Category: Revenue Intelligence

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.”

RevSure $6M Seed Round Expansion

RevSure, which describes itself as a Pipeline Readiness solution, closed on an additional $6 million in seed funding, bringing its total seed funding to $10 million.  The round was led by Neotribe Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, with participation from Operator Collective and Correlation Ventures.  Neotribe Partner Alex Salazar, the former founder and CEO of Stormpath (acquired by Okta), joined RevSure’s board.

RevSure helps go-to-market teams “share a single source of truth” concerning the health of their pipeline.  It also automates reporting tasks and offers recommendations for converting leads into qualified sales opportunities.  RevSure helps marketers determine revenue leakage and where to concentrate their spend.

RevSure offers insights into demand generation effectiveness and efficiency, helping prioritize leads and opportunities.  AI recommendations call out which leads to prioritize and how to optimize campaigns.  Users can drill down into campaigns or filter by title, industry, segment, and channel. 

RevSure already supports Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.

“The question that is top of mind for every marketing leader right now is: ‘Am I meeting my pipeline generation goals, and if not, what should I do about it?’ What sets RevSure apart is the unique combination of data normalization and predictive AI that allows CMOs and their teams to answer those questions faster than ever using a simple, action-oriented user interface,” said Haley Daiber Brannan, Investing Partner at Operator Collective.  “It’s working, and the growing customer love RevSure has earned in such a short time speaks for itself.”

The additional funds will help advance RevSure’s “mission of advancing the effectiveness of pipeline generation for B2B companies, with additional investments in product, engineering, and AI technology and resources.  RevSure will also invest in customer acquisition and “doubling down on the company’s go-to-market strategy.”

Demand Generation Effectiveness Drilldown.

RevSure focuses on the top and middle of the funnel with recommendations and prioritization tools instead of the bottom, which looks more at forecasting.  “We are in the lead-to-opportunity journey,” explained RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra to GZ Consulting.  “We don’t go into the forecast.”

“Pipeline health needs to be on every go-to-market leader’s, CEO’s, and Board’s agenda – it’s the missing link in driving predictable & profitable revenue growth, which is critical in the current economic climate. Adding AI-based predictive insights into pipeline effectiveness and health will allow companies to focus on predictability for outcomes, acceleration to revenue and effectiveness or quality and efficiency.”

RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra

RevSure officially launched at SaaStr in September 2022. “RevSure uncovers what’s happening in the marketing and sales funnel so companies know exactly what’s working, how much leakage is occurring, and where to focus resources to win more deals,” said Neotribe Ventures Partner Alex Salazar.  “We’re thrilled to be leading the expansion of RevSure’s seed round as their ability to accurately predict pipeline value from all the leads marketing generates is creating an opportunity for them to become the de facto system of engagement for demand gen teams.”

Gong Insights

Gong rep adoption of new messaging.

Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong released Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake.  The new solution delivers conversational insights captured from the Gong Conversational Sales platform to business intelligence tools.  Insights capture activities, calls, and emails.

“Business leaders are under pressure to make the right strategic decisions that will help their companies thrive, especially in this challenging climate.  But they often rely on manual data like CRM or field or customer surveys, which are subjective and go stale quickly,” said Gong CRO Ryan Longfield.  “By teaming with Snowflake to bring this rich data and understanding from Gong directly into the broader set of insights, we are making it easier for leaders to improve their [go-to-market] strategy, productivity, and execution, all based on data that’s rooted in customer interactions.”

Gong rep productivity.

Historically, it has been challenging to determine which initiatives drive deals forward and increase the likelihood of winning a contract.  As a result, sales reps have had few incentives to enter detailed activity and results information into CRMs.  Furthermore, activity and engagement data have been stove-piped in different platforms or not captured digitally.  Thus, only 54% of GTM leaders report having clear, real-time visibility into deal progression (April 2022 Harvard Business Review study sponsored by Gong).

Gong has automated the delivery of its sales insights to Snowflake, making it “easier for senior business leaders to have a view into revenue intelligence insights along with other key business metrics as they evaluate strategic decisions.”  Joint customers can set up a no-code Gong Insights instance with data flowing automatically to their existing BI tool for dashboard and report development.  Pre-built reports are also provided.

