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.
European third-party intent data vendor Cyance closed on an £860,000 funding round that included existing investors Blackfinch Ventures and Nexus Investments. The funds will be deployed for ongoing product and market expansion, including enterprise customer expansion in Europe and ABX platform development.
Last year, the firm doubled its headcount, grew revenue by 18%, and raised ACV by 30%. It also shifted from being an intent data vendor to an ABX platform. As with many other MarTech vendors, revenue flattened in Q2 of last year and began growing again in the second half of the year. They have built significant momentum in 2021 and are on pace to nearly double ARR this year.
“The fact that we’ve seen such solid commercial and financial performance over the past 12 months, despite the tough market conditions, demonstrates the appetite for accurate and localised intent data and the enormous potential within this market. And as businesses start to look beyond the pandemic and the economic recovery gathers pace, we expect demand to increase further. Taking on this new investment allows us to strengthen our team and further invest in our product. We’re now perfectly placed to take advantage of these new opportunities and cement our position as the leading ABX platform with unique intent data for European buyers.”
Cyance CEO Bulent Osman
According to CPO Jon Clarke, Cyance is “rapidly building out an ABX platform proposition” that drives better decisioning and aligns sales and marketing teams. The platform serves both sales and marketing teams, promoting revenue team collaboration, cohesion, and efficiency with a unified versus siloed data platform.
As with other vendors that have recently begun using ABX instead of ABM, Cyance emphasizes account-based programs and processes across the full revenue team and customer life cycle. ABM has long emphasized sales and marketing alignment, but the bulk of product development has been marketing-centric. The shift to ABX captures both the broader vision of ABM and a greater emphasis upon the customer experience across the full lifecycle.
“Cyance has transformed account-based marketing by developing and integrating a sophisticated SaaS solution with global, third-party intent data which addresses the needs of the European market,” said Reuben Wilcock, Head of Ventures at Blackfinch Ventures. “They have demonstrated solid growth from global B2B brands in the last 12 months, despite the challenging times we find ourselves in. We’re excited to continue supporting Cyance as it helps some of the world’s leading companies to transform their demand generation and account-based marketing programs and achieve more efficient ROI.”
Their January release sports improved intent signal tailoring and segmentation, beefed up technographics, new customer dashboards, and improved service and support. The platform offers an updated UI, enhanced ICP definition, and buying journey stage identification.
Coverage continues with a discussion of Cyance’s database and intent models.
First and third-party intent data vendor Bombora closed on $20 million in growth capital financing from Runway Growth Capital. The cash infusion “will be used to help Bombora capitalize on market opportunities, build stronger partner relationships, and accelerate its pace of innovation.”
The funds will help them expand data partnerships across the sales and marketing ecosystem.
“We want to make it easier for brands and their agencies to use it in their own stacks and chosen solutions, and for our platform partners to enhance the value of their own offerings,” said Bombora CEO Erik Matlick.
The firm is also looking to “deliver solutions that enable addressable advertising across the cookieless landscape for publishers and partners alike,” Matlick told Adweek.
“The B2B intent data market is growing quickly, and marketers are seeking better, more efficient ways to identify and engage with in-market prospects. We have been impressed with Bombora’s expertise, and its ‘data collective’ approach really stood out to us in the market. This partnership adds to Runway’s already strong history of supporting key players in the data and marketing technology space and we are excited to have Bombora join our portfolio.”
Mark Donnelly, Managing Director, Head of Origination at Runway
In other news, Bombora announced that it implemented BERT-based natural language processing in its intent categorization, resulting in a 26% increase in topic prediction. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) looks at the context of each occurrence of a word.
“Bombora’s engineers and data scientists never stop looking for ways to serve our customers better,” said Bombora Data Science VP Nicholaus Halecky, Ph.D. “The BERT-based B2B Topic Classifier demonstrates a substantial performance increase in Company Surge intent signal quality, and we know this will improve our customers’ business results.”
The BERT implementation was spearheaded by former PwC and DialogTech data scientist Amber McKenzie, Ph.D., who joined Bombora as VP Data Science. BERT is an open-sourced NLP developed by Google. It was implemented in Google Search in late 2019 and has since been deployed by Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Wayfair. BERT distinguishes meaning by assessing word order context, seeing the difference in meaning between “the stock of apples has dropped” and “Apple’s stock has dropped.”
