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.
Vendors are quickly moving to integrate generative AI into their offerings. This week, Qualified and Clari announced ChatGPT functionality. Qualified GPT, which the firm describes as “Generative AI for the Pipeline Cloud,” helps B2B vendors “harness the power of AI and engage and convert their website visitors at scale.” The firm views ChatGPT as a “new platform on top of which we will build the next version of Qualified.”
When launched four years ago, Qualified focused on predictive modeling and Predictive AI to identify buying intent signals, particularly those generated from website data.
“At Qualified, our core philosophy has always been to provide the most powerful approach to pipeline generation using a combination of people, data, and automation,” said CEO Kraig Swensrud. “With the rapid advancements in Generative AI, we will be able to provide even more robust automation to our customers, allowing them to scale their efforts, focus on their highest priority tasks, and ultimately crush their pipeline and revenue targets.”
Qualified GPT supports generative text apps that automate engagement prompting, copywriting, messaging, and chatbots. Initial features include:
Auto Pounce: Automatically sends engagement prompts (or “greetings”) that serve as conversation starters for website visitors that fall within a firm’s ICP.
Auto Correct: Qualified GPT corrects misspellings, fixes grammar errors, and proofreads responses, “helping your sales reps deliver speedy, professional responses.”
Auto Tune: Enhances rep dialogue while chatting “to sound more eloquent when speaking to potential buyers, helping every rep strike just the right tone with their important customers.”
Auto Expand: Reps can enter a few words or bullet points, and Qualified GPT will craft professional messages.
Auto Suggest: AI-powered recommended conversation responses that keep reps on message and speed up response times.
Auto Translate: Translates messages, displaying both questions and answers in the customer and sales rep’s language.
Auto Personalize: Changes or recommends website text “based on visitor data to drive the highest engagement and conversion.”
Auto Summarize: Summarizes conversations and website behavior, providing sales reps with a “succinct read out of Account activity to date.”
Qualified GPT will be rolled out as a “limited release to a subset of Pipeline Cloud customers this spring.”
Karlsruhe-based Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot rebranded as Dealfront this week. Dealfront is the combination of Echobot and visitor intelligence vendor Leedfeeder which merged last year. The rebrand coincides with the merger of the two companies on a common platform.
Dealfront content includes 30 million European companies, nearly 90 million contacts, 33 event triggers, and visitor intelligence. Dealfront sources company intelligence from national registries, company news, and corporate websites. Company content includes news, business events, corporate linkages, and registered financials.
Dealfront offers five products:
Target: ICP-based targeting spanning 30 million European companies and nearly 90 million contacts.
Connect: Sales Intelligence platform with company and contact profiles, build-a-list functionality, and Send to CRM.
Datacare: DaaS data cleansing and enrichment services. Datacare supports Bi-directional integrations with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. Dealfront also supports Zapier integrations and Slack notifications.
Web Visitors: GDPR-compliant website visitor tracking that maps page-visit activity to customers and prospects.
Promote: New Programmatic display functionality that supports targeted campaigns and IP-based retargeting of website visitors.
CEO Bastian Karweg argued that Dealfront, a European-based company, offers multiple advantages over North American-based sales intelligence and B2B Data companies. Dealfront differentiators include local market knowledge, European data hosting, and GDPR-compliant data gathered from company websites and local registries. Furthermore, Dealfront is transparent in its data sourcing and does not engage in community data mining or email scraping.
Dealfront offers native language sales and support, with offices in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Spain. Dealfront has grown to 330 employees that speak a dozen native languages, providing its clients with a “distributed, diverse salesforce across Europe.”
To emphasize its European bona fides, it adopted the blue and yellow colors of the EU flag and the tagline, “The way to win deals in Europe.”
“You just can’t do business in Europe the way you do business in the US. You don’t do business in France the way you do business in Germany,” remarked Dealfront CEO Bastian Karweg. “You don’t even do business in Berlin the way you do business in Bavaria. Dealfront delivers localized data, applications, and familiarity with European standards, culture, languages, and practices to give your sales and marketing team the advantage of feeling and acting at home in any European country or region – no matter where your business is based.”
The Dealfront platform supports four stages – Discover, Qualify, Convert, and Optimize – in a flywheel feedback loop that gains momentum as the platform refines each client’s ICP. “This flywheel effect turns static ICPs into dynamic, self-optimizing, and real-time customer profiles that always improve in accuracy and reflect reality. The result is more leads that end in sales, transforming businesses into a self-propelled revenue engine,” explained the firm.