“Having access to the right data is critical to ensuring strategic decisions can be made that lead to growth,” said Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan.  “By building on Snowflake, Gong is able to securely and seamlessly integrate its data into the rest of a company’s dataset, giving executives a clearer picture of the information they need to run their business.”

Use cases include churn risk factor analysis, most at-risk accounts, and identifying under and over-resourced accounts.

Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake is generally available. 

Gong Insights is also available as a CRM Enrichment process that syncs Gong data with the Salesforce Data Cloud or HubSpot. Finally, Gong Insights is displayed as an Initiatives Board within the Revenue Intelligence platform.  The Dashboard “gives teams visibility into team adoption, as well as the ability to understand how initiatives resonate with their target market and correlate to business impact.”

Kluster Series A

Kluster funding slide deck (Source: Insider)

UK-based Revenue Intelligence vendor Kluster closed on a £4 million ($5 million) Series A round led by the Foresight Group.  Other investors include SuperSeed and Cognism CEO James Isilay.  The round raised total funding to $6 million.

Kluster helps sales teams monitor sales data and trends.  Kluster’s AI aids sales managers in building quarterly and annual roadmaps that include hiring plans, targeted call counts, prospects to reach, and opportunities to generate.  These KPIs provide a set of plans and objectives for the upcoming period.  Kluster then monitors performance against the plan, updating the forecast, and recommending actions to reach objectives.

Kluster also supports stress testing, executive dashboards, and scenario modeling.

The funds will be deployed towards establishing an American presence and building out its go-to-market and executive teams.

“It has never been more important to plan and execute revenue strategy than it is today,” said Kluster CEO Dan Thompson.  “With the recent VC bubble, the metrics that mattered went from growth, burn, and margins to growth, growth, and growth.”

Continued Thompson, “The bubble burst, and companies have now rediscovered the importance of rigorous planning, robust strategy, and comprehensive revenue reporting.  Which is why I am delighted to partner with Foresight and deepen our relationship with SuperSeed, to bring our solution to this problem to the global market.”

The AI boom helped Kluster “get through the door,” said Thompson.  “AI is pretty buzzy, but fundraising is always tough, and it was definitely more rigorous than it would be in the past.”

Kluster has grown to 30 employees since its 2016 founding.  Half of its revenue comes from the US and Canada.  It claims to have a net revenue retention rate above 100% and strong word of mouth, with referrals generating 40% of its income.

“They (Kluster) have a strong product-market fit, and I’m relieved to see a platform that enables companies to forecast revenue more accurately,” remarked Foresight MD Jack Eadie.  “Kluster’s team is shaping the future of sales, and I am eager to see what they develop next.”

Kluster funding slide deck (Source: Insider)

Next Quarter Adds Bombora Intent

Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients.  Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering.  Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”

Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce.  Churn risk is also assessed.

Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.

Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.

Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales.  Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.

“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm.  “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers.  Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”

Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.

“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah.  “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent.  Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”

Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021.  It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.

Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.

Pricing starts at $100 per user per month.  Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.

Revenue Grid Spring Release

Revenue Grid’s New Revenue Leaks Funnel visualizes lost opportunities across the funnel.

Revenue Intelligence vendor Revenue Grid announced its Spring 2023 release, with a new Revenue Leaks Funnel headlining the announcement.  Other features include Forecast Evolution Reports, Signals Builder enhancements, sequence management enhancements, and custom calendaring fields.

The Revenue Leaks Funnel is available as a Salesforce-native, out-of-the-box report that helps revenue teams “magically spot invisible revenue leaks, understand where they occur during the selected period, and measure the magnitude of the leaks happening across the pipeline.”

The Revenue Leaks Funnel displays how opportunities progress between stages with the average stage time.  Slipped deals can be spotted and brought back on track.  Leaks are called out by stage, helping management identify where deals are being lost and address stage-related issues.  Revenue Ops and managers can view funnel dynamics for the previous week, month, quarter, or year.

A new Forecast Evolution Report compares different fiscal periods and tracks forecast changes.    Changes over the past week are displayed, with viewing at the team or rep level.  In addition, users can “see the patterns across the forecast categories over time and detect any trends in revenue leakage.”

