Sales Intelligence vendor RelPro announced a partnership with Lendovative Technologies, “a provider and developer of niche lending technologies for financial institutions.” The partnership enhances both companies’ ability to assist financial institutions that serve businesses across the United States.
The two firms made a go-to-market announcement with no technical integration. Ostensibly, it is a two-way referral partnership “consistent with us developing relationships in the Banking and Financial Services ecosystem,” explained RelPro CEO Martin Wise to GZ Consulting. Lendovative reached out to RelPro due to its “established and growing position in the Banking industry.”
“Their platform helps banks to grow their commercial business, and the next question from their customers is ‘how can I find new SMB companies and executives to call on to grow my business?’ and that’s where RelPro fits in,” continued Wise. “Equally, RelPro’s smaller banking clients are always interested in learning about new technology platforms that will help them grow their business.”
“The two-way referral partnership is consistent with us developing relationships in the Banking and Financial Services ecosystem – this is an efficient way for us to grow our business with smaller banks, and it leverages RelPro’s strong positioning in the banking industry (RelPro is used by half of the Top 50 banks in the US),” concluded Wise.
“By delivering deeper insights on small- to medium-sized companies and their decision-makers, we are helping financial services professionals identify more potential clients who need access to capital,” noted Lauren Meyers, RelPro’s VP of Partnerships & Customer Success. “This partnership with Lendovative enables us to accelerate the prospecting initiatives of lenders while providing them with a solution to help businesses navigate their cash flow needs in unique and innovative ways.”
RelPro has long specialized in financial services and developed a sales intelligence platform for the space. Its business datasets include seven million US companies, 150 million contacts, UCC filings (liens), PPP (pandemic loans) intelligence, and SBA loan data. This summer, it added Commercial Real Estate intelligence and financial services intent data to its platform.
Lendovative offers the BB-360 lending collateral tracking platform for commercial lending. BB-360 connects businesses to financial institutions, helping maximize access to short-term capital and collateralizing accounts receivable, inventory, and other assets.
“Loan growth is a key strategic goal for our financial institution clients, and that starts with actionable business intelligence,” noted Patrick True, President at Lendovative. “I have worked with similar service providers for more than thirty years, and no one is better at helping develop quality leads for commercial lending than RelPro. The synergies that exist between our two companies are powerful, and will help Lendovative Technologies achieve its mission of connecting financial institution clients to more businesses across the U.S.”
RelPro integrates and presents company and contact intelligence from 17 vendors.
Seismic content and training recommendations are presented during calls.
Seismic and Microsoft announced an integration partnership that will embed Seismic’s sales enablement workflows within Microsoft Viva Sales. Seismic will provide “content production, collaboration, task automation, and engagement intelligence for Viva Sales users across the meeting experience to help drive deals and relationships forward.” The goal is to “streamline” buyer engagement at relationship-based sales teams.
Microsoft Viva Sales became generally available on October 3. Viva Sales is “a new seller experience application that brings together any customer relationship management technology (CRM), Microsoft 365, and Teams to provide a more streamlined and AI-powered selling experience.” The new solution is designed for the hybrid work environment where reps leverage video conferences, chats, emails, and documents to close deals.
“We’re united with Seismic in our commitment to empowering sellers through relevant content and an improved seller experience. Our plan to integrate Seismic with Viva Sales will help sellers have more personalized customer engagements whether they are in the office or on the road, with a helpful assist from the AI-driven insights and content,” said Lori Lamkin, CVP, Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications.
Viva Sales customers include Adobe, Crayon, and PwC.
Avoma added scheduling and reminder functionality to its conversational intelligence platform.
Conversational Intelligence vendor Avoma added a meeting scheduler to its service. The new functionality streamlines pre-meeting workflows with automated booking, meeting reminders, and “agenda alignment” before the meeting.
Avoma Scheduler supports multiple links for “various purposes and durations based on your availability, time zone, [the] context you want to capture, and more.”
Avoma supports Outlook and Google Calendar using an OAuth integration.
