Author: Michael R. Levy

Michael R. Levy is the Principal of GZ Consulting, a market research and competitive intelligence consultancy which focuses on the information services industry. Services include market sizing, market research, competitive profiling, product strategy, licensing advice, competitor benchmarking, and sales enablement. Michael has twenty years of experience in the sales intelligence industry, having worked for OneSource (Product Marketing Manager) and InfoGroup (Manager of Strategy and Competition) before launching GZ Consulting in 2011. Michael is also the author of the "Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors." He also publishes a pair of weekly Market Insights Subscription newsletter covering B2B RevTech subjects such as Sales Intelligence, Data as a Service, Sales Engagement, Sales Enablement, ABX Platforms, and Conversational Sales & Marketing.

Vista Equity Takes Majority Stake in Salesloft

Salesloft has been building out its deal intelligence alongside conversations and cadences.

Vista Equity announced that it took a majority stake in Sales Engagement vendor Salesloft.  CEO Kyle Porter indicated that the round values Salesloft above $2.3 billion.  Salesloft is on a roll, hitting $100 million in annual recurring revenue this summer and growing annual revenue 50% this year.

Salesloft rebranded this fall with new positioning around the “Modern Revenue Workspace.”  Its Winter 2021 release included sentiment analysis for inbound emails and an AI Chrome extension tool for optimizing emails.  Salesloft also recently opened a German data center, helping it comply with GDPR and European data hosting requirements.

According to Vista Equity, Salesloft is the most capital-efficient business in its space, meaning that they are enjoying smart growth.

“This means customers can trust that we will continue to deliver the best products and service in our industry,” stated VP of Product Management Frank Dale.

At the beginning of the year, Salesloft closed on a $100 million round that valued the firm at $1.1 billion.  The January investors, led by Owl Rock Capital, have retained their stakes in the firm.

Porter told the Wall Street Journal that he foresees an IPO but did not provide details on timing.

“From day one, Salesloft’s vision has been to help sellers more successfully engage with and serve their buyers.  This investment is a huge milestone in Salesloft’s journey to becoming the most loved brand in sales technology.  It gives us the resources we need to continue serving our amazing customers, while innovating solutions to solve the complex challenges faced by sellers.”

Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter

The additional funds will be deployed towards product development and market expansion, focusing on the Asia Pacific region, and “tripling down” in EMEA.  Salesloft is enjoying triple-digit growth in EMEA after opening its London EMEA HQ in April 2019.

“This deal is about GROWTH for our CUSTOMERS,” posted Porter on LinkedIn.  “We’re growing >50% annually as the most efficient player in our category, which is critical to long-term sustainability and success.  We will be fueling significant innovation and customer services as a result of this deal.”

“This partnership with Vista is about the future we’re building for our customers,” commented CRO Steve Goldberg.  “It’s about making the lives and jobs of sellers easier.  It’s about quickly delivering the solutions and experience they need to win.”

“Vista is proud to be a preferred partner for founders of fast-growing, high-performing, high-potential companies, and we are excited to work with Kyle and the Salesloft team,” said Monti Saroya, co-head of the Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista.  “Salesloft has built an incredible enterprise software platform that provides tangible ROI by empowering sales teams and managers to increase productivity, and we are excited to bring our decades of enterprise software experience to help Salesloft further fuel its growth trajectory and global expansion.”

Vista wrote a long blog welcoming Salesloft, but the piece did not focus on Salesloft’s current positioning or value proposition.  Instead, Vista discussed its long history working with Porter (it was a Series A investor), Porter’s focus on recruiting talent and helping build the Atlanta tech ecosystem, and his willingness to mothball the Prospector product so the company could focus on building out its Cadence service.

I would add a few other notes about Kyle, whom I’ve known for just as long.  He is a natural-born storyteller who exudes enthusiasm, just as every sales rep should.  He also emphasizes authenticity in sales, the need to balance automation with personalization (a variation on authenticity), and the importance of building a strong company culture.

David Cummings, who has served on Salesloft’s Board since its early days, lauded Kyle Porter and his willingness to pivot the company for growth and recruit top talent.