“Our platform of data and applications shows you the best way to engage your ICPs in a localized way that’s effective in whatever country you’re in, in whatever region you’re targeting,” says Dealfront CPO Pekka Koskinen. “Because we’re on the inside and speak the language, we’re working with higher-quality live intelligence on your ideal buyers. Nothing gets lost in translation, nothing gets misunderstood, and nothing is outdated. Our platform, along with our teams on the ground in each location, empowers you to convert leads to deals.”
Last year, Great Hill Partners invested €180 million to merge Echobot and Leadfeeder and set aside €50 million to fund future strategic acquisitions for Dealfront. Clients include Hertz, Siemens, Eventbrite, and Pipedrive.
My plan yesterday was to deal with the sale of my house (open house Sunday with contract offers yesterday), but I couldn’t fully focus on that as important announcements were coming from Europe: B2B full-funnel marketing vendor Anteriad bought Demand Generation vendor BNZSA. Separately, Sales Intelligence and B2B data vendor Echobot, which merged with Visitor Intelligence platform Leadfeeder last year, rebranded as Dealfront and launched its new platform.
Both BNZSA and Dealfront emphasize the diversity of the European market and their ability to meet market needs across national boundaries with localized support and GDPR compliance.
BNZSA, a Madrid-based demand generation firm, has been on a tear the last few years, growing several hundred percent per annum through H1 2022 (H2 growth data was not announced). BNZSA provides Anteriad with a solid foundation for global marketing and GDPR-compliant data. In addition, it offers B2B demand generation services to over fifty multinational clients, including Oracle, SAP, Acer, Dell, and Fujitsu.
BNZSA’s team offers local market expertise and campaign support in 26 languages.
“The combination of Anteriad and BNZSA provides an industry-leading offering of B2B demand generation products and services to clients across the globe,” stated Anteriad. “The acquisition of BNZSA will enable Anteriad to expand its international data coverage by integrating BNZSA’s unique GDPR-compliant data. Bringing together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services will provide differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
MeritB2B rebranded as Anteriad in April 2021 after a series of acquisitions that expanded the company’s scope. It previously acquired several MarTech firms, including intent-data vendor True Influence (Nov 2021), ABM MarTech and Audience vendor 180byTwo (Nov 2020), and B2B data vendor Compass Marketing (Jan 2020).
“Anteriad is a company that’s ahead of its time and ahead of the market. Our positioning directly reflects our focus on being uniquely able to provide our customers the solutions they need to get ahead and take the lead,” said Anteriad CEO Rob Sanchez in 2021.
Anteriad had strong growth last year, with a 15% increase in US new customer wins and 30% globally through Mid-September. The firm enjoys loyal customers with an average retention rate of eight years. Furthermore, multi-service clients generate more than 60% of revenue, “showing the value of a full-funnel partner versus point solutions.”
The BNZSA acquisition “brings together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services,” providing multinational customers a “differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
“BNZSA, powered by Anteriad,” will act as Anteriad’s international and EMEA headquarters. BNZSA adds three hundred employees who specialize in ABM and multi-touch campaigns. BNZSA supports programmatic display based on its firmographic, technographic, and intent datasets. Its customers can build integrated multi-channel marketing programs that leverage BNZSA’s EMEA-based, multi-lingual contact center. As leads are generated, BNZSA staff offers a “Warm Handover” process which ensures that leads are appropriately transitioned to sales teams.
Anteriad CPO Ken Lordy described the acquisition to GZ Consulting as a “highly complementary combination of data and technology assets with full-funnel campaign management.” Consequently, the combined firms “now serve the full funnel demand generation needs of all our marketing clients at a truly global scale.”
Continued Lordy, “BNZSA’s services include native language speaking BDRs at one of the largest call centers in EMEA, ensuring an individualized approach and understanding of each market’s distinct local customs.”
BNZSA identifies potential prospects for its customers, surrounds them with “messaging and brand awareness,” and collects engagement metrics that inform content development and enhance BNZSA’s prospect engagement. BNZSA tracks interest and intent and maintains an ongoing dialogue with prospects. Nurturing includes the period between contacting prospects and providing a ‘Warm Handover’ of leads to account executives.
“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange, and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” said Paul Briggs, BNZSA Director of Global Corporate Development in 2021. “This ultimately boosts closed-won opportunities for our customers up to 300%.”
BNZSA digital services include SEO strategy, performance marketing/SEM, email marketing, content marketing, content syndication, marketing automation, and UX and CX design.
“BNZSA understands the individualized approach and distinct local customs of each market it serves,” said Anteriad. “BNZSA’s nuance in culture across regions includes BDRs that speak over 26 native languages at one of the largest call centers in EMEA.”
The combined company offers “data, technology, and a differentiated high-touch client service model” that supports “rich B2B demand generation and ABM solutions and in-market customization at global scale.”
BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud maintains a “significant ownership stake in the combined business.” He will report directly to Sanchez. Samhoud emphasized that both companies have a client obsession that “will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and technology, powered by people.”
