Tag: Google Chrome Extension

ZoomInfo Copilot Launched

ZoomInfo Copilot delivers account-based insights, buyer recommendations, and next best actions to sales reps.

ZoomInfo formally launched its Copilot service, which embeds GenAI capabilities within its GTM platform.  The firm claims that Copilot “turns every seller into your best seller.”

Over 20,000 users have participated in the Copilot beta, and “their results and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive.”

ZoomInfo claims its users report being 60% more productive with Copilot. They also reduced time spent on research and manual tasks by ten hours per week, and 71% uncovered new opportunities at existing accounts.

Furthermore, ZoomInfo Copilot surfaced signals related to 45% of the open opportunities in their CRM.

ZoomInfo Copilot improves the efficiency and efficacy of sales reps. (Source: Q1 2024 $ZI earnings presentation).

“In today’s GTM environment, data by itself isn’t enough. Modern sales is becoming a science. It’s not enough to know who your buyer is — you need to know what they care about, exactly when they are in market, and what problems they’re facing right now,” posted ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck on LinkedIn.  “And this information is out there in the form of digital buying signals. We have more information than ever about our buyers, but there’s too much noise.”

While signals such as sales triggers, visitor intelligence, and intent data sets continue to expand in depth and accuracy, delivering them in a coherent, holistic, and actionable way has proven difficult. Simply being told that somebody visited your website or there was an executive change at a prospect isn’t actionable because valuable signals get lost in the noise.  Most individual signals do not assist with prioritization, identifying the buying committee, or writing an email that cuts through inbox noise.  That is why sales assistants such as ZoomInfo Copilot will be warmly greeted.

“We built ZoomInfo Copilot to change that — to push these insights directly to sellers, teeing up outreach for the best leads at exactly the right moment,” continued Schuck. “Copilot turns ZoomInfo from a contact lookup tool into a platform that surfaces the key insights sellers need to take action against each day.”

Copilot also supports AI-guided prospecting that prioritizes sales rep activities on a redesigned home page.  The ranked list of target accounts, based on historical deal analysis, employs sales triggers such as intent signals and executive scoops (ZoomInfo’s term for business events) to prioritize outbound activity.

CRM deal analysis identifies the “DNA of your best-fit customers and uses ZoomInfo’s leading go-to-market data to identify the best-fit accounts for you,” said CPO Dominik Facher.  “Copilot generates natural language explanations of why an account has been prioritized so you have all the context to successfully engage.”

Copilot supports Salesforce and HubSpot for building target account lists, with additional CRMs planned in subsequent releases. Data is ingested from the Opportunity and Account record types.

To further assist prospecting, ZoomInfo surfaces buying committee members “who are most likely to engage,” which admins can curate and push out to their frontline sellers.

Sales Intelligence vendors have long said that their offerings helped reps know “who to call, when to call, and what to say.” However, this data was often raw information that needed to be analyzed by reps and messaged to prospects on an individual account basis. Not only does Copilot prioritize activities across their book of business and suggest the next best actions, but it can even recommend the channels on which individual buyers are most likely to respond.

“Marketers can access a ranked and prioritized list of the companies and buyers in-market, based on millions of signals analyzed and prioritized by ZoomInfo Copilot’s AI every day, directly from the homepage feed,” blogged Schuck. “ZoomInfo Copilot’s intelligent recommendations are presented in the language of today’s sellers to make taking action as easy and intuitive as possible. Users can explore each opportunity in more depth and engage with those opportunities directly from the Homepage Feed.”

Users can select between different persona definitions and filter by CRM presence and “likelihood to engage.”

Copilot sports an AI Email Assistant that employs GenAI to compose messaging around selected insights.

The Copilot includes an AI Email Assistant to simplify outbound, personalized outreach.  Emails are generated based on the seller’s objective, previous account context, additional context offered by the sales rep, and ZoomInfo insights.  The sales rep can select from three generated options and adjust the length or tone.  Users have the option to email one or multiple individuals and can specify which insights should be used when generating the email.

Copilot assists with buying group discovery, “Pulling insights from websites, case studies, earnings call summaries, and many more real-time signals, ZoomInfo Copilot automatically creates buying groups of individuals who are most likely to engage and align with their ideal customer profiles.”

Copilot shortens the time to value for new users by automating personalization, including ICP and persona definition.  Traditionally, new Sales Intelligence platform users spend hours customizing the platform, defining target personas, ICP, companies of interest, topics of interest, etc.  Much of this process is automated by Copilot, allowing sales reps to immediately begin deriving value.

“When someone gets onboarded, we build out what we call a customer context database. We essentially go and do a lot of research on that company, what are their value props? What are their pain points? Who are their end users?  And then we start to infer what topics, buying committees, types of companies that they’re interested in,” ZoomInfo VP of Data Strategy Brandon Tucker explained to GZ Consulting. “And then as they start to engage with the signals, or set some of those configurations on their own, they start to get even more relevant insights.”

ZoomInfo Copilot supports GenAI account queries.

A GenAI chat interface answers account questions, “giving users the answers they need quickly using conversational AI. Users can request answers on a range of account-level topics to get up to speed as quickly as possible.”