“Salesloft is mostly the story of the will, determination, and grit of the entrepreneur Kyle Porter.  From a full reboot of the business in the early days, to multiple pivots, and recently navigating the pandemic, Kyle has endured the high highs and low lows of entrepreneurship many times over.  And one of his superpowers is recruiting an amazing team starting with Rob Foreman.  Rob was introduced to Kyle through a chance encounter at a local event.  From there, the two hit it off and developed one of the strongest yin/yang partnerships I’ve ever seen.  The team grew to include incredible leaders across all the functions including Ellie, Sydney, Scott, Chad, Steve, and many others.”

“Kyle was the visionary all along,” continued Cummings.  “Through a strong focus on organization health, never-ending love for the customer (#saleslove), bold acquisitions of several companies, and masterful fundraising, Kyle operated in one of the most aggressive, yet thoughtful, ways imaginable.”

The RevTech space has some excellent CEOs who match product vision and intelligent growth with passion and a stakeholder perspective.  Besides Porter, the industry is lucky to have Henry Schuck (ZoomInfo CEO), Manny Medina (Outreach CEO), Jon Miller (Founder of Engagio and Marketo and currently the Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Demandbase), Sangram Vajre (co-founder of Terminus, author, and leader of the Flip My Funnel movement), and others.

Salesloft supports 4,000 customers, including IBM, Google, Cisco, Shopify, and LinkedIn.

As part of the transaction, Vista will be joining Salesloft’s Board, and Cummings will be exiting it.

Avoma Series A

Conversational Sales vendor Avoma closed on a $12 million Series A led by Headline, with participation from Storm Ventures, Global Founder Capital, Zoom Apps Fund, Operator Partners, Industry Ventures, and existing investors K9 Ventures, Dragon Capital, and Twin Ventures.  Founded in 2017, Avoma has garnered $15 million in total funding.

Avoma combines meeting management, an AI assistant, CRM synchronization, and conversation intelligence into a unified tool.  Other features include meeting snippets, conversational analytics, and keyword searching.

“AI does the first draft, but then you have notes and can go back and highlight notes and provide more context if you need to,” remarked CEO Aditya Kothadiya.

Avoma’s integration partners include

  • CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho
  • Video Collaboration: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet
  • SEP: Salesloft, Outreach, and Groove

The funds will expedite the build-out of their meeting lifecycle assistant.  According to TechCrunch, Avoma will focus on three pillars: AI, user interface, and workflow integrations.   It will invest in its machine learning and natural language processing for notetaking and enhance the user experience.

“Since our launch, we have helped over 300 customers and tens of thousands of professionals save multiple hours per week with AI-generated notes and collaboration and improve meeting outcomes by 30% with actionable insights,” posted Director of Marketing Yaagneshwaran Ganesh on LinkedIn.  “But so far, we have probably accomplished a small percentage of our vision.  Our goal is to not only assist you in notetaking and CRM data entry, but also to help you research attendees, get real-time coaching recommendations, send a follow-up calendar invite, and more.”

Avoma call notes

One of the core value propositions of conversational sales services is their ability to improve the presence of sales reps during calls.  Once relieved of notetaking, sales reps no longer need to delay conversations to jot down notes; instead, they can focus on meeting attendees, gather non-verbal cues, and better manage the discussion flow.

“As a product leader, I was constantly in meetings and spent time taking notes. With every new product, I would hand it over to the customer or product market team but would find that during meetings, I was not listening to what was going on because I was taking notes.  We wanted to apply technology to this so we would make sure nothing was lost.”

Avoma CEO Aditya Kothadiya

Avoma claims that this improved meeting presence results in a thirty percent improvement in meeting outcomes.  Furthermore, reps no longer need to toggle between four or five applications to “prepare for a meeting, take notes, participate, and follow through with participants with action items.”

“With so much context switching and information loss in disparate tools, knowledge professionals spend over 20% of their time on low-value admin tasks,” blogged Kothadiya.  “And that’s why there is an urgent need to streamline and automate workflows across the meeting’s entire lifecycle.”

Avoma is targeting mid-market customers and enjoys “obsessed customers,” according to Jeff Fein, a partner at Headline.  The firm has been using Avoma internally and “loved it.”

“It helped in our own processes, and when we talked to their customers, they were obsessed, many of them saying they could not live without it,” said Fein.  “They said it made their work that much more efficient.  We heard that more consistently, and it piqued our interest in a huge way.”