“Anteriad means to ‘Get in Front’, and acquiring BNZSA delivers on that philosophy. By expanding our global reach through this acquisition, Anteriad establishes itself as a true global leader in tech-enabled B2B marketing solutions. BNZSA brings an extremely talented leadership team and a differentiated offering that is made even more valuable by their local presence in key markets around the world,” said Sanchez. “Leadership at Anteriad and BNZSA are both invested in our people, our clients, and our growth. With this solid foundation, we will accomplish remarkable things for our clients in the global B2B marketing community.”
Postal ABM supports both programmatic and strategic ABM campaigns with triggered events and gifting.
Offline Engagement Platform Postal announced the general availability of Postal ABM, its offline engagement feature for one-to-many programmatic ABM campaigns. The new capability helps marketers programmatically target and engage valued accounts and audiences in a one-to-many approach based on intent and CRM data to “personalize content at scale.” Marketers can also execute Strategic ABM campaigns that target high-priority ABM accounts.
Postal ABM is “designed to make it easy to programmatically target and engage key accounts and audiences with offline campaigns,” Postal VP of Marketing Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh explained to GZ Consulting. “It’s designed for marketers running enterprise playbooks who need to scale offline engagement across their go-to-market strategy.”
Postal ABM supports built-in engagement and ROI dashboards that help sales and marketing teams “make informed decisions during the campaign and throughout the lifecycle of target accounts,” blogged Postal Product Marketing Manager Amy Schwartz.
The new Postal Engage feature triggers items and experiences to a group of contacts based on ABM signals in Salesforce. Marketers can set budgets and timelines for campaigns and track campaign success (e.g., accounts engaged, revenue generated) in Postal and Salesforce. Postal syncs its Account Engagement data with Salesforce for “better target discovery and ROI tracking.”
Postal also supports integrating physical touchpoints for virtual events. Postal claims an 80% attendance rate by automating offline marketing activities after events. For example, gifts can be sent to virtual event attendees, tradeshow badge swipers, or free trial participants. Postal also proposed sending a congratulations gift when champions change jobs.
In other news, Postal also announced that it partnered with ZoomInfo to support GTM Plays. Use cases include turning an abandoned chat follow-up into a booked meeting, welcoming a prospect back from OOO, congratulating a champion or decision maker on a promotion, and strategic prospecting campaigns.
“In today’s digital economy, it can be easy to forget the importance of offline and physical sales strategies…think back to in-person experiences such as steak dinners and golf outings with prospects,” blogged Postal Content Marketing Manager Rich Pusateri. “That was the standard practice. Now, in the world of remote selling, using custom branded kits or personalized gifts with handwritten notes in tandem with digital engagement is a proven way to make a positive impact on your bottom line.”
6sense Revenue AI for Sales helps prioritize account activity.
6sense released Revenue AI for Sales, its account prioritization platform that identifies in-market accounts and recommends contacts in an “anonymous world.” The service assists reps with prioritization, research, multi-threading, and personalization.
“Information overload is killing sellers’ productivity. In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, we need to give sellers the tools they need to reach new heights. This means giving sellers sales technology that helps them spend more time selling and less time on unproductive activities,” said CEO Jason Zintak. “We’ve already transformed marketing teams by revealing and targeting accounts and engaging anonymous buyers. Now we’re giving sales teams a massive upgrade from their legacy database vendors. This puts 6sense in a new category where we can innovate and lead, just like we have with others like predictive analytics and ABM. Early momentum from customers making the move to a better selling experience demonstrates the potential for impact.”
The Persona Map identifies engagement activity by role and level.
Revenue AI for Sales illuminates the “Dark Funnel,” where 97% of B2B research is conducted anonymously. 6sense ties new buyer intent signals with account and contact intelligence. Recommended Actions prioritize engagement and suggest which contacts to acquire and reach out to. 6sense offers first-party (visitor), second-party (G2 and TrustRadius), and third-party (Bombora) intent signals. It supports both topic and keyword intent alongside buying stage.
A Persona Map provides a visual map of the buying team, helping promote multi-threading and suggesting unknown buying team members. The map includes contact details, activities, and talking points.
People and company pages highlight company hierarchies, job insights, technographics, and psychographics. Contacts and accounts can be sent to CRMs, pushed to SEPs for engagement, and contacted via email, phone, or LinkedIn.
6sense insights are supported by a Chrome extension, allowing reps to prospect on the open web and identify potential buyers.
Prioritization Dashboards highlight in-market accounts and insights. 6sense also alerts reps to important account activity, recommended actions, and new buyer intent signals via email and Slack.
