Advice for Vendors & Purchasers of Sales Intelligence, Sales Engagement, and B2B DaaS Products
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.
D&B Hoover’s customers can now view and build lists of in-market accounts using the Bombora intent file. Users can set up SmartLists (dynamic lists) with a combination of account and intent data to identify in-market ICP accounts. The list is then displayed on the sales rep’s desktop and daily email digest.
Target lists can be assembled from over 175 selects that span company, contact, intent, and technographics. Bombora intent data is gathered from over 4,000 B2B media website and span 7,000 pre-defined topics. 70% of the websites are exclusive to Bombora.
Dun & Bradstreet provides a sophisticated approach to selecting intent topics that tie to business strategy. Instead of simply choosing the obvious topics, the firms recommend that customers employ topic clusters, “a group of like-minded Intent topics [that are] representative of all facets of a product or service.” Clusters would include
Multiple intent topics may be monitored in a SmartList.
Dun & Bradstreet has removed intent scores, which are often confusing. By creating clusters, topics are either surging or not, with no interpretation required. Instead, the number of clustered topics serves as the indicator of surge strength.
The firms recommend that content be adjusted based on the number of intent topics identified for a prospect. Sales and Marketing should “serve higher-level or awareness-based content to those showing interest in one or two topics, and lower-funnel content to those showing interest on many topics.” Furthermore, prospects with many surging topics are probably closer to making a purchase.
D&B Hoovers also added 4 million direct dial numbers to their database, bringing the product total to 6.2 million. Direct dials contain a set of standard and mobile numbers, so users should hover over the direct dial number to determine the phone type.
“As more business contacts work from home, direct dials are essential to engage customers in real-time, from anywhere,” wrote Product Management VP Phil McWade. “Access these numbers in the lists you’ve already created, when viewing a Contact Profile, or within Contacts Search & Build a List results.”
D&B Hoover’s coverage has grown to 209 million global companies and 235 million contacts
RBC calculated sales efficiency for 72 public SaaS companies and found the average sales efficiency at .8X, meaning that public SaaS companies returned 80 cents for every dollar spent on sales and marketing in the previous year.
Sales Efficiency is defined as the revenue growth rate over a period divided by sales and marketing expense margin in the previous period:
According to OpenView Partners SaaS benchmarking report, “Sales and marketing spend peaks at 50% of ARR at the expansion stage. Too many companies underinvest in sales productivity, saddling them with huge costs without the ROI…You should be carefully monitoring your sales efficiency and looking for ways to improve or maintain it year-over-year. Look out for the ‘leaky bucket’ problem, where you spend significant sums to acquire new customers, but then they churn shortly thereafter (churn bait).“
As a general rule, firms with a sales efficiency less than 0.5 do not have a “sustainable investable growth model,” wrote startup advisor Anna Talerico in SaaSX. A ratio between 0.5 and 1.0 is “much better;” however, “while this isn’t necessarily capital efficient (which would make it a hard ratio for a bootstrapped company to maintain for any length of time), it does indicate sales & marketing efficiency and many investors view this as acceptable.” Better yet, firms with a ratio above one have a “strong sales efficiency and a capital-efficient growth model.” However, when the ratio is significantly above one, the firm may be underinvesting in sales and marketing and “leaving growth on the table.”
Zoom formally launched its Zoom apps at the end of July, with Chorus and Gong among the launch partners. Over fifty business and consumer apps were launched, but Zoom did a poor job of indexing the apps, making it difficult to find apps in a category without mousing over each unknown app.
Chorus, which was acquired by ZoomInfo two weeks ago, announced General Availability of its Chorus app for Zoom Video Communications. It’s a better name than being called the ZoomInfo app for Zoom Video Communications which would simply be confusing to the marketplace.
The Chorus App for Zoom
“The Chorus app for Zoom enables us to bring the power of Conversation Intelligence seamlessly into every meeting,” said Dominik Facher, Vice President, Product Management at Chorus.ai. “We’re bringing Chorus everywhere you work — because that’s where the voice of the customer belongs. This extension of Chorus empowers sellers to have better, more meaningful interactions in real-time.”