ZoomInfo hinted at an even broader vision of automated lead qualification and workflows in a recent blog that listed four categories of qualifying data:
ZoomInfo does not support programmatic advertising, chatbots, or Slack notifications, so there is significant running room for product development, particularly around expanded intent. For example, a recent study by XANT found that inbound lead response rates decay quickly, but reps fail to respond promptly, and many fall between the cracks. The study analyzed three years of inbound leads at over 400 companies. XANT looked at 5.7 million inbound leads and found that 57.1% of first call attempts took place after a week or more, and only 0.1% of inbound leads were responded to within five minutes. However, firms that responded within those first five minutes had an 8X conversion rate versus later return calls.
“Maybe we simply didn’t realize what we were leaving on the table,” wrote XANT. “Maybe we over-rotated on targeted ABM strategies at the expense of speed-to-lead. Marketing automation shouldn’t replace meaningful and quick sales engagement.”
XANT proposes a second problem that slows lead response times: the manual assignment of leads to individuals, resulting in two sets of delays – the lead routing process and the sales reps’ ability to respond quickly when a batch of leads is handed to them.
Tying inbound leads (emails, webforms, chatbots) to workflows is the next step beyond enrichment. It allows for immediate lead scoring, assignment, and routing decisions, speeding up the response rate while determining each lead’s best course of action. The Trigger / Filter / Action methodology for intent and event-based leads fits perfectly with these other inputs. Furthermore, Chatbots and FormComplete often gather a few extra qualifying details that would be filter inputs.
“There is perhaps no greater need than for sellers to be calling on the right people at the right time,” said SalesTech analyst Nancy Nardin. “Fortunately, the level of accuracy and timeliness of data has improved by leaps and bounds with the emergence of AI, and improved data collection, cleansing, and enrichment.”
For over a decade, Sales Intelligence vendors such as Dun & Bradstreet, InsideView, Artesian Solutions, and ZoomInfo have offered sales triggers based upon executive changes, funding events, M&A, etc.. D&B Hoovers, along with many European vendors that process registered filings data, includes data change alerts (e.g., credit score change, revenue growth) and registered filings. As vendors are now adding in visitor intelligence and intent signals, there is the risk of quickly overwhelming sales reps with alerts. And since most vendors do not yet offer workflow solutions for filtering and automating sales activities, there is a strong likelihood that reps begin to view these alerts as noise instead of actionable signals. The more generalized the signal (e.g., website visits), the greater the possibility of signals being considered spam.
To further confuse things, Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs) have emerged as sales automation platforms, but they are only loosely tied to a few of the sales intelligence vendors. In many cases, the functionality is simply Send to SEP functionality.
ZoomInfo and Vainu (see 3/21 issue) now tie together triggers and actions subject to filters. While there is still a risk that reps are overwhelmed (e.g., too many automated cadences being sent to SEPs), the filters help mitigate the risk and ensure that activity is focused on an organization’s best prospects and tied to event-specific messaging.
For technology sales, ZoomInfo offers technographic changes and Scoops. The Scoops dataset is gathered from official data (e.g., public filings, PPP loans), surveys, and in-house research teams. Daily, ZoomInfo reaches out to contacts in its database to gather market intelligence about projects and the challenges they face in their department. As an incentive, ZoomInfo offers an Amazon gift card or charitable donation to each respondent. The responses are the basis of many of their Scoops.
“We are constantly evaluating new sources and pieces of information that can provide value to our customers in the form of Scoops. Last year, our Scoop number increased greatly because of new processes and expanded information coverage, including the addition of Scoops directly related to PPP loan recipients. Through continued innovation and expansion, we anticipate that our Scoops volume will continue to increase over time. We have several in-house research teams dedicated to various types of Scoop coverage, and we utilize many of the same sources to gather Scoops that are laid out on our B2B Data Sources webpage, including updates from leadership webpages, news monitoring, public filings, and company-issued announcements.”
ZoomInfo Communications Director Steve Vittorioso
The Scoop volume doubled to 917,000 events in 2020.
While the primary Workflows use cases are focused on revenue acceleration, Workflows may also be used for executive recruitment.
Admins have an approval queue for workflows created by non-admins.
Admins can edit, clone, run, or delete Workflows. They can also create workflows for non-admins or permit non-admins to create workflows subject to admin approval.
Non-admins have access to fewer integrations, cannot assign workflows to peers, and are subject to lower export limits.