Avoma has quintupled growth each of the past three years and now supports over three hundred customers.  Success has been built with a lean team of only 15 employees, but the firm plans to quadruple its US and Indian headcount over the next year.  Hiring will focus on the engineering, product, and go-to-market teams.

Global Database Adds Sales Engagement

London-based Sales and Credit Intelligence vendor Global Database added Sales Engagement features to its service.  Sales reps can automate their outbound campaigns with sequences of emails, phone calls, and other tasks.  Other features include A/B testing and analytics.

CEO Nicolae Buldumac demoed the new service to GZ Consulting, which is generally available but undergoing a soft launch with a formal release in early Q1.

“We want our customers to succeed in their outreach campaigns,” explained Buldumac.  However, “having access to data is not enough.  You need to have the necessary tools that will save you time and make your campaigns more effective.”

The Sales Engagement Platform adds an activation platform for sales reps, allowing them to reach out to prospects in a structured manner.

“We already see a lot of positive responses from our existing customers that have started using the platform, and many new features will be released in the coming weeks.”  Among the pending features are a phone dialer, Chrome extension, and Global Academy, “a series with educational material, where we will communicate the best practices to set up your campaigns, with specific examples that are working for us.”

The new Sales Engagement Platform is included as a new module at no extra charge.  The platform supports email templates, sequences, and analytics, but a dialer will not be available until Q1.

Sales reps can select one or multiple contacts from the Prospector module and assign them to a sequence.  Global Database may be licensed regionally or globally, with pricing based on the selected region and number of users.

Sales Engagement Platform provides Send to CRM support for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, with HubSpot planned; however, the service does not yet sync activities between the engagement service and CRMs.

Email templates support dynamic variables, signature blocks, and rich text.  Templates are shareable, so marketing or sales ops can create email messages and share them with the sales team.

Email reports track emails sent, replies received, tasks completed, and deliverability, helping reps and sales operations “make informed decisions on future campaigns.”  Email analytics include top engagement by title, industry, country, and employment levels.

Global Database Email Engagement Analytics

Other email features include out-of-office detection, unsubscribe support, and manual send.

Separately, Global Database announced a data request feature that lets sales reps request similar contacts.

“Once such a request has been received, our system will automatically search in multiple sources,” explained CEO Nicolae Buldumac.  “If there are limited results, this request will be passed to our in-house data enrichment team for manual review.”

Global Database supports Similar Contact prospecting. Global Database editors will research additional prospects if the returned set is small.

Global Database maintains a global collection of company, contact, credit, tenders, and filings data spanning:

  • 120 million companies
  • 118 million contacts
  • 6 million emails
  • 1.2 million direct dials
  • 20 million general numbers

Global Database contacts are GDPR compliant and employ a Legitimate Interest basis for data collection.  Global Database is registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.

“The lawful basis that we rely on for processing personal information in our public records register is that the processing is necessary for our legitimate interests which are not outweighed by the rights and freedoms of the individual (Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR),” explained Buldumac.  “Our legitimate interests include the fulfillment of our mission as set out above; namely, to increase and promote transparency of the corporate and business world, including the existence, ownership, activities, entities, and people connected with them, by maintaining our public register.”

Most Sales Engagement vendors do not own a database (the major exception is VanillaSoft which acquired AutoKlose), but several database vendors have added sales engagement capabilities to their platforms, including ZoomInfo, Cognism, and Data Axle Genie.  Adding sales engagement features is a logical market extension for B2B database companies as it provides workflow and activation tools for their data, increasing the value of the underlying database.

Global Database is profitable, and revenues are growing, but Buldumac chose not to disclose the firm’s growth rate.

IDG Acquires LeadSift

Technology media company IDG Communications acquired Halifax-based intent data vendor LeadSift.  LeadSift identifies a daily digest of in-market leads, “allowing B2B marketers to craft the appropriate messaging for outreach and sales follow-up resulting in robust new business opportunities.”