Copilot “meets you where you are,” including desktop, weekly email digests, Slack alerts, Chrome extension, and a mobile app.

“ZoomInfo Copilot also allows salespeople to seize time-sensitive opportunities in real-time with Breaking Alerts delivered through Slack,” blogged Schuck. “These alerts can be shared across multiple channels, allowing teams to quickly triage emerging opportunities and act decisively on high-quality intent signals.”

The Personalized Target Account Digest alerts users when prospects are “showing the right signals” and explains why now is a good time for reaching out to the prospect.  Users can drill down into greater detail, compose an email, or export a prospect to the CRM. 

Thus, “signals drive your actions,” said Facher.

ZoomInfo Copilot ingests ZoomInfo’s first- and third-party data to deliver “detailed overviews of specific accounts, including pain points and use cases, upcoming deals, important contacts, a summary of previous engagements, and more.”

“Finding the time to understand every account is a tall ask,” stated Facher.  However, “Copilot effortlessly summarizes the need to know and the nice to know for any account, based on ZoomInfo, your CRM, and the engagements you’ve had with your customers, like emails or calls, to generate a holistic picture of an account’s health, its history, and the opportunity.”

Thus, reps can have a “detailed understanding” of any account “in seconds” and establish a “shared foundation” of account knowledge across the account team.

“Get briefed, get aligned, and get selling,” concluded Facher.

ZoomInfo contends that its Copilot has a significant advantage over other offerings due to the breadth and quality of its reference content and engagement data.

Account AI summarizes the account with multi-dimensional views.

“What sets ZoomInfo’s Copilot apart from any other solution in the market is that it is sitting on top of our AI-ready trusted data foundation that drives decisions, personalization, and confidence,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “AI is only as good as the data it’s built on, and most solutions are layered on top of static CRM data.”

Schuck argued that ZoomInfo is well-positioned in the emerging Copilot space as it offers high-quality data for maintaining enterprise software platforms and grounding its Copilot.  Among its verified data assets are third-party reference data, second-party intent data, and first-party engagement and conversational insights:

  • 110 million global company profiles
  • 410 million contacts
  • Technographics
  • Streaming Intent
  • Scoops (Business Events and Earnings Call/Filings Summaries)
  • Technology Site Intent Partnerships with G2, TrustRadius, and TechnologyAdvice
  • Conversational Sales Transcripts (Chorus)
  • Chat Transcripts
  • Websights (Visitor ID)
  • MarketingOS engagement data

“Copilot takes signals like website visitors, spikes in job postings, earnings call transcripts, contract renewal dates, and expert calls that indicate spending or competitive threats, then uses advanced entity resolution and matching to combine them with customers’ first-party data,” stated Schuck on ZoomInfo’s recent earnings call. “It then applies AI technology to model and inform users immediately about which companies are in the market for their product and how and why you should engage with them.

“For our customers, understanding firmographics alone is not sufficient to understand whether or not your next buyer is about to be in-market for your product,” continued Schuck. “It’s only when you surround that core data with signals that you’re able to predict who your next customer should be.”

ZoomInfo feeds data and buyer signals into Copilot to identify the right buyer during the buyer research process.

Copilot looks to identify in-market accounts and buyers during the research phase, relying on a broad set of hidden buyer signals (e.g., intent, competitive research, job postings, earnings calls, website visits) before the buyer raises their hand.  The research window is the period during which sales and marketing have the greatest opportunity to influence the problem framing and preliminary vendor list.

But cold-calling into the TAM absent signals is very wasteful, as roughly only 10% of the ICP is in the market.

“Very few of the buyers that you’re looking for are in-market during the time you’re looking at them, and the ability to pinpoint those isn’t very easy today,” explained Product Marketing SVP Jam Khan to GZ Consulting.  “So you can use predictive analytics.  You can make your best guess when you have a fairly broken MQL system. ABM vendors have tried to come up with a different point of view, but it doesn’t quite replace the MQL.”

Copilot looks to identify the “chasm of opportunity” between signal generation and the first point of contact.

“The bridge we’re trying to gap is the difference between being first in a deal and being second in a deal,” argued Khan. “You’re never going to have a crystal ball that lets you anticipate before a buyer ever even starts making their decision. But that short little window is the difference between winning and losing.”

Copilot looks to “solve for the chasm” and give sales teams a first-mover advantage.  While this “window of opportunity is really small,” it is the difference between hitting .200 and .300, analogized Khan.  “To the extent where you’re able to act on those, that’s the difference between hitting your number and missing your number.”

Thus, other GenAI or Copilot offerings that pull data from the CRM face a trio of problems when generating recommendations. CRM data is limited to what has been keyed into it. As this data is historical (and reps hate maintaining CRM data), it is likely to be outdated, stale, and inaccurate.

“Third, it lacks the outside signals and insights that drive modern go-to-market motions. ZoomInfo Copilot delivers a full picture built on the foundation of the world’s most accurate and up-to-date business data, publishes real-time insights, and turns that into personalized and relevant content,” stated Schuck.