The Chorus Zoom app supports live notetaking with the transcript attached to the digital recording. Other features include
Team / Collaborator Engagement and Follow-up – Reps can share snippets of calls with managers, technical support, product teams, etc. The shared content is in the voice of the customer, improving the context and fidelity of the forwarded information or query. Collaboration is supported by one-click pins for flagging shareable moments.
Hashtags, such as #objections, push moments to a Chorus playlist.
@Mentions for looping in colleagues during calls.
A post-meeting email summary
Automated syncing with Salesforce, including budget data, stakeholders, and the post-meeting email summary
Meeting analytics
Meeting Prep intelligence – The Zoom client displays deal velocity, next steps or discussion topics from prior calls, and deal context like buying stage, key stakeholders, and deal amount.
Participant talk time and key topic trackers
While the newly launched app supports Zoom, Chorus also gathers intelligence from other meeting platforms and emails. This processing of multiple communication channels provides a set of engagement and deal risk analytics that will be supplemented by ZoomInfo’s Streaming Intent data, visitor intelligence, Scoops, Chat, and SmartForms.
“Chorus and Zoom are both intent on fundamentally changing the way work is done in a virtual environment,” said Ross Mayfield, Product Lead, Zoom Apps & Integrations for Zoom. “It’s about making our customer and prospect relationships stronger. With the Chorus app for Zoom, the benefits of Conversation Intelligence are more accessible than ever before.”
The Gong App for Zoom
Gong, which competes directly with Chorus, also launched its app this week with similar conversational intelligence for sales features. Gong automates transcription, notetaking, and analytics. Users can also tag colleagues for feedback, leverage timestamps, and attach comments in context. Gong employs AI for coaching, noting points of interest, and flagging deal risks.
“The new Gong app takes two tools that sales pros find invaluable today – Gong and Zoom – and makes them even more useful,” said Chief Product Officer of Gong, Eilon Reshef. “We’re enabling revenue professionals to stay engaged in customer conversations by plugging into their daily workflow.”
By managing recording, transcription, analytics, and intelligence, Chorus and Gong allow reps to step away from traditional notetaking and focus on the meeting, helping them be more present. As a result, they can ask better questions and manage the meeting flow more effectively while avoiding awkward pauses when taking notes.
The Zoom App marketplace, which launched late last year, already has over 50 apps, including
Zoom also announced its Zoom Events service for hybrid and virtual events. Marketers can “seamlessly manage and host back-to-back event sessions from sales summits, customer events, trade shows, and internal events.” Features include event hubs, dedicated corporate virtual event spaces, customizable registration, reporting, and a chat-enabled virtual event lobby.
“Zoom Apps and Zoom Events are critical components in broadening Zoom’s offering and reach,” said Roopam Jain, VP, Information and Communications Technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “These solutions empower users to accomplish more with video communications and are a testament to Zoom’s focus of enabling customers to create and grow businesses entirely on its platform—whether through applications, integrations, events, or other services.”
Gong’s Five Operating Principles of Revenue Intelligence.
Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong announced plans to open its first European office in Dublin. It already has over one hundred European clients, including Aircall, Hopin, GoCardless, and MOO.
“After many international companies reached out to us, looking for access to the insight uncovered by our revenue intelligence platform, we knew it was time to meet global demand in a strategic and thoughtful way,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov. “With a physical presence in Europe, we can continue to demonstrate our category leadership, support the massive growth we’ve seen in the past year, and deliver the product customers are asking for.”
The new office will be managed by Gong’s newly appointed VP of EMEA, Wendy Harris, who previously led European sales for CarGurus and Dropbox. The firm is hiring for sales, marketing, customer success, and G&A positions.
“Gong’s revenue intelligence platform is transforming the way companies do business by empowering sales organizations to adopt data-driven strategies,” she said. “Joining a high-growth company and leading its global expansion in my hometown of Dublin is truly the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Gong supports 26 languages, including French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese, with additional languages planned. The Revenue Intelligence platform captures and analyzes phone, email, and meeting conversations, providing insights into deals, people, and the market.
