Category: Sales Engagement

Sales Engagement

Flash: Clari Acquires Groove

Revenue Platform vendor Clari announced the acquisition of Sales Engagement Platform Groove this morning.  The transaction is expected to close on August 21.  No deal details were released.

“This is the most transformative day of our history,” Clari CEO Andy Byrne told VentureBeat. “It’s a big acquisition for us.  When we started this company, our thesis was grounded in the belief that AI would revolutionize how businesses manage revenue. More specifically, our vision was to assist CEOs in answering the critical question of whether they would meet or miss revenue targets.  We aimed to offer a predictive solution to address the common issue of revenue leaks that many companies face. Our goal was to help them achieve what we call revenue precision.”

The courtship began two years ago when Clari customers began asking about Groove. Around the same time, Groove was implemented internally. The firms launched a Groove / Clari integration last year with a strong UVP.

The deal brings the firms closer to creating a full customer lifecycle platform, with Groove supporting Sales Engagement and Engagement Analytics alongside Clari’s Conversational Intelligence (Clari Copilot), Digital Sales Room, and Revenue Operations capabilities.  Clari will recommend sales actions that limit revenue leakage, which reps can execute in Groove without switching applications.  Groove engagement data will be fed back into Clari, helping identify deals at risk.

“Most CEOs have a tough time answering the most important question in business: ‘Will we meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  By bringing together Clari and Groove, revenue leaders can implement their revenue collaboration and governance strategy across all internal and external workflows, giving them full visibility and control over the company’s most important business process – Revenue.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Clari’s vision is to “bring the entire revenue process into one unified platform so our clients can consolidate, simplify, [and] accelerate” their go-to-market.

According to Clari CMO Kyle Coleman, every CRO, CFO, and CEO he has spoken with over the last six months has emphasized the need to consolidate, simplify, and accelerate their revenue cycle.

“We’re really excited to be able to lean onto this macro trend of consolidation.  But it’s not just consolidating for the sake of saving money.  It’s consolidating for the sake of reducing complexity, simplifying, and improving your revenue results,” Coleman explained to GZ Consulting.  He is ”really confident” in the firm’s expanded capabilities and sees them as “exactly what revenue teams [want] right now.”

From 2013 until 2021, Clari focused on building revenue reporting and a revenue database (RevDB) with time series data.  Information is gathered from CRMs, emails, calendars, etc., with Groove soon feeding its activity data.  RevDB also ingests external data from data warehouses and Clari’s digital sales room functionality.  Data is stored and analyzed in RevDB with support for six products:

“Clari’s RevDB architecture has been a long-term investment by Clari and is the secret sauce that powers the company’s unmatched revenue AI (RevAI) capabilities,” stated Clari.  “With Groove added to the Clari portfolio, revenue teams will get real-time insights and suggested actions across every revenue workflow to create and convert more pipeline, while company leaders will be able to see every input, tie every activity to results, and precisely predict revenue outcomes.”

Clari with Groove brings together six product categories to serve the full revenue team.

“We’re augmenting the CRM with information that reps are never going to create manually.  And then we’re pulling that into our database to build our machine learning and AI models,” explained Coleman.

Last year, Clari acquired Conversational Sales Platform Wingman and added it to its deal monitoring and analytics workflows.  The integrated service was recently rebranded Clari Copilot.

“It expanded the workflows that we’re running for revenue teams, bringing call recordings into the flow of work,” remarked Coleman.  “You can actually hear and see what the customer is saying…Making CI less of a call recording solution for a call center and really more of a purpose-built solution for revenue teams.  While we’re doing that, we’re also adding this whole new dataset into the revenue database that makes us very capable for NLP and prescriptive AI…The RevAI capabilities we have made us capable of recording all these new AI use cases…We have all these different types of AI that we leverage across the platform.  We have the predictive components.  We have the generative components, and we have the natural language processing.  And we’re finding the right ways to expose that…in the flow of a rep’s work [and] in the flow of an executive’s work, so they’re actually getting the insight they need when they need it.”

Groove, already a Clari partner, allows sales reps to go from forecast and deal risk alerts to integrated actions, providing feedback loops and recommendations as a “closed loop of Insight and Action.”