Over the past eighteen months, IDG has been assembling elements of a MarTech solution, having acquired

  • Triblio – Acquired in 2020, The Triblio ABM platform supports account-based advertising, website personalization, sales activation, orchestration, and intent-based audiences.  Triblio is integrated with Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Salesloft.  In addition, Triblio recently added a Smart Score that employs AI for account prioritization.  The Smart Score uses first and third-party intent, website activity, and CRM data “to identify what accounts should be prioritized for sales outreach.”
  • KickFire – Acquired in September, KickFire provides a cookieless, privacy-compliant visitor id service (first-party intent) that de-anonymizes website traffic at the account level and enriches it with firmographics.
  • LeadSift – LeadSift captures third-party, cookieless intent data at the account and contact level.  Each week it captures 80 million intent signals.  The LeadSift database spans 20 million companies and 30 million contacts.  Customers can create custom triggers based on keywords, job postings, and competitor names.

KickFire and LeadSift are complementary intent services. KickFire identifies in-market buyers on a company website, and LeadSift determines which companies are in-market based on B2B media search activities.

IDG also recently launched a second-party intent data service called IDG Neon that leverages B2B Media interactions with “verified data from personal interactions with technology audiences across events, conversations, and surveys.”  Intent data is gathered from the nearly 45 million global B2B technology purchasers and influencers registered across its proprietary network of digital tech publications.

Neon captures branded conversations, event attendance, roundtable participation, conversations with event sponsors, and individuals posing questions at event sessions.  This level of “deeper engagement” indicates “stronger intent.”

IDG brands include CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld, and Tech Hive.

“Expectations of tech marketers have never been higher as the technology landscape continues to become more competitive.  By positioning IDG at the intersection of media and MarTech, we help B2B marketers navigate the customer journey across a dynamic ecosystem by leveraging unmatched data sets.  LeadSift’s technology is further enhancing our unique intent data that drives ROI for our customers.”

IDG Communications President Kumaran Ramanathan

“The buying journey for B2B technology purchases are extremely complex and involve multiple decision-makers,” said LeadSift co-founder Sreejata Chatterjee.  “Having a view into those intent signals at the contact level provides a massive competitive advantage and directs your sales team to engage with the right buyers at the right time.”

LeadSift was founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2012, focusing on “mining information from public web sources to help businesses identify and engage their customers in the buying journey.”   They were an early proponent of intent data, recognizing its value before it became a core element of ABM programs.

“It is obvious the company that has the most depth and breadth of data wins the B2B demand generation space,” wrote Das and Chatterjee to their customers.  “IDG.com being the #1 Tech Media company with troves of proprietary first-party intent-data across event attendance, engagement with editorial articles, branded conversations, and human-verified insights has a massive head start.  Imagine how scalable and actionable our intent signals will be once we integrate our 3rd-party real-time web-based intent signals with this proprietary first-party intent data stream.”

IDG, based in Boston, provides LeadSift with global reach and access to enterprise customers.  It also offers complementary intent data sets and the Triblio marketing platform for activating the intent datasets.

“3rd-party intent data is one piece (albeit a very important one) of the overall B2B marketing and demand generation puzzle,” continued Das and Chatterjee.  “But what if you could know all the information about your first-party web visitors (IDG | KickFire), cross-reference and prioritize them with 3rd-party intent signals (LeadSift + IDG proprietary first-party data), activate them seamlessly across digital channels (IDG | Triblio), and run highly targeted lead generation programs, all from one single dashboard!”

IDG sees itself at the intersection of media and MarTech.  However, it is not the only tech media vendor playing this angle. For example, TechTarget and Ziff Davis also combine B2B media assets, events (TechTarget’s are digital), multiple categories of intent data, and activation platforms.

“IDG’s goal of moving to the intersection of media and MarTech is to help B2B marketers navigate the customer journey across a dynamic ecosystem by leveraging unmatched data sets,” stated Ramanathan.  “LeadSift’s technology is further enhancing our unique intent data that drives ROI for our customers.”

Account-level intent starts at $12,000 per year. 

Last week, they launched LeadSift 360, a contact-level intent service that supports both keyword and research-based intent signals gathered from over five data sources.  LeadSift360 starts at $30,000 per year. IDG did not disclose deal terms.  LeadSift’s management and staff of fifteen will continue to operate in Halifax.

Informa Takes Stake in OEM Partner Totem

UK-based events and intelligence company Informa announced a pair of transactions. The bigger of the two, its acquisition of B2B content syndication vendor NetLine, was covered in my blog earlier this week.

