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.
Winn.AI captures real-time playbook insights and maps them to over twenty methodologies.
Israeli playbook vendor Winn.AI now offers a self-service registration that allows sales reps to trial the Generative AI service for a month at no charge. Winn describes itself as an “AI-driven no-typing CRM that aims to empower the next generation of sales teams.” It joins calls and offers real-time tracking, capturing, and CRM updating features for Salesforce and HubSpot.
Winn supports over twenty sales methodologies and is tuned to automatically capture playbook insights as they are organically discussed with the sales rep. Out-of-the-box methodologies include MEDDIC, MEDDPIC, Spin Selling, BANT, and Challenger. Additionally, playbooks are available for discovery calls, demos, and negotiations and may be customized.
Salesforce “State of Sales” report. Salesforce surveyed 7,700 sales reps in August & September 2022.
CEO Eldad Postan-Koren emphasized the administrative burden faced by sales reps, citing a 2023 Salesforce report that claims only 28% of sales rep time is spent selling. 72% of sales rep time is consumed by record keeping, CRM updating, virtual meetings, email follow-ups, data entry, and lead management. Winn.AI promises to claw back one-third of the 8.8% of rep time spent manually entering information. Furthermore, reps have long limited their data entry to the bare minimum, so Winn.AI will capture significantly more detail.
Other tasks, such as prioritizing leads/opportunities, researching prospects, and preparation and planning, also benefit from automated data harvesting and synchronization, helping reduce time on such tasks and improving their quality.
“Interfering with salespersons in our daily conduct is not good. Adding another system for them to enter and changing the way they are used to working is a negative type of interference,” argued Postan-Koren. “This is the main reason I built Winn.AI as an augmentation of other existing systems. This will effectively disrupt the sales force where disruption is needed and welcomed.”
Winn.AI automatically joins conversational platforms such as Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet and supports 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 each call’s conclusion.
The Winn-AI post-call meeting summary pops up on call completion and supports editing and matching against CRM records.
As playbook details are captured in real-time, reps can see which topics have been discussed and which ones remain open, helping ensure richer discussions. Following the call, reps are presented with a call summary, next steps, and playbook insights. Once reviewed, the information is synced with the appropriate CRM records.
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.”
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.
The service is priced between $59 and $89 per user per month, with volume discounts available.
Winn.AI exited stealth mode last fall and now has a team of thirty. It has begun hiring in the Bay area. Postan-Koren noted that its $17 million September seed round provides it with a financial runway through the end of next year, allowing it to focus on go-to-market instead of hustling for funding in a weak VC market.
Winn.AI was named one of the “Top Israeli Startups To Watch in 2023.” The firm placed 16th on the list by Startup Stash.
Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence brings together first and third-party intelligence.
ABX PlatformDemandbase announced a Smarter Sales Intelligence solution that combines Demandbase Sales Intelligence with additional tools, data, and prescriptive insights. UX enhancements include prescriptive dashboards with personalized account and contact recommendations.
The firm had a little fun with its press release, publishing a semi-tongue twister headline, “Demandbase Saves Stressed Sellers by Simplifying Sales with Smarter Sales Intelligence.” But wait! There’s More! Demandbase also released a 90-second infomercial touting their Sales Intelligence solution that “consolidates sales intelligence tools in both first and third-party data, and all in one place. It’s like having a superpower for smarter selling! Get easy access to insights, best-in-class predictive models, and contact recommendations integrated within your existing tools.”
Many of the UX changes were based on customer feedback, with the critical account information at the top. Content includes the journey stage, top intent keywords, people, predictive scores, and firmographics.
“The idea is that we’re bringing all the information that sellers care about and then presenting it on one screen so that they don’t have to go places to find it,” explained Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier to GZ Consulting. “It’s a unification of the data.”
Sellers “don’t enjoy the research aspect” of account-based selling, continued Breier. “They just want to be doing outreach.” Therefore, Demandbase is “meeting the sales reps “wherever there’s spending time, whether that is their browser, CRM, or SEP.”
