, or Undeliverable/Unreachable locations).
Connect for Salesforce has dramatically expanded the data sets available for enrichment, providing access to over 1,600 data elements based upon subscribed data blocks. Admins also have control over refresh frequency and rematch rules. Data may be refreshed every 14 days with the option of rematching unmatched records. Transactional matching is also supported, allowing real-time match and append for newly created records.
D&B Connect match logic administration
Other features include data health reports, field-level mapping, out-of-business flags, and duplicate management. In addition, Dun & Bradstreet offers 37 million subsidiary and branch linkages, ensuring proper territory management and lead assignment.
“What is preventing our marketing campaigns and sales plays from firing on all cylinders? asked Dun & Bradstreet Greiner. “Quite simply, bad data that is outdated, incorrect, duplicate, improperly formatted, or just outright missing. Let’s face it — we’re all to blame. We’re just not good about keeping our data up to date and refreshed. We don’t even do a good job entering the right data in the first place. This may be due in part to subjectivity, in part to laziness, and in part because there’s just not enough time in our day to be thorough enough.”
D&B Connect for Salesforce starts at $5,000 per company per year.
Outreach announced the general availability of Outreach Guide, its new revenue intelligence and deal management solution. Guide provides real-time conversation intelligence, best practice action plans, and “deal health at a glance.” Outreach also announced administrative enhancements to its Engage product and a “deep integration” with ABX Platform 6sense.
Outreach Guide, Engage, and Commit act as the “foundation” of Outreach’s sales execution platform, supporting revenue organizations across the full customer sales cycle “from prospecting for new business opportunities to deal management to sales forecasting.”
Outreach’s Customer Lifecycle loop.
Outreach aims to create a “single system of execution” that helps revenue organizations meet their full potential and address issues with prospecting, deal management, and forecasting.
To help address this “sales execution gap,” Machine learning models “learn from the actions taken in our platform and generate data-driven, predictive, real-time insights that recommend actions for users to take to improve their sales execution,” said CEO Manny Medina.
Outreach Guide supports three core capabilities:
Deal Health Scores: The Deal Health Score employs machine learning to predict deal health. It also provides deal insights, recommended actions, and where to focus. In addition, deal Health displays positive and negative indicators (e.g., stuck in current stage, no recent inbound emails, recent executive engagement).
Deal Health signals deals at risk to both the sales rep and sales management, providing an opportunity to address problems and adjust forecasts.
Deal Health scores can be viewed in the aggregate as well, providing a neutral perspective on how each deal is proceeding versus comparable opportunities.
Deal Health scores are currently in beta.
Kaia Real-time assistance and conversation intelligence:Kaia offers real-time call transcription, content cards, and context-based rep enablement during Zoom and Microsoft teams meetings. After meetings, Kaia streamlines meeting summaries with AI-captured action items and follow-ups. As a result, Outreach claims rep productivity increases by nearly 30%, and the likelihood of scheduling a follow-up meeting jumps by 36%.
Kaia is linguistically customized for each client, capturing product names and competitors as keywords. During a call, content cards display real-time sales aides, such as product summaries or technical notes. Content cards provide quick cheat sheets on product value, pricing, or integrations (see the example on the right).
By removing notetaking and displaying content cards, Kaia allows sales reps to be more present during calls and pitch with greater confidence; instead of pausing a meeting to jot down notes, sales reps can quickly add a bookmark or short meeting note.
Automated and collaborative purchasing through Success Plans:Success Plans foster collaboration between buyers and sellers with detailed online purchase action plans that include a timeline, success criteria, resources, and team views. Collaborative action plans align stakeholders, build buyer trust, ensure timely stakeholder engagement, and provide internal stakeholders with prospect engagement and deal progress. Outreach claims that reps who closely monitor Success Plans enjoy a 13% bump in close rates.
“The buying team has all the information related to the deal in a central place, and all teams are aligned to clearly understand each other’s goals, interactions, and requirements essential for driving long-term success, delivering an unparalleled buying experience throughout the entire selling process,” stated Director of Product Marketing Elizabeth Dailing.
Furthermore, Success Plans are available to Customer Success teams when onboarding new customers, helping streamline handoffs.