“Challenges exist on multiple fronts today as sellers have to navigate through a constant barrage of information and noise, plummeting productivity and increasing frustration,” said CTO Viral Bajaria. “With our AI-driven solution, sales teams will be able to focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – while our technology takes care of the rest. 6sense Revenue AI for Sales uses the power of AI, big data, and intelligence to give sellers confidence in their ability to close more deals and be the trusted advisor their customers want and need.”
6sense maintained its momentum last year, growing revenue by 70%. The company attributed its ongoing growth to its “strategic focus on new product introductions, market expansion, and ecosystem growth.”
New product introductions included the October release of Conversational Email. The module, which leverages Generative AI, intent, and pre-intent data, dramatically enhances productivity when sending marketing and sales emails and fielding responses. Conversational email composes “relevant and hyper-personalized emails to qualify and convert leads at scale.” 6sense claims its customers enjoy a 50 percent reduction in deal-cycle time, a 150% increase in average deal size, and $900K of new pipeline activity in four weeks.
“The results of the past year’s performance are a major achievement that demonstrates how the team’s hard work has paid off,” said Brian Ascher, Partner at Venrock. “As 6sense continues executing against commitments and the product roadmap, we expect to see this upward trend maintain its momentum. This is what the larger investor community loves to see, and we are proud of the 6sense team delivering these results.”
Other enhancements include ongoing investment in the Slintel database and the release of 6sense Pipeline Intelligence based on Fortella. Both Slintel and Fortella were acquired in H2 2021.
“6sense offers billions of data points of market-leading account and contact data along with best-in-class curated data, enhancing a customer’s own first-party data sources and tech stacks to deliver powerful B2B go-to-market strategies, insights, and orchestrations,” claimed the firm.
6sense continued to grow its partner ecosystem with new integrations, including HubSpot, Microsoft, and Integrate. In addition, its integrations with Dynamics and HubSpot CRM support prescriptive sales dashboards and buyer insights.
“Throughout the past year, we’ve built upon our growth in meaningful ways and continue to provide our customers with tangible value that impacts their bottom line,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “Using our own platform is essential to our success and puts us in a unique position where 6sense Revenue AI is a competitive advantage – both in our own category and where our customers compete. Looking across our customer base, we see revenue generation is 120% more effective when using 6sense, their deal size doubles, and win rate increases 4X.”
The firm has expanded internationally over the past year with an increasing presence in EMEA and APAC. The London office grew to 45 full-time employees, and APAC has over 400 employees in India and Singapore.
Sales Execution Platform Outreach unveiled a series of product enhancements and dashboards at its Explore+ web conference earlier this month. New features include Smart Email Assist with Generative AI, a Create Pipeline Calculator, Buyer Topics and Reactions in Kaia, Deal Grid, Deal Overview, Success Plan Methodologies, and Data Sharing with Outreach.
“The industry has never had a single place to generate and manage pipeline, run sales cycles from creation to close, coach reps, and forecast – until now,” said the firm.
Over the past decade, sales teams have acquired a set of SalesTech solutions that create a “hairball” of point solutions that work poorly together and suffer from siloed data and regular system switching. Furthermore, a unified data platform supports advanced workflows, AI models, and account insights for sales coaching and deal management.
Outreach has enjoyed solid adoption of its new platform since launching it ten months ago. Multi-product adoption is strong, with over 400 customers using two or more products. Furthermore, multi-product adoption is driving platform ARR, which has grown by over 100% in the past two quarters. Since the platform was launched, Outreach’s new logo deal size has increased by 16%.
Outreach repositioned itself as a Sales Execution Platform as it expanded beyond Sales Engagement (Source: Outreach Analyst presentation).
“Today, Chief Revenue Officers are facing two major problems: pipeline coverage and conversion. They need to create an adequate amount of pipeline, and close it at a greater rate,” said CEO Manny Medina. “That’s why Outreach has been on a journey to expand our offerings to solve our customers’ biggest problems today. Our goal is to provide sales leaders with a single platform to manage all of their deals – from creating more pipeline to closing more deals. Today’s announcements at Explore+ are an important milestone in our platform journey, and we look forward to continue innovating for the 30 million B2B salespeople around the world to help them unleash their selling potential.”
Outreach Smart Email Assistant
The Smart Email Assistant generates automated email replies that go beyond email templates. AI factors in previous conversations between the buyer and seller when generating responses. By automating email responses, “sales reps can focus their time on editing and personalizing the AI-generated content, instead of drafting these emails from scratch.”
A new Pipeline Calculator recommends prospecting activities to fill pipeline gaps. The calculator utilizes historical pipeline data to determine the number of prospects that should be added to sequences to meet their quota. In addition, the historical conversion rate assumptions are displayed and adjustable. Thus, the assumed conversion or win rates can be adjusted to accommodate market shifts or new processes or messaging that boost historical results.