The Prescriptive Sales Dashboard provides a “unified and prioritized view of a seller’s territory/account list.”
Prescriptive Sales Dashboards proactively inform sellers where they should direct their attention, when they should reach out, and what they should say. Both accounts and contacts are recommended, with suggestions specific to each rep’s territory. The Dashboard calls out the top accounts and contacts for outreach based on activity and intent; that is, which leads have the highest probability of converting into opportunities.
The Sales Dashboard offers multiple filters, identifying accounts that:
“I should reach out this week.”
“have been in the news recently.”
“are most engaged.”
“have the highest intent.”
“have a high likelihood to become an opportunity.”
And contacts that
“I should reach out this week.”
“Are not in my CRM.”
“Are part of the buying group and from Top Accounts.”
“Are former buyers.”
“Are trending on my website.”
High engagement lists are likely to be compelling for reps. In many cases, they will be aware of the engagement as they are directly involved. Still, there will also be situations where they are unaware of the engagement (e.g., Customer Success set up a trial at the account or individuals attended a webinar or responded to a marketing campaign) and missing an opportunity for outreach.
Recommendations are not black-boxed but include engagement data and known contacts in the buying group. If a rep disagrees with a recommendation, a feedback button helps train the model.
“One of the biggest risks when you’re trying to get adoption from the sales persona on something like this, is losing their trust,” explained Breier. “We want to give some context and qualify the recommendation that we’re making.”
Demandbase also identifies and recommends contacts for outreach, even if they aren’t currently in the CRM. Along with names and titles, Demandbase feeds emails, mobile phones, technographics, intent signals, and persona-based messaging. New fields include Demandbase’s predictive scores:
Pipeline Predict Score: How likely an account will become a pipeline opportunity.
Qualification Score: Likelihood an account will ever become a customer, regardless of where it is in the buyer journey.
Demandbase continues to build out its data coverage, with 83 million companies, 147 million contacts, 87 million emails, and 40 million direct dials. Much of its third-party content was integrated after they acquired InsideView and DemandMatrix two years ago.
Account Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).People Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).
Furthermore, Demandbase simplified its user interface to display the most important information about prospects and customers.
Demandbase announced a native Outreach integration with other SEPs in development. Streamlining Sales Intelligence and Sales Engagement allows reps to “focus on engaging with prospects and closing deals, rather than wasting time on manual tasks.” The I-frame integration supports core Demandbase Sales Intelligence functionality within Outreach workflows. For example, sales reps can research companies and contacts, build lists, and launch Outreach sequences inside of Outreach.
The Demandbase Sales Intelligence Watchlist displayed as an I-frame tab in Outreach.
Users will see common information, tools, and workflows presented in the same format as their CRM but in Outreach’s Account, Prospect, and Opportunity records. There is also a standalone tab in Outreach similar to the Demandbase standalone tab found in CRMs. This Custom Tab supports company and contact searching, prospect list building, connection management for warm introductions, customer and prospect news tracking, and custom buying trigger configuration.
“We’ve noticed that the order of preference as far as where sellers spend time actually starts with their SEP – So, Outreach. And if they have to, they’ll go to CRM,” observed Demandbase Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier. “When you look at Outreach users who have Demandbase and Outreach, they can spend all of their time within Outreach and never have to go to the Demandbase platform. They’re not missing out on any information… It’s just one less thing that they have to learn and one less barrier to access the Demandbase information.”
“Being a seller has never been easy, but the proliferation of data and tools has led to stressed-out sellers with lost productivity, lower quota attainment, and less revenue,” says Gabe Rogol, chief executive officer at Demandbase. “With our simplified and smarter Sales Intelligence solution, reps no longer need to waste precious time figuring out their next steps and executing them. Instead, they can close more deals and make more money. Think of our intelligence as a sales superpower, all within the tools sellers use every day.”
Demandbase Sales Intelligence is integrated with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach, Slack, and browsers. The Sales Engagement integration enables reps to add contacts to Outreach sequences and personalize the messaging.