Informa also announced that it has taken a stake in UK event tech company Totem, an existing partner of its Informa Connect division.  In April, the firms launched ConnectMe, a bespoke licensing of Totem’s platform to support Informa’s virtual and hybrid events.

“With the launch of ConnectMe with Totem, Informa is preparing itself for the next stage in the events experience, one in which we can seamlessly curate and blend the physical and virtual, ensuring the two are complementary, not competitive. 

ConnectMe will ensure that we can cater for varying levels of audience readiness to re-enter physical spaces by ensuring that neither physical nor virtual audiences feel they are excluded from a truly optimal experience.  In 2021 and beyond, that is the service we aim to achieve, and ConnectMe will help us to do it.”

Informa Connect CMO Isobel Peck in April

Informa Connect hosts in-person and virtual events and training, online communities, digital content, and marketing services for the Finance, Biotech/Pharma, and other specialist markets.

“Totem has been an important partner over the last 18 months, and we’re pleased to be deepening this relationship,” said Informa Connect CEO Andrew Mullins.  “We want to keep enhancing our in-person events, adding smart features, technologies, and apps that give our customers an even better experience.  With Totem, we have a partner that is equally committed to outstanding experiences and bringing new innovation to events.”

Wrapping digital intelligence around trade shows is a logical extension of the digitization of sales and marketing. Live events came to a halt in 2020 and are still reeling, but in 2022 we should begin to see them re-emerge. Events should be hybrid, with digital content sharing from the event floor to virtual attendees.

Event attendees also should improve data capture. Loading a trade show scanned file from the exhibition floor has always been subject to delays, with reps following up a week later (if at all) to determine whether there was interest. Calendaring service Chili Piper recently announced Chili Events for setting up trade show meetings prior to an event and follow-up meetings with reps directly from the floor. It is a matter of striking while the iron is hot.

Informa did not disclose the pricing for either deal or the extent of its investment in Totem.

Informa Acquires NetLine

Informa, a UK-based intelligence and events company, acquired B2B content syndication vendor NetLine Corporation, adding audience development, buyer-level intent, and B2B digital demand generation capabilities.  The firm also announced that it had taken a stake in Totem, its OEM partner for ConnectMe, a virtual and hybrid event solution.

NetLine will join Informa Tech, “one of the world’s largest providers of intelligence, industry forums, and marketing services to the tech industry.”  Informa Tech supports over 250 global events, 40 media publications (e.g., Information Week, ITPro Today, Network Computing), newsletters, research (Ovum, IHS Markit | Technology, Heavy Reading, and Tractica), and training.

NetLine’s B2B content syndication lead generation network reaches more than 125 million unique visitors per month and processes more than 700,000 leads monthly.

Back in July, NetLine rolled out Lead Management Platform, a SaaS solution for capturing B2B leads and amplifying marketing content.  The Lead Management Platform, initially developed for tier 1 B2B media companies, supports centralized lead capture, qualification, routing, and analytics tied to amplification campaign capabilities.  The Lead Management Platform requires no coding, allowing marketers to quickly test and rollout white-labeled gated content.

“The platform is entirely focused on helping marketers more efficiently translate their gated content experiences into more efficient outcomes,” explained NetLine’s Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting in July.  “If and/or when the Marketer has the need to increase lead volume beyond what their own channels can support, they can simply convert their inbound oriented campaign already built within the interface, add a budget, and tap into NetLine’s audience for on-demand scale.  No IOs, no negotiations, no phone calls.  Simple on-demand access to [the] largest B2B lead generation platform on the web.”

NetLine immediately matches visitors against its 52 million global B2B contact database (60% US) via cookies or email addresses.  In addition, lead forms are both customizable and dynamic, allowing companies to specify which information is to be captured and dynamically removing fields in its form display.

NetLine claims that over 70% of its audiences are immediately recognized so that there is zero or limited typing required.  Most users will be required to enter only five to seven fields, a significant reduction in data entry versus traditional and non-predictive forms.  And because data entry is reduced, abandonment rates are lower, generating a higher return on marketing spend.

The lead forms are content-form agnostic.  A common format can be deployed against all content, including webinars and virtual experiences, resulting in a standard data capture format for all content categories.  Forms are also customizable, supporting both basic themes and white-labeled user experiences that match corporate templates.

