Month: December 2022

Salesloft Winter 2022 Release

Salesloft released a trio of enterprise-grade features to its Sales Engagement platform.  New Enhancements support account-based team selling, improved governance and access controls, and mobile app improvements.

Salesloft User Relationships

Account-based team selling allows multiple team members to work on an account and set multiple account owners with a single, shared view.  Furthermore, Salesloft automation rules support team selling with automated role assignments and account relationships across the customer lifecycle “so that reps can easily follow rules of engagement without losing time to admin tasks and workarounds.”

Expanded access controls provide complete control over which data customers have access across Cadences, Conversations, and Deals.  Organizations can limit access to sensitive opportunity data, call recordings, and customer records, ensuring security, compliance, and privacy.

Data access is based on the principle of least privilege, so users only have access to data required to do their job.  Thus, sales managers have access to all data relevant to their direct reports, while AEs can only view their data.

Salesloft Mobile App

Recognizing that field sales reps are returning to the road, the Salesloft Mobile App supports immediate customer engagement in support of time-sensitive communications.  Features include a Mobile Live Feed similar to the Salesloft Live Feed, person searching, email sending, and messaging (text).

The Mobile app lets sales reps make and log calls, send messages, and send emails directly from the mobile app using the mobile phone’s network.  The mobile app places a pair of calls that bridges the mobile device through the Salesloft dialer, with caller id displaying the dedicated Salesloft number.  Call recording, Live Call Studio, and voicemail drops are not supported.

Email enhancements are available now, with broader cadence step support in early 2023.

“Sales teams have adopted technology quickly, often at the expense of critical governance capabilities.  This exposes companies to policy or compliance violations,” said Salesloft CPO Ellie Fields.  “We believe it is Salesloft’s job to provide sales teams with technology they need to sell, and to make sure that technology is governed.  Especially in tight markets, our customers want to spend time selling, not managing disparate systems.”

Salesloft also announced that it rearchitected its Google Chrome extension, providing the “full Salesloft platform through one, consistent sidebar across Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and Gmail.”  The redesigned extension will be available in early 2023.

Other platform enhancements include automated data enrichment based on email signatures; out-of-office detection for Spanish, French, and German; Slack notifications for one-off tasks; improved email sentiment analysis; future period forecasts in Deals; and improved Deal Engagement Scores.

New integrations include Gryphon.ai (phone and email certifications), EveryoneSocial, Salesfinitiy (dialer), and StoryDoc (build presentations and share prospects via cadences).

Enhanced integrations include HubSpot (syncing of ownership data) and Vidyard (Live Feed notifications when a Vidyard video is shared).

Bombora B2B Research Trends

Intent data vendor Bombora analyzed its topical data to gauge economic concerns and how they may play out across B2B research.  While economic growth is up 60%, economic downturn is up 119% year-over-year, and market volatility has spiked 149%. Likewise, layoffs (109%) are far outpacing hiring (42%).

“In general, what we’re seeing is a shift in focus from business growth to business resiliency.  In fact, July 2022 actually marked the first time we’ve seen the volume of searches for resiliency surpass those for growth,” blogged Hsiaolei Miller, Bombora VP Insights & Partner Success.  “So, instead of focusing on advertising and launching new products, B2B businesses have been investing more of their time and energy into understanding how to maintain their current business through retaining their customers, encouraging renewals, and other strategies.”

Business Resilience topics are surging (Source: Bombora Market Insights)

Thus, Brand and Demand is the primary focus of businesses, with searching on customer expansion and RevOps becoming more important.  Last year, growth-oriented topics outpaced more “maintenance-focused” topics.  However, these topics have achieved rough parity.

Moreover, research in Brand and Demand topics has shifted towards inbound efforts and away from outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing research is growing and outbound is in decline Business Resilience topics are surging
(Source: Bombora Market Insights).