Workflows do not support FormComplete, ZoomInfo’s webform, but the functionality is on the product roadmap.
ZoomInfo Workflows are natural language statements that follow a trigger/filter/action process.
ZoomInfo rolled out an upgraded Workflows product for automating trigger-based tasks. The service sports a simplified natural-language UI for building workflows “in ways that feel conversational, simple, and secure.”
ZoomInfo Senior Product Director Apparao Karri explained that Workflows are at the intersection of go-to-market data availability and sales automation, calling it “the long tail of GTM automation.”
Continued Karri, “Intelligent Automation is a key differentiator for businesses, and the underlying technology stack is mature and ready to deliver at scale. ZoomInfo Workflows is a product built on this framework to improve productivity, reduce lost opportunities, and bring consistency to the go-to-market motions.”
Product Marketing Director Thad Peterson contrasted Workflows with Marketing Automation Platforms:
“Marketing automation has existed for many years, but often on a generic playing field. For example, when visitors fill out a form on a company website, marketers can drop their information into a sequence or a campaign in their CRM. But those campaigns are limited because a form-fill mechanism doesn’t provide targeted and specific information for each of those prospective customers.Now we live in a world where individual sales reps can create hyper-targeted campaigns based on nearly every imaginable scenario.”
ZoomInfo Product Marketing Director Thad Peterson
The basic structure of a Workflow is triggers, filters, and actions. Triggers are business events detected by ZoomInfo and include ZoomInfo WebSights (website visitor intelligence), technographic changes, Clickagy Streaming Intent, fundings, and ZoomInfo Scoops (e.g., projects, PPP funding). Triggers may also be created from saved searches that identify new companies or contacts that meet the saved criteria.
Triggers act as signals subject to pre-defined filters. The filters are conditions that must be met for an action to be taken. They can be based upon ZoomInfo or Salesforce criteria. For example, presence in an ABM list, meeting firmographic criteria, assigned to a rep in Salesforce, or not present in Salesforce. Actions dictate the Workflow response and include sending emails, assigning contacts, creating records, or kicking off sales flows (cadences) in ZoomInfo Engage, SalesLoft, or Outreach. Marketing actions can be processed through HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, and Eloqua.
Actions include a processing frequency (e.g., daily, weekly) and limits on the number of exported records. The limit works as a throttle so that reps are not overwhelmed with too many leads. It also prevents a workflow from using up too many ZoomInfo credits. Some actions have sub-actions associated with platforms (e.g. set campaign or cadence / sequence / flow).
Filters can also be employed for territory assignment, ensuring that the activity is routed to the proper sales rep. As ZoomInfo has one of the deepest pools of professional contacts with emails and direct-dial phones, they can activate sales and marketing activity from anonymous account-level signals for targeted functions and levels.
“If businesses want to scale quickly, they can’t become mired in day-to-day tasks that can easily be automated,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “ZoomInfo’s Workflows eliminates redundant, repetitive tasks and helps teams to focus on the human side of closing business by establishing strong relationships with prospects and customers.”
Demandbase, which reframed itself as an Account Based Experience platform last month, announced a pair of enhancements to its service: Site Customization and Form Enrichment. Site Customization lets marketers display “unique site experiences for their target account” based upon more granular segmentation (e.g., firmographics, intent, website activity).
Other customization enhancements include
Preview links for stakeholder review before release
Account list targeting with personalized ads
Tailored landing pages based upon the stage of the buying journey
The website can be personalized based upon industry, stage, geography, company size, or other variables. Messaging, CTAs, collateral, and creative elements can be customized based upon the visitor.
“The creative elements and the experience you want to give to your customer or prospect are up to you,” blogged Demandbase Director of Product Marketing Ruth Juni. “One thing is for sure: Taking the time to think through the messaging from the consumer’s perspective will ensure you’re delivering the right message to the consumer at the right time.”
Marketers can also display unique web form designs with minimal field display. Demandbase then enriches the submitted form with additional prospect details.
“ABX is rooted in an intense focus on the customer at every stage of the buying cycle, using intelligent insights to know when and how to engage, and what to say to each account,” said Jon Miller, Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Demandbase. “Your website is one of the most important interactions a customer or prospect can have with your brand, which is why it’s critical that your website experience should be as personalized as email or other channels. Our new features for Demandbase Personalization make it easy to deliver the right website experience and elevate the entire journey.”
