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.
Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients. Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering. Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”
Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce. Churn risk is also assessed.
Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.
Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.
Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales. Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.
“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm. “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers. Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”
Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.
“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah. “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent. Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”
Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021. It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.
Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.
Pricing starts at $100 per user per month. Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.
One of the most important SalesTech trends, besides the emergence of ChatGPT, is the rapid incorporation of engagement datasets alongside intent datasets for prioritization and messaging.
A few years ago, we saw the emergence of intent data sets such as first-party web visitor tracking, second-party product review site research, and third-party B2B media research. Initially, this content was integrated into MAPs, ABX platforms, and CDPs, but it was not well integrated into SalesTech. We are now seeing intent data being integrated into SalesTech platforms in a simplified fashion (e.g., High Intent Topics in CRM profiles and Slack alerts) that is digestible for sales reps.
However, intent data only indicates whether a company is in-market, not whether the buying committee is considering your offering or seriously engaged with your sales team. This intelligence comes from a new category of engagement data captured from digital interactions between the revenue team (sales, marketing, and customer success) and the buying committee. Engagement intelligence consists of both traditional digital interactions (e.g., clickthroughs, downloads) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics derived from sales and buying team activities.
NLP helps RevTech platforms determine who is interacting with your firm. It also analyzes buyer sentiment, buyer concerns, deal health, and risk flags. The primary sources of engagement data are emails, recorded phone calls, and recorded meetings. However, any digital interaction between buyers and sellers can be captured such as activity in digital sales rooms, webinar attendance, chat messaging, and scheduled meetings. I anticipate that customer support platforms will also be tapped for engagement data to help gauge churn risk and friction during product trials.
Engagement data indicates whether a deal is on track and what issues could result in lost deals or pushed out pipeline. For example, engagement data assesses whether:
Discussions are single or multi-threaded
Key decisionmakers are involved (e.g., has a security review been performed or has legal been included?)
Competitors have been mentioned
Pricing concerns were raised
Follow on meetings have been scheduled
Meetings had a positive flow or were dominated by the sales rep
In short, engagement data provides sales reps and managers deal health and risk analytics that improve forecasting and ensure that deal risks are quickly mitigated. And as interactions are digital, managers can discuss these issues during one-on-ones or offer quick tips on next steps. They can even review the discussion associated with the risk and identify skills and knowledge gaps for coaching.
Nektar’s Insights Hub details buyer-seller interactions, leading indicators, buying committee engagement, MEDDIC adherence, etc.
The interesting thing about intent and engagement data is they are highly complementary with each other. Operations teams should be looking at integrating intent data alongside engagement data. Intent data is valuable for identifying who and when to reach out to ideal customers. However, once a relationship is established, the focus shifts to engagement data for monitoring deal health. After a deal is signed, both engagement and intent data are in play. Intent data identifies cross-sell opportunities and churn risk through second and third-party intent topic monitoring while Engagement and Product Usage data evaluate adoption rates and potential implementation issues.
Engagement data and deal health analytics can be found in Revenue Intelligence services (e.g., Clari, Revenue Grid), Sales Engagement (e.g., Salesloft, Outreach, Groove), Conversational Sales (e.g., Gong, Chorus), Revenue Operations (Nektar), and Sales Enablement (e.g., Seismic, Bigtincan) platforms.
Demandbase sales and marketing engagement data can be visually displayed in Dynamics 365.
Demandbase unveiled a pair of CRM connectors for HubSpot and MSD 365. The bi-directional, native integrations allow Demandbase One to push data into the CRMs for automated workflows, Lead-to-Account mapping, tracking, and responding to engagement activity. Syncing is performed nightly.
“This release creates a unified interface that empowers revenue operations, sales, and marketing teams to grow predictable pipeline and close larger deals,” blogged Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier. “The integrations enable a variety of rich workflows for customers to enhance their analytics, derive valuable insights, target more efficiently, and build reporting that aligns with their own CRM data set and their GTM needs.”
Demandbase launched the unified first and third-party view in its Salesforce connector this summer and has now expanded it to two other leading CRMs.
Demandbase offers a set of Calculated Fields that includes intent, engagement, and predictive scores that are synced and displayed in CRMs.
Demandbase feeds intent and engagement data, firmographics, technographics, and Demandbase Calculated Fields into CRMs. With this data, operations can create CRM custom sales views, reports, and dashboards that display website activity, intent, and heatmaps. Sales reps can view both sales intelligence and engagement data from a unified view.