When I spoke to the firms last year about their partnership, they presented an excellent joint value proposition presentation.  This messaging continued forward into their acquisition briefing.

A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them.  Revenue leaks exist across the entire revenue lifecycle.  For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time by Clari, allowing reps to take action via Groove to bring the deal back on track. 

When Clari identifies a deal slipping for competitive reasons, it can suggest a play be executed in Groove.  Likewise, Clari can identify sub-par win rates, overly generous discounting, and low conversion rates for early-stage opportunities.

As Groove is native to Salesforce, it records all activities in real time, providing “full-funnel forecasting” and analytics to Salesforce and Clari.  Groove activity will also begin feeding into Clari’s RevDB time-series activities and conversations database.

“We can tie our campaigns through to revenue in Salesforce, and that is something that they (Groove’s competitors) cannot do,” argued Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant.  “Then all of that rich data, tying engagement through to revenue, is pulled into Clari and used in the analysis, and that is available today.”

Coleman explained that while you can’t win a deal at any moment, you can certainly break a deal.  And once a deal is lost, “it’s very difficult to un-lose” it.  Thus, “if you don’t do the right thing at the right time – handle the right objection or pull the right person in or do the right kind of follow-up” – the deal could be jeopardized.  Therefore, “handling revenue critical moments expertly and in a prescribed way” and governed by best practices is critical in addressing revenue leaks.

“Having all of that insight into all these moments that exist and then having confidence that every one of your employees is going to be able to execute on them?  Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.

Clari customers benefit from a consolidated selling platform for prospecting and engagement.  The platform will turn insight into action, allowing sales reps to kick off a Groove Flow immediately.  They will also better understand “top-of-the-funnel effectiveness and tie it to down-funnel results.”

Clari customers “can use it [Groove] both to fill the funnel and execute the funnel, turning insights into action in real-time – closing that loop and knowing what’s happening at the top of the funnel.”  Revenue teams can tie activities to revenue results and “hone and change” their revenue process.

Groove customers also benefit from platform unification as they prioritize activities, simplify forecasting, and enjoy a better understanding of deal status.  They will leverage analytics that tie activity to revenue impact, thus improving outcome predictions.

Furthermore, leaders will receive “end-to-end visibility of the revenue process by connecting sales engagement with conversion.”

“The goal is to consolidate all revenue-critical technology for all revenue-critical employees,” stated Coleman.  While the focus is on supporting the revenue team, Clari is finding that other stakeholders, such as finance and product management, also benefit from the ability to track sales activity.

For antitrust reasons, Clari has not discussed pricing with Groove for the six products but expects to have it locked down by the end of the month.  Reps will be quickly trained on the combined offering, and a unified team will be at Dreamforce.

“We’re bringing all of our quota carriers together for a two-day super deep dive – everything you need to know about the Groove product [and] everything you need to know about the combined platform.  We don’t want our sales reps to show up uninformed when they take the first meetings, and we expect there to be a healthy amount of demand coming in for this combination,” explained Coleman.  “We’re on this path to be a truly multi-product company.  And part of that journey is creating a true co-sell playbook.  When does it make sense to sell the full platform?  When should it be Groove standalone?  When should it be Groove plus Copilot?”

“The ultimate goal from a Go-to-Market standpoint is to be the single revenue platform that’s used by all revenue employees,” continued Coleman.  “We feel really good about this vision that we have to be the most used platform.”

Clari already has $1.5 trillion in revenue under management and over 1,500 customers.

Groove co-founders Chris Rothstein and Austin Wang will join Clari and oversee the Groove product line’s strategy, product direction, and customer success.

“I’m incredibly excited about the power of combining Clari’s Revenue Platform with Groove’s best-in-class pipeline creation and conversion capabilities,” said Rothstein.  “Together, we will create more pipeline and enable sellers to act on opportunities with incredible speed and effectiveness.  Revenue teams are looking to win more, faster — and Groove and Clari are bringing the rocket fuel.”

The first stage of the Groove integration is planned for October.

“This acquisition will create a sense of urgency in the market that leads all key players to step up their focus to create their own version of a revenue orchestration platform,” opined Forrester Principal Analyst Seth Marrs.  “It’s a significant win for all companies looking to improve sales performance.”