“Copilot is one of the best pieces of software we built at ZoomInfo, across ease-of-use, end-to-end understanding of our customers’ pain points and product market fit. We have had leading AI models in production for years,” crowed Schuck.  “We expect to monetize Copilot and we’ll roll it out in a thoughtful way, focusing first on the customers who are most likely to get significant value out of the advanced platform. Our go-to-market teams are excited to bring this to their customers, and I have a lot of conviction around the upgrade paths in our customer base.”

Earnings Scoops, the latest content set to be collected and fed into Copilot, extend ZoomInfo’s technology and business event Scoops into SEC filing analysis.  The service ingests 10-Ks (annual), 8-Ks (Material announcements), international filings, and earnings transcripts. It then outputs a set of condensed topical summaries.  Earnings Scoops leverage GenAI to analyze customer and prospect competitors, goals, initiatives, pain points, and SWOT elements.  They are also fed into its beta Copilot service.

Earnings Scoops are assigned metatags from a set of 150 Scoops topics that assist with searching and Copilot customization.  This additional tagging helps tailor Scoop presentation to each firm’s ICP and is displayed in a Scoops Topics column (see a subset of topics from Meta’s recent earnings on the right).

“Many organizations still struggle to provide frontline sellers with actionable go-to-market insights distilled from the myriad of available signals,” said IDC Analyst Roger Beharry Lall. “While AI can sift through mountains of data, solutions must be built on a foundation of fresh, accurate, and clean data in order to deliver meaningful intelligence. Suppliers like ZoomInfo that can combine robust data sets with novel AI capabilities will help customers lead their markets by enabling engagement to the right people with the right message at precisely the right moment.”

While Schuck is confident in Copilot and ZoomInfo’s ability to monetize it, Schuck does not believe it will significantly grow revenue in H2.

“It’s going to take longer than that. I have a lot of confidence because I personally pitched this product across dozens of our customers, across all segments, and all industries,” argued Schuck.  “From a product market fit, I don’t think we’ve been ever so close to fit as we have been with Copilot, outside of the core company and contact data. And so, I have a tremendous amount of confidence that we’re going to be able to turn that enthusiasm into monetization, but I also expect it to happen over time.”

The Homepage prioritizes accounts with next best action recommendations.

LeadDelta: Seed Round & Product Profile

The LeadDelta Network Manager provides a light CRM view for managing LinkedIn contacts.

LeadDelta, which offers a Sales Engagement platform focused on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, closed on an $800,000 pre-seed round.  LeadDelta has been self-funded since its 2021 founding.

LeadDelta focuses on managing the social capital entrepreneurs and sales reps capture in Sales Navigator. 

LeadDelta began as a “simple app” for tagging LinkedIn connections but now offers a broader app used by over 11,000 individuals and teams.  Features include a dashboard, sidebar (Chrome Extension), and Smart Inbox that help users manage their network.

The Smart Inbox lets users pin, star, and tag LinkedIn messages.  It also supports LinkedIn message filtering, a connection sidebar for viewing notes and tags while chatting, messaging templates, and a unified inbox for LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.  Users can message up to 25 contacts at a time.

The network manager syncs and updates contacts in a “lightweight CRM view.”  Users can search and sort contacts, create custom tables and views, follow/unfollow in bulk, and filter contacts.  The network manager also displays signals such as when connections were made and the last text.

The LeadDelta Dashboard analyzes the user’s LinkedIn network.

The Dashboard helps users view and manage key connection attributes, tags, and notes.

LinkedIn has not been careful about partnering with vendors that pull data from its platform; however, LeadDelta has managed to avoid conflict with LinkedIn by focusing on enhancing the LinkedIn experience and not mining it for contact intelligence.

“It has been a journey of really trying to be the good guys on Linkedin and really making sure that Linkedin likes what we do because we complement the community.  We enhance the community.

What we say is ‘You own your data.  This is your data.’ This is also how we are a legitimate Linkedin business.  You have the permissions, and you say what you want, but then you can choose to whom to give.  If you want to give your contacts to your company or not, and which contacts, and what context?  This is your digital Rolodex, and for the first time, you can monetize it.  You can come to your new employer and say, look at my app.”

CEO Vedran Rasic

LeadDelta has been growing “steadily 20% month-over-month,” helping them “complete the fundraising from really reputable angels around the globe,” continued Rasic.

The firm will soon be launching LeadDelta Workspaces to “revolutionize how teams sell, hire, fundraise, and market their products and services. For the first time, teams can utilize their combined social capital,” said LeadDelta.

Workspaces support pooled connections across teams, notes, and tagging.

LeadDelta will simplify sales and support selling from both traditional and non-traditional sales roles.  Rasic sees LeadDelta as akin to Figma, which simplified design and took market share from Adobe. 

“Figma came and said, Everybody is a designer, and we can all collaborate.  We can all add notes [and] comments.  We can all engage.  This is the same thing.  This is what we want to do for sales for relationships,” analogized Rasic.  “Imagine a recruiter being able to help a salesperson close a deal or a salesperson, in reverse, being able to help recruit or score that next hire.”

Historically, individuals could only manage 150 relationships at a time, but that number is expanding due to social networks and AI, helping with fundraising, selling, marketing, and hiring.  LeadDelta’s goal is to create “one integrated, cross-referenced professional network” that improves the odds of success as users collaborate cross-functionally.

The network will expand further as additional individuals participate and data is integrated from other platforms such as HubSpot and Gmail.