When a form is submitted, NetLine auto-generates confirmation emails and shares data with enterprise software platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, and ON24. In addition, dynamic filtering removes leads that are poor candidates from being distributed to downstream systems.  As a result, the content is fulfilled, but low-quality leads are not passed downstream.

The Lead Management Platform lets marketers amplify content to targeted audiences with an open auction CPL pricing.  Marketers “simply convert native campaign, add budget, and gain immediate access to the largest volume of content-generated B2B buyer-level data on the web, where more than 700,000 first-party leads are generated across more than 300 industries each month.”

Amplification is targeted, with ads displayed based upon geography, company size, function, and level.  Marketers may also upload company names or domains for targeted ABM campaigns.

CPL pricing begins around $4 per lead, subject to a monthly budget.

“Before today, B2B Marketers needed at least a handful of technologies to run their lead gen programs: software to capture, enrich, scrub, filter, fulfill, report within their own sites and an entirely different suite of vendors to amplify their content beyond the reach of their inbound forms,” said Fortino in July.  “Now, B2B Marketers can do it all with one simple self-service interface. Whether they want to centralize lead capture or create a hub for qualification, routing, analytics, and companion content amplification campaigns, the platform does it all, allowing B2B Marketers to reduce their costs while simultaneously becoming more efficient in the process.”

A free version supports up to five campaigns and 100 leads per month with dynamic forms, integrations, and reporting.  The Standard version, priced at $49 per month, supports 50 campaigns, 500 leads per month, and custom colors and styles.  For enterprise marketers, the Pro edition, priced at $199 per month, supports unlimited campaigns and leads, fully customizable branding, and one custom domain with unlimited sub-domains.

Both monthly and annual pricing are available, with annual pricing discounted by 20%.

Continue to Part II covering the Totem investment.

Gong Previews 2022 Services

Conversational Intelligence vendor Gong previewed a set of product and ecosystem integrations that “solidify its status as the platform for revenue teams.”  New products include Gong Assist for automated task management and Reality-Based Forecasting for improved pipeline projections.  The new Gong Collective supports its expanded universe of partner integrations.

“These moves come as the Gong Reality Platform – which captures and analyzes customer interactions and makes recommendations based on those interactions – continues to improve the performance of customer-facing teams,” stated the firm.

Gong Assist automates sales overhead.

Gong Assist goes beyond task reminders to automate burdensome tasks that steal time away from the primary goals of sales reps: fostering long-term relationships and growing revenue.  For example, instead of simply reminding a rep to set up a meeting or send an email, Gong will draft the email or meeting invite for the rep.  Gong can also tee up congratulatory notes to contacts that have assumed new roles.

Gong Reality-Based Forecasting streamlines pipeline updates.

Gong will also be launching a new Reality-Based Forecasting product that provides “streamlined, bottoms-up forecasting and a fuller look at revenue trends.”  Reps and sales management can view and maintain forecast data directly within Gong instead of toggling to other apps.  In addition, reality-Based Forecasting will automatically remind reps to update forecasts “based on customer interactions that have been captured and analyzed by Gong.”

The Gong Collective is a branding of their partner ecosystem, which supports more than one hundred integrations.  Gong provided details on a few of its partnerships:

  • DocuSign will present contracts within Gong.  It will also alert teams when deals have progressed, but no sales contract has been drafted.
  • Slack Connect, Salesforce’s private channels for customers and partners, are ingested by Gong and treated as an additional engagement signal.

    “Gong and Slack create that digital sales floor where revenue leaders can confidently manage sales teams — motivating and mentoring sales reps remotely, forecasting more accurately, engaging with customers effectively, and closing business more efficiently in a hybrid sales environment,” said Brad Armstrong, SVP of Business Development at Slack.
  • HighSpot and Seismic suggest which content should be shared and Gong gathers visiting analytics “to help customer-facing teams engage effectively and keep deals moving forward.”

“Gong has created raving fans by optimizing the performance of customer-facing teams,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov. “Our new products only add to this value, making the Gong Reality Platform an even more valuable, centralized destination for teams to be successful.”

Outreach Deal Intelligence (Part II)

Continuation from yesterday’s blog on Outreach Deal Intelligence.

The Outreach platform manages and monitors deal health beginning with Sales Development Reps warming up accounts via sequenced outreach.  Once a prospect is ready to speak with an account executive, the meeting is calendared, and relevant stakeholders are notified.  During meetings, Outreach Kaia records, analyzes, and summarizes calls while providing real-time transcription, bookmarking, and insights.