Unifying the meeting process reduces toggling between applications and the likelihood of missed context or action items.
According to Avoma, no-shows and cancelation rates average up to 40% of meetings, resulting in wasted time, longer deal cycles, and reduced conversion rates. Thus, reminders allow for fewer no-shows and automated rescheduling.
Avoma argues that the meeting process is disjointed with separate tools for
Scheduling meetings
Setting agendas
Taking notes during meetings
Recording, transcribing, and analyzing the call
Sharing meeting notes after the call
Syncing meeting intelligence with the CRM
Different departments and customers have different tech stacks, so meeting intelligence can end up siloed. Furthermore, juggling multiple tools leads to lost context and action items slipping between the cracks.
“There are already several scheduling tools available, but they are point solutions, requiring people to navigate several tools before, during, and after a meeting. Our approach is to help you save costs as well as avoid the multiple tool fatigue by simplifying end-to-end meeting workflows. This helps you offer a seamless experience to your customers.”
Avoma CEO Aditya Kothadiya
SEPs Outreach and Salesloft and chatbots from Drift and ZoomInfo also offer integrated meeting scheduling within their conversational AI platforms.
The new 6Sense Conversational Email Campaign Builder
At the 6sense Breakthrough Conference, 6sense unveiled its new Conversational Email module. Conversational Email employs AI models, psychographics, technographics, intent data, and predictive analytics to deliver “hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant emails to qualify and convert leads to sales meetings.”
Conversational Email supports campaigns across functions and the buyers’ journey. Marketing can send “personalized peer-to-peer nurture emails from multiple AI personas, and Operations can systematize meeting conversion and scheduling for qualified accounts. Sales teams can operationalize best practices and “scale across segments much easier.”
Marketing can also deploy Conversational Email to revive dormant accounts, qualify and convert inbound leads, and boost webinar and event registrations, participation, and follow-up.
6sense claims that beta customers enjoyed a 50% reduction in deal cycle times for marketing-sourced opportunities and a 1.5X increase in average deal size.
“A look at the basic process Conversational AI uses to nurture leads and turn them into sales opportunities.”
AI tools include a Visual Conversation Flow Builder, Email Assistant, and Qualification and Sales Handover. The Email Assistant employs AI to “effortlessly engage the correct buying team members, schedule follow-up based on out-of-office replies, book meetings with the right owners, and send targeted content.”
Dynamic content consists of multivariate blocks tailored to specific keywords, segments, personas, or products for personalizing messages.
Additionally, Conversational Email supports automated workflow triggers based on account buying behavior and contact activity.
“This launch is one of our most significant product updates yet,” said 6sense CTO Viral Bajaria. “Every company has overlooked and underworked, yet high-quality, leads. Critical outreach happens too late or simply never at all, which leads to missed revenue opportunities. The early results from customers in our beta program using 6sense Conversational Email demonstrates the impact: reduction in deal cycles, increase in average deal size, and new pipeline generated. While others in the market focus on sending emails, we are the first to focus on writing relevant emails and responding in ways that lead to more quality pipeline, more efficiently.”
6sense Contextual Targeting improves engagement and recall.
6sense also rolled out Contextual Targeting, which places ads alongside similar digital content. A study by Spark Neuro found that contextually relevant ads generate 43% greater engagement and double the ad recall.
In addition, 6sense offers over 100 new custom contextual topics for B2B marketers. “Advertisers won’t need to settle to use contextual segments that are largely designed for consumer marketers,” stated 6sense.
6sense claimed three benefits to Contextual Targeting. It:
Respects user privacy by targeting audiences without using behavioral or data profiles
Provides ready-to-use contextual topics built specifically for B2B
Eliminates wasted ad spend on buyers that aren’t likely to engage
Another new feature is Campaign Forecasting which estimates a campaign’s daily audience, daily impressions, and daily spend. Campaign Forecasting helps marketers assess campaign budget and reach before launching the campaign.