Gong has also been building out its partner network, including Bain & Company, Sandler, and SBR Consulting.
Gong’s June Series E valued the firm at $7.25 billion. Over the past year, it grew its headcount by 89% to over 700 employees. The Israeli firm was founded in 2015. The firm will see stiffer competition from Chorus, which was acquired by ZoomInfo two weeks ago. ZoomInfo provides it with deep pockets, global data enrichment, workflow tools, a chatbot, and a sales engagement platform.
Buyer-level intent data vendor NetLine rolled out its Lead Management Platform, a SaaS solution for capturing B2B leads and amplifying marketing content. The Lead Management Platform, which was initially developed for tier 1 B2B media companies, supports centralized lead capture, qualification, routing, and analytics tied to amplification campaign capabilities.
“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. “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.
Fortino emphasized that no coding is required, allowing marketers to test and roll out their solutions quickly. “Unlike other data enrichment technologies, all of which are restricted to API deployment, we designed the product to support the needs of a nimble marketer ready, willing, and able to move without reliance of developers and/or the need to schedule a project. Our goal was to offer B2B Marketers with the ability to launch a content-centric, white-labeled, gated content experience with system-level enrichment and on-demand scale in minutes.”
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. “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%.
ZoomInfo has not been shy about acquiring companies in its bid to become a leading revenue acceleration company. This morning, they announced the acquisition of Chorus.AI, a leading Conversation Intelligence company. While most of its deals have been small, Chorus has the opportunity to leverage ZoomInfo’s company and contact intelligence with rich engagement data and analytics, placing the firm at the center of the rapidly growing Conversation Intelligence market.
Chorus employs machine learning and AI to “capture and analyze” calls, meetings, and emails, digitizing customer interactions, and capturing insights for revenue teams and sales management. As a result, sales reps can be more present during calls as they no longer need to capture action items and take notes while leading sales meetings. Automating insight capture allows them to be better engaged during the call, avoiding those awkward pauses for note-taking.
While not discussed in the press release, combining Chorus’ NLP with Insent should raise bot performance and become another leg of conversation intelligence at the top of the funnel.
The expanded ZoomInfo will support and assess a broad set of digital touchpoints for intent and engagement:
Chorus also assists with buying committee discovery. While ZoomInfo has long supported contact discovery at the account level, monitoring engagement to determine who is involved in deals and who is being referenced in conversations is the next major step in buying committee discovery, moving it from educated guesswork to a scientific approach. Once committee members are identified, Chorus monitors conversations for sentiments, motivations, and concerns, helping gauge deal health. ZoomInfo will supply Chorus with rich company and contact information fed to customer CRMs and continuously maintained by ZoomInfo’s APIs and connectors.
Chorus Momentum Insights
Chorus’ Momentum Insights, released in December, helps revenue teams understand customer relationships, improve their forecasting, identify which interactions propel deals forward, and flag deal risks.
“Momentum Insights will unlock learnings never before available from the CRM to harness the most valuable dataset available—conversations with customers,” said Chorus CEO Jim Benton at the time. “This will empower revenue teams to solve complex problems which require strong relationships, and relationships ultimately drive revenue. Reps get exactly what they need to engage and personalize their efforts, while leadership is able to trust the unbiased data aggregated from each opportunity to inform critical business decisions.”
“By integrating keyword trackers from Chorus into ZoomInfo, revenue teams will also be able to create audiences based on insights from conversations, flag deals and renewals that could be in jeopardy, and trigger alerts to address concerns in real-time,” stated ZoomInfo.
The deal added $18 billion to the company’s TAM, raising it to $70 billion. The acquisition is “expected to be accretive to growth immediately, generate adjusted operating profits within 12 months, and be accretive to cash flow in the second half of FY 2022.”
“ZoomInfo is the only company that can marry a best-in-class data layer with world-class go-to-market applications,” said CEO Henry Schuck. “The acquisition of Chorus will accelerate our vision to deliver a modern go-to-market platform that brings together best-in-class intelligence with comprehensive data management, workflow, and engagement software, empowering companies to effectively execute their revenue-generating strategies. With the largest Conversation Intelligence patent portfolio in the industry, Chorus will advance each aspect of our vision by surfacing a new category of insights, illuminating new workflows, and enabling more targeted engagement at scale.”
