Salesforce announced a pair of autonomous Einstein Sales Agents: Einstein SDR and Einstein Sales Coach. The products, built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform, will be generally available in October.
Einstein SDR Agent, a chatbot, engages with inbound prospects and is not limited to pre-programmed responses. The multi-lingual conversational marketing agent manages top-of-funnel communications and hands leads off to sellers. The SDR Agent employs RAG to interpret and process information. It can answer questions, handle objections, qualify leads, and book meetings, with responses grounded by Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Data Cloud.
“Companies can upload existing sales materials like product FAQs, sales plays, and case studies for Einstein to use to generate a trusted and accurate response to lead queries,” explained the firm.”
Configuring Einstein SDR Agents.
Revenue Operations can customize the language, avatar, and tone. They can also set “guardrails for how often, what channels, and when Einstein should engage with inbound prospects.”
Einstein SDR Agent also lets RevOps set lead routing rules, log actions as Tasks, and monitor activity via existing reports and dashboards.
“Einstein SDR Agent makes decisions and prioritizes actions that align with the desired outcomes and analyzes a prospect’s question to autonomously determine what to do next — whether that’s answering product questions, handling objections, or scheduling a meeting,” stated Salesforce. “Each response is trusted, accurate, and personalized because it is grounded in a company’s CRM and harmonized external data using Agentforce’s retrieval augmented generation (RAG) service.”
When meetings are set, Einstein SDR Agent warmly hands off to reps with a pre-meeting summary that “critical lead information and previous interactions.”
The SDR Agent supports SMS and WhatsApp.
Einstein Sales Coach offers embedded role plays with feedback based on current scenarios.
The Einstein Sales Coach also employs RAG and text-to-voice to assist with sales role plays. Each roleplay is deal-specific, and Einstein provides post-roleplay feedback. RAG allows Einstein to customize sale scenarios based on Salesforce details about the deal, account, and prior correspondence.
The Sales Coach allows reps to practice pitching, handling objections, or negotiating before meeting with real customers.
“Using RAG, Einstein finds the relevant information in Salesforce — such as previous correspondence with that customer or external files provided, like buyer personas and buyer journey documents — and generates contextual responses in the buyer’s tone back to the seller during the role-play. For example, if a deal is in the negotiation stage, Einstein can create a role-play scenario sourced from the relevant context, including the opportunity record and buyer persona materials, to simulate the target buyer and engage in pricing negotiations.”
Einstein Sales Coach “incorporates insights from thought leaders and reputable publications when offering seller feedback.” Feedback includes next steps identified in Salesforce and overdue tasks and uploaded content such as sales methodologies and objection handling.
Einstein Sales Coach provides both positive and critical roleplay feedback for current deal scenarios. Next Steps are also called out.
During calls, Einstein provides real-time feedback, noting competitor mentions with competitive insights and providing negotiation tips.
“Every AI conversation needs to be an ROI conversation, and that will happen only when AI augments your team to accelerate growth,” argued Sales Cloud GM Ketan Karkhanis. “Every sales team needs more at-bats and more enablement to accelerate close rates, and that’s what these new autonomous sales agents will help drive. The sales team of the future is humans working with AI to drive sales success.”
Lavender applies AI to assist sales reps with drafting emails and recommending best practices.
Sales AI Email Coach Lavender rolled its V3 release into beta. The full release, expected later this summer, sports faster writing times through improved personalization tools and insights, and an enhanced coaching system with segmented and custom dynamic models.
By design, Lavender doesn’t want to replace sales reps but make them more effective, a sharp contrast with many SalesTech vendors. Lavender’s AI helps sales orgs understand why emails work and uses this understanding to help reps quickly write effective emails.
“Everything that we do is steeped in this concept of enablement and trying to get the user to think. There’s nothing I hate more than the concept of AI taking thinking away from sellers, because that’s where their growth is going to happen. The friction that we introduce is always intentional.”
COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting
The objective is to educate the sales rep on best practices that raise response rates and move deals forward. Blackboxing these practices doesn’t educate the rep and it ignores the wisdom of the rep.
While Lavender speeds up the composition process (efficiency), its true benefit comes in improving message quality through personalization and email best practices (as determined by AI analysis of client email data). Simply pushing out more quasi-personalized emails provides limited lift.
“If you actually customize emails to a one-to-one message, we’re seeing companies not only getting 25% plus response rates to their cold emails, but they’re generating a majority of their pipeline via those emails,” said Allred. “For example, a Forbes ‘Cloud 100’ company is seeing about 1900% more pipeline delivered via these emails.”
Sales reps struggle to provide “thoughtful personalization” as they need to search across their email, CRM, Gong conversations, and Sales Intelligence solutions. Reviewing and synthesizing this content can be quite time consuming. Furthermore, email platforms lack analytics, so are a “giant black box” when it comes to determining which emails are effective.
Sales reps have access to personal and conversational context when drafting emails.
Sales reps can select which context sources to employ when drafting an email, with Lavender recommending potential icebreakers and then generating the message.
Lavender addresses the issue of analyzing personalized emails, which creates a “complete blind spot” for Sales Ops. If each email is unique, RevOps can no longer perform A/B analysis of templates.
“In our dashboard, we’re helping managers understand exactly why reps are having success when it comes to email because it’s not an A/B comparison,” argued Allred. “There are hundreds of emails going out. They’ve all been personalized and customized. There are hundreds of variables that are at play here, and so we’re measuring all of them and pulling out what’s most important.”
Lavender’s email coach evaluates your message real time against your historical best practices to recommend changes (brevity, short sentences, non-spammy headers, questions) that raise response rates (2-3x on average) and continue deal progression.
Lavender’s email coach provides real time scoring. The AI detects reasons the email won’t get a reply and fixes them using a variety of LLMs.
Allred remarked that cold emails shouldn’t get all of the attention, arguing that the key to moving companies through various stages of the funnel is raising response rates. Unfortunately, one of the reasons that email threads die is because sales reps stop asking questions. So, Lavender builds in personalization and encourages questions in responses.
“If you actually customize emails to a one-to-one message, not only are the emails getting 25% plus percent response rates, but the pipeline that you’re driving from that is almost 2,000% more per email.”
Lavender analyzes data across the inbox (Outlook, Gmail) and SEP (Salesloft, Gong Engage, Outreach, Groove, Apollo) to create custom scoring recommendations. It also marries CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), Conversational Sales (Gong) and third-party data to assist with drafting personalized emails with high response rates.
Lavender ingests activity from enterprise software platforms, analyzes the emails, and recommends edits based on best practices.
The AI can examine the emails and determine which phrasing, formats, styles, and wording are effective and which are falling flat. Lavender is diving deeper into AI analytics, looking to discern which emails are effective and why.
“Our approach to this [problem] is to stitch together an understanding of what’s happening in both inboxes, pull that together into a single pane of understanding, and then feed that back to the rep in real-time to give them the coaching they need. We pull all of that information to the forefront for the user.”
It’s a pure understanding of why an email works from an activity standpoint just like the metadata that we capture today, to the persona analytics, to the writing style data that’s been at the heart of Lavender since the beginning. Not just the style but the content itself.”
Lavender CEO Will Allred
The new release will also introduce a set of open-sourced email frameworks that help sellers tune their logic based on the scenario. For example, if a seller is trying to write an email to a prior closed lost opportunity, a framework would help the seller think through the message and subsequent follow-ups.
“We’re going to surface frameworks to help people think through better ways to write the message,” explained COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting. “We want our users to become better writers and better sellers. One of the things we found helpful in creating that was open-sourcing and bringing our frameworks to the surface so people could understand the logic behind what makes a great email.”