Furthermore, CRM data is available for list building and filtering in Demandbase One. Users can define selectors, set up orchestration, create Demandbase campaigns, visualize and apply Demandbase intent and predictive scores, analyze journeys, and build reports. Furthermore, “accurate account identification, combined with their CRM data, also means better predictive models, marketing and sales alerts, personalization opportunities, and more.”
For example, past opportunity data from the CRMs are now available to Demandbase pipeline predict and qualification scoring models to assist with account prioritization. Demandbase also helps, “align messaging to each stage” of the buyer’s journey and assists with list building and campaign execution.
Conversely, Demandbase is syncing its insights (e.g., intent data, web traffic, most engaged contacts) with the CRM, helping reps prioritize accounts and prepare for account interactions. Insights include Demandbase’s configurable data, such as its scores and engagement minutes that populate custom fields.
Demandbase brought firmographic, contact, and technographics databases in-house following the May 2021 acquisitions of InsideView (firmographics, contacts, and event triggers) and DemandMatrix (technographics). Intent data includes first and third-party intelligence such as Surging Intent, Demandbase Keyword Intent, Campaign Responses, and Web Page Visits.
Revenue Operations can also select intent data from Bombora and G2, which are processed through the ABX platform’s predictive models.
“Both of these integrations improve orchestration, delivering greater sales and marketing alignment and a friction-free experience,” stated Demandbase.
“These integrations ensure our customers who use Dynamics 365 and HubSpot CRM realize the full value of the Demandbase platform. Pairing Demandbase natively with the CRM allows our customers to orchestrate a seamless go-to-market motion with full alignment between marketing and sales. We’re providing the full power of our Account Intelligence in these connected systems and saving sales and marketing teams time by providing them actionable insights wherever they want to consume them. The result is better performance with less manual effort at every stage of the customer journey.”
Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw
Demandbase is not done with the connectors. It plans to add additional functionality to the CRMs, including “new sales-focused experiences, additional capabilities in the Demandbase app in Dynamics, enhanced Lead-To-Account functionality, and the ability to automate and scale account-based / people-based plays directly from your activities.”
Demandbase supports both HubSpot CRM and Marketing Automation platforms.
People.AI announced a partnership with Zoom Video Communications to deliver its sales engagement intelligence alongside Zoom’s conversational intelligence within Zoom IQ for Sales. People.AI buyer role and engagement insights will be combined with Zoom’s conversational sales intelligence. The joint solution also supports cross-channel engagement data, post-call summaries, and contact creation and enrichment.
The combined solution will provide “greater visibility into buyer engagements, enabling go-to-market teams to access previously buried insights,” said the firms. “Sellers will have the ability to engage the right people in the right accounts, resulting in pipeline predictability and revenue.”
Revenue teams will enjoy greater pipeline visibility, helping de-risk deals and drive revenue growth. During calls, a side panel will provide an “unparalleled understanding of ‘who is who’ within accounts and opportunities, empowering your sales teams to strategically plot next steps with the right people and personas to grow pipeline, drive larger deals, shorten sales cycles, and improve win rate.”
“Zoom has been a customer of ours since 2017 and a business we’ve always admired,” said Thomas Wyatt, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at People.ai. “Our joint customers will soon be able to leverage Zoom’s world-class conversation intelligence solution enriched by buyer and relationship intelligence that only People.ai can provide.”
During Zoom Calls, People.AI displays Stakeholder Insights that include contact information, engagement levels, and connection overviews.
Zoom IQ for Sales was launched in April and provides a host of standard conversational sales capabilities, including sentiment analysis, engagement scores, talk-listen ratios, the longest monologue, filler word frequency, a snippets library, and competitor and feature mentions. Furthermore, it includes a few differentiators:
Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.
Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision. General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.
Zoom IQ for Sales is available for Zoom and Zoom Phone. It is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange. Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.
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.
ABX PlatformRollWorks launched Journey Events for HubSpot, a consolidated account-level view of the customer buying journey. The service helps B2B teams understand which activities are helping move customers through the decision process and which activities are sub-optimal and should be adjusted.
“Due to its ability to surface every marketing and sales activity driving an account’s progression, Journey Events for HubSpot also provides sales teams a comprehensive look (both immediately and over time) at how an account is moving—what is working and what is helping to drive the account progression, including seeing every action alongside an account spike,” stated the firm. “This helps sellers plan and personalize outreach by identifying the optimal time to contact an account and tailor messaging based on the last action that may have had an effect.”
Journey Events pulls engagement, intent, and stage data from HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, RollWorks, and G2.
RollWorks Journey Events was announced last fall and is now available inside HubSpot.
RollWorks gathers time-stamped events such as meetings booked, opportunities generated, and SDR emails. It then matches activity history against intent, engagement, and journey stage data. As a result, sales and marketing professionals can visualize account progression against activity history to determine the efficacy of various activities.