The Signals Builder defines custom signals of specific types and assigns them to specific recipients.  Revenue Grid provided the following examples:

  • Custom Recipient: Account Executive assigns webinar leads to BDR (custom recipient) who has to process them first and add leads to the specific post-event sequence.
  • Sales Leader: An opportunity was created with a value exceeding $50,000.
  • Sales Manager: An opportunity is less than 15 days away from the close date and is at the “Proposal Price Quote.”
  • Sales Representative: A Lead was created more than 30 days ago but has not been contacted yet.

A new sequence-related productivity report helps sales managers monitor sales rep action items (e.g., replies, to-do lists, notifications) and coordinate their performance.  Managers can view and compare activity across their sales team.

Other sequence enhancements include searching and adding prospects to sequences from Salesforce, sequence pausing, and adding a prospect owner as a step owner in a sequence. Operations teams can add custom fields to booking confirmation forms, including text fields, labels, and checkboxes.  Forms automatically fill in the email and name on Book Me confirmation pages for recurring events.

RevSure Pipeline Readiness

Demand Generation Effectiveness displays the most effective channels by various metrics

RevSure, which describes itself as a Pipeline Readiness solution, announced enhancements that “provide marketing teams with increased insights into data and around lead-to-revenue projections.”  The new capabilities help marketers increase their spend efficiency and focus expenditures on campaigns and actions with the highest ROI.

RevSure helps go-to-market teams “share a single source of truth” concerning the health of their pipeline.  It also automates reporting tasks and offers recommendations for converting leads into qualified sales opportunities.

“With a united full-funnel view, you can effortlessly pull all of this data into one place, so you can easily analyze the impact of each campaign and lead source at a glance.  Did your latest low-cost webinar lead to a high amount of pipeline and bookings?  You may want to consider scaling your efforts or investing in more webinars.  On the other hand, did that conference you attended 8 months ago and spent tens of thousands of dollars on not lead to the pipeline and bookings you were hoping for?  Might be worth crossing that conference off your list for the next year, so you can ensure you are focusing on the campaigns and channels that are bringing you the greatest ROI,” blogged RevSure.

New features offer insights into demand generation effectiveness and efficiency, helping prioritize leads and opportunities.  AI recommendations call out which leads to prioritize and how to optimize campaigns.  Users can drill down into campaigns or filter by title, industry, segment, or channel.  The Demand Generation Effectiveness is a color-coded tree map of “what is working and where is it working,” explained RevSure Head of Marketing Kacyn Goranson to GZ Consulting.  “It will show you generated lead volume, gross cost per lead, or booking value, so you can quickly slice and dice your marketing efforts” and determine “what is actually effective” across the funnel.

RevSure also provides stage conversion analytics, cohort analysis for campaign efficacy, and marketing campaign / KPI analytics.

Cohort analysis with Lead Insights

Lead prioritization is based on firmographics (e.g., location, size, industry), persona, engagement data from MAPs, intent, channel, campaign data, and lead source.  Data is sourced from Apollo and customer-licensed intent datasets.

To improve demand generation effectiveness, RevSure now ingests Salesforce campaigns and lead sources, along with Google AdWords and LinkedIn Campaigns.  These additional data sources are available for campaign budget analysis.  Users can “easily calculate and determine” conversion velocity, pipeline, and booking value.

“Today’s marketers have a gap in their data toolsets and are currently lacking AI-based models, and many CMOs are tasked with adopting and driving what will be effective, and winning, data strategies,” argued RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra.  “Using RevSure helps provide marketing teams with intelligence and insights into their sales pipeline, and data that empowers them to strategically defend marketing budgets and pivot campaigns based on sales performance – both of which can be critical to sales success in the current economic climate.”

RevSure provides sales and marketing teams lists of their top 25, 50, and 100 most promising leads and opportunities.  It also displays “step-by-step recommendations” concerning when and how to follow up with them, “turning qualified leads into legitimate sales opportunities.”

Lead Prioritization provides a summary of the Top 25, 50, and 100 opportunities along with the working lead list and projected pipeline value.

RevSure already supports Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.  The HubSpot App Marketplace partnership was launched earlier this month.

RevSure focuses on the top and middle of the funnel with recommendations and prioritization tools instead of the bottom, which looks more at forecasting.  “We are in the lead-to-opportunity journey,” explained Singh to GZ Consulting.  “We don’t go into the forecast.”