Lavender also added a ChatGPT style modal that allows the user flexibility to brainstorm, receive writing advice, or research via searching (or prompting) the web.
Lavender launched its service before the Cambrian Explosion of GenAI apps and subsequently built an “LLM stack” that includes its own models, Anthropic, OpenAI, Watson X, and more. This early mover advantage allowed it to build a solid customer base. According to the Chrome Store, Lavender has over 35,000 active users, a scale that exceeds its competitors.
“We have more daily active users than anyone in our space has downloads of their like products,” stated Allred.
Sales Enablement vendor Showpad announced PitchAI, its response to the problem of overloaded managers that lack the time to consistently provide timely feedback and coaching around sales pitches.
“Delivering the perfect sales pitch is one of the most challenging sales skills to master—both for inside and field sellers. A sales pitch must be confident, impactful, and quick,” stated the firm. “It should grab a buyer’s attention, capture trust, and leave a curiosity gap. A great pitch doesn’t happen by accident—it takes practice, preparation, and feedback. Yet, sales managers and enablement teams aren’t always able to provide the thoughtful and attentive evaluations and feedback reps need to develop their pitch.”
According to a 2018 Gartner Leadership survey, only 42% of sales managers feel equipped to develop their staff. Furthermore, “sellers feel the shortcomings of managers as well. Just 38% of sellers report their manager helps them develop the skills they need for their role today, while only 34% report their manager helps them develop the skills they need for the future.”
PitchAI employs AI to record and analyze sales pitches, providing consistent, on-demand coaching. Feedback is instant, allowing the rep to iterate, refine, and build confidence.
Furthermore, PitchAI analyzes the seller’s “credibility, sincerity, and knowledge through non-verbal communication” and coaches reps on improving their messaging and presentation. Each pitch is benchmarked against top sellers across the industry “to provide context to PitchAI’s rating and performance scores.”
PitchAI evaluates reps across four dimensions:
Speed: How fast or slow the pitch delivery is and whether it’s understandable.
Body language: How trustworthy, friendly, and approachable the seller appears.
Silences: How and when to add or remove pauses.
Happiness: How enthusiastic the pitch comes across overall.
Tips are industry and language-specific. Showpad noted that “long silences make for a bad pitch in German, but a good one in Portuguese.”
PitchAI banner messaging includes advice on what adjustments to make.
Sales Execution Platform Outreach and Revenue Consultancy Corporate Visions announced a partnership to “help companies transform enterprise organizations’ sales for the modern era.” Corporate Visions, which recently acquired win/loss analytics vendor Primary Intelligence, offers science-backed revenue growth services for sales, marketing, and customer success.
Along with hosting conferences and training, Corporate Visions helps firms “articulate value and promote growth” in three ways:
Make Value Situational by distinguishing your commercial programs between customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Make Value Specific by creating and delivering customer conversations that communicate concrete value, change behavior, and motivate buying decisions.
Make Value Systematic by equipping your commercial engine to deliver consistent and persistent touches across the entire Customer Deciding Journey.
“I have been a fan of Corporate Visions and their work since the beginning of Outreach. Their commitment to research-backed solutions for sales challenges and solid track record of implementing solutions across GTM teams that lead to results is unmatched. Their work has resulted in increased revenue and profitability for many of the world’s biggest companies,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina. “That’s why Outreach is partnering with Corporate Visions to empower Chief Revenue Officers to unlock sales productivity so they can efficiently create pipeline and predictably close more deals.”
The partnership aims to increase deal velocity, improve sales quota attainment, and generate higher win rates. Corporate Visions will offer a quartet of Outreach-based services around tech implementation strategy, sales messaging optimization, skills coaching, and sales forecast process & measurement.
“By leveraging Corporate Visions’ best practices as organizations implement Outreach’s platform, enterprise sales leaders, from the CRO down, will ensure that every action their team is taking consistently builds enough pipeline coverage for the next quarter without sacrificing today’s deal velocity or pipeline conversion rates,” wrote the firms.