“With cost pressures mounting, businesses need to focus on extracting as much value and engagement possible from the customers in their pipeline vs. going through the process to find net-new customers,” argued Miller.  “Businesses still want new business, but they want to be more efficiently capturing and capitalizing on every lead that comes into the pipeline.  This can be seen in the increased research into retargeting and conversational marketing strategies and the increase in interest in general inbound marketing software.”

Bombora also found increases in research related to customer expansion (upsell, cross-sell) and time to value.

“Customer expansion involves creating more value for your business by selling your existing customers more of your product or service.  Customer TTV is the time it takes until the ‘Aha!  moment’ when a customer realizes the expected value of your product,” stated Miller.  “Businesses are looking to accomplish both of these goals through investments in customer support automation vs. traditional customer support, which aims to maximize efficiency while also lowering overall customer support costs.”

On Salesforce’s earnings call this month, co-CEO Bret Taylor argued that executives are focusing on time to value and digital transformation benefits (e.g., cost savings, customer satisfaction, and top-line growth) when evaluating digital investments.

Ross Graber, Principal Analyst at Forrester, came to a similar conclusion in his 2023 B2B predictions.  “In light of economic uncertainty, B2B organizations will strive to grow in the places they know and the places they understand.  As a result, B2B growth strategies will tilt heavily toward retention, cross-sell, and upsell revenues.  Growing revenues within the existing customer base requires not only great products and services, but strong customer relationships.”

Sales and Operations Planning had the biggest jump in topical research in Q3, up 386% year-over-year.  RevOps looks to align sales, marketing, and customer success across the customer lifecycle.  RevOps looks to address questions such as how do we get and keep customers?

“During times of uncertainty, businesses are less focused on casting wide nets for new customers and taking big risks, and more focused on squeezing the value out of the customers they already have in their pipeline,” stated Miller.

Resources

Owler Integrates with HubSpot & Teams

Owler maintains lists of companies that have been synced with HubSpot.

Company Intelligence vendor Owler unveiled a pair of integrations with HubSpot and Microsoft Teams.  Both offerings are available through its Owler Max subscription product for sales reps.

Owler supports competitive and sales intelligence, with data gathered from web mining and crowdsourcing.  Along with standard firmographics, it offers M&A intelligence, funding profiles, company news alerts, and twenty-three sales triggers.

Owler Max is their sales intelligence edition with CRM syncing, email alerts, and prospecting.  Reps control which of the twenty-three alert categories are relevant, including new triggers based on revenue and employee count changes.

Company prospecting selects include industry, location, company status, revenue, employee counts, funding history, and competitors.  Owler profiles 15 million global companies, with the option to push companies and lists to the CRM.  Company data is passed bi-directionally, while news can be used to create HubSpot Tasks or display alerts via email, HubSpot, or Slack.

News and company profile links are embedded within HubSpot Tasks.

“Owler Max provides sales teams with resources they need to do their jobs the best they possibly can,” said Owler CEO Tim Harsch.  “Our new integrations and data insights offer sales teams key improvements to organization, workflow, and research efficiency.  Sales professionals can leverage data better, drive desired results quicker, and grow the capacity of collaboration in the remote work era.”

Owler syncs data every six hours and can match and upload 1,000 records per minute.

The Teams integration was launched back in August.  Owler Max users will see their MS Teams instance in the Owler Max dashboard.  They then click connect, name the connection, and syncing commences for all followed companies.  Team members can then read, collaborate, or share company intelligence via Teams or email, with alerts automatically posted to Teams channels.  Alerts may be aggregated from all lists or customized.  Users can also control which of its nearly two dozen event categories should be shared so that only relevant topics are posted.

“Owler Max’s new offerings put sales teams on a straight path to winning.  To unlock their full potential, sales teams need efficient access to personalized data and tools for seamless workflow.  By providing this scaffolding, Owler Max gives sales professionals an immediate competitive edge.” 

Owler CEO Tim Harsch

Owler Max is priced at $600 per annum with a minimum of five seats.  Owler Max also supports a Salesforce connector.