“Consolidating to create a more comprehensive platform is the best option in this environment,” continued Marrs.  “Those that don’t, face the less appealing prospect of a down round or going out of business.”

“B2B sales tech buyers want to take advantage of AI for sales and simultaneously reduce complexity in their tech stack,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Dan Gottlieb.  “Clari with Groove now has the pieces to deliver a complete revenue hub with interconnected workflows and deep data integrations.”

SalesTech Landscape

Vendor Neutral posted its 2023 SalesTech Landscape.

Vendor Neutral published Nicolas De Kouchkovsky’s seventh annual SalesTech Landscape.  When viewed online, a magnifying glass helps the viewer focus on specific categories.  The eyechart now contains over 1,000 tools across fifty categories.

New categories include “Extended Reality (XR), Email Deliverability, Product-Led Sales Platform (i.e., PLG CRM), and Ecosystem & Co-Selling Management to enable the emerging ‘nearbound’ sales motion.

Unfortunately, the SalesTech Landscape is not available for licensing or as a downloadable list.

“Sales engagement is the first category that came out of modern SalesTech stacks,” remarked De Kouchkovsky.  “When it emerged, it provoked a gold rush, stimulating the birth of a myriad of email solution providers.  Fast forward to today, multichannel — email, voice, including growingly LinkedIn and messaging — is the norm.  It forced the landscape to settle: some vendors have graduated into true multichannel engagement platforms, some have pivoted out of the space, and the rest are offering the function as a commodity.”

Traditionally, sales engagement platforms have focused on outbound prospecting.  It’s time to reset: inbound matters,” continued De Kouchkovsky.  “In a world where buyers are researching on their own, engaging them when they land on your website constitutes a unique opportunity.”

De Kouchkovsky noted that inbound is more than chatbot and messaging.  It also includes voice (call distribution and callback) and direct scheduling.

He also observed that prospecting (and broader sales intelligence) remains segregated from sales engagement.  He cited two exceptions, Apollo and ZoomInfo Engage, but I would add Cognism to this list.

De Kouchkovsky argued that sales reps are overwhelmed with data entry and juggle multiple apps with more complex workflows.  He called out several emerging solutions beyond Sales Engagement Platforms for addressing these problems: Collaboration and email plug-ins, Sales Workplace systems (e.g., Dooly, Scratchpad) that “overlay existing systems to offer sellers a streamlined experience to update systems,” and workflow automation tools that manage “the back-end synchronization between the various apps of the stack.”

De Kouchkovsky is tracking Digital Sales Rooms with Mutual Action Plans to address growing buying committees.

“Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) are not new but now play a more strategic role in sharing content with all the stakeholders and helping better ‘read’ deal dynamics through content consumption, remarked De Kouchkovsky.  “Mutual Action Plans began as shared to-do spreadsheets.  They are becoming another mini-category, used not just by customer success teams but also to drive the initial sale through to onboarding.”

The Landscape is also seeing a blossoming of AI assistants that offer recommendations and guidance.  This category grew 2X over the past year.

Vidyard Rooms

Vidyard Rooms Invitation and Security Levels

Vidyard formally launched its Vidyard Rooms digital sales room (DSR) to beta.  Vidyard Rooms are available at no charge for both free and subscription clients.  However, Vidyard plans to introduce paid DSR plans in the future.

Vidyard Rooms support personalized videos, tailored demonstrations, recorded meetings, documents, and proposals.  Users can comment on and tag content.  Sellers are notified when new buyers join the room and when content is consumed.

“At Vidyard, we are always looking for ways to help sellers and go-to-market teams create more productive relationships with their buyers,” said COO Jonathan Lister.  “With Vidyard Rooms, we are doing just that – empowering sales professionals to build personal relationships at scale and educate key stakeholders in a way that is timely, convenient, and collaborative.”

Vidyard described it as the first “video-first DSR,” but I’m not sure that video-first provides a significant value add as all DSRs support video (and many include chat).  There are three primary values of DSRs:

  1. Collaboration
  2. Expedited deal onboarding and journey stage transition (i.e., looping in the legal department or handing off from an account manager to a customer success manager).
  3. Engagement metrics. 