LeadDelta targets SMBs with annual invoices between $5K and $50K.  Many of their prospects have deployed HubSpot; thus, HubSpot CRM connectivity is a popular request that will soon be implemented in the platform.

Along with HubSpot, LeadDelta is looking to add CSV uploads to capture second-degree connections.

Rasic noted that at many tech organizations, the executive team is well-connected but too busy to leverage its connections for the organization.  LeadDelta helps address this issue.

“As a person who fostered numerous for-profit and non-profit enterprises through stewarding community efforts, it wasn’t until LeadDelta that I got the first smart and dedicated application for targeted network outreach,” stated lead investor Tijo Bajic.  “This is not only an idea I believe in.  It powers how I interact daily as a professional.  I’m proud to be the first investor and the angel syndicate lead.”

LeadDelta is priced at $29 per user per month or $19.33 when billed annually.  In addition, the firm is offering grandfathered pricing to its early clients.

The LeadDelta Sidebar (Chrome connection).

6sense Revenue AI for Sales

6sense Revenue AI for Sales helps prioritize account activity.

6sense released Revenue AI for Sales, its account prioritization platform that identifies in-market accounts and recommends contacts in an “anonymous world.”  The service assists reps with prioritization, research, multi-threading, and personalization.

“Information overload is killing sellers’ productivity.  In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, we need to give sellers the tools they need to reach new heights.  This means giving sellers sales technology that helps them spend more time selling and less time on unproductive activities,” said CEO Jason Zintak. “We’ve already transformed marketing teams by revealing and targeting accounts and engaging anonymous buyers.  Now we’re giving sales teams a massive upgrade from their legacy database vendors.  This puts 6sense in a new category where we can innovate and lead, just like we have with others like predictive analytics and ABM.  Early momentum from customers making the move to a better selling experience demonstrates the potential for impact.”

The Persona Map identifies engagement activity by role and level.

Revenue AI for Sales illuminates the “Dark Funnel,” where 97% of B2B research is conducted anonymously.  6sense ties new buyer intent signals with account and contact intelligence.  Recommended Actions prioritize engagement and suggest which contacts to acquire and reach out to.  6sense offers first-party (visitor), second-party (G2 and TrustRadius), and third-party (Bombora) intent signals.  It supports both topic and keyword intent alongside buying stage.

A Persona Map provides a visual map of the buying team, helping promote multi-threading and suggesting unknown buying team members.  The map includes contact details, activities, and talking points.

People and company pages highlight company hierarchies, job insights, technographics, and psychographics.  Contacts and accounts can be sent to CRMs, pushed to SEPs for engagement, and contacted via email, phone, or LinkedIn.

6sense insights are supported by a Chrome extension, allowing reps to prospect on the open web and identify potential buyers.

Prioritization Dashboards highlight in-market accounts and insights.  6sense also alerts reps to important account activity, recommended actions, and new buyer intent signals via email and Slack.

“Challenges exist on multiple fronts today as sellers have to navigate through a constant barrage of information and noise, plummeting productivity and increasing frustration,” said CTO Viral Bajaria. “With our AI-driven solution, sales teams will be able to focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – while our technology takes care of the rest.  6sense Revenue AI for Sales uses the power of AI, big data, and intelligence to give sellers confidence in their ability to close more deals and be the trusted advisor their customers want and need.”

6sense maintained its momentum last year, growing revenue by 70%.  The company attributed its ongoing growth to its “strategic focus on new product introductions, market expansion, and ecosystem growth.”

New product introductions included the October release of Conversational Email.  The module, which leverages Generative AI, intent, and pre-intent data, dramatically enhances productivity when sending marketing and sales emails and fielding responses.  Conversational email composes “relevant and hyper-personalized emails to qualify and convert leads at scale.”  6sense claims its customers enjoy a 50 percent reduction in deal-cycle time, a 150% increase in average deal size, and $900K of new pipeline activity in four weeks.

“The results of the past year’s performance are a major achievement that demonstrates how the team’s hard work has paid off,” said Brian Ascher, Partner at Venrock.  “As 6sense continues executing against commitments and the product roadmap, we expect to see this upward trend maintain its momentum.  This is what the larger investor community loves to see, and we are proud of the 6sense team delivering these results.”

Other enhancements include ongoing investment in the Slintel database and the release of 6sense Pipeline Intelligence based on Fortella.  Both Slintel and Fortella were acquired in H2 2021.

“6sense offers billions of data points of market-leading account and contact data along with best-in-class curated data, enhancing a customer’s own first-party data sources and tech stacks to deliver powerful B2B go-to-market strategies, insights, and orchestrations,” claimed the firm.

6sense continued to grow its partner ecosystem with new integrations, including HubSpot, Microsoft, and Integrate.  In addition, its integrations with Dynamics and HubSpot CRM support prescriptive sales dashboards and buyer insights.

“Throughout the past year, we’ve built upon our growth in meaningful ways and continue to provide our customers with tangible value that impacts their bottom line,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “Using our own platform is essential to our success and puts us in a unique position where 6sense Revenue AI is a competitive advantage – both in our own category and where our customers compete.  Looking across our customer base, we see revenue generation is 120% more effective when using 6sense, their deal size doubles, and win rate increases 4X.”