The Team view helps track who is involved from the buying team and how engaged they are, how recently they were engaged, and what content they viewed.
Outreach Guide is designed to address the “Sales Execution Gap.”
Trigger Enhancements – A streamlined trigger builder improves the creation, management, and discovery of triggers. The refreshed trigger builder is aligned with traditional CRM language and supports multiple values per condition, drag-and-drop action reordering, and simplified condition group creation.
New Outlook-Add In – A native integration lets reps ‘Send’ emails from Outlook and send and sync “relevant emails to Outreach, as well as insert their available times or add a link to their calendar.” Outreach will also flag opted-out communications in Outlook and prevent them from being sent or added to a sequence.
Microsoft Graph Integration
Data Retention in Outreach Voice Recordings – Admins can configure data retention policies such as deleting data as a one-time event or setting up regular data deletions for Outreach Voice Recordings.
Additionally, Outreach announced an Irish Datacenter for Outreach Engage, meeting EU data residency requirements for GDPR compliance. “The EU Datacenter for Outreach Engage allows an organization’s data to be stored in a specific geographic location,” blogged Caroline Shin, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Outreach. “This means customer-owned data associated with those Outreach instances including prospects, accounts, organizations, and workflow data such as sequences and meetings will be stored and contained within the EU infrastructure.”
Seismic rolled out the Seismic Enablement Cloud, an enablement platform for customer-facing teams. The new service ensures that team members have the “right skills, content, tools, and insights to effectively engage customers and drive growth.” Instead of offering a set of point solutions for content, training, and engagement, Seismic claims it is the first unified enablement platform that supports digital interactions across the entire buyer’s journey.
“For more than a decade, Seismic has helped develop and shape the enablement industry in partnership with our 2,200+ customers. Leading organizations view enablement as mission-critical to their growth, and it has become a core part of the enterprise tech stack. Now we are revolutionizing the space by bringing all of the pillars of modern enablement under one, unified cloud,” said Seismic Chief Product Officer Krish Mantripragada. “In this new era of selling, customer-facing teams need more than content management and basic analytics to engage today’s buyers. The Enablement Cloud redefines the boundaries of enablement, delivering the most comprehensive suite of products and solutions to empower the entire go-to-market engine.”
The Seismic Enablement platform supports “end-to-end workflows,” including
Enablement and training strategy and Planning
Sales Content Management from building content through asset sharing, including content recommendations, personalization, and social sharing
New hire onboarding, ongoing training, and AI-assisted coaching and skills development
Buyer experience personalization across all touchpoints and digital channels, including social media, email, and digital salesrooms
Content Automation with dynamic templates and quick assembly, with support for data integrations.
Insights concerning the “behaviors, activities, and content that increase productivity and deliver the best outcomes”
Integration support for over 150 solutions, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google
“Just as sales and marketing clouds have brought together several complementary products and solutions to address the needs of their respective teams, we see a similar need and opportunity for the enablement cloud – a dedicated platform purpose-built to empower enablement and GTM teams to deliver exceptional end-to-end buyer experiences,” blogged Mantripragada. “The Seismic Enablement Cloud redefines enablement by bringing together historically siloed systems for sales content management, learning & coaching, strategy & planning, content automation, buyer engagement, and enablement intelligence into one enterprise-grade platform that supports end-to-end workflows for GTM teams.”
Seismic includes Lessonly (a recent acquisition) pitch training.
Recently founded demo experience software company Saleo received $1.5 million in early-stage investment for its live demo platform. Funding came from Tech Square Ventures, Jon Hallett, Kyle Porter, Rob Forman, Tim Kopp, John Hanger, Bryan Wade, and Eric Spett. The firm is based in Atlanta, as are most of the investors.
Justin McDonald and Daniel Hellerman, experienced RevTech execs who previously worked at Terminus (three of the investors are Terminus executives), founded Saleo. In addition, McDonald launched Ramble Chat which he subsequently sold to Terminus.
“We believe that every software company should have the means to deliver the perfect software demo that ‘wows’ their buyers every time. No more missing data, hours of prep time, or sub-par generic demos,” posted McDonald on LinkedIn.