There is also a latent opportunity for building out the demand unit, but vendors have not focused on that.  None of these requires a video-first platform but building out the demand unit and engagement metrics call for the DSR to be native to an SEP, ABX platform, or Revenue Intelligence platform that ingests multi-channel signals.  Furthermore, Vidyard is integrated with most of the major vendors in these categories.

As such, Vidyard Rooms are likely to be used primarily by SMBs and in enterprise sales segments that have deployed asynchronous video but not cutting-edge RevTech platforms.

“Demand for Digital Sales Rooms is up 325% year-over-year as post-pandemic digitalization and a shift towards efficient growth put pressure on sales teams to transform the way they work with buyers,” said GTM Partners Chief Analyst Bryan Brown.  “With its unique video-first approach, Vidyard Rooms is a compelling new solution in this emerging market that aims to make digital sales rooms more personal, engaging, and helpful to buyers.”

Vidyard Rooms act as a centralized hub for sharing deal artifacts with stakeholders.

Demandbase / Outreach Integration

Demandbase announced a native Outreach integration with other SEPs in development.  Streamlining Sales Intelligence and Sales Engagement allows reps to “focus on engaging with prospects and closing deals, rather than wasting time on manual tasks.”  The I-frame integration supports core Demandbase Sales Intelligence functionality within Outreach workflows.  For example, sales reps can research companies and contacts, build lists, and launch Outreach sequences inside of Outreach.

The Demandbase Sales Intelligence Watchlist displayed as an I-frame tab in Outreach.

Users will see common information, tools, and workflows presented in the same format as their CRM but in Outreach’s Account, Prospect, and Opportunity records.  There is also a standalone tab in Outreach similar to the Demandbase standalone tab found in CRMs.  This Custom Tab supports company and contact searching, prospect list building, connection management for warm introductions, customer and prospect news tracking, and custom buying trigger configuration.

“We’ve noticed that the order of preference as far as where sellers spend time actually starts with their SEP – So, Outreach.  And if they have to, they’ll go to CRM,” observed Demandbase Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier.  “When you look at Outreach users who have Demandbase and Outreach, they can spend all of their time within Outreach and never have to go to the Demandbase platform.  They’re not missing out on any information… It’s just one less thing that they have to learn and one less barrier to access the Demandbase information.”

“Being a seller has never been easy, but the proliferation of data and tools has led to stressed-out sellers with lost productivity, lower quota attainment, and less revenue,” says Gabe Rogol, chief executive officer at Demandbase. “With our simplified and smarter Sales Intelligence solution, reps no longer need to waste precious time figuring out their next steps and executing them.  Instead, they can close more deals and make more money.  Think of our intelligence as a sales superpower, all within the tools sellers use every day.”

Demandbase Sales Intelligence is integrated with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach, Slack, and browsers.  The Sales Engagement integration enables reps to add contacts to Outreach sequences and personalize the messaging.

“Integrating Demandbase’s Sales Intelligence directly within our platform will unlock new levels of value for sales teams looking to efficiently create and predictably close more pipeline,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “With this next-generation integration, sellers can more easily and quickly find and contact accounts, get data-focused insights, and unlock new levels of productivity — all while never leaving the Outreach Sales Execution Platform.”

Demandbase recently dropped the Cloud Designations for its products, emphasizing its unified functionality within the Demandbase One platform.

“We found that it kind of creates this illusion of complexity that we don’t feel serves it justice as far as the actual products you’re spending time in,” said Palmer.  “They’re even more interconnected.  Most of our customers are now buying three or more products.  We’ve got bundles and packages of everything, so we’ve just moved away from that whole cloud nomenclature to just Demandbase One.”

The Cloud services will now be called Demandbase ABX, Demandbase Advertising, Demandbase Sales Intelligence (FKA InsideView), and Demandbase Data.

A Hot Leads feature that provides SDRs with key engagement insights and the ability to take action on unknown leads will soon be available.  Hot Leads will be displayed in the Prescriptive dashboards and identified by engagement activity, intent, recency, news/company/job changes, technographics, etc.  Hot Leads will be GDPR and PII compliant.