The firm has expanded internationally over the past year with an increasing presence in EMEA and APAC.  The London office grew to 45 full-time employees, and APAC has over 400 employees in India and Singapore.

6sense employment growth (Source: LinkedIn)

Salesloft Winter 2022 Release

Salesloft released a trio of enterprise-grade features to its Sales Engagement platform.  New Enhancements support account-based team selling, improved governance and access controls, and mobile app improvements.

Salesloft User Relationships

Account-based team selling allows multiple team members to work on an account and set multiple account owners with a single, shared view.  Furthermore, Salesloft automation rules support team selling with automated role assignments and account relationships across the customer lifecycle “so that reps can easily follow rules of engagement without losing time to admin tasks and workarounds.”

Expanded access controls provide complete control over which data customers have access across Cadences, Conversations, and Deals.  Organizations can limit access to sensitive opportunity data, call recordings, and customer records, ensuring security, compliance, and privacy.

Data access is based on the principle of least privilege, so users only have access to data required to do their job.  Thus, sales managers have access to all data relevant to their direct reports, while AEs can only view their data.

Salesloft Mobile App

Recognizing that field sales reps are returning to the road, the Salesloft Mobile App supports immediate customer engagement in support of time-sensitive communications.  Features include a Mobile Live Feed similar to the Salesloft Live Feed, person searching, email sending, and messaging (text).

The Mobile app lets sales reps make and log calls, send messages, and send emails directly from the mobile app using the mobile phone’s network.  The mobile app places a pair of calls that bridges the mobile device through the Salesloft dialer, with caller id displaying the dedicated Salesloft number.  Call recording, Live Call Studio, and voicemail drops are not supported.

Email enhancements are available now, with broader cadence step support in early 2023.

“Sales teams have adopted technology quickly, often at the expense of critical governance capabilities.  This exposes companies to policy or compliance violations,” said Salesloft CPO Ellie Fields.  “We believe it is Salesloft’s job to provide sales teams with technology they need to sell, and to make sure that technology is governed.  Especially in tight markets, our customers want to spend time selling, not managing disparate systems.”

Salesloft also announced that it rearchitected its Google Chrome extension, providing the “full Salesloft platform through one, consistent sidebar across Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and Gmail.”  The redesigned extension will be available in early 2023.

Other platform enhancements include automated data enrichment based on email signatures; out-of-office detection for Spanish, French, and German; Slack notifications for one-off tasks; improved email sentiment analysis; future period forecasts in Deals; and improved Deal Engagement Scores.

New integrations include Gryphon.ai (phone and email certifications), EveryoneSocial, Salesfinitiy (dialer), and StoryDoc (build presentations and share prospects via cadences).

Enhanced integrations include HubSpot (syncing of ownership data) and Vidyard (Live Feed notifications when a Vidyard video is shared).

Lusha Series B

Crowdsourced contact vendor Lusha closed on a $205 million Series B that valued the company at $1.5 billion.  Growth equity firm PSG led both the Series A and B rounds.  ION Crossover Partners also joined the B round, which brought total Lusha investment to $245 million.

Following its February Series A, Lusha invested in its go-to-market strategy and trebled its growth rate.

“We were still bootstrapped one year ago when we understood that we have a big opportunity to surge forward.  We have since tripled our revenue growth rate, and that is why we required another funding round faster than we thought,” explained CEO Yoni Tserruya.  “The next stage will be to go public.  I’m not sure when that will be, but it will take at least two more years.  We are seeing many companies that are going public too early and are facing difficulties in making projections and meeting expectations.”

The additional funds will be deployed towards building out its community of 800,000 B2B sales professionals “into the industry’s largest,” expanding its global presence, and continuing to focus on data quality, compliance, features, and ease of use.

“We have been following Lusha’s progress over the last two years and found the team’s vision and execution highly impressive. As sales teams continue to leverage data to drive their go-to-market strategies, Lusha is becoming an integral product for teams to optimize their outreach to improve overall win rates. With Lusha’s data significantly increasing the value and ROI realized by sales teams, we are excited to be a part of this next chapter in Lusha’s remarkable journey.”

Gili Iohan, General Partner at ION Crossover Partners

“Our primary goal is to give every salesperson, regardless of size or budget, access to the highest quality data at the most affordable price while championing world-class standards of privacy and compliance,” said President Assaf Eisenstein.  “With this funding round, we will continue to invest highly in our data infrastructure and privacy standards to provide optimal levels of compliance and security for Lusha’s 800,000+ community members,” said Assaf Eisenstein, Co-founder and President of Lusha.

Contact data is gathered from a Community service that ingests email headers and signature blocks to maintain business card and email signature data.  Data is also collected from publicly available sources, third-party licensing, and algorithmic data appending (e.g., email templates).  Lusha claims that its community members help Lusha deliver “the most accurate data through constant validation and enrichment of its database.” 

As part of its GDPR and CCPA compliance program, individuals are notified when they’ve been added to the database.  Only business data is gathered, with no Personally Identifiable Information collected.

Lusha provides 100 million business profiles, 60 million email addresses, and 50 million direct dials across 15 million companies.