Saleo enables real-time customization of demo environments and supports collaboration among revenue teams during the demo creation process. As a result, Saleo helps revenue teams “shorten their sales cycle, increase win rates, and close more deals by removing the burden of missing data, outdated demo environments, and time-consuming demo prep.”
Saleo supports a demo library that can be personalized by industry, company, use case, and job function. Successful demos can be shared as a template or cloned and customized. In addition, Saleo provides revenue teams with complete control over the demo environment, including graphs, metrics, tables, text, and images, “enabling you to create the perfect software demo that connects directly to your customer’s pain points and lands exactly the way you want.”
“We’re the only technology that allows software companies to manipulate and customize their live demo environment. Other players breaking in are taking screenshots of existing applications and making changes to them.”
Saleo CEO Justin McDonald
Saleo has a no-code integration that runs with any browser-based SaaS app via a Chrome extension that connects to their SaaS platform. Time-based metrics are always current. Furthermore, Saleo doesn’t operate as a screen capture service but demos the firm’s live SaaS product without requiring any embedded code.
“Saleo represents one of those very rare early-stage companies that is launched with such a compelling combination of team, vision, product, and market potential. Saleo’s customers have been blown away by the impact on sales conversion.” said Jon Hallett of Hallett Capital. “I was stunned when I saw how easy it was to use and the potential sales impact it represents for future customers. Of all the new companies I have seen this year, this one has me the most excited.”
“SaaS companies have always struggled to deliver great software demos – either in the time investment to prepare a sales demonstration, or the myriad of challenges around missing data or how to customize a demo for different buyers,” said Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter. “Saleo has created an ingenious solution to help sales engineers and account executives demo their software apps like never before, and most importantly, increase their win rates. I am excited to be a part of it.”
Saleo currently has four remote employees and is looking at office space. It plans to expand to twelve headcount by the end of the year, with hires in engineering, sales and customer services. It expects to close a seed funding round in the next six months and sign forty customers before the end of the year.
The new MarTech Landscape is available as a searchable database.
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma published the first update to the MarTech Landscape in two years. The latest edition, which covers 9,932 solutions, is up 24% since 2020. While 12% of the 2020 vendors (972) have either been acquired or no longer operate, another 2,904 have been added.
Brinker noted that while acquisitions continue apace, they have not resulted in industry consolidation as large players support partner ecosystems that foster new entrants:
“The irony of platform consolidation in MarTech — and cloud software more generally — is that it drives the development of more specialist and custom apps.
Consolidated platforms reduce the choices of which ones developers should build on to reach the largest possible audience. This is the dynamic with Apple and Android that has resulted in millions of mobile apps. It’s a virtuous cycle, as the more apps built on a platform further increase that platform’s strength — attracting even more developers to build on it.
Consolidated platforms also tend to be quite stable, both technically and as businesses that are likely to be around for years to come. They often win on cost economies of scale and breadth of functionality. This further drives that virtuous cycle of attracting more apps to be built on their foundation.
App platforms also play a special role in facilitating the success of specialist apps by making them more discoverable for customers in their domain through app marketplaces. The more plug-and-play an app can be on their platform, the easier it is to adopt — which further enables more specialist apps to be successful within their ecosystem.”
The MarTech space continues its rapid growth, with nearly 10,000 solutions in 2022.
As the logos have been reduced to favicons, the data is now available on a free, interactive site called martechmap.com. Users can mouse over any favicon to view a mini-profile with links to the company website and CabinetM profiles. Users can search, sort, filter, and create custom PDFs. They can also filter by keyword and vendor’s HQ country.
“The massive scale and rapid rate of change of the MarTech industry and the wealth of solutions within it was no longer well-served by a once-a-year, static graphic,” blogged Brinker. “It’s a point in time, which is interesting to see year-over-year. But we want this community resource to be something that is updated on a more continuous basis. By now producing the graphic algorithmically, it’s easy to release updates in a matter of minutes — versus the dark ages of hand-placing little logos manually on a slide.”