ClickDimensions Launches Sales Engagement

RevTech Vendor and Consultancy ClickDimensions rolled out its Sales Engagement service that works alongside its other Dynamics 365 sales and marketing services.  ClickDimensions is looking to unify sales and marketing motions, particularly among SMBs.

“ClickDimensions Sales Engagement makes this unification possible, giving teams control over leads and better visibility into revenue-driving activities.  Once these teams are better aligned, companies see an average revenue increase of 34%,” stated the firm.

ClickDimensions aims to “democratize best-in-class tools for all companies” and unify sales and marketing strategies.  According to ClickDimensions, Sales Engagement “offers a unified approach for sales and marketing teams and eradicates the potential for customer drop-offs and miscommunication between each team as leads progress through the funnel.  The result is greater sales team efficiency, higher-quality buyer journeys, and increased customer loyalty and revenue.”

ClickDimensions Chief Growth Officer Margaret Wise explained to GZ Consulting that many of their Microsoft Dynamics customers “aren’t the digital leaders.  They are often digital laggards.  They are often in manufacturing, associations, and nonprofits.  They’re not bleeding edge typically from a marketing perspective.”

So, the question for Wise becomes, “How do we provide solutions that are accessible, integrated, easy to use, and affordable for that specific kind of customer that doesn’t want to be bleeding edge on the latest and greatest?  They want something dependable, easy, [and] that they can find resources for.”

At SMBs, CEOs often take an active role in the technology purchasing decision “because it is tied directly to revenue and growth,” continued Wise.  “A lot of the change urgency is being driven out of the C-suite.”  Thus, their messaging needs to address C-level issues around lead generation and revenue management.

ClickDimensions argues that these laggards often lack a digital strategy, have uncoordinated social media marketing, and mostly transmit one-off email messages.

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement, which runs natively in Dynamics, offers templated emails sent through Outlook, sales sequences, lead scoring, and next-best-action recommendations.  When combined with ClickDimensions Marketing Automation, revenue teams have a “complete view of every step of the customer journey.”

Sequences can be built for initial meeting requests, prospecting, follow-up, inbound, events (both invitation and follow-up), periodic check-ins, account review, and upcoming renewal.  This breadth supports sales and customer success teams across the customer lifecycle.

Sequence analytics are also provided with step-level results (e.g., calls, bounces, opens, replies) and post-activity disposition capture (e.g., interested, not interested, interested – not now).

Sequenced tasks include manual and automated emails, phone calls, LinkedIn, and generic tasks; however, they do not yet support dialer or LinkedIn integrations. 

Admins also set up sequence-based rules for scenarios such as reply action for sequenced emails and bounce handling.  Admins can also set sequences to automatically trigger or wait for sales review before triggering.

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement sequence status at the contact level across leads.

“The modern buying journey has completely transformed from what it was a mere three years ago, which means companies need to adapt how they sell – and fast,” stated ClickDimensions CEO Mike Dickerson.  “Launching ClickDimensions Sales Engagement is our way of responding to these industry challenges, equipping our customers with critical tools to boost revenue, and unifying sales and marketing teams around a digital-first customer experience.”

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement is a “natural progression and the perfect complement to its flagship solution, ClickDimensions Marketing Automation,” continued the firm.  “The platform helps marketers optimize campaigns, automate follow-ups, create lead nurturing processes, and target leads to sales.  From there, ClickDimensions Sales Engagement will help salespeople with the next best action, automating outreach to leads and redirecting leads to marketing for further nurture if they’re not ready to purchase.”

ClickDimensions Marketing offers one-to-many outreach during the nurture phase (e.g., newsletters, marketing campaigns, event invitations).  Later, ClickDimensions Sales Engagement supports one-to-one or one-to-few communications with prospects and customers.  Marketing Automation can send leads to sales reps based on triggers or lead scores, and Sales Engagement offers a button to return prospects to nurture for leads that are not in active buying cycles.  Thus, the problem of MQLs being ignored and dropped by sales as not qualified has a logical resolution – return the lead to marketing nurture and support a “non-linear customer journey.”