The Lusha browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge sends contacts from Gmail, social media, and B2B sites directly to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, SalesLoft, and Outreach.  Users license credits individually or for a team, with the admin allocating credits.  Lusha also supports Salesforce bulk enrichment and a contacts API.

Lusha employs a freemium model for limited contact information lookup, but users must pay to export data, build prospect lists, enrich files, and integrate with CRMs and SEPs. Annual pricing is shown.

Lusha helps sales professionals identify their ideal buyers and tailor their message to potential customers.

“Similar to the shift that marketing underwent a decade ago, sales professionals are abandoning spray and pray outreach, in favor of super-targeted selling based on data,” said Tserruya.  “Lusha enables all salespeople to utilize data to recognize their most relevant opportunities and maximize revenue in a simple, easy-to-use solution.  We look forward to using this funding to be at the forefront of this industry shift and grow Lusha into the largest B2B sales community”.

Lusha is rapidly growing, adding 29 staffers last month.  It grew 45% over the past six months and 103% over the past year to 229 employees.  Engineering grew 170% over the past year to 55 employees.  Their other top departments are Sales (34 headcount, up 106%), Support (22 headcount, up 175%), and IT (21 headcount, up 91%).

The Israeli firm expects to end the year with 240 employees, twenty in its Boston office.

Lusha, founded in 2016, lists 32 open positions: five sales and support openings in Boston and twenty-seven openings in Tel Aviv across engineering, data, R&D, product, marketing, sales, HR, compliance, finance, and customer success.

Lusha’s customers include Facebook, Google, Dropbox, and Uber.  Most of its customers are B2B SaaS companies, but it’s also used by VCs, investors, and recruiting agencies.

Apollo.IO $32M Series B

Sales Intelligence and Engagement vendor Apollo.io closed a $32 million Series B led by Tribe Capital, with participation from NewView Capital and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. In addition, Sri Pangulur, a partner at Tribe Capital, joined Apollo.io’s board.  Total funding sits at $41.3 million.

Apollo is deploying the funds towards building out its product and engineering teams.  It will also expand its sales, marketing, and operational resources, including additional leadership hires.

In a blog announcing the transaction, CEO Tim Zheng admitted that the Apollo brand is not well known and that Apollo will be using the funds to address brand weakness.  “Our next steps include increasing awareness of Apollo, increasing our user base outside of small teams, and building out an intelligence layer in Apollo to make individual sales reps and teams more successful.”

Apollo is growing rapidly, with its customer base increasing 200% over the past year despite awareness issues.  It has been profitable for the past eighteen months and has more than one million users and 9,000 paid customers.

Recent enhancements include an international dialer, contact and company data improvements, and prospecting and Chrome extension upgrades.

“Apollo is challenging the status quo in B2B lead intelligence and sales engagement by making contact data and prospecting tools in this space more accessible,” said Pangulur. “Seeing the company’s incredible growth over the past year, enhanced product offerings, and new client acquisitions, we are confident in Apollo’s ability to disrupt the SalesTech market for B2B companies, offering a more intelligent, more cost-effective, and simpler solution.”

Apollo falls into a category that I’ve labeled Hybrid Engagement that combines sales engagement tools with sales intelligence and B2B DaaS.  Other vendors with Hybrid Engagement capabilities include ZoomInfo, Cognism, Data Axle Genie, and VanillaSoft.

“Sales professionals at B2B companies are burdened by a go-to-market process that’s manual, tedious, and complex. It’s stifled by convoluted workflows, very little guidance, lengthy onboarding, and high price tags for name-brand solutions,” said CEO Tim Zheng. “This funding will help us further accelerate our product-led growth model, which has seen tremendous success in the contact data space. 

“Apollo’s vision is to give its customers the most powerful and intelligent GTM platform in the industry, so they can reach their full market potential,” continued Zheng. “We want to make access to B2B data even easier, while enhancing the data with sales intelligence and automated workflows.”

Apollo Job Change Alerts

Apollo has assembled a database of 200 million contacts across ten million companies.  Data include direct-dial phones, emails, funding intelligence, technographics, and job changes.  Apollo’s dataset supports direct research, lead prospecting, and LinkedIn matching via a Chrome Extension. In addition, Apollo Refresh performs real-time updates in Salesforce.

Sales Engagement features include sequences (cadences), automated emails, A/B testing, a click-to-call dialer, and a rules engine.

“As we emerge from the pandemic, buyers want an Amazon-like experience where companies are anticipating their needs. You need user data to better drive the sales experience, and as it evolves more personalized capabilities as well,” said Zheng.  “Apollo has some unique positioning in that they are doing product-led growth, but also covering the data stack as well.”

Apollo employs a freemium model with ten free exports per month, the Chrome extension, a Gmail extension, and limited sequences. 

Basic, at $49 per user per month ($39 billed annually), provides 250 export credits per month, unlimited sequences, email integrations, and a broader set of reports and Dashboards. 

The Professional edition adds the dialer, call recordings, customizable reports, and 1,000 exports per month.  Professional is priced at $99 per user per month when billed monthly and $79 per user per month when billed annually.