“Integrating Demandbase’s Sales Intelligence directly within our platform will unlock new levels of value for sales teams looking to efficiently create and predictably close more pipeline,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina. “With this next-generation integration, sellers can more easily and quickly find and contact accounts, get data-focused insights, and unlock new levels of productivity — all while never leaving the Outreach Sales Execution Platform.”
Demandbase recently dropped the Cloud Designations for its products, emphasizing its unified functionality within the Demandbase One platform.
“We found that it kind of creates this illusion of complexity that we don’t feel serves it justice as far as the actual products you’re spending time in,” said Palmer. “They’re even more interconnected. Most of our customers are now buying three or more products. We’ve got bundles and packages of everything, so we’ve just moved away from that whole cloud nomenclature to just Demandbase One.”
A Hot Leads feature that provides SDRs with key engagement insights and the ability to take action on unknown leads will soon be available. Hot Leads will be displayed in the Prescriptive dashboards and identified by engagement activity, intent, recency, news/company/job changes, technographics, etc. Hot Leads will be GDPR and PII compliant.
In other news, Demandbase was named a Notable Provider in Forrester’s Account-Based Selling Technologies Landscape, Q2, 2023 report. Seventeen vendors were included in the report. Account-Based Sales vendors “improve visibility into the potential of each account; increase sales rep efficiency; and increase pipeline value (deal size), win rates, and forecast accuracy.”
“The landscape for B2B GTM teams continues to change at [a] breakneck pace. At Demandbase, we’re committed to shaping that market evolution to empower our customers to achieve their most audacious goals,” said Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw. “This year, we’ve placed a deep focus on making sellers’ jobs easier and more effective with AI-powered insights and seamless workflows, and we believe our inclusion in this report further validates that direction.”
LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago. As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers. New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.
LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality. However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”
LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.
Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities. Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).
The new Sales Navigator Account Hub.
The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities. It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.
“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis. “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data. Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”
The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:
Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence. Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub. Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them. Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent
Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1. Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category. The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.
Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole. The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.
“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.
At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts. Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.
“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare. “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals. Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies. With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities
New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages. These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).
Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:
Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
New connections to colleagues
LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website
“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment. If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance. If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix. “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”
Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”
Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.
Other Search enhancements include:
A simplified saved search UX
A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
Current job title and past job title filters
The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions. Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.
LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year. The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment. At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.
B2B DaaS vendor SalesIntel shifted away from credit-based data pricing to unlimited data access to its firmographics, technographics, contacts (including emails and direct dials), and news alert intelligence. Pricing is based on the number of users, with unlimited access to downloads, exports, and data enrichment.
”SalesIntel’s unlimited everything plan removes the friction, frustration, and predatory pricing so many customers experience when working with other B2B data providers.” comments SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “We are proud to be a true partner to this industry by leading a pricing revolution that will help go-to-market teams build limitless pipeline.”
SalesIntel’s unlimited content includes:
300 million unique technology installs across 22 million accounts. Technographics span 18,000 technologies.
100 million email-verified contacts. Of these, over 17 million are maintained by SalesIntel editors and regularly reverified to maintain a 95% accuracy level.
B2B account news and alerts for 22 million companies organized into 32 categories.
Contracts include the RevDriver Chrome extension, Bombora intent data, and platform integrations (e.g., Salesforce, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, Marketo).
Licenses also include access to SalesIntel’s Research-on-Demand editors for finding new contacts or reverifying contact information. Research on Demand is subject to credits, but at 120 per seat, the cap is generous.
SalesIntel has simplified pricing based on the number of seats.
Under credit-based pricing models, “Marketing is worried about not having enough credits for campaigns, Sales is worried about not having enough credits to effectively prospect, and RevOps is worried that there won’t be enough credits to keep all this data clean.”
Removing credit-based pricing offers several benefits to customers:
Budgeting is simplified as the total cost of a SalesIntel contract is known when the contract is signed. RevTech teams do not need to create mid-year POs if credits are running low or additional marketing campaigns are planned.
RevOps does not need to allocate and monitor credits across multiple teams or reallocate a dwindling set of credits at the end of the year.