“At a critical time when marketers across the board are being asked to do more with far less, RollWorks Journey Events for HubSpot stands out for its ability to help all go-to-market teams be more efficient with their ABM strategies. Being able to see each and every marketing and sales activity that’s driving account progression is huge. With that, for example, you won’t send irrelevant messages in an email or waste money sending a gift to an account if it isn’t ready. Instead, your organization can focus on what’s working and foster a common language between sales and marketing.”
Jodi Cerretani, RollWorks’ Head of Demand Generation
RollWorks has established HubSpot as a key partner and invested significantly in HubSpot connectors. In June, it launched Sales Insights for HubSpot, which employs data science to provide a “360-degree view of accounts throughout the buying journey, helping B2B marketers and sales teams to eliminate the guesswork and create more timely and efficient sales outreach.”
It also has enjoyed significant success with its RollWorks ABM HubSpot App, which passed 500 installs in April, 150% above its nearest platform competitor. The integration enables teams “to identify high-fit, high-intent accounts and buyers, reach them efficiently, and measure impact.”
“RollWorks is laser-focused on engagement quality innovation, and we are incredibly proud of our acceleration and momentum within the HubSpot ecosystem,” stated Justin Cooperman, VP of Product Management. “With Journey Events for HubSpot, we’ve raised the bar on relevance and personalization between seller and prospect.”
RollWorks Sales Insights for HubSpot identifies spiking ad engagement and website visits.
Sales Insights identifies accounts with spiking engagement based on visitor intelligence and advertising views. RollWorks flags accounts with Account Spikes compared to baseline activity and visualizes engagement within HubSpot. As a result, revenue teams can prioritize marketing programs and sales outreach based on spiking engagement.
Sales Insights de-anonymizes existing HubSpot CRM contacts and automates sales alerts when engagement activity spikes. It also identifies unassigned spiking accounts and notifies sales reps via email when there is spiking engagement. Additionally, within the HubSpot Company Record, an account timeline displays activity across the website, ads, intent, CRM, marketing automation platform, etc.
Likewise, marketing can analyze which campaigns lead to engagement surges and tailor ABM campaigns accordingly. They can also build nurture workflows for spiking accounts. “There’s a difference between ‘pipeline’ and ‘pipedream.’ I prefer the former,” said RollWorks VP of Sales Shawn Cook. “When my sales teams know who and what content a prospect is engaging with, they can take on the role of trusted advisor and advance the conversations with the accounts that are likely to buy from us. Sales needs to not only know what the content is but also why that piece of content was created. This is where the alignment is magnified.”
Sales Insights for HubSpot is included as part of the $995 per month RollWorks Account Based Platform license.
“Zoom IQ for Sales analyzes customer interactions to surface key insights, actions, and content from sales meetings. Sales leaders can also use this data to help make better-informed management decisions regarding their sales teams,” blogged UCaaS Product Marketing Manager Theresa Larkin. “With actionable insights based on proven sales strategies and a wealth of data, organizations can streamline the new sales rep onboarding process, create a modern sales methodology, and further develop their sales teams.”
Zoom IQ for Sales conversational analytics
Zoom describes Zoom IQ for Sales as its “First Step in Conversational Intelligence.” The service is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange. Insights include
Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
Longest Spiel – Identifies the longest monologue to help reps hone their pitches and avoid monologues.
Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.
Talk-Listen Ratios – Analyzes whether there is a balance between lead speaker talk time and time granted to others.
Competitor and Feature Mentions – Tags competitors and product features so reps, competitive analysts, and product teams can drill into prospect concerns, competitive statements, and potential gaps in the product.
Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision. General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.
Zoom IQ supports a video snippets library of best practices exemplars. Snippets can be used for initial training or for reviewing how to handle specific objections, present the value of various products, or position across target verticals.
Zoom Sales IQ Playlists
“Zoom has made strategic investments in homegrown speech recognition technologies and recruited a world-class team to produce high-fidelity transcription services that are a backbone for products like Zoom IQ…We’re developing domain-specific NLU (natural language understanding) using few-shot models to build features that will be more reliable and valuable to our users,” said Josh Dulberger, Zoom’s head of product, data, and AI. “Sales teams…want to focus on the customer, and managing the engagement rather than taking notes, but also so they can review their calls to pick up nuances, easily identify next steps, or solicit some guidance from a colleague. Managers and sales leaders can’t sit in on every call but want to understand the selling climate, when to coach, and which reps are finding the right message.”
Zoom IQ for Sales places Zoom in competition with many of its partners, including Salesloft, Outreach, Chorus, and Gong.