There are additional fees for full Salesforce synchronization, API access, Apollo Refresh, and exporting up to 10,000 records at a time. In addition, advanced dialer features (e.g., international dialing, call transcription, local presence, and CRM logging) are only available as part of custom packages.

Apollo employs a freemium model with 9,000 paid customers.

LeadIQ $30M Series B

Account Based Prospecting Platform LeadIQ announced a $30 million Series B led by Cathay Innovation, with Fresco Capital, Strong Ventures, and Eight Road Ventures joining the round.  The round brings total funding to $42 million.

The funds will be deployed to accelerate the product roadmap in account prioritization, buying team and contact personalization, and sales team collaboration.  Funds will also be used to fill key management positions for managing its growth and expansion as CEO Mei Siauw plans to double the firm’s headcount over the next eighteen months.

LeadIQ still has $6 million available from its Series A but is looking to expand from lead management into broader account management; thus, it is raising the necessary funds for new product development. 

According to Cathay Innovation, LeadIQ has “some of the best enterprise SaaS unit economics we’ve seen.”

Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch reported that “the company also sports net retention figures of around 125% and a strong ratio of account size versus customer acquisition costs.  Those are the sorts of metrics that SaaS investors covet.”

LeadIQ, founded in 2015, is based in San Francisco and Singapore.  It employs a remote workforce of 115 in 22 countries and serves companies in 45 countries.  Over the past year, the company quadrupled its ARR to “eight digits.”  The firm supports over 20,000 sales professionals across 1,200 enterprise and mid-market deployments.

LeadIQ automates sales rep prospecting workflows.

LeadIQ functionality helps sales teams “focus on the right activities and automate the rest.”  Its Chrome extension supports prospecting and lead capture from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, capturing both individual contacts and filtered contact lists.  Leads may be exported to Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and Salesloft, with duplicates blocked.  Contacts sent to Outreach and Salesloft kick off cadences.

“With 65% of teams missing revenue targets, outbound sales efficiency is a major challenge for enterprises globally,” said founder and CEO Mei Siauw. “Today, account-based prospecting is still highly manual and time-consuming thanks to fragmented data across multiple systems, repetitive busywork, low-quality research, and varying privacy laws. We built LeadIQ to help sales teams everywhere make authentic prospect connections with a more thoughtful approach. The numbers speak volumes, where we tripled growth in our enterprise and mid-market segments year-over-year. With this latest financing, we look forward to working with current and new investors like Cathay Innovation, who have the global reach and local market expertise across the US, Europe, and Asia to help us scale further during this next phase of growth.”

LeadIQ CEI Mei Siauw

Other features include

  • Email verification
  • Lead, Contacts, and Account enrichment and update
  • Territory management recognizes when reps are capturing leads that do not conform with their territory
  • Contact tracking that alerts reps when contacts change companies or titles.
  • An admin portal that helps customers comply with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA

“Led by a resilient and tenacious CEO with incredible vision, LeadIQ offers a next-gen platform that is the glue that unifies sales at the top of the funnel to provide the most comprehensive solution on the market,” said Cathay Innovation CEO Denis Barrier.  “Its workflow automation builds a strong moat and competitive advantage, which is critical with the pandemic-era digital transformation and subsequent talent wars forcing sales leaders to prioritize efficiency and effectiveness beyond the quota. We look forward to leveraging our resources worldwide to accelerate the company further onto the global stage.”

LeadIQ begins at $720 per rep on an annual basis for the Starter Plan.  Sales reps receive 250 verified emails per month and 25 mobile numbers.  However, the Starter Plan only supports Google Sheets and HubSpot Capture.

The Pro Plan doubles the price and monthly data plan.  Pro includes Salesforce and SEP integrations and lets users enrich CSV files of up to 100 rows.

Pricing for the Enterprise Edition runs at $135 per rep per month and includes job change notifications, prospecting, a team analytics dashboard, and priority support.  The Enterprise plan requires a minimum of twenty users, so it begins at $32,400. LeadIQ did not disclose its current valuation.

People.AI Acquires Hero and Releases Sales Solution for Salesforce

Revenue Operations and Sales Intelligence vendor People.AI acquired Hero Research, a Salesforce productivity app that simplifies CRM access.  The Hero service was immediately re-branded as PeopleGlass.  People.AI also announced a new Salesforce experience for sales reps and managers.

PeopleGlass is designed as an “interaction layer” to reduce the overhead and complexity of maintaining Salesforce content.  Glass refers to the “single pane of glass” metaphor often used for CRM cross-record reporting, a core feature of PeopleGlass.  People.AI argues that CRMs have become complex, full-stack solutions covering many use cases but are cumbersome due to their functional breadth.

“We believe that current CRM solutions are inadequate. Modern businesses are complex and full-stack solutions (platforms that offer many services) reflect the complexity of the many use cases that they need to cover as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Many CRMs today offer the whole gamut, addressing needs from pre-sales, post-sales, support, marketing, etc.,” argues People.AI.  “Furthermore, these companies are focused on selling large deals into small groups of decision makers who rarely interact with the products they purchase. It’s no wonder why many users feel they’ve been ignored by the people building the products they spend huge portions of their lives in.

In the meantime, most people have experience with iPhones, Gmail, and other great products. This only increases the frustration with legacy CRM tools.