RevSure is less than a year old and officially launched at SaaStr in September 2022.  According to Singh, the firm is ahead of its customer acquisition and revenue targets.

Demand Generation Effectiveness Drilldown.

Clari Acquires and Integrates Wingman into its Revenue Intelligence Platform

In June, Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari acquired Conversational Intelligence vendor Wingman, bringing together two complementary SalesTech vendors.  Wingman provided Clari users with additional account intelligence derived from calls, meetings, and emails.  The goal was to provide “visibility plus action all the way from the boardroom to the bullpen,” said Wingman CEO Shruti Kapoor.

Clari recently announced that Wingman is fully integrated into its service.

“The acquisition of Wingman, a leader in conversation intelligence, gives Clari’s category-leading Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversations, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes,” announced Clari.  “Wingman goes beyond the limits of similar conversation intelligence tools by helping revenue-critical teams act in the moment when it matters.”

“A major part of our strategic vision is conversation intelligence, which is why we’re thrilled to announce that Clari has acquired Wingman, a leader in CI.  This gives Clari’s Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversation data, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes.  The full value of conversation intelligence has never been fully realized, until now.  Clari helps your team move beyond siloed, departmental systems and processes that cause endless breakdowns across your revenue process and brings all revenue-critical employees into a unified platform to run revenue.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

“As we think about scaling our impact, it’s clear to us that we want to free up these insights for everyone who’s revenue-critical, from the bullpen to the boardroom,” blogged Kapoor.  “We want to give you the ability to switch between micro (every customer interaction) and macro (the entire revenue pipeline) as easily as toggling channels on television.”

Wingman battle cards are displayed in real-time.

Wingman records, transcribes, and tags calls, storing them in a searchable library by keyword, tag (e.g., Price, Customer Pain, Blockers), or competitor mentions.  Topics may be customized to capture competitors, product names, technologies, etc.  Reps can also set live bookmarks across all supported video platforms.

Wingman also offers real-time battle cards, a set of short suggestions displayed in context during a call.  New sales reps will be confident that they are providing accurate information consistent with company positioning.  Other real-time coaching tools include long monologue alerts, word rate notices, and time-based cue cards.

Wingman game tapes provide a reference library of training snippets.

Call summaries include questions, next steps, pain points, blockers, and topics of interest.  Post-call analytics include call duration, longest monologue, engaging questions that elicited a response from the prospect, and interactivity.

To assist with coaching, Wingman automatically identifies speakers and creates speech tracks, letting managers or reps focus on specific individuals.  It also offers a “game tapes” library for new hire training.  Game tapes provide a set of best-of-breed video samples for pricing, blockers, features, etc.

Wingman also offers Deal Central deal intelligence.  Deal Central identifies deal health risks such as the lack of a decision-maker or pricing not being discussed.  It is this engagement intelligence that will complement Clari’s revenue intelligence capabilities.

“We were looking at all of the signals that are important for…our customers to help them make better decisions in their revenue execution…We have had great success bringing in data from CRM systems, email systems, meeting information for calendars,” stated CTO Venkat Rangan.  “One thing that we also recognized was bringing in conversational data – conversational intelligence analysis of call recordings – whether it’s voice calls or Zoom meeting calls…was going to fundamentally change the quality of the signals we bring in.”

Sales reps can also share meetings or snippets with colleagues, providing access to the customer’s voice.  Reps can also share call URLs with prospects and know when prospects view them.

Wingman is integrated with

  • CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive
  • SEP: Outreach, Salesloft
  • Conferencing: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet
  • Dialer: RingCentral, Dialpad, Fresh Caller, Aircall, FrontSpin
  • Other: Slack, Zapier
Wingman Pricing

Wingman’s monthly pricing starts at $60 per rep.  It has “no hidden setup costs, no minimum seat requirement, and no charges for sales managers & observers.”

In the summer of 2021, Wingman was named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in the Conversational Intelligence category.

When acquired in June, Bengaluru-based Wingman had 57 employees (per LinkedIn) and had doubled its ARR over the previous six months.  It was founded in 2018 and claims to have over 200 customers.