Marketing can run enrichment, including visitor enrichment, and updates as frequently as they’d like, limiting the impact of data decay on their account, contact, and lead data.
Marketing can regularly analyze and expand its ICP and test new verticals without worrying about credits.
Sales Reps can research and sync key contacts to their SEP or CRM without worrying about using up their allotted credits halfway through the year.
Furthermore, SalesIntel does not include any “data destroy” clauses, a legal issue that some incumbent vendors employ to increase the cost to defectors.
CMO James Lamberti explained to GZ Consulting that credit-based pricing “becomes a barrier to value for the customer,” with customers feeling “trapped” by usage limits. “We want people to begin to appreciate the full depth and breadth of our data and to leverage it in ways to make themselves more efficient.”
Ramnani argued that SalesIntel customers enjoy value via “three very simple steps:
We help them identify their ICP using the intelligence from our firmographic and technographic data.
Then, we apply the intelligence of news and intent data to see who from their ICP is in the market today.
Within those in-market companies, our customers enjoy direct conversations using mobile phones and direct dials.”
However, “context is everything.” Vendors that provide large contact sets without the context of an ICP, account news, and intent data (i.e., steps 1 and 2) are providing names and numbers but fostering inefficiency in their go-to-market. Targeting is more than simply finding many names. Revenue teams need to know whom to call, when to call, and what to say.
SalesIntel can offer unlimited data access because it owns all of its data except for Bombora’s intent file.
Historically, Sales Intelligence services offered seat-based pricing, and marketing data vendors provided volume-based pricing. When services began serving both departments, credit-based models were crafted on top of seat-based pricing, creating complex and frustrating pricing. SalesIntel is looking to return to simple pricing and “partner with the industry” based on “the value of our data and the quality of our software,” argued Lamberti.
Lamberti described the sweet spot for this model as the mid-market – firms between 40 and 50 employees and several hundred. These firms have some maturity in their marketing stack and go-to-market motion, with multiple BDRs and sellers.
However, “if you’re just a ten-person team with one seller and one BDR, we’ll certainly do business. We’re going to have a package for them. But the unlimited package is really so that we can go after the market where we really are a great fit, where we win.”
“Strategically, we know that this is the time to strike. We’re not VC-backed. This is where Manoj has got the right [employee-shareholder] strategy,” argued Lamberti. The firm is not subject to the financial pressure of outside equity investors or public markets. Thus, the new pricing is designed strategically “to gain share and grow our market footprint dramatically.” SalesIntel contracts are annual with multi-year discounts. Pricing starts at around $11,000, with additional seats priced at $1,200. Current customers that renew early can convert to the new pricing structure.
Crowd-based Company Research vendor Owler added contacts to its Owler Max Sales Intelligence service. Owler was launched in 2011 by Jim Fowler after he sold contacts database Jigsaw (renamed Data.com but now decommissioned) to Salesforce. Both databases employed a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to collecting data, but Owler offered only the CEO name and executive change news alerts. Broader contact details for its 15 million company profiles were not available until now.
Owler grew into a respected database for competitive tracking, funding data, and news alerts but avoided contact data. As it increasingly positioned itself as a sales tool, it needed to address its lack of contacts.
Contact Data, which is only being added to its top-end Max edition, includes direct phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles for 150 million North American professionals. Along with firmographics, users can filter contacts by Job Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Location.
Contact data is available via Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chrome.
‘We are very excited to introduce Contact Data into our Owler Max tool. This is a powerful way to get in touch with potential customers and partners,” stated CEO Tim Harsch. “Our goal has always been to make it easier for companies to grow and succeed, and this new addition to our platform will help our users do just that.”
Contacts may be filtered by Name, Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Current Location.
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.”
Nearly two-thirds of business buyers (64%) were born after 1980 and are taking a different approach to purchasing than their older colleagues. While direct purchasing from vendors remains the primary route, self-directed research and purchasing channels (e.g., external marketplaces, app stores, vendor websites, and existing products / product-led growth) are becoming increasingly popular.
