Category: Sales Coaching

Winn.AI Launched

The Winn.AI Zoom app supports real-time playbooks and intelligence capture.

Conversational data capture has been a popular theme this month with announcements from People.AI and Nektar.  Winn.AI, a Tel Aviv-based AI Assistant and playbook vendor, came out of stealth mode this month to offer AI-based playbook coaching during digital sales calls.  Winn.AI also captures real-time conversations and syncs account intelligence with Salesforce and HubSpot.

“Winn.AI relieves salespeople of…administrative busywork so that they can focus on their customers — not their keyboards.  Its magic lies in its unique ability to monitor, interpret, and document sales calls,” said CEO Eldad Postan-Koren.

Winn.AI also supports playbooks and tracks key topics during calls, helping salespeople stay focused on their prospects.  Winn.AI captures all relevant data during sales calls, such as pain points, timelines, competitors, and team size.  Product, competitive, and technical information are also displayed during calls, reducing the frequency of “I’ll get back to you” responses and presenting competitive parries.

“One of our core competencies is that we’re training our AI in real-life sales meetings.  This greatly helps us make it more accurate versus standard training resources,” said Postan-Koren. “Furthermore, the more a customer uses the product in their own sales meetings, our AI capabilities will improve to match their exact needs.”

To speed up playbook definition, Winn.AI includes a set of templates based on common sales methodologies.

Winn.AI joins conversational platforms, beginning with Zoom.  Teams, Google Meet, and additional conversational platforms (meetings and dialers) are on the roadmap for Q4.

Other features include time warnings, attendee lists, and post-call meeting summaries.  Editable summaries are displayed as soon as the call ends, adding them to the standard call workflow but removing most data entry.  Salespeople can also send a personalized recap email to call participants.  This review and notification process is generally completed within four minutes of call conclusion.

The Winn-AI post-call meeting summary pops up on call completion and supports editing and matching against CRM records.

Winn.AI does not create new records at this point but updates and enriches current Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity records.  Winn.AI does not yet support inbound calls or SDR outbound prospecting performed on dialers.

Playbook coaching reduces onboarding time and gives reps confidence that they have proper messaging, competitive knowledge, and technical details at the ready.

Like most SalesTech companies in 2022, Winn.AI positions itself around productivity and effectiveness during lean times.

“The funding round timing made perfect sense.  During turbulent times, when salespeople’s productivity and effectiveness are more critical than ever, a tool like Winn.AI provides the additional edge sales leaders and individuals are seeking,” Postan-Koren said.  “The Winn.AI real-time assistant acts as an extra pair of hands during meetings, giving salespeople the freedom to focus their attention entirely on the customer.”

Winn.AI is backed by $17.25 million seed funding from Insight Partners and S-Capital.  The firm has 25 employees and plans to double its headcount by the end of 2023.  The funds will be invested in “improving our deep technology” and building a sales and marketing organization.  All employees are in Israel, but they will be hiring in the US over the next two quarters.

Near-term roadmap goals are expanding the set of supported conference platforms and dialers, broadening the set of supported customer-facing roles (e.g., customer success, support, SDRs), adding playbook measurement and optimization tools, and implementing multiple, dynamic playbook branching (e.g., competitive handling, verticalized playbooks, technical discussions).

Postan-Koren offered GZ Consulting a compelling vision of “automated knowledge and personalization” feedback loops with the sales enablement team.  Closing the loop helps the enablement team maintain playbook recommendations.  Winn.AI will collect common responses and discussion tracks and feedback this intelligence to sales enablement for review and adjustments.  This human-in-the-loop approach facilitates playbook and coaching refinement and filling in coaching gaps.  It also identifies potential training needs as markets evolve.

“Winn.AI’s innovative and intuitive technology has identified a solution that addresses the pain points of Busy work.  By allowing salespeople to focus on making the sale, Winn.AI enables organizations to Improve performance and increase the quota,” said Hagi Schwartz, Managing Director at Insight Partners.