CEO Henry Shuck has been open to both large and small deals, so long as the combination of ZoomInfo and the acquired company drives significant growth in revenue at the acquisition. A few decades ago, the term was synergy, but that phrase was used so often to describe failed deals that it is now verboten when describing acquisitions. However, ZoomInfo with Chorus has the opportunity to grow significantly faster than as a standalone organization.
As with the recently acquired Insent.AI and Clickagy, Chorus will benefit from access to the breadth, depth, and quality of ZoomInfo’s B2B dataset and access to ZoomInfo’s Go To Market strategy and efficient sales processes. With an LTV / CAC ratio greater than ten, ZoomInfo should be able to efficiently cross-sell and upsell Chorus’ analytics across its 20,000 customers.
Chorus also sets up ZoomInfo’s new Engage platform to challenge market leaders SalesLoft and Outreach. Chorus is one of the leading Conversation Intelligence firms.
“We are thrilled about the opportunity to join forces with ZoomInfo and bring Conversation Intelligence to every revenue team,” said Jim Benton, Chorus.ai CEO, who will join ZoomInfo as SVP, Emerging Products. “ZoomInfo has a bold vision of delivering a world-class go-to-market platform that empowers companies to drive better execution and more revenue. Chorus will play a vital role in helping deliver on that promise with deep, A.I.-driven insights based on real interactions with prospects and customers, a previously untapped source of crucial data about their relationships.”
Frost & Sullivan named Chorus a 2021 Customer Value Leader in Conversation Intelligence. “Frost & Sullivan finds Chorus’ value proposition is multi-faceted as it offers vital benefits for various personnel, including sales, customer success, sales development, and frontline managers, as well as long-term solutions designed to promote employee skill growth,” wrote Samantha Fisher, Best Practices Research Analyst.
The deal was priced about $575 million in cash. The purchase price includes a cash tax benefit related to the asset purchase of more than $100 million, ZoomInfo said. The transaction will be funded with cash on hand and $500 million in additional financing.
European IT Sales and Marketing Agency BNZSA announced that it is enjoying “hypergrowth” with 274% year-on-year revenue growth in Q2. Bookings are up 176% year-to-date. It is forecasting 300% annual growth in 2021.
During Q2, BNZSA added 25 new clients and doubled its multi-national team. It hired 163 employees, evenly distributed between their offices in Madrid and Tangiers. BNZSA employs more than 300 employees from 34 nations, allowing it to broadly deliver tele-based lead generation services in sixteen languages across EMEA. BNZSA has also been expanding its lead generation services in the Americas.
Q2 net revenue retention rose to 190%.
BNZSA doubled its campaign delivery load in H1, completing 433 lead generation campaigns.
“Coming off the back of a record-breaking 2020, we planned for 2021 to be a year of hypergrowth. By January, a lot of meticulous planning had been done – in business development, client services, data, IT, and HR – to ensure that we are able to effortlessly scale up throughout the year and meet unprecedented client demand.
“The phenomenal performance in the first half of the year demonstrates the unique value BNZSA brings to the B2B IT lead generation marketplace. It also indicates that demand for enterprise hardware and software solutions is very strong globally. We are seeing businesses aggressively investing in their infrastructures to enable their teams to operate effectively from wherever, and to ramp-up their agility in responding to customer needs.”
BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud
BNZSA’s agents place more than 1.5 million calls a year, delivering a 96% lead acceptance rate.
Earlier this year, BNZSA launched its Intent Activation Engine. The service identifies, tracks, and activates buyer intent. BNZSA combines technographic, firmographic, intent, NLP, and B2B telemarketing data to deliver a set of intent-activated leads. Agents then initially join calls to foster “warm handovers” to their clients.
Along with tele-based demand generation, BNZSA supports buying committee identification; intent, firmographic and technographic insights; and prospect engagement.