“Clari’s acquisition of Wingman will help customers turn recorded conversations into a strategic asset for spotting revenue leak and driving revenue precision.  At a time when leaders are looking to unify their teams and their tech stacks, adding Wingman solidifies Clari’s position as the only enterprise platform for running the end-to-end revenue process,” boasted Byrne.  “Wingman’s conversation intelligence technology leads the market in real-time guidance and coaching capabilities, providing actionable insights when sellers need them most to help close deals faster.  Revenue leadership can scale teams, methodologies, and go-to-market strategies with confidence knowing that all team members will have the latest messaging and collateral at their fingertips, in every conversation.”

Rangan said that Wingman was a strong fit to Clari across multiple dimensions: technologies, market approach, and culture.

Kapoor noted that the combination allows for conversational analysis at all levels.  Users can Zoom into a single conversation and deal health, while managers and executives can zoom out to pipeline analytics, revenue forecasting, and deals at risk. 

Bringing the organizations together was the “best and fastest way to get there together,” argued Kapoor.

Initially, Rangan would like to focus Wingman enhancements on the emerging and commercial segments due to a strong alignment between Wingman and customer needs.  The Wingman roadmap also lays out steps to make Wingman mid-market and enterprise ready.  Longer-term, conversational intelligence signals will be fed from Wingman into Clari and “serve all of the revenue workflows” across the boardroom, senior management, front-line management, and sales reps.  Conversational intelligence will feed the forecasting and pipeline inspection processes.

Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst at Forrester, was bullish on the transaction, noting that Clari has “stayed away from deeper revenue intelligence capabilities that focus on interaction execution, preferring to aggregate that information from other tools and present it in Clari.”  However, he sees four reasons that the acquisition makes sense:

  1. Adding CI eliminates a key dependency – While Clari had access to 28% of interactions via email and calendaring, it relied on third parties to capture 45% of interactions via phone and web conferencing.
  2. It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
  3. Valuations have come back to Earth – Six months ago, this deal may not have made financial sense, but “with funding drying up, this is the perfect time for late-stage market leaders with large war chests to acquire technology companies at a reasonable price.”
  4. This new capability aligns with Clari’s stated strategy – Deal health analytics derived from unstructured conversations will augment Clari’s vision of “predictable revenue growth.”  It will also capture and analyze internal deal review calls and potentially update deal progress and commit status automatically.  While deal status CRM updates are not a current capability, Marrs has suggested a logical future capability.

Conversation Intelligence is one of several product categories that are being merged into SalesTech platform solutions.  Converging technologies include Meeting Management, Sales Engagement, Conversational Intelligence, Revenue Intelligence, and Digital Salesrooms.  Clari now offers three of these (it also supports digital sales rooms via its 2021 DealPoint acquisition).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Clari Optimize and Groove Partnership

Revenue Platform Clari made a trio of announcements related to a partnership with Sales Engagement Platform Groove, the full integration of conversational sales platform Wingman, and the pending release of its Optimize module for controlling revenue leaks.  Optimize helps revenue teams diagnose and address revenue leaks, reducing revenue loss due to deal slippage, bad data, and error-prone manual processes.

“The Clari Revenue Platform gives revenue leaders the past, present, and future data they need to not just control revenue but help grow it,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne.  “Only Clari provides the full historical picture and adds real-time capabilities to act fast as well as the forward-looking projections to proactively strategize revenue precision.”

Optimize offers a “single, centralized view” of revenue metrics, including win rates, forecast accuracy, and deal cycle times.  In addition, Optimize helps revenue leaders answer questions such as “How is my team trending this quarter?  Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  How can I ensure my reps are doing the right things to produce predictably winning results?”

Clari argues that market leaders have been unable to answer these questions proactively, making it difficult to mitigate issues and risks.  Clari combines historical and external data to assist with revenue benchmarking.  Thus, Clari can reach beyond the CRM to gather account intelligence.  For example, it can look at usage data to assess churn risk.

“Optimize is all about finding revenue leaks so customers can see not just where and why they’re missing revenue, but what they can do about it. No other solution on the market has the ability to harness past time series data to provide a historical view of revenue leak.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Optimize, available soon, will provide a single view for the whole organization of revenue and insights, capturing CRM intelligence, activity data, and forecasts.  With the integration of Wingman, its recently acquired conversational intelligence subsidiary, the voice of the customer is fully embedded within Clari analytics and forecasts.