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.”
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.
Lavender, which markets an AI-powered sales email coaching platform, closed an $11 million Series A, raising its total funding to $13.2 million. Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Signia Venture Partners. The funding follows strong growth in 2022, with revenue rising 865%.
Funds will be deployed towards expanding its team and introducing “new AI-powered features that help revenue teams not just understand why their messaging is falling flat but also provide actionable coaching to improve productivity and generate faster responses.”
“Lavender’s new investment helps it build out a generative AI solution at the intersection of email marketing, sales enablement, and news and information,” wrote Outsell Lead Analyst Randy Giusto. “It shows where sales and marketing intelligence vendors must head next.”
Lavender integrates with a user’s email workflow, helping reps improve response rates. It also delivers prospect company and contact intelligence. Lavender scores emails and recommends steps to improve response rates. It also “coaches sales reps on how to build meaningful relationships and close more deals.”
Along with raising response rates, email composition time is significantly reduced. Lavender claims that rep time writing an email drops from fifteen minutes to one while raising email response rates fourfold to twenty percent or more.
“Using Lavender is like giving every seller on the team a dedicated coach, making them more effective, more efficient, and more confident in their job,” stated CEO William Ballance. “This funding quickly accelerates our ability to build the best email experience for sellers around the world. Most importantly, we’re creating new jobs as our team of #EmailWizards rapidly expands.”
The Lavender Team Dashboard
Lavender recommendations are initially based on “millions of successful sales emails and your historical emails.” However, it continues to adjust recommendations based on “what works best for you.”
Lavender evaluates the subject and body to improve open rates. It will identify subjects that are too long, not in title case, or contain numbers and punctuation. For the body, it looks at the length, layout, spelling, and grammar. For example, long sentences and paragraphs are difficult to read on mobile devices, so they are discouraged. According to Lavender, 80% of buyers are viewing emails on their phone, “so making emails easily scannable on a mobile device is imperative.” A mobile preview window displays the email as it would appear on phones.
“We recommend things across multiple categories, including formatting, phrasing, tonality and emotional intelligence, mobile optimization, personalization, and more,” explained Lavender COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting. “The data is always shifting though, and as trends shift in sales emails/what works well for that user and/or their team, Lavender’s scoring and recommendations dynamically adjust accordingly.”
Other Lavender features include a coaching dashboard, AI for Sales emails, and a personalization assistant. The coaching dashboard provides individual and team email scores, open rates, reply rates, and writing time. It helps managers determine which reps require additional coaching, what is working, and why it is working.
Lavender includes a “Start my Email” function that employs generative AI to “draft impactful outgoing email messages” based on seed bullet points from the rep or as email responses based on the email thread.
The personalization assistant displays recipient context to assist with personalization. For example, lavender surfaces social data, personality insights, news, events, job listings, funding announcements, and other intelligence within the composition workflow. Lavender AI also recommends “personalized intros to tailor your email and make it relevant to the recipient.”
Lavender is integrated with Gmail, Outlook, Outreach, and Salesloft. Lavender Anywhere, a Chrome extension, supports email composition for HubSpot, LinkedIn, Groove, Apollo, Engage, Outplay, and Mailchimp. As Lavender Anywhere is not directly integrated with these platforms, users must cut and paste the resulting text into the communication window. Lavender Anywhere is available with Pro and Teams licenses.
“Lavender is delivering exceptional value to our customers. Their integration provides real-time email assistance to help Salesloft customers build and deepen their relationships with prospects through better emails,” said Salesloft VP of Global Alliances Devin Schiffman. “We share in the mission of helping sellers be loved by the buyers they serve.”
Customers include Twilio, Sharebite, Sendoso, Segment, Lucidworks, and Clari. Allred said Lavender sells into a “large range” of companies, “but our sweet spot tends to be mid-market tech or tech-enabled companies.”