By segment, the management group grew the fastest (67%) and the data segment had the slowest growth (7%):
Advertising & Promotion: 16%
Content & Experience: 34%
Social & Relationships: 17%
Commerce & Sales: 24%
Data: 7%
Management: 67%
“The growth in management tools is likely a result of marketing teams operating their day-to-day work in an ever more digital fashion — including greater support for remote work,” posited Brinker and Riemersma in their “State of MarTech 2022” report.
The MarTech Landscape database is in beta, so expect performance issues. As it is an online database vs. a static list, I would recommend that vendors confirm that their products are properly displayed, including acquisitions, products that have changed names, and recently launched offerings. For example, the ABM category is missing several vendors. Changes can be submitted via the Contribute tab.
Salesloft’s new Forecast module ingests deal data from multiple platforms, allowing sales professionals to review deals and take actions necessary to stay on track.
Salesloft continues to extend its value proposition beyond sales engagement and conversational intelligence into deal forecasting and revenue intelligence. Its new Forecast capability, bundled with the Enterprise edition, is available as part of Salesloft’s Spring ’22 Release. Other spring enhancements include Multi-language Support for Conversations, Out-of-Office Detection, and mobile updates.
Salesloft noted that forecasting remains a “disjointed and manual process” often conducted with spreadsheets. Sales professionals must collect information from disconnected systems and often deliver inaccurate numbers that waste “valuable selling time.” What’s more, manual processes provide few insights for improving sales results and aren’t actionable. Thus, significant resources are expended coming to a forecast number, but by the time the CSO or CRO rolls it up to the CEO, the forecast is a black box number based on quickly aging data with few actionable insights.
The disjointed forecasting process (Source: Salesloft)
“Forecasting is a critical process for every revenue organization,” said Salesloft CPO Ellie Fields. “But when sellers use spreadsheets, there’s a high risk of user error and acting on old data. Spreadsheets aren’t scalable, are incredibly manual, ungoverned, and only serve as a snapshot in time. There’s no context to help sellers look ahead.”
In a presentation to GZ Consulting, SVP of Product Management Frank Dale emphasized that Salesloft is looking to stay in the “revenue lane” focusing on “what happens between the buyer and the seller.” Forecasting falls within the revenue lane as it “leverages the data generated from interactions between buyers and sellers.” Furthermore, forecasting should not be separate from revenue generation. It isn’t simply calling a number but “taking action to make that number.”
The revenue lane “covers all core selling jobs” and tasks, including driving demand, generating pipeline, managing deals, and engaging customers.
“Revenue teams don’t want a forecast. They want a real-time, adaptive week-by-week action plan to beat their number. That’s not what forecasting is today. Forecasting, as it is done today, sucks. For most revenue teams, it is something they have to do, not something they want to do. That’s because the tools they have available make just getting to a forecast number difficult and time-consuming. What’s worse is that they don’t often trust the number they arrive at. That’s a big problem. It’s hard to know where to spend your time when you’re not sure if what you’re looking at is accurate.”
Salesloft SVP of Product Management Frank Dale
The Salesloft Modern Revenue Workspace is built on three pillars: Connecting with buyers, improving interactions with customers and prospects based on the data that is generated from interactions, and aligning the team around best practices. Forecasting falls into the alignment pillar but is designed to support connection and feedback.
“There is a huge gap. The gap is not necessarily about calling the number, but it is more about the action plan on that number,” explained Senior Director of Product Management Anshu Chowdhery to GZ Consulting. Salesloft set two goals for its Forecast launch: A shared workflow for gathering deal intelligence and turning it into a forecast; and the ability to achieve that number.
Salesloft Forecast capabilities include
Forecasts are rolled up across the organization.
Users can drill down to opportunities and track changes in the pipeline. They can also take action from within Forecast.
An AI-driven forecast model employs “sales engagement data and historical performance to dial in on what’s likely to land, and what you can influence.”
Forecasts are based on AI models and engagement data gathered by Salesloft.
“What we’re building is an integrated, whole system,” remarked Dale. “We’re integrating all of the activity capture from Cadence, all of the conversation data and capture from our conversation intelligence product, the CRM data from our deals product, and then the ability to turn around and take action again through our cadence product once you’ve made the call.”