Postan-Koren explained that Winn.AI employs NLU (Natural Language Understanding), which goes beyond NLP (Natural Language Processing).

“Understanding is not processing because I can ask you, ‘Michael, how many employees are you?’ And your answer will be 20 employees.  But I can also ask you, ‘Mike, do you have 20 employees?’ And your answer will be yes.  Or I can ask you ‘how many employees?’ and your answer will be 20.  So here are three different ways to ask the same question to get the same answer, and the computer won’t understand it.  Understanding context is the secret sauce here.”

What also differentiates Winn.AI is the combination of playbooks with real-time call coaching, data capture, and CRM syncing, allowing reps to be more present during calls.  These elements are supported across many products, but I have not seen a company combine them into a single offering.

“The system is a personal assistant for the salespeople and relieves the burdensome administrative work of taking notes, having a list of answers, and entering information into the CRM,” stated Postan-Koren.  “ It does so all at a level of detail that does not exist in other tools on the market, so much so that in real-time, it can exactly match a specific topic of conversation to the relevant field in the CRM.  Also, the system knows how to follow the topics of the conversation in real-time, check the full coverage of the conversation’s agenda, and give instructions that will help improve performance.  This is a new category in the SalesTech world, and Winn.AI aims to lead this category.”

Winn.AI is currently in beta with plans to formally launch in early 2023.  The firm is not targeting specific verticals as it believes it has a compelling cross-industry solution that supports digital sales, customer success, and service departments.

Winn.AI is SOC II, Type 2 compliant.

Pricing has not been disclosed.

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.

Abstrakt Salesloft Connector

Abstrakt’s playbooks and real-time coaching are available within Salesloft

Abstrakt announced an integration with Sales Engagement Platform Salesloft to deliver its real-time call coaching and automated playbooks for calls initiated on Salesloft.  Abstrakt also offers real-time call transcription and passes call details to the contact record after each call.

Playbooks guide sales reps with the “correct questions, relevant customer stories, or high-level demo points for every possible scenario.”  Playbook questions are highlighted during a call, and responses are immediately tagged.  Playbooks can be configured by team, rep role, persona, and stage. 

“Our partnership with Abstrakt shows commitment to our customers by bringing a first-of-its-kind, real-time call coaching software to our platform,” said Devin Schiffman, VP of Alliances at Salesloft. “Real-time is a critical element of sales coaching, and this strategic partnership will continue to drive more opportunities for our customers.”

Abstrakt real-time coaching and playbooks help sales reps focus on prospects “without missing qualifying questions.”  It also provides recommendations for managing objections within 0.2 seconds.

Call recordings and transcripts are available within a few seconds of call completion.  The service also provides talk tracks, talk ratio metrics, topic tagging, and playbook completion percent.

Next Step Items are on the Abstrakt roadmap.

Abstrakt is available as both a standalone and Salesloft integrated solution.  Salesloft is Abstrakt’s first integration partner.  Outreach and HubSpot connectors are coming soon.

“When we looked into the market, we knew we wanted to do two things: work with the leader in the sales engagement space (Salesloft) and make sure Abstrakt filled a void in their current offering (which we do),” said Abstrakt CEO Greg Reffner.  “I am very excited about the opportunity to provide a great experience for all Salesloft & Abstrakt customers.”

Abstrakt supports sales, recruitment, and insurance agent use cases.

Abstrakt is priced at $100 per user per month, with a ten percent discount for annual payment.  Volume discounts are available.  There is no surcharge for the Salesloft connector.

Abstrakt will have five employees by the end of the month with a distributed workforce.  It has managed its initial product development with Beeso Studio, a startup studio in Omaha Nebraska. Abstrakt launched in April 2021 and operated as a paid beta until early this year.  Crunchbase lists them as receiving $730,000 in pre-seed funding.

Microsoft Viva Sales

Microsoft announced Viva Sales, “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.  Viva Sales will also support Salesforce at launch.