Furthermore, Wingman provides real-time coaching during sales calls, helping reps avoid mistakes and providing real-time intelligence (e.g., technical information, competitive battlecards) to sales reps.  By improving sales objection handling, parrying competitive attacks, and preventing delays due to technical follow-ups, Wingman also reduces revenue leakage.

“It’s not just about coaching your teams to sell more, or about deal reviews,” said Holly Procter, senior vice president and global head of sales at Clari.  “It’s more about running your revenue better—governing revenue-critical moments for success and collaboration across revenue-critical people, which includes buyers as well as sellers.  Nobody else offers this collaborative, real-time approach.”

The Clari + Groove Joint Value Proposition

Clari and Groove announced a partnership at Dreamforce that helps “joint customers run revenue with more precision, greater collaboration, and faster execution.”  Sales Engagement Platform Groove acts as a “system of action,” while Revenue Intelligence platform Clari acts as a “system of collaboration and governance.” Both platforms sync with Salesforce, which serves as the “system of record” for sales activity.

The partners argue that while revenue is at the heart of every business, CEOs struggle to get a handle on revenue and are uncertain about whether they will meet, beat, or miss revenue projections.

“Up to fifty percent of entire company employees are revenue critical.  They are responsible in some form or fashion for delivering revenue.” 

Clari SVP of Marketing Kyle Coleman explained to GZ Consulting

Revenue responsibility is broader than quota carriers and includes SDRs, CSMs, AMs, leadership, product managers, and engineers.  Unfortunately, “consistent, predictable execution and collaboration” across these employees remain “very challenging” due to the lack of a unified platform shared across all these roles.

“It’s also very difficult, therefore, to govern any sort of revenue process or sub-process in a repeatable way,” continued Coleman.  “What revenue leaders end up doing is every quarter, they’re trying to capture this lightning in a bottle to know whether they’re going to meet, beat or miss, but it’s sort of a scramble more often than not.”

With the Groove / Clari partnership, “we will be able to govern processes, we’ll be able to replicate the best practices, we’ll be able to do the right kind of real-time analysis that leads to action in a closed loop way so that we know that everything is happening as it should be when it should be,” argued Coleman.

A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them.  Revenue leaks exist across the full revenue lifecycle.  For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time, 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.

“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 able to be 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” that is 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 this?  Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.

“Clari has always been about providing companies with the collaboration and governance required to run revenue with maximum precision, and Groove completes the equation by enabling our joint customers to turn the insights we provide into action,” said Byrne.  “We’ve seen incredibly strong results from joint customers using our two platforms together, and this formal partnership will help us transform even more revenue organizations.”

Groove offers enterprise customers a Salesforce-native SEP that records all activity directly to Salesforce.

“Groove and Clari coming together is definitely a ‘1 + 1 = 3’ scenario for revenue leaders,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein.  “Bringing together Clari’s revenue collaboration and governance capabilities with Groove’s strength in sales execution and productivity provides the ultimate value proposition: See the future with Clari and then create that future with Groove.”

Company Links: Groove | Clari

People.AI Enhancements: Engagement Dashboards Account Planning & People.AI for Oracle Sales Cloud

Revenue Intelligence vendor People.AI announced a trio of product enhancements to its Platform: Engagement Dashboards, Account Planning, and People.ai for Oracle Sales Cloud.  The enhancements are intended to “help sales and ops teams drive greater efficiency, deeper relationships, and clearer visibility.”

According to Seth Marrs of Forrester, 82% of sales activities are digital and available for capture and analysis.  Furthermore, these analytics go beyond historical engagement data such as email opens and downloads and include insights concerning the nature of the interaction, buyer sentiment, open questions, and next steps.

Marrs sees the biggest RevTech trends as “the availability of interaction data and what that can do to really drive visibility into where you want to go, visibility into how you can better interact with customers, visibility into what you need to do to win more.  It’s unprecedented.  Now the big thing is how you pull that all together into an insight engine that can really help sales leaders and sellers.  And on the other side of it, how do you get sales leaders and sellers to adopt this.”