“This forecasting product is built on top of [our] Deals product,” expanded Chowdhery. “Deals bi-directionally syncs with Salesforce. So, everything that lives on Salesforce is in Deals, and that’s the significant advantage of [our] forecasting solution. We are able to sync everything and pull all information, not only from Salesforce but across our platform – every engagement that’s happening on the cadence side or conversation side. The sales leader has the ability to view that timeline and identify…[whether] no conversations happened in the last thirty days; this deal is at risk; what should I do in order to win that deal?”
A Weekly Opportunity Changes view lists all of the changes to amounts, close dates, and stages over the past week and how those changes impact the forecast, providing a dynamic view of weekly activity.
Dale stated that Forecast provides value across the revenue team. Frontline sales management has greater visibility into the pipeline, and Forecast provides sales reps “a true read on what they need to do to land and hit their number.” In addition, both reps and managers benefit from reduced busy work in managing pipeline updates.
Dale contends that daily administrative work for reps is reduced by an hour by streamlining the forecasting and updating process.
While Forecast focuses on new business forecasting, future enhancements will support renewal forecasting and run-rate forecasting (i.e., intra-period deals). Also, Salesloft will continue to build out its analytics and plans to release Vulnerable Opportunities Notifications for flagging at-risk opportunities.
Forecast provides a common workflow that rolls up deal intelligence across the organization. Users can drill down into specific deals and take actions, greatly improving insights and actionability. “This is a seamless workflow for the reps and honestly, across the entire revenue organization to submit their forecasts and submit their number,” said Chowdhery.
Salesloft’s Forecasting workflow.
A modern forecasting system must be part of your sales execution system,” blogged Fields. “The information about your deals in flight – who’s contacting the customer, what meetings were had and what was said, how the customer responds — is the foundational information that your forecast rests on. If you’re using a sales engagement platform, all of that activity is already being tracked automatically, without your sellers needing to spend time logging their activities. Meetings and calls are recorded and searchable so you can review that pivotal moment with the buyer.”
“Forecasting under-delivers when the end result is just a number,” continued Fields. “The end result should be a set of actions you can take to deliver better results. To do that, you need to not only see a number, but you need to see areas of softness and strength, important deal gaps, and opportunities. You need to recognize that the East team will need your support this quarter, but that the West will probably overachieve. You need to know where to spend your team’s time most productively to get over the line.”
Dale emphasized the importance of cross-product workflows aligned with “things people actually want to do.” Unfortunately, vendors often build technology that “chases a problem” or is designed to answer checklist questions about functionality. Salesloft “starts with problems people have and then builds solutions to match that. So anytime you see us build something like forecasting, we’re building it based on what people are actually trying to do.” Forecasting was built because it was a regular customer request.
Submitted forecasts show progress towards goal and a comparison vs. the prior week.
Salesloft claims that its new Forecast module transforms forecasting “from a burdensome task into a strategic action plan to close more revenue.” Revenue estimates and deal close dates are derived from real-time data and employ “multiple forecasting techniques to make it easy to see where the team’s performance is trending.” AI helps identify missed opportunities and deals at risk, letting reps mitigate deal risk and factor it into pipeline estimates. As Forecast is native to Salesloft’s Modern Revenue Workspace, managers can assign follow-ups or add deal notes within the Salesloft workflow.
“With Forecast, customers have the visibility, intelligence, and workflow to close deals more consistently and act upon unrealized opportunities,” stated the firm.
“Forecast by Salesloft is an intelligent solution with strong data governance, so there’s less room for errors,” stated Fields. “Sellers can forecast and take action on those deals from the same platform. When sales managers have real-time visibility and the ability to drill down, coaching sellers and taking action happens naturally, leading to better deal outcomes.”
On its earnings call last week, ZoomInfo announced a pair of acquisitions that closed on April 1: Comparably (discussed yesterday) and Dogpatch Advisors.
Dogpatch Advisors is a “modern sales advisory consultancy that helps enterprises scale revenue operations, build sales playbooks, use data and insights to create and refine sales, and build outbound operations functions.” In addition, Dogpatch will “enable ZoomInfo to further drive Enterprise and Strategic revenue through expanded customer playbooks that utilize more data and product categories.”