According to Gartner, 98% of marketers argue that personalization enhances customer relationships. “Gartner is predicting that smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 25% by 2023,” said Demandbase Product VP Seth Myers. “Personalization is taking center stage in business today. This makes the case even more for our enhanced Personalization product and its industry-leading features that treat personalization as seriously as it should be treated. We’re bound and determined to keep anticipating what our customers want and need, in order to continue to elevate ABX.”
A screenshot of the Demandbase One Dashboard showing the top trending Intent keywords over 12 weeks.
Sales Engagement vendor 6sense closed on a $125 million Series D that valued the firm at $2.1 billion. The round was led by D1 Capital, with Sapphire Ventures and Tiger Global joining. Existing investor Insight Partners participated as well.
A few years ago, 6sense described itself as a predictive analytics company. When the predictive analytics segment failed to gain significant traction, it rebranded as an ABM Orchestration Platform. The other predictive analytics companies rebranded as CDPs or were acquired for their technology.
Repositioning as an ABM platform proved prescient as 6sense now competes head-to-head with Terminus and Demandbase, two other very successful ABM Platforms. Terminus closed on a $90 million Series C in February, and Demandbase is also well funded, setting up a market share land grab for ABM Platforms.
6sense has doubled in size each of the past three years, setting the stage for its unicorn round. Forrester named them a leader in its Q2 2020 Wave Report on ABM Platforms, where 6Sense scored highest on current offering and tied with Terminus on strategy.
“6sense has made significant progress since our first evaluation of this market in 2018 — and now offers a comprehensive solution, matched by an aggressive vision, roadmap, and market approach,” wrote Forrester Principal Analyst Steven Casey.
“Customer conversations are a critical part of our due diligence process, and the feedback from 6sense customers is among the best we’ve heard. Improving revenue results is a goal for every business, but it’s easier said than done. The way 6sense consistently creates value for customers made it clear that they deliver a unique, must-have solution for B2B revenue teams.”
Dan Sundheim, Chief Investment Officer at D1 Capital Partners
6sense will invest the funds in market growth and product development, including its data layer, machine learning-based next best action recommendations, and scaling its “AI-based orchestration capabilities to deliver ideal customer journeys based on data and insights.”
The round comes 15 months after a $40 million Series C led by Insight Partners. Pitchbook indicates that the firm was valued at only $300 million in January 2020. 6sense is on track for another year of 100% plus growth after inking deals with 100 new customers in Q4.
“We’re doubling down on our investment because we’ve seen the 6sense team consistently execute against their plans for the past year and a half, and we witness firsthand the results the platform delivers every day for our portfolio of high growth companies,” said Jeff Lieberman, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Being the leader in account-based sales and marketing technology ideally positions 6sense to unlock additional market opportunities, and we’re confident that they have the vision and track record to forge the future of revenue technology.”
CEO Jason Zintak sees a broader vision for the company than SalesTech, MarTech, or AdTech, describing his firm as a RevTech company.
“Our AI is focused on signal, identifying companies that are in the market to buy something,” Zintak told TechCrunch. “Once you have that, you can sell to them.”
RevTech looks to unify the marketing, sales, RevOps, and customer success groups within the revenue team and align them behind selling to the right buyers at the right time. Firms still struggle with identifying prospects that are the ideal fit, much less properly timing their prospect outreach.
“This is both a data and execution problem. One can’t be untethered from the other,” blogged Zintak. “I’ve long believed there is a tremendous opportunity to solve this problem and move the sales and marketing technology world away from outdated tools, and usher in a new era of B2B platforms that will fundamentally change the way companies go to market. We’re already seeing account-based tech, sales tech, and legacy marketing tech categories beginning to converge into a massive market that will only continue to grow. I also believe 6sense is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity and deliver the transformation our industry is so hungry for.”
Thus, 6Sense looks to provide the go-to-market platform that delivers a “comprehensive B2B go-to-market with data, insights, and orchestration capabilities at the core.”
6Sense identifies the best-fit accounts and supports prospect timing via intent-based prediction models. 6sense claims that its customers:
Raise their average deal size by 35%.
Increase their opportunity conversion rate by 20%.
Reduce deal-cycle time by 20%.
Zintak argues that the alignment problem is exacerbated by multiple tech stacks with data and functional silos that “optimize” around subsets of the revenue problem.