6sense also announced at Breakthrough that a sales intelligence data application would be released in Q1. 6sense, which bought data company Slintel last October, will offer global contact data, intent data (3rd-party data, anonymous web visitor insights), firmographics, psychographics, and technographics. In addition, the “intuitive” UX will provide “actionable insights and [an] orchestration layer necessary to identify, prioritize and engage with accounts in-market.”
“With B2B buying committee members increasingly choosing to remain anonymous through most of their journey, sellers need insight to earlier signals for their sales outreach to be effective. With our latest advancement in 6sense Sales Intelligence, we bring industry-leading intent data, contact data, and AI insights to help sellers efficiently identify priority prospects, personalize their interactions, and take timely action with ease to drive meetings and conversion of pipeline to revenue.”
Amar Doshi, SVP of Product & UX at 6sense
The Breakthrough Conference was billed as “an inside look at best practices to leverage AI and big data to accelerate revenue generation efficiently.”
“The Proceed with Confidence focus of our 2022 Breakthrough event couldn’t be more timely. We heard from more than 50 sales and marketing speakers at this year’s event that 6sense Revenue AI is the must-have competitive edge they can’t grow without,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “B2B companies are losing revenue opportunities and leaving money on the table. To deliver a better buying experience in today’s selling environment, it’s imperative to leverage AI along with pre-intent data, intent data, and predictive analytics to know which accounts are in market to buy your product or service, when and how to target them, and what messages to deliver to best engage.”
“Being able to provide our customers with 1st-party intent data on the largest healthcare technology and information audience on the web is a true game changer in our industry,” said Sean Brooks, Co-Founder of Xtelligent Healthcare Media. “Sales and marketing teams will now have direct access to entire healthcare buying teams, including Clinicians, Line of Business, and IT Decision-Makers, to find more opportunities and accelerate technology deals.”
Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.
Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies. TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered. Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”
The service is available for ten segments:
Analytics
Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR)
Healthcare Security & Compliance
Health IT Infrastructure
Life Sciences
Patient Engagement
Payer
Pharma
Revenue Cycle Management
Telehealth
Intent data is gathered from 14 B2B healthcare media properties. HealthTech sites include EHR Intelligence, Health IT Security, and Health IT Analytics. Clinical research and medical sites include LifeSciences Intelligence, PharmaNews Intelligence, and HealthPayer Intelligence. Over 400 healthcare topics are covered, with roughly half focused on Healthcare Tech.
Priority Engine for Healthcare also offers visitor intelligence and content view tracking. Healthcare intent data from BrightTALK, TechTarget’s digital webinar and event platform, is also included.
Xtelligent, also based in Boston, has a similar content model to TechTarget. When acquired last year, it had over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites, but lacked a platform for enabling its contacts and intent datasets.
Xtelligent content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market. Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.
The new intent topics identify HealthTech content consumption at the account and prospect levels, gathered from TechTarget’s 150 enterprise and health technology websites.
“By expanding the amount of permission-based, relevant 1st-party purchase intent data our customers have access to and delivering a full suite of marketing, sales, and go-to-market services to engage real buyers, we help companies of all sizes achieve better results at scale in this market,” said Michael Cotoia, CEO, TechTarget. “As a leader in coverage of B2B enterprise tech for more than 20 years – combined with working very closely with our almost 3,000 customers – TechTarget has unique visibility into the buying dynamics across every major sector of the market. Our experience positions us well to bring our model to adjacent vertical markets with similar attributes to enterprise B2B tech – long/complex-sales cycles, large purchases, multiple members of the buying team, and a strong need for 1st party data to enable marketers and sellers – just as we have done in healthcare.”
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.
“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’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:
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.
It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
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.”
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).
Revenue Platform Clari made a trio of announcements related to a partnership with Sales Engagement Platform Groove, the full integration of conversational sales platform Wingman, and the pending release of its Optimize module for controlling revenue leaks. Optimize helps revenue teams diagnose and address revenue leaks, reducing revenue loss due to deal slippage, bad data, and error-prone manual processes.