Dogpatch was immediately rebranded as ZoomInfo Labs, providing a “new go-to-market thought leadership team” that “drives go-to-market data analysis, product enhancements, and strategy for our enterprise customers.”
Dogpatch CEO Ben Salzman will be heading up ZoomInfo Labs.
“This will immediately expand our capabilities for enterprises and drive enhancements across our suite of products,” stated Schuck. “Over time, we expect ZoomInfo Labs to put the modern go-to-market playbook within reach of every company.”
“Dogpatch Advisors is professional services and consultancy firm that helps enterprises build out their go-to-market efforts using data and insights and software to make those go-to-market efforts incredibly effective and efficient. And when we talk with our customers and our prospects…they want a world where their go-to-market motions are driven by data, where our software is interconnected seamlessly, where they have the ability to run innovative sales playbooks, but they don’t have a pathway to get there.
What we’re hoping to do with ZoomInfo Labs is to provide a mechanism to help our customers see a future that’s innovative, that’s data-driven, where systems are integrated and talk to each other, where our data cloud sits at the foundation of that, and our application layer drives the interconnectivity of that motion… [ZoomInfo Labs] is designed to help our customers not only see that vision but then also achieve that.”
ZoomInfo CFO Cameron Hyzer
Both acquisitions closed on April 1 but were announced on May 2. Individual deal terms were not disclosed, but the two firms were acquired for “approximately $145 million, inclusive of the purchase of a convertible promissory note and cash, net of cash acquired, subject to adjustments for working capital, transaction-related equity awards, and other customary adjustments.”
ZoomInfo also agreed to pay up to $28 million in equity awards “subject to continued employment and/or attainment of certain financial metrics.”
“We expect these acquisitions to contribute revenue in the low teens millions of dollars in 2022 and create a modest drag on margins of one to two points for the remaining quarters this year,” said Hyzer.
CEO Cameron Hyzer said that Dogpatch was more than an acquihire deal. While it has a small employee base, Dogpatch has “relationships and a history of really delivering great go-to-market consulting engagements for large clients.”
“It’s a handful of people, but I think that they very much box outside of [its weight] class in terms of the value they’re able to deliver,” continued Hyzer. “And we think that by bringing that on and being able to deliver those engagements that we’ll be able to further accelerate the solutions that we’re offering as well.”
At its earnings call last week, ZoomInfo announced a pair of acquisitions: Comparably and Dogpatch Advisors (rebranded as ZoomInfo Labs). Comparably builds out ZoomInfo’s capabilities and content in the recruitment space while Dogpatch provides ZoomInfo with professional services capabilities around data deployment and playbook development.
Comparably is a SaaS provider of employer branding, recruitment marketing, and an employee review platform. Comparably surveys and collects culture insights and compensation data directly from verified employees. It also publishes the “Best Places to Work Awards.” Comparably serves “a large portion” of the Fortune 500 and had over 20 million global visitors last year. Comparably helps syndicate awards across major business and news outlets.
“ZoomInfo’s acquisition of Comparably represents a pitch-perfect response to these changes,” blogged Senior Content Manager Sailee Sarangdhar. “Comparably, a leading employee review website and the only platform showcasing workplace culture, salary, and corporate brand reputation data, attracts more than 3 million people per month who rely on its comprehensive data about companies of all sizes. Comparably, combined with ZoomInfo’s already formidable data and software tools, gives talent leaders and companies of all sizes more powerful ways to activate their employer brand, helping to better influence prospects and convert candidates in their pipeline.”
Comparably assists with a company’s career site, Google Search placement, featured articles, media and press, social content, and video testimonials, helping amplify employee sentiment to promote the company and its culture.
“Millions of visitors come to our website to better understand company cultures, access salary data, and get employee insights. We’ve also built a popular set of software solutions to help companies enhance their employer brand and recruitment marketing,” explained Comparably CEO Jason Nazar.
Comparably recognizes that candidates prefer to work for firms with strong leadership and healthy cultures aligned with their values.
“Simply reaching out to these candidates is no longer enough — to succeed, employers need to showcase why their workplace is one that job seekers would be proud to join,” explained Sarangdhar.