In other news, Demandbase was named a Notable Provider in Forrester’s Account-Based Selling Technologies Landscape, Q2, 2023 report.  Seventeen vendors were included in the report.  Account-Based Sales vendors “improve visibility into the potential of each account; increase sales rep efficiency; and increase pipeline value (deal size), win rates, and forecast accuracy.”

“The landscape for B2B GTM teams continues to change at [a] breakneck pace.  At Demandbase, we’re committed to shaping that market evolution to empower our customers to achieve their most audacious goals,” said Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw.  “This year, we’ve placed a deep focus on making sellers’ jobs easier and more effective with AI-powered insights and seamless workflows, and we believe our inclusion in this report further validates that direction.”

Continue to my coverage of Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence.

Leadinfo Acquires Leadcamp

team.blue subsidiary Leadinfo acquired Intent-based Sales Engagement Platform Leadcamp.  Leadcamp expands the Leadinfo value proposition from web visitor tracking to broader lead engagement.  Leadcamp, based in Ghent, Belgium, captures email, web, meeting, and content engagement and employs AI to identify “high-intent active prospects.”

“We always want to offer our customers new products to make them more effective in their chosen markets,” said team.blue Group CEO Claudio Corbetta.  “This acquisition is a great example of investing in a fast-growing business to advance our expertise and product range in the lead generation space.”

The Leadcamp Heat Score measures multi-channel engagement providing both a composite score and engagement by channels.  Additionally, AI-powered notifications let reps be “proactive and timely” in their follow-ups, “avoiding missed opportunities” and increasing the odds of closing each deal.

Heat Scores also act as customizable triggers for reminders and alerts, streamlining the buying journey.  Triggers include form submissions, multiple website visits within a prescribed period, Heat Score thresholds, and calls made.  Leadcamp claims that trigger automation speeds up the buying process three-fold.

Email functionality includes sales email tracking, link monitoring, engagement analysis, and a content library.  Sales teams also have access to sequences (cadences), templates, and volume throttling.

“We are excited about the acquisition of Leadcamp and the addition of their expertise in targeted marketing campaigns and automation tools to our platform,” commented Leadinfo Founder Han Kleppe.  “This acquisition will enable us to better support our customers in finding new customers and to put their lead generation on autopilot.”

The Leadcamp acquisition is the second European firm folded into Leadinfo since it was acquired by team.blue last July.  In October, it acquired German visitor tracking firm Webprospector.de.

Leadinfo claims to be the market leader in Benelux and the most prominent international provider in the D-A-CH region.  It consolidated its position in the Netherlands over the past eighteen months with the acquisitions of Leadexpress (December 2021) and LeadElephant (January 2022). 

Leadinfo supports over 3,000 customers in Benelux, D-A-CH, Great Britain, and Scandinavia.  Customers include Lavazza, Quis Machinery, Channable, and Creditsafe.

Leadinfo was named a 2022 Fast 50 technology growth leader by Deloitte, placing 8th in the Dutch market.

LeadDelta: Seed Round & Product Profile

The LeadDelta Network Manager provides a light CRM view for managing LinkedIn contacts.

LeadDelta, which offers a Sales Engagement platform focused on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, closed on an $800,000 pre-seed round.  LeadDelta has been self-funded since its 2021 founding.

LeadDelta focuses on managing the social capital entrepreneurs and sales reps capture in Sales Navigator. 

LeadDelta began as a “simple app” for tagging LinkedIn connections but now offers a broader app used by over 11,000 individuals and teams.  Features include a dashboard, sidebar (Chrome Extension), and Smart Inbox that help users manage their network.

The Smart Inbox lets users pin, star, and tag LinkedIn messages.  It also supports LinkedIn message filtering, a connection sidebar for viewing notes and tags while chatting, messaging templates, and a unified inbox for LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.  Users can message up to 25 contacts at a time.

The network manager syncs and updates contacts in a “lightweight CRM view.”  Users can search and sort contacts, create custom tables and views, follow/unfollow in bulk, and filter contacts.  The network manager also displays signals such as when connections were made and the last text.

The LeadDelta Dashboard analyzes the user’s LinkedIn network.

The Dashboard helps users view and manage key connection attributes, tags, and notes.