TechCrunch Senior Report Kyle Wiggers cautioned buyers about Zoom’s AI capabilities: “The jury’s out on the accuracy of Zoom’s algorithms, particularly given the company’s history of deploying flawed AI. Sentiment analysis algorithms are especially prone to gender and race bias, and not every salesperson will necessarily agree with how Zoom measures engagement.”
“Zoom is almost certainly feeling the pressure from investors to establish new lines of revenue,” continued Wiggers. “While the company’s earnings soared during the pandemic, guidance is down as customers begin to shift to hybrid and in-office work arrangements less reliant on videoconferencing.”
Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.
“Half a million businesses choose Zoom and rely on it for internal and external conversations,” said Dulberger. “The Zoom platform already has a strong foundation in this area with features such as transcription, recordings, and highlights. This also gives us an opportunity to expand this type of functionality across the Zoom platform such as Zoom Contact Center and within our meetings and events solutions to help presenters pace their speech, take notes, capture action items or employ specific tactics.”
Zoom Events, Zoom’s platform for virtual and hybrid shows, is adding a backstage feature that lets panelists, speakers, and production crews meet before, during, and after events. During the session, support staff can view the webinar feed, chat with each other, answer attendees’ questions, and practice their presentations. Zoom Events Backstage should be available by the end of April.
Other new Events features include branded wallpaper that displays behind tiles and webinar reactions.
The Outreach Deal Summary provides an opportunity overview, recent activity, and access to Kaia, Commit, and Success Plans.
Sales Engagement Platform vendor Outreach will be rolling out AI-Guided Deal Intelligence in 2022. The new Deal Insights functionality provides a consolidated opportunity view that includes a deal overview, deal health, risks, and next best action recommendations from a single pane of glass.
“Deal Intelligence doesn’t just warn you a deal is off track but will actually guide you to help understand what you can do now, in the moment, to change the outcome,” explained Senior Communications Manager Amanda Woolley to GZ Consulting. “Deal Intelligence is going to reach across the Outreach platform and gather signals from all facets of the platform and throughout the customer journey and move from risk identification into action.”
Many of the components of Deal Intelligence such as Sentiment Analysis, Success Plans, Kaia, Commit, and engagement monitoring already exist in the Outreach platform, with the new Deal Intelligence tying together data and insights from the various modules and summarizing them with deal health and next best action recommendations.
“Built on the foundation of our deep machine learning tools like Kaia, Intent, title classification, and more, Deal Intelligence will help remove some of the “best guesses” we revenue leaders have been doing,” explained Outreach CRO Anna Baird. “Deal Intelligence will be gathering signals and let us know – not only when we have a risk – but what we can do to change the outcome! It’s not just a warning light, but a full explanation of how to correct the issue. Deal Intelligence will bring true transparency to opportunity management and help us get to that predictable revenue goal we all want.”
Deal intelligence is gathered across the deal lifecycle and ongoing customer interactions, including sequences, email sentiment, calendaring, Outreach Kaia (conversational intelligence and real-time recommendations), Success Plans (digital salesrooms), and Outreach Commit (pipeline health and forecasting).
“The current ML model looks at the multiple factors and compares them across benchmarks we have collected to derive the [Health Insights] score,” explained Woolley. “Some of the key top-level factors included Decision-maker engagement, activity across email and calls, meeting analysis as well as interaction within Success Plan. For every deal, the ML model determines which factors are positive (‘green flag’) or negative polarity (‘red flag’).”
Both red and green flags are displayed in Deal Intelligence. The Deal Intelligence service summarizes relevant signals, but “given the number of signals captured, it is very hard for a sales rep to drill through every deal.” Outreach’s goal is to “surface all the relevant information for the sales rep in a unified view with the ability to drill deeper as well as take action from within Outreach.”
“Sales reps only succeed when they take the right actions to close deals, yet for far too long they have lacked true visibility into the health of their deals and are forced to turn to intuition and guesswork to select the next best actions to take. Sales leaders and reps have to contend with disparate, dated sales technologies as they strive for an accurate understanding of their deals, pipeline, and forecast. CRM solutions provide a way to store data but rely on extensive tedious manual data entry from sales reps, often resulting in a “garbage-in garbage-out” situation that does not help reps or managers make confident decisions. Point solutions like conversation intelligence offer a way to record conversations and glean insights hours or days later, but at best, they can tell what the reps’ next actions in other systems should be. All are failing to deliver deal observability. And none of them give real-time deal intelligence to sales reps and seamlessly automate the next actions all in one continuous experience. Until now, that is.”