The Comparably acquisition augments RecruitingOS, which the firm is rebranding as TalentOS, and positions it as “a superior talent platform that enriches the talent search experience for recruiters.” Recruiters will also benefit from enhanced talent data fed into ZoomInfo’s “Likely to Listen” score.
Employer branded content will be integrated into ZoomInfo Engage, “enabling recruiters to leverage statistics, awards, testimonials, videos, and more in their talent sourcing efforts.”
Finally, Insights from Comparably will be deployed to ZoomInfo MarketingOS for executing targeted ad campaigns for specific roles. Sarangdhar argues that “combining the power of awareness-generating ads with website visitor insights has the potential to be a game-changer for HR and recruitment teams.”
“Job seekers are more educated and discerning than ever before, and companies are going to unseen lengths to recruit candidates of all backgrounds and skillsets,” said Nazar. “Comparably has distinguished our brand as a unique data asset reflecting fair and accurate company cultures and the most popular SaaS platform for employer branding and recruitment marketing solutions. Partnering with ZoomInfo is an incredible opportunity to continue to support millions of employees and thousands of businesses and to help revolutionize how the modern challenges of recruiting are solved.”
TalentOS, which was launched in June 2021, has been deployed by over 1,000 companies. Product customer counts and ACV grew 50% quarter-over-quarter in Q1.
New user functionality includes a guided onboarding journey and a new experience for launching initial email automation campaigns. In addition, power users can leverage an advanced Boolean search capability and a redesigned AI-powered similar companies recommendation engine for recruiting.
“With Comparably, TalentOS gives companies the ability to engage and hire candidates with much more sophistication and influence,” stated CEO Henry Schuck. TalentOS plus Comparably is a must-have combination for any company recruiting in today’s competitive work environment. As an enterprise go-to-market, we know that the best-performing enterprise companies are leveraging data, insights, and software for their revenue operations, and they are significantly outperforming go-to-market teams early on in their digitization journey. Access to high-quality, relevant data provides significant competitive advantages for all sales and marketing organizations.”
Sales Engagement Platform Groove now offers joint customers Vertical IQ industry and economic intelligence from the Groove Omnibar.
Vertical IQ helps “banking and credit union relationship managers, advisors, and consultants build trust and strengthen sales conversations through insightful and timely industry intelligence.”
Vertical IQ publishes 530 plain English industry overviews and 3,400 local economic analyses. The research is utilized by relationship managers in the financial services sector and strategic sales reps looking to better understand the needs and concerns of customers and prospects. Vertical IQ profiles also assist marketers in better understanding pains at various C-level functions within an industry, offer a set of industry-specific questions for sales reps and relationship managers, and help customer success teams understand the pains and concerns of their customers.
“It’s not uncommon for reps to speak to a hundred people a day across multiple verticals, and our integration with Vertical IQ gives them the industry intelligence they need to have impactful conversations every single time,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein. “With Groove and Vertical IQ, reps can now get access to industry knowledge in a single click from wherever they work.”
Industry intelligence is available to joint customers at no additional charge with single sign-on functionality.
The firms are initially targeting financial services and banking organizations, a core market for Vertical IQ. According to Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein, displaying Vertical IQ profiles to relationship managers is a “powerful use case.” RMs often lack industry-specific expertise but need to understand the basics of many industries, including pain points, trends, financial ratios, and CxO concerns.
However, the firms see a broader set of beneficiaries (e.g., relationship managers, sales professionals, customer success professionals), regardless of their industry. The Vertical IQ sweet spot is professionals that sell into, support, or analyze a broad set of industries. Vertical IQ provides “the insights users need to better understand a specific industry before, during, and after meetings,” continued Klein. “As we continue to enhance the integration, we believe some of the key content will be challenges, trends, financial benchmark data, and the content related to call preparation.”
“Groove’s flexibility and ease-of-use make it an effective sales engagement platform for relationship sellers, which is why we’re seeing such strong demand for this integration from our joint customer base,” said Vertical IQ CEO Bobby Martin. “This integration is just the beginning of our vision for empowering the modern sales professional.”
While Sales Intelligence platforms have long offered market research and industry overviews to their customers, the Groove – Vertical IQ partnership is the first integration of industry overviews into a Sales Engagement platform.