“The Clari Revenue Platform gives revenue leaders the past, present, and future data they need to not just control revenue but help grow it,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne. “Only Clari provides the full historical picture and adds real-time capabilities to act fast as well as the forward-looking projections to proactively strategize revenue precision.”
Optimize offers a “single, centralized view” of revenue metrics, including win rates, forecast accuracy, and deal cycle times. In addition, Optimize helps revenue leaders answer questions such as “How is my team trending this quarter? Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue? How can I ensure my reps are doing the right things to produce predictably winning results?”
Clari argues that market leaders have been unable to answer these questions proactively, making it difficult to mitigate issues and risks. Clari combines historical and external data to assist with revenue benchmarking. Thus, Clari can reach beyond the CRM to gather account intelligence. For example, it can look at usage data to assess churn risk.
“Optimize is all about finding revenue leaks so customers can see not just where and why they’re missing revenue, but what they can do about it. No other solution on the market has the ability to harness past time series data to provide a historical view of revenue leak.”
Clari CEO Andy Byrne
Optimize, available soon, will provide a single view for the whole organization of revenue and insights, capturing CRM intelligence, activity data, and forecasts. With the integration of Wingman, its recently acquiredconversational intelligence subsidiary, the voice of the customer is fully embedded within Clari analytics and forecasts.
Furthermore, Wingman provides real-time coaching during sales calls, helping reps avoid mistakes and providing real-time intelligence (e.g., technical information, competitive battlecards) to sales reps. By improving sales objection handling, parrying competitive attacks, and preventing delays due to technical follow-ups, Wingman also reduces revenue leakage.
“It’s not just about coaching your teams to sell more, or about deal reviews,” said Holly Procter, senior vice president and global head of sales at Clari. “It’s more about running your revenue better—governing revenue-critical moments for success and collaboration across revenue-critical people, which includes buyers as well as sellers. Nobody else offers this collaborative, real-time approach.”
The Clari + Groove Joint Value Proposition
Clari and Groove announced a partnership at Dreamforce that helps “joint customers run revenue with more precision, greater collaboration, and faster execution.” Sales Engagement Platform Groove acts as a “system of action,” while Revenue Intelligence platform Clari acts as a “system of collaboration and governance.” Both platforms sync with Salesforce, which serves as the “system of record” for sales activity.
The partners argue that while revenue is at the heart of every business, CEOs struggle to get a handle on revenue and are uncertain about whether they will meet, beat, or miss revenue projections.
“Up to fifty percent of entire company employees are revenue critical. They are responsible in some form or fashion for delivering revenue.”
Clari SVP of Marketing Kyle Coleman explained to GZ Consulting
Revenue responsibility is broader than quota carriers and includes SDRs, CSMs, AMs, leadership, product managers, and engineers. Unfortunately, “consistent, predictable execution and collaboration” across these employees remain “very challenging” due to the lack of a unified platform shared across all these roles.
“It’s also very difficult, therefore, to govern any sort of revenue process or sub-process in a repeatable way,” continued Coleman. “What revenue leaders end up doing is every quarter, they’re trying to capture this lightning in a bottle to know whether they’re going to meet, beat or miss, but it’s sort of a scramble more often than not.”
With the Groove / Clari partnership, “we will be able to govern processes, we’ll be able to replicate the best practices, we’ll be able to do the right kind of real-time analysis that leads to action in a closed loop way so that we know that everything is happening as it should be when it should be,” argued Coleman.
A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them. Revenue leaks exist across the full revenue lifecycle. For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time, allowing reps to take action via Groove to bring the deal back on track.
When Clari identifies a deal slipping for competitive reasons, it can suggest a play be executed in Groove. Likewise, Clari can identify sub-par win rates, overly generous discounting, and low conversion rates for early-stage opportunities.
As Groove is native to Salesforce, it records all activities in real-time, providing “full-funnel forecasting” and analytics to Salesforce and Clari.