Outreach Pipeline Calculator
Outreach continues to develop Kaia, its conversational sales module, with the addition of Buyer Topics and Reactions. AEs and sales managers can revisit meeting recordings and review the buyer’s reaction to fourteen relevant sales topics, such as budget, legal, or support.
“Using AI, Outreach is able to understand the contextual utterance of relevant sales topics in any meeting or email – ranging from pricing to product to next steps to support – and can understand when the buyer raised an objection at any point in the meeting,” explained the firm. “It delivers invaluable insight into what is really happening in meetings, down to each moment, and at scale across all meetings.”
Success Plans now support popular sales methodologies, including MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, and SPIN Selling, helping reps “consistently and continuously qualify deals and align with champions to mitigate deal risk.”
Outreach added a single-pane-of-glass opportunity viewer called Deal Grid. Reps can view their deals sorted by health score and value to focus on their best opportunities. They can also edit fields such as Close Date, Amount, Stage, and Forecast status (e.g., omitted, commit, best case, most likely) with information synced to the CRM and forecasts updated.
Opportunity Viewers are a common feature of Revenue Intelligence platforms (e.g., Clari, RevenueGrid, People.AI), but with Sales Execution and Revenue Intelligence platforms expanding into each other’s domain, Deal Grid was an anticipated new feature. Opportunity viewers help reps review their deal status, update the CRM, and prepare for meetings with sales managers. They solve the problem of serially jumping between Opportunity records in Salesforce (which the firm has moved to resolve with similar functionality).
Outreach released several new reports and dashboards:
Create and Close Dashboard: Provides AEs and sales managers with a high-level forecasted revenue summary of the existing pipeline and highlights pipeline gaps and risks.
“The insight-laden dashboard shows the forecasted revenue from existing pipeline, and highlights pipeline coverage gaps for the current and future quarter, which helps reps proactively mitigate risk earlier and drive to success,” said Outreach.
Outreach Pipeline Calculator
Deal Overview: An overview of open opportunities with a deal summary, an engagement timeline, deal health, sales methodology insights, next steps, and the shared plan. The engagement timeline displays all sales activities and a heat map detailing customer engagement trends.
Outreach Deal Overview
Pipeline Dashboard: Displays all “relevant pipeline details to life in a single, sortable view, allowing sales managers to stay on top of their quarter.” The dashboard includes a pipeline activity summary by stage, projected finish, revenue to date, quota, and top deals with deal health scores.
Outreach Pipeline Dashboard
Outreach also announced bi-directional syncing with HubSpot. Earlier this month, it unveiled expanded Outreach Data Sharing with Snowflake.
Despite recent layoffs, Outreach continues to build its customer base. FY 2023 revenue (FYE Jan 2023) passed $200 million across 6000 customers. Outreach’s scale benefits its clients as it records over 25 million action/outcome pairings per week, helping refine its machine learning insights and recommendations.
On the same day that Microsoft launched Copilot, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, its generative AI service that combines Salesforce’s own AI models with external models such as OpenAI’s. Einstein GPT supports personalized content creation across all of Salesforce’s clouds and Slack. For example, Generative AI functionality can write personalized sales emails, author customer support responses, compose targeted marketing collateral, and auto-generate code for developers.
“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated, and personalized ways,” said CEO Marc Benioff. “Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.”
Einstein GPT for Sales
Einstein GPT is the next generation of Salesforce’s Einstein AI capabilities. Einstein GPT supports natural-language prompts that “trigger powerful, time-saving automations and create personalized, AI-generated content” within Salesforce. In addition, each application maintains a human-in-the-loop that reviews and edits client communications before they are sent out.
Einstein GPT reduces “the friction in sales reps wanting to move fast to meet their quota, having to leave Salesforce to send customer communication or do prospecting research, and spending too much time finding information stored in various parts of the CRM,” wrote Salesforce Ben.
New functionality includes:
Einstein GPT for Sales: Auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction. It can also provide external news for prospect research, add contacts not already in Salesforce, and generate additional collaboration channels on Slack.
Einstein GPT can identify event triggers and recommend whom to contact.
Einstein GPT for Service: Generate knowledge articles from past case notes. Auto-generate personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction through personalized and expedited service interactions. Einstein GPT for Service also auto-generates case summaries and knowledge articles from past case notes.
Generating a case article.
Einstein GPT for Marketing: Dynamically generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising. The service can generate content with brand-compliant images and layouts. Marketing content can then be uploaded to Experience Builder.
Einstein GPT for Slack writes copy with brand-compliant images and formatting.