The passing back and forth of leads between sales and marketing enables a “continual process until the actual opportunity progresses,” said Wise.

ClickDimensions Marketing Automation supports email marketing, campaign automation, surveys, events, landing pages, forms, SMS, and Social.  While the company now offers marketing automation and sales engagement, its long-term plans are to provide a “full RevTech solution” built on the Dynamics platform.  This future platform and services organization will be built both organically and via acquisitions and support embedded AI for sentiment analysis, next-best actions, opportunity scoring, and activity capture.

ClickDimensions is a Microsoft VAR and consultancy with a global footprint across 76 countries and 3,500 customers.  Half of its revenue is derived in the EMEA region, with most of the rest in North America.  It serves a broad set of industries, with no segment representing over 25% of its customer base.

ClickDimensions also offers consultancy services that provide “fractional access to skilled resources that are in short supply.”  Services include onboarding, training, and execution; demand generation; customer data services; and marketing operations.

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement sequence options include pausing the sequence and managing responses to engagement activity.

Clearbit Partners with G2

Clearbit leverages first and second-party intent data for building and activating audiences.

B2B data vendor Clearbit is the latest firm to announce a partnership with G2 to deliver G2’s second-party technology intent data.  The G2 feed will be available alongside Clearbit’s firmographics, contacts, and Reveal visitor intelligence.

“For any company that shows up in your defined Audiences, Capture automatically creates new accounts and key contacts (from our database of marketable and verified contacts) directly in Salesforce,” blogged Clearbit CMO Kevin Tate.  “This way, your marketing and sales teams can focus on engaging the right people, based on role and title, from the companies you care about.”

Clearbit offers B2B data enrichment, audience building, visitor intelligence, and web forms to over 1,500 customers, including Segment (Twilio), Intercom, HubSpot, Asana, and Atlassian.  Clearbit’s reference database gathers insights on 44 million companies and 350 million contacts.

“Marketers know that engaging the right companies at the right time is key, but with increased pressure to build high-quality pipeline, it’s never been more critical.  With G2 and Clearbit, teams can now leverage the powerful combination of company fit and buyer intent to focus their funnel – and even use Clearbit Capture to discover key buyers and contacts at their best-fit, high-intent prospects.”

Clearbit CTO Harlow Ward

G2 Buyer Intent Signals include

  • Companies viewing G2 Product Profiles and Sponsored Content
  • Companies viewing G2 Categories, Comparison Products, and Alternative & Competitor Pages
  • G2 Buyer Intent Scores for every visiting company

“Buyer intent data is a secret weapon for leading B2B marketers,” said Christine Li, VP of Growth & Enablement at G2.  “Clearbit’s integration with G2 helps marketers take that data even further — driving more streamlined actions for sales, intent-based revenue, and realizing the full potential of account-based marketing.”

The combined first and second-party intent datasets help identify the optimal time to reach out to customers and prospects.  By integrating intent data with a firm’s ICP, marketing can determine which ideal customers are in-market.

As G2 also identifies accounts that are viewing alternatives or running product comparisons, it assists with identifying competitive threats at current customers.  Risk flags allow Account Executives and Customer Success Managers to reach out proactively to wobbly renewals and reduce churn risk. 

Clearbit Audience and Capture leverages first and second-party attendance.

Clearbit Audience and Capture combine first and second-party intelligence for building and activating campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google.  Admins can also set up automated Slack alerts when intent scores are met, helping ensure that sales reps focus on target accounts while they are in-market.

“Our focus is on helping you put our Clearbit + G2 audiences to work across your existing stack and apps (with our flexible integrations & webhooks),” remarked Tate to GZ Consulting.  “It’ll be interesting to see how these changes in the economy continue to affect how companies spend on MarTech – but we’re seeing more companies currently looking for flexible solutions to ‘upgrade the stack they already have’ vs. ‘rip-and-replace with a walled-garden suite.’”