“As self-service transactions rise in popularity, providers must understand the behaviors of their target buyers to create seamless experiences that are easy to find, easy to use, and align to their preferences,” argued Forrester Analysts Amy Hayes and Barbara Winters.
The pair noted that information gathering is similar across all generations, with a near-even split between personal and self-guided buyers. However, younger buyers place a greater emphasis on independent information resources such as technology information websites, forums/message boards, and industry websites.
TechTarget CIO is one of over 150 enterprise technology and HealthTech research sites.
This youth movement was echoed on TechTarget’s earnings call last week. TechTarget publishes over 150 opted-in enterprise software and HealthTech websites and generates intent data from research activities (They also own the BrightTALK webinar and digital content platform).
This shift towards increased research resulted in a 50% increase in organic search-based visits to TechTarget’s technology research sites over the past year.
“High quality, independent content has always been the foundation of our business. As the demographics of technology buyers skew younger, they want to self-service their purchase diligence and minimize contact with vendor sales reps until very late in the purchase process. Most vendors’ go-to-market processes are sales-rep-centric, which we believe is causing a disconnect with what buyers want. As a result, our expectation is that vendors will be forced to transform their go-to-market processes to be aligned with how and when buyers engage. Smart vendors are doing this today by creating more buyer-oriented content to provide regular touchpoints with prospects outside of sales rep engagement.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
“Over 50% of technology buyers wanted a rep-less experience, which means they really rely on content to make all decisions about 6, 7, [and] 8-figure acquisitions that they want. They can’t be fooled by thin, broad-based, irrelevant content that’s not recent,” argued Cotoia. “So being able to help our customers tie in those insights to help empower their content strategy will be an effective place for us…as a publisher and as a community with proprietary first-party data insights.”
“This is a wake-up call for providers to contemplate how their demand, customer engagement, and reputation programs for earned media coverage align to how and where buyers look for information.”
Younger purchasers are also more likely to be dissatisfied with the buying experience. “Buyer-facing roles must understand the holistic experience from the buyer’s perspective,” advised Forrester.
team.blue subsidiary Leadinfo acquired Intent-based Sales Engagement Platform Leadcamp. Leadcamp expands the Leadinfo value proposition from web visitor tracking to broader lead engagement. Leadcamp, based in Ghent, Belgium, captures email, web, meeting, and content engagement and employs AI to identify “high-intent active prospects.”
“We always want to offer our customers new products to make them more effective in their chosen markets,” said team.blue Group CEO Claudio Corbetta. “This acquisition is a great example of investing in a fast-growing business to advance our expertise and product range in the lead generation space.”
The Leadcamp Heat Score measures multi-channel engagement providing both a composite score and engagement by channels. Additionally, AI-powered notifications let reps be “proactive and timely” in their follow-ups, “avoiding missed opportunities” and increasing the odds of closing each deal.
Heat Scores also act as customizable triggers for reminders and alerts, streamlining the buying journey. Triggers include form submissions, multiple website visits within a prescribed period, Heat Score thresholds, and calls made. Leadcamp claims that trigger automation speeds up the buying process three-fold.
Email functionality includes sales email tracking, link monitoring, engagement analysis, and a content library. Sales teams also have access to sequences (cadences), templates, and volume throttling.
“We are excited about the acquisition of Leadcamp and the addition of their expertise in targeted marketing campaigns and automation tools to our platform,” commented Leadinfo Founder Han Kleppe. “This acquisition will enable us to better support our customers in finding new customers and to put their lead generation on autopilot.”
Leadinfo claims to be the market leader in Benelux and the most prominent international provider in the D-A-CH region. It consolidated its position in the Netherlands over the past eighteen months with the acquisitions of Leadexpress (December 2021) and LeadElephant (January 2022).
Leadinfo supports over 3,000 customers in Benelux, D-A-CH, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. Customers include Lavazza, Quis Machinery, Channable, and Creditsafe.
Leadinfo was named a 2022 Fast 50 technology growth leader by Deloitte, placing 8th in the Dutch market.