“BNZSA is built on four core values – people, highest quality, extra mile, and changing the industry,” Brahim added. “Our business is all about people and the relationships we build with clients and their prospects. We’re obsessed with the quality of the information we hold, how we use it, and the insights it brings to client programmes – as well as the quality service we deliver daily. Going the extra mile is not a nice to have, it’s how we operate. Bring all of this together and we’re changing the industry by default.”
Headquartered in Madrid, BNZSA is well-positioned to conform to GDPR and country-specific data privacy regulations. It was founded seven years ago as a marketing agency focused on tele-based demand generation. It has steadily grown at 30% per annum since launch and grew revenue by 38% last year before entering its hypergrowth phase this year.
BNZSA has over 100 clients, including Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Juniper Networks, Oracle, Samsung, and SAP. Growth is combined with a 95% client retention rate.
Sales Engagement Platform vendor SalesLoft released a pair of reports that assist with attribution and deal engagement: Outcomes Dashboard and Cadence Outcomes. SalesLoft claims that it is the “only company that can tie customer touchpoints and activities to actual revenue outcomes like deals won, revenue per customer, and revenue per reps.
Unfortunately, “sales outcomes have been notoriously hard to track within the industry, especially over the past year when sellers worked remotely. They’ve joined data about buyer engagement + opportunity data and put it…front and center in SalesLoft. Now, teams are better equipped to know what’s working so they can stop guessing and get better results.”
Kaelen Delaune of PR firm Kickstand Communications
The Outcomes Dashboard associates the last activity to revenue. The new dashboard helps managers identify top performers, focus on opportunities for improvement, and coach toward desired outcomes.
Traditionally, sales metrics focused on how many calls were made, emails sent, appointments set, and meetings held. While this intelligence is useful, it measures process inputs, not their efficacy. By associating these inputs with results, managers can identify which activities are moving the revenue needle and which ones are sub-optimal or under-deployed by reps, requiring coaching.
“Every sales team is trying to drive outcomes, not activities. Until now, outcomes have been hard to track,” said Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer for SalesLoft. “When teams know what’s working, they can stop guessing and get better results.”
The Outcomes Dashboard helps managers project where they stand versus plan, identify the top performers and those in need of coaching, and improve forecasting.
Cadence Outcomes identify which cadences are driving meetings booked and opportunities created, helping managers and reps fine-tune and run cadences that move deals forward.
“Now that we have outcome data, we can provide richer analytics. The Outcomes Dashboard lets managers see how their teams are performing versus goals. We continue to invest in data insights for customers, through analytics like the Outcomes Dashboard, and through explainable AI, like the Deal Engagement Score, which is also now available.”
Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer at SalesLoft
In a conversation with GZ Consulting, Fields emphasized the value of multi-channel cadences, noting that multi-channel approaches provide a forty percent lift in outcomes. Thus, SalesLoft is looking to “make it as easy as possible to sell” through the deployment of “multiple channels across a single platform.”
The Outcomes Dashboard and Cadence Outcomes are available in all of SalesLoft’s packages. SalesLoft also released Deal Engagement Scores to GA. These employ over thirty factors for evaluating engagement across cadences and deals.
Last week, SalesLoft acquired InStereo, a professional services partner. InStereo provides go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
Sales Engagement vendor SalesLoft announced that it acquired professional services partner InStereo. InStereo, founded in 2018 by Bill Galfano and Adam Post, was an early ecosystem partner that has grown alongside SalesLoft. Last year, SalesLoft named them their “Partner of the Year.”
“We were impressed by their focus on what the customer is trying to achieve,” SalesLoft President and Chief Strategy Officer Rob Forman told GZ Consulting.
As a partner, InStereo helped “B2B Sales and Marketing teams better engage with buyers to create more demand, authentically engage prospects, and convert prospects into delighted customers.”