Einstein GPT for Slack Customer 360 apps: Deliver AI-powered customer insights in Slack (e.g., smart summaries of sales opportunities) and surface end users’ actions. The Slack service supports writing assistance, background research on accounts, and instant conversation summaries.
Einstein GPT for Developers: Improve developer productivity with Salesforce Research’s proprietary large language model by using an AI chat assistant to generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex.
“Salesforce can be a powerful multiplier of generative AI experiences because Einstein GPT blends public data with CRM data, and when several million of our customers are all using Einstein GPT, the model gets refined with each instance and becomes more accurate,” explained Salesforce’s SVP of AI and Machine Learning Jayesh Govindarajan. “It’s a cumulative effect and is really a huge differentiator for Salesforce.”
Salesforce is also looking to establish an AI ecosystem, with OpenAI as the first integration.
“Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data,” announced Salesforce. “With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real-time.”
As part of the announcement, Salesforce established a $250 million venture fund to develop “responsible, trusted, and generative AI.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said using ChatGPT in CRM services “allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI—a belief that Salesforce shares with us.”
“It will be fascinating to watch how this plays out,” opined Fortune editor David Meyer. “On the one hand, we’re now in the territory of serious businesses using generative AI for serious things, as opposed to playing around to see how long it takes to get a chatbot to say something offensive. On the other hand, some of these applications involve customers who may have some curveball questions. And it’s worth remembering that generative AI technology like OpenAI’s ChatGPT will occasionally ‘hallucinate,’ that is, basically make up fake information.”
“In theory, Microsoft’s and Salesforce’s new offerings should be safer to use because they only draw on information from companies’ own websites and internal databases—the customer-facing elements will in that sense be a bit like those Google search boxes in websites,” continued Meyer. “But that won’t necessarily make these AIs immune to occasionally emitting bogus information. Companies will find out soon enough how carefully they need to monitor their new copilots.”
Einstein GPT is in closed pilot.
A ChatGPT for Slack app is in beta. The ChatGPT app was built by OpenAI on the Slack platform and “delivers instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance directly in Slack.”
ChatGPT for Slack, built by OpenAI, was released this week.
Microsoft announced Microsoft Dynamics Copilot, an interactive, AI-powered assistance tool for sales, marketing, customer service, operations, and supply-chain management. Microsoft is positioning Copilot as an AI that helps businesspeople “create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions.”
CEO Satya Nadella promised that Copilot will “transform every business process and function with interactive, AI-powered collaboration.”
In the short run, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Cloud & AI EVP, believes that “the fastest way to get some of this AI value” will be via “finished app” integrations like Copilot. Microsoft can tailor integrations into apps that “people are already trained on.” This augmentation strategy lets Microsoft “move faster,” so there is a “huge opportunity.”
Few people outside of the AI community had heard of ChatGPT, much less experimented with it, until a few months ago, but now it is being widely tested by end users, noted Guthrie. “People are looking for solutions that integrate with their workflows that they already have and help them kind of accelerate even more.”
“And then, I think, we’re also going to see the next generation of apps that are going to be built on the raw APIs and the services around it that are going to re-envision pretty much every experience that we see,” continued Guthrie.
Copilot operates within Dynamics CRM and ERPs to reduce mundane tasks such as manual data entry, content generation, and note-taking.
And such tools are welcome by front-line workers. According to a recent Microsoft survey, nearly ninety percent of workers hope AI will reduce repetitive tasks.
Dynamics 365 Copilot offers generative AI to automate tedious tasks and “accelerate their pace of innovation and improve business outcomes.”
Copilot is natively built into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales. AI helps sales reps respond to customers and includes email summaries of Teams meetings along with action items, follow-up dates, and voiced concerns. Additionally, summaries are available for different meeting types, including multi-participant and internal calls.
“The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, as well as insights from the recorded Teams call,” wrote Charles Lamanna, CVP Business Applications and Platform. “With sellers spending as much as 66% of their day checking and responding to emails, this presents a significant business upside to give the seller more time with their customers.”
Email replies are generally available in Viva Sales, and customizable emails will be added on March 15. “For example, a seller can generate an email that proposes a meeting time with a customer, complete with a proposed meeting date and time based on availability on the seller’s Outlook calendar,” blogged Emily He, CVP Business Applications Marketing.
Sellers will also be able to rate generated content with a thumbs up or thumbs down to help refine replies. And if the response needs to be tweaked, sales reps can provide a follow-on prompt that updates the response based on the additional context.
Generating marketing text with an emphasized feature.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing simplifies data exploration, audience segmentation, and content creation.
Marketers can curate “highly personalized and targeted customer segments by having a dialogue with their customer data platform using natural language,” wrote Lamanna. Marketers do not need to be SQL experts or wait for an operations specialist to build the query. Instead, they can build segments in near real-time using Copilot’s Query Assist feature.