“We can tie our campaigns through to revenue in Salesforce, and that is something that they (Groove’s competitors) cannot do,” argued Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant. “Then all of that rich data, tying engagement through to revenue is able to be pulled into Clari and used in the analysis, and that is available today.”
Coleman explained that while you can’t win a deal at any moment, you can certainly break a deal. And once a deal is lost, “it’s very difficult to un-lose” it. Thus, “if you don’t do the right thing at the right time – handle the right objection, or pull the right person in or do the right kind of follow-up” – the deal could be jeopardized. Therefore, “handling revenue critical moments expertly and in a prescribed way” that is governed by best practices is critical in addressing revenue leaks.
“Having all of that insight into all these moments that exist and then having confidence that every one of your employees is going to be able to execute on this? Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.
“Clari has always been about providing companies with the collaboration and governance required to run revenue with maximum precision, and Groove completes the equation by enabling our joint customers to turn the insights we provide into action,” said Byrne. “We’ve seen incredibly strong results from joint customers using our two platforms together, and this formal partnership will help us transform even more revenue organizations.”
Groove offers enterprise customers a Salesforce-native SEP that records all activity directly to Salesforce.
“Groove and Clari coming together is definitely a ‘1 + 1 = 3’ scenario for revenue leaders,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein. “Bringing together Clari’s revenue collaboration and governance capabilities with Groove’s strength in sales execution and productivity provides the ultimate value proposition: See the future with Clari and then create that future with Groove.”
Coinciding with its Q3 2022 release, LinkedIn is positioning Sales Navigator as a facilitator of Deep Selling. Deep Sales positions LinkedIn as a new way to sell that addresses many of the current problems faced by sales teams (e.g., The Great Reshuffle, increased deal complexity following COVID, the digitization of communications, and an increase in SPAM). This new positioning was announced in the Wall Street Journal.
“Too many sales professionals are stuck in what we’ve come to call “shallow selling” – an endless, frustrating loop of contacting more and more potential buyers in ways that no longer work,” posted LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ Marketing VP Gail Moody-Byrd. “I’ve felt the pain of sales in my professional life. I’ve consoled colleagues who were at risk of getting fired because they weren’t hitting their numbers or seen them committing “unnatural acts” to get a deal closed. I’ve been on endless, painful pipeline review calls, looking at leads that will never materialize into a closed/won deal. And I feel it daily in my personal life, as I try to dodge intrusive emails, texts, and phone calls that keep coming at me to purchase MarTech software.”
Moody-Byrd argued that shallow selling doesn’t work, but reps can employ deep learning software to support “deep sales.”
“Think of deep learning, where software learns from enormous amounts of reliable data to get to a meaningful answer. Deep sales relies on that kind of data to deeply understand buyers and their context. It helps sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed, at a time in the buying process that makes sense. It helps develop deep relationships with buyers, based on understanding them – the opposite of shallow spray-and-pray tactics.”
LinkedIn claims that Sales Navigator customers enjoy a 38% increase in pipeline generated, a six percent increase in win rates, and a 47% increase in deal size. The firm is positioning the combination of Sales Navigator and Sales Insights as its Deep Sales solution set.
“It’s good to see LinkedIn working on new ways to utilize machine learning to sort its various data inputs and provide a better experience,” stated SocialMediaToday Head of Content Andrew Hutchinson. “Thus far, LinkedIn hasn’t really been able to tap into its unmatched database of professional insights, but maybe, through advanced machine learning on its huge dataset, it’s moving towards the next stage of becoming a critical companion for all HR and business professionals, by facilitating guidance on various fronts that can lead to smarter decisions.”
Sales Navigator actionable insights include relationship intelligence, buyer intent, and Account Insights.
LinkedIn began rolling out the latest edition of its Sales Navigator service to clients at the end of last month. The Q3 release focused on adding intent and engagement data to the sales intelligence service. Intent-based features include a new Account Dashboard with Buyer Intent, a buyer intent filter in Build a List, and intent highlights on the home and account pages.