“Lavender is marketed toward ‘sales emails’ – but many things are a sale,” continued Allred. “Our users use Lavender for B2B sales, recruiting, customer success, marketing, and many more.”
While output is English only, features such as the email generator or summary tools can ingest foreign language input. Thus, Lavender “works great for ESL (English second language) selling into English speaking markets,” said Allred.
“Lavender’s platform goes beyond basic AI-generated writing to augment—rather than automate—sales outreach and humanize every interaction. It supercharges sales reps by reducing their time spent writing emails so that they can focus on building relationships and selling products,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “We were blown away by the ‘customer love’ for Lavender’s product, which is a testament to the founding team’s deep understanding of their end user and the tight-knit community of sales leaders it has already built. We’re excited to partner with this team on the journey ahead.”
The firm has benefited from the recent interest in generative AI and ChatGPT. “We were using GPT-3 long before ChatGPT was a thing, but ChatGPT has definitely increased interest in Generative AI more broadly. Users have created UGC (user-generated content) of them using Lavender to edit ChatGPT–generated emails,” explained Allred. “But before ChatGPT was released, thousands of users were already getting the benefit of it within Lavender.”
“We view the process of emailing as four parts: research, creation, editing, and learning,” continued Allred. Lavender assists in all four. Generative models can assist along the way to streamline things for our users.”
Lavender employs a freemium pricing model.
Lavender is sold on a freemium basis. Free users receive email analysis and personalization for five emails per month.
Reps can license an Individual Pro license for $29 per month that provides unlimited emails and recommendations. In addition, the Pro service includes Lavender Anywhere, multi-inbox support, analytics, and Gmail and Outlook 365 integrations.
For $49 per user per month, companies can license a Team edition that includes Team AI coaching, Team Insights, a Manager’s Dashboard, and SEP integrations for Salesloft or Outreach. Lavender offers a seven-day free trial and free premium licenses for job seekers, students, and bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
Attention, an AI-powered sales assistant, exited stealth mode and closed a $3.1 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Other participants include Frst, Liquid2 Ventures, Maschmeyer Group Ventures, Ride Ventures, and the founders of Ramp, Level AI, Truework, CBInsights, and Zoi. The new funds will be deployed towards advanced AI capabilities and market growth for the New York City-based startup.
Attention helps sales teams “overcome inefficiencies at every stage of the sales cycle,” including CRM hygiene, sales acceleration, and revenue growth. Attention accelerates sales rep ramp-up, drafts follow-up emails based on customer statements, improves forecasting, and automatically enriches Salesforce and HubSpot with post-call deal intelligence.
Attention maps discussions to custom CRM fields specific to standard sales methodologies such as MEDDIC and BANT.
Attention Battlecards
Attention also provides real-time suggestions and question responses, “resulting in all sales representatives having higher rates of success and closed business.” Recommendations include product responses to technical questions and objections handling. The Attention AI determines common unsupported questions and builds battlecards based on sales responses. Battlecards can also be developed or edited by the sales enablement team.
One novel feature is the ability to query the meeting transcript with a question, allowing reps to summarize or revisit the discussion around key topics quickly.
Sales reps can share call snippets with managers or SMEs via Slack, allowing them to forward open questions in the voice of the customer.
“Attention is a game-changer. We’ve rarely seen any product like this in terms of efficiency gains and ramp-up acceleration. We’re also blown away by how fast they’ve been releasing new capabilities.” said Peter Santis, head of sales at RocketChat. Santis both licensed the service for RocketChat and participated in the seed round.
Founders Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg founded competing AI software startups before joining forces in September 2021 to build Attention.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Anis and Matthias as they leverage the latest developments in AI generation and natural language understanding to superpower sales organizations,” remarked Hadley Harris from Eniac Ventures. “We love working with repeat founders and couldn’t be happier with the strong pull they’re already getting from the market.”