“With a few clicks, Copilot produces the results, along with information such as the customers’ average age, product preferences, or average purchase price,” wrote He. “These insights can then be configured into a segment to support a campaign.”
Copilot also suggests additional segments.
Using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can describe their customer segment to a query assist feature and look for inspiration for fresh email campaign content based. “Copilot makes suggestions based on key topics entered by the marketer, the organization’s existing marketing emails, as well as from a range of internet sources to increase the relevance of generated ideas,” blogged Lamanna.
Marketers can enter up to five bullet points in Content Ideas, which generates an email via Azure OpenAI Service.
“Unique content can be used as a starting point when composing marketing emails,” explained He. “It can analyze the organization’s existing emails, in addition to a range of internet sources, to increase the relevance of generated ideas. With Copilot, marketers can save hours of time brainstorming and editing while keeping content fresh and engaging.”
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service drafts contextual answers to queries in both chat and email. It also supports an “interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history, so this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions.”
Copilot for customer service drafts emails and chats for customer service agents.
Other generative AI tools support product descriptions and supply chain disruption forecasts based on weather, financial, and geopolitical news.
Copilot is in preview across Dynamics 365 and Viva Sales.
The new Relationship Explorer surfaces “hidden allies” and best paths into accounts, helping sales reps avoid cold outreach and “spam cannon techniques.”
“Instead of a blanket approach where you target everyone at an account, you can laser in on the people who are most likely to take a meeting with you based on their persona and what connection they have to you,” explained LinkedIn Senior Director of Product Mitali Pattnaik. “You can also use it to multi-thread deeper into accounts by finding the next-best person to reach out to. This creates a more efficient experience for buyers and sellers alike.”
Sales Navigator has long supported introductions and TeamLink (colleague) suggestions, but it has never fully leveraged the value of its economic graph for warm communications. The Economic Graph supports 900-million-member profiles across 61 million companies, along with current and prior employment, educational background, posts, etc.
Sales Navigator has a second advantage: its profiles are maintained by its members, ensuring that profiles are kept up to date and contain rich data around education, interests, skills, employment history, etc.
“Teams have relied so heavily on cold outreach largely because they’re leveraging sales intelligence tools that are limited in showing how to get a foot in the door of an account. These tools are chock-full of stale data: everything from incorrect contact info to the wrong person in the wrong role. With reliance on tools full of stale data, reps end up spamming all potential prospects with a spray-and-pray strategy, leading to an abysmal 1-2% response rate,” argued Pattnaik. “Looking forward, sellers are going to need to be smarter and reach out with a more personalized approach.”
Relationship Explorer recommends prospects at an account, leveraging the interactions and trends across its professional network “to provide sellers with optimal paths to connect with their target personas at their target accounts.” As a result, Relationship Explorer saves time prospecting, cross-selling, and upselling at accounts, helping reps find the best contacts at target accounts.
The feature offers up to eight “of the most relevant individuals” based on their target persona and relevant, actionable insights (called spotlights by LinkedIn) based on interactions between members and organizations. Spotlights highlight both biographic and dynamic information, including recent job changes, LinkedIn postings, and past customers. As such, they provide timely reasons to reach out and content to include in their outreach.
Relationship Explorer suggests the best contact at an account based on the user-defined persona.
Relationship Explorer is available in all Sales Navigator editions. However, while it displays a dozen spotlights, not all are available in each edition. For example, Past Customer spotlights are only available in the Advanced Plus edition.
Personas help users identify their target audience by function, seniority level, geography, and current job title. They are available on the Homepage, Search, Relationship Explorer, and Account pages.
Users can define up to five personas which act as templates for homing in on ideal prospects.
Persona definitions on the homepage.
Pattnaik suggested several use cases for personas:
Creating highly targeted Personas matching target customer profiles.
Leveraging Personas in Search, Homepage, or Account Pages to identify the most relevant opportunities.
Identifying warm paths and decision-makers at targeted accounts with Relationship Explorer.
Using insights from Account Pages, including Persona growth, to prioritize accounts composed of leads matching Personas.
Persona functionality is available to all users.
Over the past few releases, Sales Navigator has built buyer intent into its service. Its latest intent-based feature is Product Category Buyer Intent, which identifies buyers searching for products in their category.
Product Intent Categories
Previous Sales Navigator intent was based upon research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category but may not know a vendor or its offerings. The two types of intent data can be compared to understand the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
“Categories are created with AI by combining related keywords into one central category, which is then tied to products using publicly facing product descriptions. For example, “fintech” and “financial tech” are individual keywords, which the AI model can combine into a single category,” explained Pattnaik. “Intent is then connected using buyer’s members’ profile as well as recent buying activities on LinkedIn.com to help sellers find the buyers who are likely looking for a solution like theirs.”