Other enhancements include a new Lead Panel and an updated search UX that streamlines search execution.
Senior Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, Mitali Pattnaik, blogged that high-performing sellers don’t spend more time selling but:
Focus on the opportunities that matter the most
Identify buyers when they are ready to engage
Go beyond shared connections to find hidden allies
These steps are the “playbook for winning in sales today.” To support sales reps, LinkedIn will focus on “three sets of relevant, actionable intelligence within Sales Navigator: Account insights to understand what matters to your customers and which ones to focus on; Relationship intelligence to map the ideal paths into an account and stay up-to-date on [the] movement of key decision makers; and Buyer intent to see which of your prospects are currently showing interest in your solution.”
Relationship Intelligence includes
Decision makers connected with you or your team
Former coworkers from your current or prior jobs
Prior customers associated with closed/won opportunities in your CRM
Leads following your company on LinkedIn or engaging with your company’s ads
While relationship mapping and account insights have long been part of the Sales Navigator value proposition, buyer intent is a new product focus. Buyer Intent is displayed in a new Account Dashboard that includes a buyer activity timeline with “specific people who have completed intent activities in the past 30 days, as well as a graph showing the distribution across all activities.”
The Account Dashboard identifies both current and new accounts displaying buying intent. Sales professionals can then identify warm paths to high-intent leads.
The Account Dashboard displays buyer interest at saved accounts and prospects.
Account Insights go beyond standard firmographics to include headcount across specific job titles and departments, connectivity across a company’s network, and account growth and engagement trends.
Buyer intent has also been added as a screening variable in Build a List and integrated into the new Lead Panel.
Initially, only four types of buyer intent are supported:
Who’s followed a company
Who’s visited your profile
Who’s a new connection to yourself
Who’s filled out a lead gen form
However, LinkedIn is promising additional buyer intent categories in coming releases.
“This is only the beginning of our multi-year journey to bring intent information to life in our products and services,” wrote VP of Product Management Lindsey Edwards. “We believe understanding intent can make a significant difference in the effectiveness of your go-to-market strategies, and we look forward to embarking on this path together with you.”
LinkedIn contends that its intent data differs from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence. Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account. Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”
Sales Navigator also claimed that it offers a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement,” stated LinkedIn. “Only Sales Navigator will be able to show you intent data throughout the buyers’ journey.”
Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.
“As we improve this dataset, sellers will see a complete view of every intent activity completed, giving a full timeline into the right moment and message and allowing you to reliably capitalize on every warm opportunity.”
“We know B2B selling has gone through a dramatic shift these past few years. We know now that buyers today are far harder to reach, and – quite honestly – many don’t want to be reached. At least not with irrelevant or generic outreach,” wrote Pattnaik. “To help you overcome that, we are focused on this next generation of Sales Navigator. Tapping into the unique power of our Economic Graph, Sales Navigator can help you sell in the way today’s buyers want to buy.”
Buyer intent is available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.
The new Lead Panel streamlines prospecting and quick qualification.
The new Lead Panel accelerates people searching. Instead of opening a new window, a popup panel supports immediate research from lead lists, allowing for quick qualification of prospective leads. In addition, the Lead Panel offers an overview with Save and Message buttons.
The Lead Panel is a beta feature being rolled out to accounts with fifty or fewer seats this quarter. The Lead Panel will eventually be available to all Sales Navigator licensees.
Search enhancements include pinned filters that display as default filters and an expanded industry taxonomy that spans over 400 industries. The new industry codes are aligned with the NAICS North American industry taxonomy.
New search filters include buyer intent and a TeamLink filter (searching across colleague networks).
LinkedIn’s economic graph now spans 850 million business professionals and 58 million companies.
LinkedIn Sales Insights enhancements include a new personas management page, adding persona locations to persona definitions, and increasing the number of persona tags in CRM export to six.
Sales Insights is a data analytics and enrichment service for sales ops.
The Sales Insights Persona Manager
Continue to Part II, which discusses LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ new “Deep Selling” positioning.