“Bringing InStereo directly into the SalesLoft family is a key way we are investing in our customers’ success. Our customers will benefit from InStereo’s deep understanding of buyer journeys and engagement strategies. Their experience and proven enterprise methodologies will help customers operationalize the SalesLoft platform and accelerate the value of Sales Engagement across their entire revenue organization.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
InStereo focuses on go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce delivered through a pair of consulting services:
Buyer Experience Strategy focuses on the buyer’s journey, ICP, demand unit persona, and the “buyer engagement blueprint.”
“We believe customer journey maps are more than just wall art,” states InStereo. “We create buyer journeys you can activate. By understanding how buyers approach the purchase process, sales and marketing teams can better align people, process, and content to deliver just what buyers need, when they need it.”
Buyer Engagement Services pairs clients with a Strategist and Revenue Consultant to assist with enterprise software implementations. For SalesLoft, they focus on “1:1, personalized engagement via cadences” and process automation. For marketing automation, InStereo assists with nurture campaigns and optimization, and for CRM, they focus on leveraging CRM capabilities and improving data quality. Other services include SalesLoft Admin as a Service and sales development services.
“At SalesLoft, our goal isn’t to just sell software; it’s to help our customers exceed their revenue goals,” said SalesLoft CRO Steve Goldberg. “Too many times software companies focus on features and technology, not the success of their customers. InStereo shares our passion for helping our customers get the outcomes they’re looking for.”
InStereo’s customers skew towards enterprise implementations. SalesLoft “plans to take their methodologies into new areas of our business,” expanding InStereo beyond the technology vertical into financial services, SalesLoft’s second-largest vertical.
InStereo has completed over 150 customer engagements. Joint customers include Cargill, Pegasystems, and 3M.
“This past year we tripled our investment into our alliance organization and programs because empowering our partners leads to success for our customers,” said Forman. “InStereo leveraged the power of our partnership and consistently drove incredible outcomes for our mutual customers.”
All twenty InStereo employees will be joining SalesLoft, including their two founders and Carrie McGrew, InStereo’s VP of Strategy. In addition, Galfano will be joining the CRO Leadership Team as the SVP of Consulting Services.
SalesLoft did not provide any pricing deals on the acquisition.
Sales Engagement Platform Groove announced a new Auto Contact Capture feature that identifies missing Salesforce contacts cc’d on emails or meeting invitations. Groove helps fill out the buying committee, capturing intelligence around members at the periphery of deals while reducing rep data entry overhead.
Beyond demand unit identification, Auto Contact Capture monitors engagement across the buying committee. “This ensures that every contact involved in the buying process receives a consistent, timely, and relevant experience from their first engagement,” wrote Groove.
“Now more than ever, businesses need to be able to get a complete picture of their sales pipeline in order to maximize revenue,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein. “By consolidating revenue intelligence and advanced activity capture into one unified sales engagement platform, Groove empowers businesses to close more deals and intelligently refine their sales processes.”
Groove captures and logs revenue intelligence from emails, calendars, meetings, and LinkedIn communications. Users control which categories are captured and logged to leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and cases. While Groove does not offer direct contact enrichment, records can be enriched through subscription partners such as ZoomInfo.
To ensure data integrity, Groove performs duplicate checking that begins with the email but includes additional heuristics. Groove will not create a contact if the email does not match a domain already existing as an account in Salesforce. Groove also maintains user and domain-level blocklists to ensure that only relevant business contacts are created via Auto Contact Capture.
Groove does not provide user alerts concerning captured records, but “it’s easy for reps to identify contacts that have been automatically added to Salesforce,” Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein wrote to GZ Consulting. “Each contact created through Auto Contact Capture has a custom Groove field that is marked as true (Is Created by Groove), allowing for quick analysis and reporting on all contacts created through this new feature.”
Groove has focused on expanding its revenue intelligence capabilities over the past year. Recent enhancements include activity sync, reporting, and analytics features. In March, the firm rolled out real-time opportunity and pipeline management and enhanced ROI reporting.
“Through this expanded capability set, Groove enables revenue leaders to make real-time, data-driven business decisions based on real campaign results at both the individual and team level,” stated Groove. Groove is built natively in Salesforce and uses SFDC as its data store, acting as an engagement layer on top of Salesforce. Thus, there is no data sync process between Groove and Salesforce.