Viva Sales “represents a new way of working by breaking down silos of data and breaking down silos of experience,” explained Microsoft Corporate VP for Business Applications Emily He.  Sales reps “really want a more simplified experience.  So, Viva Sales enables a seller to use the tools they already love and use every day, including your email system like Outlook, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, as well as Teams,” she said.

Unfortunately, reps manage these disparate communications channels and their CRM to organize administrative tasks, collaborate on sales, and attend virtual sales meetings.  “Yet, all sellers really want is to spend more time with their customers,” stated Microsoft Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff.

Continued Althoff, “What if everything a salesperson needed to do their job was brought together in one place – where they already spend most of their day – in calls, meetings, and chats?  What if their customer records, data, and tasks were intelligently organized and accessible in the tools they use every day?  What if the collaboration environment sellers use to talk to customers automatically provides the next best action and sentiment analysis?”

Viva Sales is a “new modern way of selling” that operates as a “smart CRM companion” that simplifies the seller’s workflows and enriches the CRM.  Viva Sales captures AI-driven insights from Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft Office and feeds this information to the CRM.

“Viva Sales empowers sellers to be more connected with their customers, resulting in more personalized customer engagements and closed deals faster,” stated Althoff.  “This happens through a simple customer tagging feature, which automates the data capture, saves the seller time, and provides their organization with a more complete picture of deal and customer status.  With AI embedded throughout, Viva Sales is like a sales coach to move deals along with recommendations and reminders.  This intelligence layer provides sellers the information they need to help them be more productive.”

Viva was launched last year as an employee portal, but Sales is the first functionally-specific edition of the service.  Viva Sales will be in public preview in July and generally available this fall.  Microsoft Dynamics Sales is inclusive of Viva Sales and “addresses both sellers’ and sales leaders’ needs by automatically enriching Dynamics 365 Sales with customer engagement data captured in Office 365 and Teams.”

Once an email is tagged to an account, Viva Sales presents a sidebar with CRM intelligence. Customer interactions are then logged to the CRM.

Sales reps tag customers or prospects in a Microsoft application.  This “tag to capture” functionality alerts Viva to begin capturing account intelligence and offering insights to the sales rep.  Viva Sales employs Microsoft’s recently announced Context IQ for capturing relevant content across Microsoft apps and services.  This data can then be synced with any CRM.

“What we are focused on is removing the drudgery of manually entering the data into a CRM and then providing the AI capabilities for the sellers,” explained Product Marketing Senior Director Neha Bajwa.  “There’s a virtual personal assistant that is sitting and helping them out doing all the busywork that we would normally have to do.”

The objective is to solve the problem of manual data entry without destroying the CRM.  Viva runs alongside the CRM, capturing intelligence from other enterprise sales apps commonly deployed across sales teams.  The data capture and CRM syncing improve rep productivity while the AI suggestions improve sales effectiveness through better recommendations, reminders, and Next Best actions.

“As you work with a customer, you can not only see your own interactions, [but] you can also see across your company and find all the people that are interacting with your client as well,” said Microsoft VP for Modern Work Jared Spataro.  “We’re trying to apply AI not only to remove the boring stuff, but also to provide real value add so that you can cope with the volume and the expectations associated with you doing your job.”

The service recommends next steps, displays complete interaction histories, and pushes reminders to reps.  It is also connected to LinkedIn, providing the names of colleagues with strong connections to a contact or account, allowing sales reps to conduct research before a Teams chat.

Viva Sales recommends colleagues with pre-existing relationships for pre-meeting briefings via Teams Chat.

During a Teams call, reps can view the relevant customer information in a sidebar and access meeting prep notes.  After the call is recorded and transcribed, Viva Sales summarizes the call and captures action items.  Conversation KPIs and talk tracks are also generated.

Another feature is the generation of customer lists with recent activity, sentiment graphs, and engagement within Excel.

Customer lists within Excel are enriched by Viva Sales. A sidebar provides contact-specific insights, including colleague connections and meeting summaries.

“The future of selling isn’t a new system.  It’s bringing the information sellers need at the right time, the right context, into the tools they know, so their work experience can be streamlined,” said Althoff.  “Empowering sellers to spend more time with their customers has been our goal — and we’ve done that by reimagining the selling experience with Viva Sales.”