One issue is the fragmentation of channels, with few vendors supporting cross-channel insight gathering and analytics.

“The real nuggets and the real value are in your ability to go out and find insights in that data that are actually new or that you couldn’t see before that you can use to help the seller win more deals, that you can use to identify more deals,” expanded Marrs.

Marrs called Revenue Intelligence insights “force multipliers” that aren’t geared towards doing things faster but improving sales efficacy.  While automated activity capture offers efficiency gains by removing sales rep data entry, its true value is in standardizing the data capture and offering insights.

“The industry today has turned selling into an obstacle course, where reps need to navigate so many hurdles in order to actually do their job.  We’re clearing the pathway so teams can focus on what matters: building revenue,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, CEO of People.ai. “Our newest product offerings aim to transform the B2B sales process by providing our customers with more data and greater insight to accelerate business decisions that will grow pipeline, increase deal sizes, shorten sales cycles and boost win rates.”

Custom Engagement Dashboards can be quickly built via a drag-and-drop UI.

Engagement Dashboards improve the visibility of buyer and sales engagement and identify at-risk accounts and opportunities.  Engagement Dashboards offer personalized tables with custom metrics for any CRM or People.AI field, providing an improved understanding of opportunity and pipeline health.  Dashboards are self-service and can be created by either users or admins.

Reps can find out which high-value accounts have low engagement or are missing key stakeholders, which accounts have pipeline potential, and which accounts are vendors properly engaged at the department and persona level.

Engagement Dashboards also assist with rep coaching with a My Performance page that compares current performance against past performance and peers.

The People.AI Account Planning application operationalizes a company’s account planning methodology within Salesforce.  Account Planning helps visualize each “buyer’s business, goals, and obstacles” for enhanced opportunity discovery.

ClosePlan, a 2021 acquisition, has been integrated with People.AI.  ClosePlan offers scorecards and playbooks designed around sales methodologies such as MEDDIC, MEDDPIC, Miller Heiman, BANT, and Value Selling.  Reps can quickly qualify opportunities and identify blind spots.  Deal Scorecard dashboards display opportunity health to align deal conversations better and take corrective actions.  New features include the ability to attach opportunities and account maps to account plans.

Engagement data is integrated into account maps, identifying which departments are engaged and which ones present deal risk.  Maps also identify positive and negative relationships across accounts.

People.AI Stakeholder Overview

New stakeholder insights cards (see image on the right) detail engagement trends, upcoming activities, sales team connections, and the opportunities with which the stakeholder is affiliated.

PeopleGlass, which offers a single pane of glass for viewing and updating opportunities across accounts, added field-level commenting and sharing across the account team. 

People.AI also refreshed the PeopleGlass UX to simplify onboarding, personalization, navigation, and integration with Salesforce templates.  Users can also @ share with colleagues specific fields, share the full PeopleGlass view, and quickly create new opportunities in Salesforce.

People.AI for Oracle Sales Cloud helps generate revenue by “increasing sales productivity, which will drive more and bigger deals faster and increase buyer satisfaction.”  People.AI supports automated data capture with matching, filtering, and contact enrichment, freeing “sellers from tedious data-entry tasks,” allowing them to focus on selling.  The service also offers “prescriptive and contextual seller actions” that assist with account targeting and activity prioritization.

“We’re collaborating with People.ai because we’re equally laser-focused on transforming the sales process into a modern revenue engine,” said Katrina Gosek, Product Management VP, Oracle Customer Experience.  “Together, we will be able to provide our mutual customers with the actionable revenue insights needed to drive significant revenue transformation and growth.

People.AI already supports Salesforce, with over 250 implementations.

In its November release, People.AI will be supporting summary visualization for addressing questions such as with which personas and departments we should be engaging, which high-value accounts have low engagement, and how much pipeline is at risk.

Summary Visualizations will be available in the November release.

People.AI will also begin managing data gathering and reporting across multiple CRM instances, providing an overview of account activity across different divisions or regions.  Multi-CRM unification provides “visibility into who’s talking to which accounts, identify cross-sell opportunities, and gain buyer group intel across business units and acquisitions.”

I am covering CRM data capture and enrichment vendors this week in my blog. Yesterday, I covered Nektar.AI, and on Thursday, I will cover Winn.AI.