PeopleGlass aims to solve this problem by focusing solely on the end user and leveraging learnings from the best modern consumer software.”

People.AI, “Why We Started People Glass”

PeopleGlass supports custom sheets, forms, hotkeys, a command-line interface, and a “clean and versatile workspace to eliminate the pain points of using CRMs.”  PeopleGlass may be launched in the browser or added as a Chrome extension.

Custom Sheets provide a spreadsheet view across Salesforce records that supports filters, bulk record updates, searching, and inline updates.  Thus, reps can quickly update opportunity records before pipeline review meetings and then review the spreadsheet with managers.  Records are immediately updated in Salesforce.

PeopleGlass Opportunity viewing and updates

Users can create personal views or modify any of the included templates.  Adding columns, resizing columns, and moving columns are straightforward actions.  Users can also quickly view any record as a form or view the record in Salesforce.

PeopleGlass Forms provide custom layouts for creating and updating account, contact, leads, opportunities, notes or tasks.  Admins can set default fields for records.

A set of hotkeys expedite data entry, allowing users to quickly create records, log calls, and search records. PeopleGlass provides a customizable home page for displaying metrics, sharing and copying sheets or forms with colleagues.

Part II, which discusses the Hero Research acquisition and their Salesforce solution, continues here.

Seismic Aura AI Enhancements and SmartPlays

Seismic announced enhancements to its recently launched Aura AI platform.  Aura provides sales reps with “intelligent recommendations on how to effectively engage with buyers, advance deals, and uncover new opportunities.”

Aura AI is a personal assistant for sales reps delivered via a Chrome extension.  It suggests “personalized, relevant content recommendations” using data from similar customers and prospects.  This content can then be forwarded to customers and prospects or posted on social sites as a LiveSend Link that supports full tracking and analytics.

Seismic LiveSend Links support tracking and analytics

Aura also displays customer engagement history and engagement between the customer and colleagues.

“Artificial intelligence isn’t just about making sellers more productive, which is important.  It’s also about helping buyers solve their problems by connecting them with the right content,” blogged Seismic Senior Content Strategist Tony Smith.

Seismic also released CRM SmartPlays within Salesforce.  The new feature “removes the burden of identifying the best sales plays” and suggests higher-performing content and context. “The modern salesperson is constantly pulled in multiple directions, leading to information overload and decision fatigue on what to do next. Aura’s content recommendations act as the seller’s sidekick, helping them eliminate the noise and avoid missing the next important engagement moment,” said Seismic CEO Doug Winter.  “Our approach to AI combines the best of human and artificial intelligence to give sellers a competitive edge and more time back in their day to engage with buyers. I can’t wait for more Seismic customers to see what Aura will do for them.”

Seismic Spring Enhancements

Sales Enablement vendor Seismic rolled out a set of platform enhancements last month that are “designed to help organizations capture every revenue moment and drive effective, efficient buyer engagement across all digital channels.”  The release included Seismic Aura, their new AI Engine for sales content.

Seismic Aura employs AI and machine learning to surface “new business opportunities and increase seller efficacy.”

“Over the last year, we’ve witnessed an incredible shift to all-digital buyer engagements. At Seismic, we’ve anticipated this change for some time now.  Our platform exists to make go-to-market teams more effective, whether their buyers are face-to-face or remote,” said Chief Product Officer Krish Mantripragada.  “The next challenge for technology leaders like Seismic will be to enable businesses to thrive in this new era of digital-first selling.  The innovations we’re launching at [Seismic’s virtual conference] Shift, along with the product updates we have coming later this year, bring sales and marketing teams closer together, helping them reach new customers and engage with existing customers in a compelling manner regardless of where they are.”

Continued Mantripragada, “humans can analyze only so much. Buried inside data are patterns, behavior, and insights that will hold keys to your questions and undiscovered opportunities. We are combining human intelligence and machine intelligence to harness the power of this data.”

Other Spring 2021 release features include

  • CRM SmartPlays employ predictive intelligence to recommend the most effective sales plays at any moment.  SmartPlays are delivered within the rep’s CRM workflow.
  • Seismic Sidekick, a Chrome extension powered by Aura, delivers guided selling and content recommendations “based on past engagement, similar buyers, and interests specific to each contact.” Sidekick helps surface engagement opportunities and reduces time spent searching for content.
  • Dynamic Email Templates
  • Global Privacy Management supports GDPR and country-specific, multi-lingual privacy requirements and notifications.
  • Groove and Seismic announced an integration partnership to “deliver relevant, approved, [and] compliant” Seismic content and LiveSend links within the Groove Sales Engagement Platform. The integration delivers relevant content and CRM data within the Groove workflow and assists with intelligent content discovery.

Along with announcing new features, Seismic boasted about its ongoing momentum.  Their net retention rate stands at 111%.  They have over one million users at over 700 enterprise clients, including deep penetration in the financial services sector.  Seismic claims that 22 of the top 25 global asset management companies are customers, along with 7 of the top 10 US banks and 4 of the top 5 North American wealth management firms. Seismic added over 200 employees last year and opened its first Canadian office with the December Grapevine6 acquisition.  They now have more than 1000 workers across fifteen offices.

Continue to Groove – Seismic Integration.