One of the core issues at the heart of CRM implementations is the reliance on manual data entry, argued Paul Greenberg, Managing Principal at The 56 Group.  What is necessary is ongoing automation to remove this busy work.

“Sellers rely on digital collaboration and productivity tools to connect with customers and close deals, but a lot of the insights they uncover with these tools don’t make it into the CRM,” Greenberg.  “Microsoft is taking on this challenge by offering a solution that complements the CRM.  Viva Sales automates the busy work, captures critical information about the customer, and helps sellers get the job done.”

The Seismic Enablement Cloud

The Seismic Enablement Cloud

Seismic rolled out the Seismic Enablement Cloud, an enablement platform for customer-facing teams.  The new service ensures that team members have the “right skills, content, tools, and insights to effectively engage customers and drive growth.”  Instead of offering a set of point solutions for content, training, and engagement, Seismic claims it is the first unified enablement platform that supports digital interactions across the entire buyer’s journey.

“For more than a decade, Seismic has helped develop and shape the enablement industry in partnership with our 2,200+ customers.  Leading organizations view enablement as mission-critical to their growth, and it has become a core part of the enterprise tech stack.  Now we are revolutionizing the space by bringing all of the pillars of modern enablement under one, unified cloud,” said Seismic Chief Product Officer Krish Mantripragada.  “In this new era of selling, customer-facing teams need more than content management and basic analytics to engage today’s buyers.  The Enablement Cloud redefines the boundaries of enablement, delivering the most comprehensive suite of products and solutions to empower the entire go-to-market engine.”

The Seismic Enablement platform supports “end-to-end workflows,” including

  • Enablement and training strategy and Planning
  • Sales Content Management from building content through asset sharing, including content recommendations, personalization, and social sharing
  • New hire onboarding, ongoing training, and AI-assisted coaching and skills development
  • Buyer experience personalization across all touchpoints and digital channels, including social media, email, and digital salesrooms
  • Content Automation with dynamic templates and quick assembly, with support for data integrations.
  • Insights concerning the “behaviors, activities, and content that increase productivity and deliver the best outcomes”
  • Integration support for over 150 solutions, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google

“Just as sales and marketing clouds have brought together several complementary products and solutions to address the needs of their respective teams, we see a similar need and opportunity for the enablement cloud – a dedicated platform purpose-built to empower enablement and GTM teams to deliver exceptional end-to-end buyer experiences,” blogged Mantripragada.  “The Seismic Enablement Cloud redefines enablement by bringing together historically siloed systems for sales content management, learning & coaching, strategy & planning, content automation, buyer engagement, and enablement intelligence into one enterprise-grade platform that supports end-to-end workflows for GTM teams.”

Seismic includes Lessonly (a recent acquisition) pitch training.

Chorus Mobile App

Chorus, which was acquired by ZoomInfo last summer, rolled out a mobile app for its conversational sales service.  The app supports core Chorus features on Android and iOS phones.  Users can listen to calls, speed them up, and pause them.  They can also share key moments with colleagues via Slack, email, and text.  Hashtags and @ mentions assist with tagging and sharing.

Managers and trainers can assign listening and provide feedback, which can be reviewed during walks, commutes, or downtime.  Users also have access to a library of best practices spanning various topics, including objection handling, pitching to specific verticals, or value discussions.

“With Chorus, reps can review top performers’ recordings on their own schedule,” said Alyson Baber, commercial sales leader at Zoom.  “They can also focus on keywords, such as a competitor’s name or pricing information, and go directly to those parts of the discussion instead of having to sit through the entire call.”

Customer Success and Account Teams can review preceding conversations, review conversations before quarterly business reviews, and share the voice of the customer or product feedback with other teams.

Chorus has over 20,000 customers.

Chorus iPhone screenshots

SalesHood Expands Training Tools with SkillsHood

Sales Enablement vendor SalesHood announced the general availability of SkillsHood, an asynchronous training platform for the entire organization.  The SkillsHood Enablement Platform “automates and scales organizational readiness and messaging alignment processes both for distributed and remote employees.”