Attention supports communications platforms, including Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Meets, Zoom, and Zapier.
Attention’s initial customers are in the technology sales space, most commonly with 50 to 100 licensed sales reps.
“The acquisition extends Bigtincan’s lead in AI-driven revenue intelligence by improving B2B sales organization’s ability to scale by delivering insights and recommendations directly to sales reps for better decision-making to increase revenue,” the firm told investors. “The SalesDirector.ai technology links people, activity, and engagement across the buyer’s journey to derive insights, including opportunity risk and relationship strength, and then makes intelligent recommendations. By capturing all sales, marketing, and customer success activity the technology drives actionable revenue insights required to make the right business decisions.”
Bigtincan stated that SalesDirector’s technology would improve its AI-powered insights capabilities and forecasting accuracy.
SalesDirector ingests data from GSuite/Gmail, Slack, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Exchange and feeds contact data (e.g., Title, Department, Level, Phone) to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. SalesDirector also captures Engagement Signals and writes them back to CRMs as custom fields:
Executive Engaged on Opportunity / Account
Single or Multi-Threaded Opportunity Relationship
Last QBR Complete / Next QBR Scheduled
Partner / Sales Engineer Engaged on Opportunity
Next Step / Meeting Scheduled
AI tools include stakeholder identification, individuals who are supporters or detractors, disengaged stakeholders, account risk scoring, sentiment analysis, and deal health.
SalesDirector.AI Account Insights and Next Best Actions.
“Every organization has to be more productive,” said Bigtincan CEO David Keane. “With the Sales Enablement market shifting towards a more holistic approach encompassing Revenue Enablement, we can deliver more value to our customers by providing full-cycle sellers with AI-driven recommendations on the next best actions based on intelligent sales analytics from SalesDirector.ai.”
SalesDirector pricing begins at $29 per user per month for activity capture. Revenue Insights pricing is not published.
AI-assisted stakeholder mapping.
Bigtincan will incorporate SalesDirector’s functionality into its product suite and phase out the SalesDirector brand.
“Traditionally, when we do small tech-focused acquisitions, they become part of the Bigtincan product suite, so that capability gets added to the existing platform we have,” said Keane. “We don’t tend to run these things as separate businesses, mostly because we miss out on some of the benefits for our shareholders of taking it all together and taking that technology and really getting in the platform. This is no different than our existing strategy – embed, connect it all together and make it something that our customers can choose to add. We do believe that it is all about choice, and we want people to be able to buy these technologies from us as additional value-added options. I think that’s going to be the case here as well.”
Bigtincan paid $1.2 million in cash and equity for SalesDirector.
The entire SalesDirector team is joining Bigtincan.
Bigtincan, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, has acquired a series of RevTech companies, including ClearSlide, Brainshark, and VoiceVibes.
Seismic content and training recommendations are presented during calls.
Seismic and Microsoft announced an integration partnership that will embed Seismic’s sales enablement workflows within Microsoft Viva Sales. Seismic will provide “content production, collaboration, task automation, and engagement intelligence for Viva Sales users across the meeting experience to help drive deals and relationships forward.” The goal is to “streamline” buyer engagement at relationship-based sales teams.
Microsoft Viva Sales became generally available on October 3. Viva Sales is “a new seller experience application that brings together any customer relationship management technology (CRM), Microsoft 365, and Teams to provide a more streamlined and AI-powered selling experience.” The new solution is designed for the hybrid work environment where reps leverage video conferences, chats, emails, and documents to close deals.
“We’re united with Seismic in our commitment to empowering sellers through relevant content and an improved seller experience. Our plan to integrate Seismic with Viva Sales will help sellers have more personalized customer engagements whether they are in the office or on the road, with a helpful assist from the AI-driven insights and content,” said Lori Lamkin, CVP, Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications.
Viva Sales customers include Adobe, Crayon, and PwC.