LinkedIn is rolling out several new Buyer Activities that will be displayed on Account Pages and the Buyer Intent Account Dashboard. Additional intent categories are rolling out over the next quarter:
LinkedIn Ad Engagement: Clicks and view activity data. Both of these data points are private, so sellers will only be able to see the general profile of the buyer.
InMail Acceptance for a colleague: Displays the public identity of individuals who have accepted InMails from other sellers on the same contract.
Company LinkedIn page visits: Clicks on the company page. Page visits are a private activity, so the buyer is anonymous.
LinkedIn profile visits to colleagues and leadership: A new activity that shows sellers when a potential buyer visits the profile of a colleague on the same contract or company leadership. This is also a private activity.
Buyer Intent is available in the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions of Sales Navigator.
Users can now search against any account list or use an account list as a suppression list. Other new search filters include:
Past Customer (Advanced Plus only)
Past Colleague
Executive TeamLink – leverages the networks of a company’s executives (Advanced and Advanced Plus only).
Viewed Your Profile
Product Category Buyer Intent
LinkedIn also enhanced its Sales Insights (LSI) service with the improved matching of companies to CRM accounts and Adjustable Growth Time ranges.
LinkedIn admitted that its previous LSI matching logic may have been inaccurate as it only matched against a few standard CRM fields. LSI now supports CRM custom ingestion that improves match rates with customer-defined match fields. There is also an option to force matches based on LinkedIn Ids or URLs.
LinkedIn Sales Insights Field Mapping
Adjustable Growth Time Ranges can be set to 3, 6, 12, and 24-month increments.
One of the most important SalesTech trends, besides the emergence of ChatGPT, is the rapid incorporation of engagement datasets alongside intent datasets for prioritization and messaging.
A few years ago, we saw the emergence of intent data sets such as first-party web visitor tracking, second-party product review site research, and third-party B2B media research. Initially, this content was integrated into MAPs, ABX platforms, and CDPs, but it was not well integrated into SalesTech. We are now seeing intent data being integrated into SalesTech platforms in a simplified fashion (e.g., High Intent Topics in CRM profiles and Slack alerts) that is digestible for sales reps.
However, intent data only indicates whether a company is in-market, not whether the buying committee is considering your offering or seriously engaged with your sales team. This intelligence comes from a new category of engagement data captured from digital interactions between the revenue team (sales, marketing, and customer success) and the buying committee. Engagement intelligence consists of both traditional digital interactions (e.g., clickthroughs, downloads) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics derived from sales and buying team activities.
NLP helps RevTech platforms determine who is interacting with your firm. It also analyzes buyer sentiment, buyer concerns, deal health, and risk flags. The primary sources of engagement data are emails, recorded phone calls, and recorded meetings. However, any digital interaction between buyers and sellers can be captured such as activity in digital sales rooms, webinar attendance, chat messaging, and scheduled meetings. I anticipate that customer support platforms will also be tapped for engagement data to help gauge churn risk and friction during product trials.
Engagement data indicates whether a deal is on track and what issues could result in lost deals or pushed out pipeline. For example, engagement data assesses whether:
Discussions are single or multi-threaded
Key decisionmakers are involved (e.g., has a security review been performed or has legal been included?)
Competitors have been mentioned
Pricing concerns were raised
Follow on meetings have been scheduled
Meetings had a positive flow or were dominated by the sales rep
In short, engagement data provides sales reps and managers deal health and risk analytics that improve forecasting and ensure that deal risks are quickly mitigated. And as interactions are digital, managers can discuss these issues during one-on-ones or offer quick tips on next steps. They can even review the discussion associated with the risk and identify skills and knowledge gaps for coaching.
Nektar’s Insights Hub details buyer-seller interactions, leading indicators, buying committee engagement, MEDDIC adherence, etc.
The interesting thing about intent and engagement data is they are highly complementary with each other. Operations teams should be looking at integrating intent data alongside engagement data. Intent data is valuable for identifying who and when to reach out to ideal customers. However, once a relationship is established, the focus shifts to engagement data for monitoring deal health. After a deal is signed, both engagement and intent data are in play. Intent data identifies cross-sell opportunities and churn risk through second and third-party intent topic monitoring while Engagement and Product Usage data evaluate adoption rates and potential implementation issues.
Engagement data and deal health analytics can be found in Revenue Intelligence services (e.g., Clari, Revenue Grid), Sales Engagement (e.g., Salesloft, Outreach, Groove), Conversational Sales (e.g., Gong, Chorus), Revenue Operations (Nektar), and Sales Enablement (e.g., Seismic, Bigtincan) platforms.