“SkillsHood is our latest innovation created to boost employee productivity by elevating how employees learn, coach, and collaborate asynchronously across their organization,” posted CEO Elay Cohen on LinkedIn.  “The SkillsHood Enablement Platform automates and scales organizational readiness and messaging alignment processes both for distributed and remote employees.”

SkillsHood delivers personalized learning and development training for both onboarding and ongoing training.  Features include prescriptive learning paths, video role-playing, manager coaching, video storytelling, employee recognition, peer feedback, quizzes, and assessments.   Streamed content may be delivered just-in-time by role and tenure.  Other features include gamification, badging, and analytics.  The enablement platform is integrated with Domo, GoodData, Tableau, and PoweredBI.

“It’s amazing to see sales enablement mature and transform to company-wide enablement,” said Cohen.  “Now more than ever, all departments are looking for innovative ways to lift employee productivity and bring teams together virtually.”

Remote training will remain a core requirement after the pandemic.  Gartner forecasts that 48% of employees will work at least part of the time versus 30% remotely before COVID-19.

Salesloft and the Modern Revenue Workspace (Part II)

Continued from Part I

Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter suggested that the answer to overwhelmed sales reps is not more technology and data but better-designed tools and workflows that address the “Revenue Performance Gap.”  Salesloft’s Modern Revenue Workspace offers

  • “Proper insights at the right time
  • The ability to take action
  • The ability to communicate
  • The coachable moment”

Instead of a series of tools, Salesloft is positioning itself as one of Gartner’s “alpha platforms” that broadly ties together sales workflows and channels.  Gartner noted a set of attributes of these platforms:

– “Alpha Platforms are hyper-aggressive vendors who are broadening capabilities at a breakneck speed. 

– It’s not just M&A, some companies will evolve into alpha platforms by building capabilities. This is totally doable, they just have to be able to work fast.

– Alpha platforms aren’t necessarily buying competitors in the same category – they are buying into adjacent categories.”

Gartner Analysts Craig Rosenberg and Dan Gottlieb, “Sales Tech Mayhem: 39 Observations From a Scorching Hot Tech Market,” Garter Blog (July 28, 2021)

“It’s a time to tell a new story about sales and provide you with a complete, digital go-to-market solutions your sellers and sales teams need,” said Porter.

The Salesloft Platform supports Deals, Conversations, Cadences, a partner ecosystem, administration, and governance

According to Salesloft Chief Product Officer Ellie Fields, this advanced sales platform is “built for sellers.”  It reduces workflow friction, allowing reps to “take faster action” and prioritize their time.  The platform also serves as a centralized engagement hub with the “most critical tools for digital selling,” including email, phone, SMS, meetings, social, etc.

The Modern Revenue Workspace deploys data and AI within the workflow, delivering insights such as the most engaged prospects, deals at risk, and “trends that improve outcomes.”

The Salesloft platform acts as a hub for digital selling, driving alignment across the revenue team.  Along with Deals, Conversations, and Cadences, the platform synchronizes data with a system of record (Salesforce, MS Dynamics, or HubSpot) and supports sales intelligence and workflows with over 115 ecosystem partners.

The new release is based on a set of advanced objectives:

  • Take Action Anywhere – Communications channels are available throughout the platform.  For example, reps can call, email, book a meeting, or send an SMS message within the Deals view.  Digital communications are then captured and analyzed, helping identify “the most engaged prospects, stalled but winnable deals, and trends that help revenue teams adjust course to improve performance.”
  • Know What Changed in Your Deal – Reports identify which opportunities were updated, how long the deal is in the current stage, and whether the close date or amount changed.  For example, progression indicators are now displayed in Pipeline Review and Deals reports.
  • Enterprise Ready Conversations – Salesloft continues to enhance its communications channels with support for Microsoft Teams, native Zoom and WebEx support, improved transcription, and governance enhancements.  The native Zoom support is more reliable than the previous bot tool.  Salesloft also added Consent to Record for MS Teams and will be adding it for other platforms and its dialer.  They also added English language recording announcements with additional language announcements in development.