Outreach CMO Melton Littlepage
Part II continues tomorrow with a discussion of Outreach deal health analytics across the deal lifecycle.
Conversational Sales and Marketing vendor Qualified announced select availability for its new Signals intent product. Qualified Signals delivers sales intelligence gleaned from company websites, helping them identify in-market accounts and prioritize their outreach.
Qualified Signals is an “AI product that combines website engagement with Salesforce data to surface the buying intent of a B2B company’s target accounts; helping sales reps focus on exactly the right accounts to generate more pipeline and revenue,” blogged Qualified CRO Robert Zimmerman.
When ABM was proposed as the successor to lead-generation marketing, it focused on defining the ICP and targeting accordingly. While the ICP concept is still important, it fails to recognize that at any one moment, most ICP accounts are not in-market. Thus, a further refinement was in order, deploying intent (e.g., visitor intelligence, chatbots, third-party B2B website activity) and engagement data (e.g., email responses, meeting attendance, sentiment) to prioritize accounts so that sales reps focus on the accounts that are in market and marketing continues to nurture ICP accounts with low-level intent signals.
“Sales reps need a simple way to identify the accounts with high purchase intent so they can maximize pipeline more efficiently,” argued Zimmerman. “Meanwhile, target accounts are poking around the website and signaling buying intent, but sales reps have no idea. This is a missed opportunity because website engagement is a critical predictor of purchase intent. It demonstrates patterns of website activity that indicate whether an account is sales-ready.”
Unfortunately, website activity is a “blind spot for salespeople” that leaves them “in the dark as to where to focus their attention, how to engage target accounts, and how deals are progressing.”
Qualified Signals employs an AI-predictive model that collects “hundreds of thousands of website data points to determine which accounts are in-market to buy and sales-ready.” Models include website activity such as mouse movement, clicks, scroll depth, page views, active time on site, chatbot engagement, live chat, voice calls, meetings booked, recency and frequency of visits, and visitor count.
“In a booming sales tech market, there are countless sales intelligence tools out there, but they often overlook the most important sales and marketing asset—the corporate website,” said Qualified CEO Kraig Swensrud. “Signals arms sellers with an entirely new type of buying intent data, so revenue teams know exactly which accounts to pursue to crush their quota.”
The Qualified Signals Account Trend Report analyzes buyer activity on the company website across a rep’s territory, helping her prioritize activity and identify accounts where activity is cooling.
Signals are displayed to sales reps in the Salesforce Account record and convert complex buyer behavior into straightforward trends such as cooling, neutral, heating, and surging. Trend data “can also be customized using unique Salesforce Account data to home in on the accounts that matter most, like ABM tier, account owner, region, or industry.”
Signals optionally pushes custom Account intent fields to Salesforce, which can then be built into custom reports and dashboards.
Qualified also displays Signals Account 360, a dynamic graph that visualizes purchase intent fluctuations over time for individual accounts. Signals are expressed as a current Heat Index temperature, dynamic trend, and detailed account activity view that replays account engagement at the contact level. The account timeline “offers a detailed, highly visual, timestamped overview of notable website events that occurred throughout the buying process,” blogged Zimmerman.
The Account 360 view combines heat index trend data alongside visitor intelligence.
Additionally, Signals supports mobile, email, and Slack alerts when an account hits client specified thresholds on the Qualified Heat Index. Alerts may be sent in real-time or included in a daily or weekly email digest.
“Qualified Signals amplifies Qualified X, bringing purchase intent data to the visitor level within your conversational sales and marketing application,” stated the firm. “When a sales rep prospects into a target account, they’re instantly notified when that account arrives on the site. Plus, they have all intent data at the ready. They can instantly meet with the prospect using a full stack of meeting tools, including chat, voice, and screen-sharing.”
Due to the complexity of visitor intelligence and similar data, intent signals have mostly been fed into marketing platforms and not converted into actionable semaphores; however, sales intelligence vendors have begun enabling these signals.
“The website is no longer just for marketers; it’s now a window into your biggest sales opportunities. Sellers have their standard indicators that an account is interested, and a deal is moving forward; but in between the standard touchpoints, prospects are poking around your website, reading a customer story, or engaging via live chat. Sellers have had limited insight into how target accounts are exploring this property, but the website is an amazing predictor of intent. Now, Qualified Signals will surface this invaluable insight for revenue teams.”
Qualified CEO Kraig Swensrud
Qualified Signals will GA in early 2022.
Qualified closed on a $51 million Series B round in May that Salesforce Ventures led. The firm describes itself as “the only conversational sales and marketing platform purpose-built for Salesforce Sales Cloud.”
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