LinkedIn has not been careful about partnering with vendors that pull data from its platform; however, LeadDelta has managed to avoid conflict with LinkedIn by focusing on enhancing the LinkedIn experience and not mining it for contact intelligence.

“It has been a journey of really trying to be the good guys on Linkedin and really making sure that Linkedin likes what we do because we complement the community.  We enhance the community.

What we say is ‘You own your data.  This is your data.’ This is also how we are a legitimate Linkedin business.  You have the permissions, and you say what you want, but then you can choose to whom to give.  If you want to give your contacts to your company or not, and which contacts, and what context?  This is your digital Rolodex, and for the first time, you can monetize it.  You can come to your new employer and say, look at my app.”

CEO Vedran Rasic

LeadDelta has been growing “steadily 20% month-over-month,” helping them “complete the fundraising from really reputable angels around the globe,” continued Rasic.

The firm will soon be launching LeadDelta Workspaces to “revolutionize how teams sell, hire, fundraise, and market their products and services. For the first time, teams can utilize their combined social capital,” said LeadDelta.

Workspaces support pooled connections across teams, notes, and tagging.

LeadDelta will simplify sales and support selling from both traditional and non-traditional sales roles.  Rasic sees LeadDelta as akin to Figma, which simplified design and took market share from Adobe. 

“Figma came and said, Everybody is a designer, and we can all collaborate.  We can all add notes [and] comments.  We can all engage.  This is the same thing.  This is what we want to do for sales for relationships,” analogized Rasic.  “Imagine a recruiter being able to help a salesperson close a deal or a salesperson, in reverse, being able to help recruit or score that next hire.”

Historically, individuals could only manage 150 relationships at a time, but that number is expanding due to social networks and AI, helping with fundraising, selling, marketing, and hiring.  LeadDelta’s goal is to create “one integrated, cross-referenced professional network” that improves the odds of success as users collaborate cross-functionally.

The network will expand further as additional individuals participate and data is integrated from other platforms such as HubSpot and Gmail.

LeadDelta targets SMBs with annual invoices between $5K and $50K.  Many of their prospects have deployed HubSpot; thus, HubSpot CRM connectivity is a popular request that will soon be implemented in the platform.

Along with HubSpot, LeadDelta is looking to add CSV uploads to capture second-degree connections.

Rasic noted that at many tech organizations, the executive team is well-connected but too busy to leverage its connections for the organization.  LeadDelta helps address this issue.

“As a person who fostered numerous for-profit and non-profit enterprises through stewarding community efforts, it wasn’t until LeadDelta that I got the first smart and dedicated application for targeted network outreach,” stated lead investor Tijo Bajic.  “This is not only an idea I believe in.  It powers how I interact daily as a professional.  I’m proud to be the first investor and the angel syndicate lead.”

LeadDelta is priced at $29 per user per month or $19.33 when billed annually.  In addition, the firm is offering grandfathered pricing to its early clients.

The LeadDelta Sidebar (Chrome connection).

Postal ABM

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.”

The Physical Mail GTM Play from ZoomInfo.

Resources

Outreach Explore+ Announcements

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.

Outreach emphasized the breadth of its Sales Execution offering that began with Sales Engagement and has expanded to include Conversational Sales, Digital Sales Rooms, Success Plans, Coaching, Generative AI Emails, and Revenue Intelligence.  This full-funnel approach addresses sales teams’ top two issues: pipeline coverage and pipeline closing.

“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.

Engagement Data Is Becoming Integral to SalesTech

Chorus Momentum identifies deal risks.

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.

Revenue Grid Deal Guidance

Groove Plays Announced

Groove Plays are triggered when one or multiple conditions are met.

Sales Engagement vendor Groove introduced its Plays service to the market this morning.  Groove observed that most sales engagement vendors tout flows (aka cadences and sequences) but that sequenced, linear processes fail to capture the increasingly complex nature of modern enterprise sales.  Furthermore, flows were initially designed for SDRs and appointment setting but are inadequate for meeting the broader needs of the revenue team.

Along with the introduction of Plays, Groove is shifting from sales engagement to a broader vision of “Connected Sales Execution” that unifies team, strategy, and technology.