    The enhanced Conversations transcription engine offers “improved accuracy, searchability, and filtering” that helps managers and sellers “easily identify buyer and market trends and coaching opportunities to set more meetings, build more pipeline, speed deal cycles, and improve the chances of winning more deals.” 

    A new Conversations Summary is delivered to inboxes.
  • Unify Communications across Channels – Conversations in Activity Feed provide updates on important meetings.
  • Understand Outcomes across the Platform – Outcomes in Step Analytics identify which steps are working, helping improve Cadences.
  • Insights Anywhere – A Meetings panel on the home page summarizes pending meetings to assist with call prep.
  • Automate No-Show Workflows – New cadence workflows help reps reschedule missed meetings.  A “partial show” workflow also provides the call hyperlink and summary to those who missed a meeting.

At a high level, the goal is to remove friction in the sales process by reducing the need to jump from app to app.  Instead, reps can engage with shareholders and obtain insights from anywhere in Salesloft.

Future items include SHAKEN/STIRRED registration, native Google Meeting support, and Salesforce Event field logging.

The Salesloft Opportunity Dashboard supports custom coloring for Deal Gaps to highlight deals most at risk.

Revenue Grid Series A

Revenue Grid Pipeline Analytics displayed within Salesforce

Revenue Grid which rebranded last year from Invisible.io following its pivot into revenue intelligence, closed on a $20 million Series A to expand its AI-based revenue insights and guided selling recommendations.  The round was led by W3 Capital, with participation from ICU Ventures and existing investors.

Funds will be dedicated to scaling company growth with investments in sales, marketing, and R&D.  The firm plans to continue innovating around guided selling, revenue intelligence, and best practices research.

“Revenue Grid is ahead of the market in intelligent, guided selling, and sales automation,” said Steve Wadsworth, Partner at W3 Capital. “What has impressed us the most about Revenue Grid is their level of technology and product advancement and their innate understanding of the Sales and Revenue functions within organizations. Revenue Grid has already developed the solutions that the market is just now starting to look for.”

Revenue Grid offers a set of revenue opportunity, engagement, and risk signals that spur sales reps to take action.  It also automates sales routines, supports playbooks, fosters best practices, recommends modifications to the sales process, and measures the impact of recommended changes.

Core Revenue Grid capabilities include CRM data auto-capture, pipeline inspection, health checks, deal guidance, and revenue signals.

Revenue Grid ingested over one billion “communications items” to train its AI, including emails, meetings, and calls.  Communications are indexed by industry and sales process types and correlated against success rates.  Other features include sentiment analysis, sales opportunity summarization, and detecting demand unit members that have not been associated with an opportunity or added to the CRM.

“Revenue Grid can track objections and suggest the right mitigation on different levels of the sales funnel — from lead outreach to late opportunity stages. [It can] understand a communication type like ’email ping pong,’ ‘on hold,’ ‘no authority or power,’ and commitments tracking like whether email needs replying or whether a specific date for follow up or commitment was mentioned.”

CEO Vlad Voskresensky

“It is our mission to give companies an unbeatable competitive advantage by completely digitizing their sales processes, and right now we are in the perfect position to expand globally and help companies transform their sales process,” said Voskresensky.  “We are bringing smarter AI to sales, but it goes beyond just that.  It is quite literally shifting the sales tech stack from the ‘view mode’ to the ‘do mode.’”

While the round is a Series A, Revenue Grid is well established with 1,200 customers, including Hilton, Western Union, Moody’s, Trip Advisor, Red Cross, and Robert Half.  Over 800,000 sales professionals rely on Revenue Grid.  Through OEM deals, it supports an additional 20,000 companies.

The firm claims that its platform generates 21% faster revenue per account for its clients and offers a 250% ROI.