Outreach Kaia also triggers the creation of an opportunity and “recommends a pre-built blueprint for a mutual action plan, known as Success Plans, between buyer and seller.”

Outreach Success Plans align buyers and sellers to improve action and predictability.  They act as a buying hub that allows buyers and sellers to agree on shared success criteria, objectives, and timelines.  Success Plans also support shared access to project resources, allowing new demand unit members to quickly access project documents.  Only invited individuals can participate in the Success Plans.

Outreach claims that two-thirds of buyers have “stopped working with a company mid-deal, simply because the competitor provided a better buying experience.”  Thus, streamlining the document sharing process, framing the timeline, and agreeing on success criteria facilitates the process and improves deal visibility and the likelihood of winning each deal.

“The Success Plan in Outreach is the only integrated mutual action plan that already has all the activity data to date associated with the deal, including the meeting notes and email exchanges.  Combined with the power of AI-captured job titles and sentiment, Success Plans include all the people engaged in the deal on the buying team, along with the milestones, purchasing steps, and resources needed to collaborate on the deal going forward.  Every new meeting booked, stakeholder introduced, and resource shared is automatically synced into the Success Plan.  This takes the administrative tax off the seller and gives them more time to actively sell while ensuring accurate and timely data capture of granular buyer engagement.  Each phase in the Success Plan is pre-configured and linked to a stage in the sales process under the hood. Gone are the days of sales leaders hounding reps for status updates – they are now updated and monitored automatically.”

Outreach CMO Melton Littlepage

As the deal progresses, Outreach captures engagement and sentiment across meetings, emails, and the Success Plan, feeding AI-based deal health insights and recommendations to sales reps and management.  In addition, deal health is aggregated at the team level in Outreach Commit, with projections around which deals are likely to close during the quarter.

Outreach AI Guided Deal Intelligence

Outreach is positioning the new functionality as a “single source of truth for deals, pipeline, and forecasting” that drives “faster deal cycles and more predictable revenue.”  Its platform offers a single solution for sales engagement, conversation intelligence, digital salesrooms, and revenue intelligence.

“Outreach has already demonstrated that by creating operational excellence with a system of action for prospecting, you can optimize your sales processes and qualify more deals, faster,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “Outreach’s new AI-Guided Deal Intelligence demonstrates this again with the closing process – by centralizing the activity around a deal behind a single pane of glass, capturing accurate data and transforming it into deal health insights that drive actions, account executives are more equipped than ever to close more deals, faster, and sales managers, leaders and CROs can sleep soundly knowing they finally have a source of truth for deal health.”

Deal Intelligence will be available for an open beta in early 2022.

Outreach Deal Intelligence

The Outreach Deal Summary provides an opportunity overview, recent activity, and access to Kaia, Commit, and Success Plans.

Sales Engagement Platform vendor Outreach will be rolling out AI-Guided Deal Intelligence in 2022.  The new Deal Insights functionality provides a consolidated opportunity view that includes a deal overview, deal health, risks, and next best action recommendations from a single pane of glass.

“Deal Intelligence doesn’t just warn you a deal is off track but will actually guide you to help understand what you can do now, in the moment, to change the outcome,” explained Senior Communications Manager Amanda Woolley to GZ Consulting.  “Deal Intelligence is going to reach across the Outreach platform and gather signals from all facets of the platform and throughout the customer journey and move from risk identification into action.”

Many of the components of Deal Intelligence such as Sentiment Analysis, Success Plans, Kaia, Commit, and engagement monitoring already exist in the Outreach platform, with the new Deal Intelligence tying together data and insights from the various modules and summarizing them with deal health and next best action recommendations.

“Built on the foundation of our deep machine learning tools like Kaia, Intent, title classification, and more, Deal Intelligence will help remove some of the “best guesses” we revenue leaders have been doing,” explained Outreach CRO Anna Baird.  “Deal Intelligence will be gathering signals and let us know – not only when we have a risk – but what we can do to change the outcome!  It’s not just a warning light, but a full explanation of how to correct the issue.  Deal Intelligence will bring true transparency to opportunity management and help us get to that predictable revenue goal we all want.”