“The MarTech landscape is teeming with micro-solutions for every nagging problem the marketing automation platform vendors aren’t able to solve (or they themselves created). SalesTech is no different. Your CRM wasn’t built to facilitate decision-making; it was built to store records. Add RevOps and customer success teams into the mix, and the people, process, and technology alignment challenges grow exponentially, as more data becomes siloed and disconnected from execution.”
6Sense CEO Jason Zintak
“AI generally is a buzzword, but here it is a key part of the solution, the brand behind the platform,” said Teddie Ward of Insight Partners. “Instead of having massive funnels, 6sense switches the whole thing around. Catching the right person at the right time and in the right context make sales and marketing more effective. And the AI piece is what really powers it. It uses signals to construct the buyer journey and tell the salesperson when it is the right time to engage.”
“We invest heavily in sales and marketing technology, and 6sense is truly one-of-a-kind,” said Sapphire Ventures partner Rajeev Dham. “We’ve always viewed 6sense as a market leader with the ability to execute on their bold vision of transforming sales and marketing with data-driven insights and orchestration capabilities. 6sense is already the leading account-based sales and marketing platform, and they are poised to define and deliver the future of revenue technology that every B2B organization needs.”
Once again, I’m writing about a SalesTech or B2B MarTech firm that had strong growth during the pandemic. Simply, B2B firms sped up their digitization and looked for online methods for internal and external communications. With WFH and the recognition of subscription revenues over the life of contracts, it is highly likely that 2020 strength will continue into 2021. In the case of Brainshark, they increased both their new business contracts and multi-year renewal rates. Brainshark also announced off-the-shelf learning content from a pair of training companies: ValueSelling Associates and 2Win!.
Sales Readiness vendor Brainshark posted sixty percent growth in platform usage last year with a 38% increase in new business. 71% of the new contracts were multi-year, with multi-year renewals up 40% year over year.
“Companies across the globe had to completely rewrite their playbook when the pandemic began disrupting business one year ago,” said CEO Greg Flynn. “Many realized improving their sales readiness was a way to gain a competitive advantage. They also realized Brainshark’s proven, award-winning platform was just the tool they needed. We’re especially thrilled to see our customers utilizing our coaching solution more than ever because we’ve seen first-hand the impact it can have on an organization’s bottom line.”
Citing a CSO Insights study that found that firms with dedicated sales enablement teams had a 15.3% higher win rate on forecasted deals, the firm stated, “Brainshark can be the foundation of a successful sales readiness strategy, helping organizations equip sales reps with the knowledge and skills they need, measure preparedness, and connect readiness to revenue.”
Brainshark Sales Readiness Scorecards include CRM data
Last year, the firm launched Sales Readiness Scorecards, which “provide more powerful, instant, and comprehensive visibility into whether reps and their teams are prepared to engage with clients and prospects.” Scorecard data is pulled from Salesforce, providing firms with pipeline and performance KPIs. In 2021, Brainshark plans to deepen CRM integrations for expanded metrics and coaching tools.
“The questions sales enablement professionals need to answer go beyond ‘Are our reps ready?’ The more important question is, ’Are our readiness and enablement programs working? Scorecards provide that clarity. Enablement leaders can discover which reps need help with certain parts of the sales process, and then build learning programs to address those areas for maximum impact. At the same time, sales managers have critical performance data at their fingertips that allows them to be better, more strategic coaches.”
Brainshark Chief Product Officer Greg Keshian
2Win! training “helps sales professionals master demo, presentation, client success, and storytelling skills, especially in a virtual world.”
Julie Thomas, CEO of ValueSelling Associates, said, “Our eValueSelling Fundamentals is a fast track for those who want to learn value-based selling. By blending real-world examples with interactive exercises and quizzes, users learn how to prepare for a sales call, assess the health of opportunities, and ask questions that engage prospects. This program makes for a perfect integration into Brainshark’s platform, allowing sales enablement leaders a simple and convenient way to build their training content and accelerate their results.” Brainshark lists BCI and go1 as additional training content partners.
Sales Engagement Platform Groove expanded its analytics with new revenue intelligence capabilities that support real-time opportunity and pipeline management and expanded ROI reporting. The new capabilities support pipeline reviews with a single pane of glass workspace populated with real-time Salesforce data.
In its 2020 State of Sales Report, Salesforce stated that “High-performing sales teams are 1.5 times more likely to base forecasts on data-driven insights.” Ensuring that data is accurate, timely, and complete has long been an issue with CRMs, requiring sales reps to spend hours each week recording their activities and updating account, contact, lead, and opportunity data.