Revenue Grid is growing “seventy to eighty percent year-to-year,” said Voskresensky.  The firm has a 96% retention rate and net retention over 100%.

Revenue Grid has a team of 150 and plans to add another 50 headcount by 2022.

“[This] whole round is an equity investment. It’s actually our first round, prior to which we were bootstrapped and profitable,” Voskresensky said.  “Honestly, when the pandemic hit, we didn’t know what it would mean to our business, but it was actually a period of growth.  Our products became invaluable for sales reps as they all moved to working remotely, and it helped them stay focused, organized, and efficient.”

Revenue Grid also announced that highly regarded industry veteran Bob Stutz joined their board.  Stutz is the President of Customer Experience at SAP and previously served as CEO of Marketing Cloud, Chief Analytics Officer at Salesforce, and Corporate Vice President for Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM.   Stutz will assist with the product roadmap, revenue growth, and market expansion.

“Revenue Grid is a very interesting company as they look at optimizing sales processes in a very innovative way, and I am very excited to join their board to support them in growing their business on a global scale,” commented Stutz.

Revenue Grid did not announce its current valuation.

Revenue Grid Guided Selling Recommendations displayed in Salesforce.

Brainshark Growth and Training Partnerships

Once again, I’m writing about a SalesTech or B2B MarTech firm that had strong growth during the pandemic.  Simply, B2B firms sped up their digitization and looked for online methods for internal and external communications.  With WFH and the recognition of subscription revenues over the life of contracts, it is highly likely that 2020 strength will continue into 2021.  In the case of Brainshark, they increased both their new business contracts and multi-year renewal rates.  Brainshark also announced off-the-shelf learning content from a pair of training companies: ValueSelling Associates and 2Win!.

Sales Readiness vendor Brainshark posted sixty percent growth in platform usage last year with a 38% increase in new business.  71% of the new contracts were multi-year, with multi-year renewals up 40% year over year.

“Companies across the globe had to completely rewrite their playbook when the pandemic began disrupting business one year ago,” said CEO Greg Flynn.  “Many realized improving their sales readiness was a way to gain a competitive advantage.  They also realized Brainshark’s proven, award-winning platform was just the tool they needed.  We’re especially thrilled to see our customers utilizing our coaching solution more than ever because we’ve seen first-hand the impact it can have on an organization’s bottom line.”

Citing a CSO Insights study that found that firms with dedicated sales enablement teams had a 15.3% higher win rate on forecasted deals, the firm stated, “Brainshark can be the foundation of a successful sales readiness strategy, helping organizations equip sales reps with the knowledge and skills they need, measure preparedness, and connect readiness to revenue.”

Brainshark Sales Readiness Scorecards include CRM data

Last year, the firm launched Sales Readiness Scorecards, which “provide more powerful, instant, and comprehensive visibility into whether reps and their teams are prepared to engage with clients and prospects.”  Scorecard data is pulled from Salesforce, providing firms with pipeline and performance KPIs.  In 2021, Brainshark plans to deepen CRM integrations for expanded metrics and coaching tools.

“The questions sales enablement professionals need to answer go beyond ‘Are our reps ready?’ The more important question is, ’Are our readiness and enablement programs working?  Scorecards provide that clarity.  Enablement leaders can discover which reps need help with certain parts of the sales process, and then build learning programs to address those areas for maximum impact.  At the same time, sales managers have critical performance data at their fingertips that allows them to be better, more strategic coaches.”

Brainshark Chief Product Officer Greg Keshian

2Win! training “helps sales professionals master demo, presentation, client success, and storytelling skills, especially in a virtual world.”

Julie Thomas, CEO of ValueSelling Associates, said, “Our eValueSelling Fundamentals is a fast track for those who want to learn value-based selling.  By blending real-world examples with interactive exercises and quizzes, users learn how to prepare for a sales call, assess the health of opportunities, and ask questions that engage prospects.  This program makes for a perfect integration into Brainshark’s platform, allowing sales enablement leaders a simple and convenient way to build their training content and accelerate their results.” Brainshark lists BCI and go1 as additional training content partners.