Deal intelligence is gathered across the deal lifecycle and ongoing customer interactions, including sequences, email sentiment, calendaring, Outreach Kaia (conversational intelligence and real-time recommendations), Success Plans (digital salesrooms), and Outreach Commit (pipeline health and forecasting).

“The current ML model looks at the multiple factors and compares them across benchmarks we have collected to derive the [Health Insights] score,” explained Woolley.  “Some of the key top-level factors included Decision-maker engagement, activity across email and calls, meeting analysis as well as interaction within Success Plan.  For every deal, the ML model determines which factors are positive (‘green flag’) or negative polarity (‘red flag’).”

Both red and green flags are displayed in Deal Intelligence.  The Deal Intelligence service summarizes relevant signals, but “given the number of signals captured, it is very hard for a sales rep to drill through every deal.”  Outreach’s goal is to “surface all the relevant information for the sales rep in a unified view with the ability to drill deeper as well as take action from within Outreach.”

“Sales reps only succeed when they take the right actions to close deals, yet for far too long they have lacked true visibility into the health of their deals and are forced to turn to intuition and guesswork to select the next best actions to take. Sales leaders and reps have to contend with disparate, dated sales technologies as they strive for an accurate understanding of their deals, pipeline, and forecast.  CRM solutions provide a way to store data but rely on extensive tedious manual data entry from sales reps, often resulting in a “garbage-in garbage-out” situation that does not help reps or managers make confident decisions.  Point solutions like conversation intelligence offer a way to record conversations and glean insights hours or days later, but at best, they can tell what the reps’ next actions in other systems should be. All are failing to deliver deal observability. And none of them give real-time deal intelligence to sales reps and seamlessly automate the next actions all in one continuous experience.  Until now, that is.”

Outreach CMO Melton Littlepage

Part II continues tomorrow with a discussion of Outreach deal health analytics across the deal lifecycle.

LinkedIn Q4 Sales Navigator Release (Part II)

LinkedIn also addressed the lack of sharing of Sales Navigator Account Maps in its Q4 release.  The value of maps is much greater if they can be shared across the sales and customer success teams.  Sales reps will skip activities that do not have a clear return on investment (i.e., they expedite the sales process, increase the odds of a win, reduce bureaucratic steps, etc.)  Sharing account maps across the team dramatically increases their value and encourages reps to invest the necessary time mapping out the account.  Sharing also assists with account handoffs between SDRs to Account Reps and later to Customer Success teams.

“Selling is a team sport, and we know that team members need to be in the loop and connected on key accounts, especially as changes to the buying committee may be greater and more frequent right now,” wrote Senior Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions Mitali Pattnaik.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account Maps

Account Maps are available to Team and Enterprise licensors.  However, Account Maps may only be shared with co-workers on the same Sales Navigator contract; thus, partners or co-workers with separate Sales Navigator agreements still lack map sharing. 

When others update a shared Account Map, everybody is notified of the update.

Those with CRM sync turned on (Advanced + CRM in January) will enjoy additional CRM features.  Users will be able to create new leads or contacts “in more places within Sales Navigator to better match up with their workflows” and display additional context.  New features include

  • New CRM Cards within Sales Navigator Lead Pages
  • New CRM Badges that notify reps when an account or lead is matched against the CRM
  • Clicking on the CRM Badge provides additional context on Sales Navigator Leads and Accounts from the matched CRM record. For Sales Navigator Leads not found in CRM, a user can create a CRM Contact or Lead.
  • CRM Badges are now displayed in the InMail and Messaging Flow.

LinkedIn will be rolling out Q4 enhancements to customers in the coming weeks, as with other quarterly releases.

LinkedIn also announced updates to LinkedIn Sales Intelligence (LSI), its data service for Sales Operations.  LSI leverages the power of LinkedIn data to “help sales target the right companies and accelerate revenue.”  Launched earlier this year, LSI supports report building, account recommendations, and Account data enrichment.

Sales Operations now has access to industry codes aligned with the NAICS industry taxonomy used in the US, Canada, and Mexico.  Other enhancements include a new welcome flow and access to saved reports on the home page.

LinkedIn Sales Intelligence Report Builder

To assist with report building, a set of LSI Tool-Tips assist with defining Sources, Personas, Market Insights, and Exports.