Sales Intelligence platforms have picked up the slack around CRM data, offering DaaS prospecting and enrichment services. Likewise, SEPs capture most sales rep activity data, reducing activity tracking overhead; however, updating opportunity data and evaluating opportunity risk remain a significant automation gap.
Maintaining Opportunity data, which is critical for pipeline reviews and forecasting, is made more difficult by the data structure of CRMs. One common complaint about Salesforce is the difficulty of viewing and updating opportunity data, which is fragmented across accounts. Revenue Intelligence tools from Clari, Revenue Grid, SalesLoft, and Groove simplify the data update and review process by providing a centralized interface for updating the pipeline and reviewing it with managers. Updates are immediately written back to Salesforce, simplifying the pipeline management process and ensuring that current opportunity data is instantly synced in Salesforce.
While Clari and Revenue Grid focus on Revenue Intelligence, Groove and SalesLoft attack the issue from a Sales Engagement perspective. This functional overlap between categories has been evident since SalesLoft acquired Costello in 2019 and integrated Costello’s revenue intelligence capabilities. While Sales Engagement Platforms began as multi-channel messaging services for SDRs, they have significantly broadened their scope to include Analytics, Guided Selling, Engagement Metrics, Meeting Management, and Revenue Intelligence.
Anthony McPartin, Forrester Principal Analyst in Sales Operations, described the widening scope of these categories. “This notion of the sales engagement platform as a cockpit for sellers is likely to continue to drive further integrations between other sales tech categories and these platforms as the advantages of bringing everything to the seller where they sell (the original vision for CRM technology) become more widely recognized.”
Revenue Intelligence Platforms have also expanded their scope, assisting with opportunity risk assessment, deal forecasting, conversational intelligence, and buying team discovery.
Out of date and incomplete information is a significant issue for B2B decision-makers. According to a July 2020 Forrester study, two-thirds of B2B decision-makers are hampered by stale, distorted, or limited CRM data.
“From incomplete sales activity data to out-of-date information stored in shadow CRMs, there are many challenges that prevent sales organizations from trusting their pipeline and conducting comprehensive reviews. Today’s release solves a critical usability challenge that Salesforce users have faced since the platform’s inception, in a way that establishes transparency and trust between the rep and the seller.”
Groove CEO Chris Rothstein
“We had major issues with getting our sales teams to document what they were doing in Gmail, and this is where Groove really shines,” said Bart Johnson, Director of User Engagement & Training at Aquent. “Groove isn’t just a huge timer saver for our reps, it also gives them ‘cross-vision’ into the different orgs and groups selling into [each] account.”
Sales Engagement vendor SalesLoft announced Deal Engagement scores, a “machine-learning capability [that] gives frontline managers an unbiased way to prioritize deals based on the calculation of over 30 data elements captured across Cadence, Conversations, and Deals.”
Instead of a black-boxed score, SalesLoft provides recommendations and an explanation of the score, helping sales managers identify opportunity issues and risks and take actions to improve close rates. Thus, Deal Engagement Scores serve as early warning signs that deals may be going south, allowing them to take proactive actions that improve close rates.
Deal Engagement Scores are shown over time and include a set of stage progression indicators such as days since the last meeting, days until the next meeting, and close date pushes. A seven-day summary details recent engagement activity and deal progression.
“It’s not enough to have just a Cadence product,” said Frank Dale, SalesLoft’s SVP of Product Development. “With Cadence, Conversations, and Deals on one platform, we collect data across the full buying cycle, from the first email, every call, meeting, and communication, through to deal closure and renewal. Only SalesLoft can analyze all of this data to predict revenue outcomes. No other Sales Engagement provider can offer this.”
SalesLoft published the 35 metrics that feed into their Deal Engagement Scores.
35 data elements are fed into their machine-learning model to prioritize and identify opportunity issues and risks. Engagement is measured across emails, phone calls, and meetings, with interactions measured by level. Over 120 million customer interactions were fed into the machine-learning model. As a machine-learning capability, the model continues to improve and adapt.
“Having this capability allows front-line sales managers an instant gut check on specific health for deals in flight,” posted CEO Kyle Porter on LinkedIn.
Deal Engagement Scores are available to early access customers with Deals functionality in the Enterprise and Sell plans. It will GA by June.