“When my co-founder Austin and I founded Groove, we were sales leaders facing the exact challenge that Groove Plays solves,” said CEO Chris Rothstein.  “We knew that in order to digitally transform sales as a profession, we had to start by building a foundation in advanced data capture and linear-process automation.  With Groove Plays, we are introducing the next generation of Groove to solve the biggest untapped market in sales.”

Forrester recognized this transformation in its Q3 2022 Sales Engagement Platforms Wave report, noting that Groove’s activity capture and interaction management are “top-notch.”  Groove collects and aggregates signals from interactions and scores from Salesforce and external sources such as Clari, Seismic, 6sense, and Snowflake.  “This information is used to connect buying group members and make suggestions based on broad data sets.  Groove specializes in industry-specific and customer-specific suggestions and signals.”

“We’re launching Groove Plays as a way to take your playbook finally out of your head and put it into software so that you can assist reps at the right time, rather than after it’s too late,” explained Rothstein to GZ Consulting.  “And then the second huge benefit: if you can constantly see what’s being done, what’s not being done, and what’s correlated with winning, then you can evolve and constantly get better.

Plays are designed for complex, non-linear sales processes.  Sales Operations set up Groove Plays to monitor accounts for risks and opportunities.  Plays are triggered when specified conditions are met (e.g., stalled deals, single threading, missing participants by role).

Groove Plays also monitors rep activity to see whether plays contributed to positive outcomes.  Thus, sales managers and operations teams know whether sales reps follow company playbooks and which ones are effective.  Play analytics are broken into outcomes without intervention (the playbook was followed), with intervention (the playbook was followed but after a reminder), or ignored.

Furthermore, by monitoring activity, Plays prevent reps from failing to follow critical steps (e.g., sending a follow-up message after a call, quickly turning around meeting action items).

Groove Play Outcomes analyzes the efficacy of Plays

Alerts are fed to Groove’s Master Review List, which is displayed in its Chrome extension and visible across Salesforce, Groove, and email.  In addition, timers can be set to prevent plays from automatically firing, thus reducing the likelihood that reps are overwhelmed by automated triggers.

Plays provide proactive coaching instead of waiting until account reviews or forecasts.  Delayed recommendations are generally reactive instead of proactive.  “At that point, it’s too late.  And then you react way too late.  Our goal is for you to put the rules in the system, so it’s assisting you at the right time when there are signals…so you can be more proactive and consistent,” stated Rothstein.

Plays recommend actions when specific criteria are met.  For example, a play can be built for deals with negative sentiment concerning price and slowing engagement.  The play could then recommend an ROI calculator to a prospect, helping shift their thinking from cost to ROI.

Plays can also be built around handoffs, ensuring that crucial transition steps are not skipped.

Plays are also integrated into Groove’s conversational intelligence service and generative AI, providing meeting follow-up emails based on insights.  Reps can choose to regenerate the email or add snippets.

Groove suggests “ideal email content based on insights gathered from earlier in the deal process via Groove Conversations and advance activity capture.”

Plays can also be designed around deal risk, suggesting actions if key buying committee members are not engaged.  Likewise, plays can be setup if MEDDIC steps have not been completed, the primary contact has not responded to a renewal message, or internal approval timelines are not being met.

Groove’s RIO AI engine consists of three underlying engines:

  • NLP: Analyzes emails and generates insights for coaching.
  • Association: Ties actions to outcomes across the tech stack.
  • Guidance: Suggests actions based on sales plays and generates personalized content and best engagement times.

Groove supports “Connected Sales Execution” across sales, marketing, and customer success.   RIO ingests account and activity histories with feedback loops to refine plays and recommendations.  Thus, Connected Sales Execution spans teams, processes, and technology. 

“We’re a platform to help you execute your sales strategy,” argued Rothstein.  At its heart, Groove employs AI, processes, rules, and sensors (e.g., email capture, calendar capture, logging, phone calls) that analyze activities and generate insights.

“We’ve always been a company that connects all these things: the technology and the process, the team and the process,” stated Rothstein.  “Where we can help is getting everyone on the same page, executing the playbook in real-time, and seeing what’s working and [what’s] not.”

Groove Plays is in Alpha with a planned Q2 beta.  Groove Plays will be available to all customers at no additional cost when it GAs this summer.