Tag: NLP

Winn.AI Launched

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winn.AI is SOC II, Type 2 compliant.

Pricing has not been disclosed.

Nektar.AI Exits Stealth Mode

Nektar.AI supports automated activity capture and CRM sync across the full customer lifecycle.

After two years in stealth mode, Revenue Operations solution provider Nektar.AI was unveiled earlier this month.  Nektar looks to solve the “CRM data leakage” problem whereby critical lead, contact, and opportunity data is omitted or decays.  For example, Nektar recognizes meeting attendees missing from the CRM and automatically creates contact records that include email, direct dial phone, title, and buying committee role.  Out-of-date or missing data negatively impacts both the sales process and operational functions such as analytics, automated recommendations, and pipeline forecasting.

Nektar offers a no-code platform that applies natural-language processing against email, calendar, chat, and social touchpoints, capturing revenue activity data across the full customer lifecycle and syncing it with the CRM.  Automated activity capture improves rep productivity, allowing sales professionals to focus on selling instead of data entry and updating.

“Sales teams depend on their CRM data to gain insights into team productivity, pipeline insights, and revenue forecasting.  Despite a CRM being an important system of record for modern go-to-market teams, it still grapples with the problem of poor user adoption and missing data.  As per estimates, 40-50% of sales activity data remains missing from a CRM, while 27% of the data that’s available in a CRM decays every month.  This leads to major data and productivity leakage,” stated the firm.

Furthermore, deals are becoming increasingly complex, with larger buying committees and sales teams communicating across an expanding array of sales channels.  While most of these conversations are now digital, they take place across disparate platforms and channels, resulting in data fragmentation.  Nektar’s mission is to collect this fragmented intelligence and feed it into the CRM, making it available to the revenue team without requiring sales resources to key this intelligence.

“There are a lot of reporting and analytics solutions out there.  Other solutions have been investing primarily in the downstream problem with respect to visibility and analytics, an important problem to solve.  But the core problem actually starts upstream, which is where activities are taking place and where data is being generated.  A lot of that data doesn’t make its way into CRM, which actually results in downstream problems.  If there’s poor data in, you will have poor insights available,” explained CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya to GZ Consulting.

“We found our product-market fit when we found that more than 50% of critical revenue activity data is not going into CRM,” continued Vijayvergiya.  “This data leak results in productivity leaks, and that results in revenue leaks.”

Furthermore, as firms make staffing cuts, “they’re trying to do more with less” and losing implicit knowledge that never made its way into the CRM.  Nektar allows companies to recover much of this lost activity and contact intelligence, boosting a firm’s ability to manage revenue operations during a recession.

“There are tools like Gong and Clari and some other forecasting solutions which provide good insights,” expanded Vijayvergiya on Nektar’s value proposition.  But these systems are not resolving the data leakage problem. 

Nektar claims 95% accuracy in its data capture and syncing processes.  The service can go live in ninety minutes and begins providing time to value in three days as it gathers both historical data missing from the CRM and populates it with ongoing activity capture. 

Nektar operates in the background, collecting and syncing data.  Thus, there are no training sessions or additional UIs to learn.  Sales reps do not need to toggle to other platforms, and their data entry work is significantly reduced.

“Nektar plugs the CRM data leakage without a user lifting their finger.  We basically eliminate the need for user adoption and give all the time back to salespeople to go and sell while relieving their administrative burden,” said Vijayvergiya.

While there have been third-party solutions to populate and enrich account and contact data records for over a decade (e.g., Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo), these vendors were blind to the demand unit unless a sales rep entered all members.  Nektar is complementary to third-party DaaS providers, Revenue Intelligence vendors (e.g., Clari, Revenue Grid), Conversational Sales (e.g., Gong, Chorus), and business intelligence vendors (e.g., Tableau).

“We are aware that some of these solutions have their own activity capture system, but most of their activity capture solutions work in silos for certain sets of users who adopt their solution,” continued Vijayvergiya.  “Users are not adopting the solution, or data loss happens anyway.   A solution which we replace, more often than not, is Salesforce Einstein Activity Capture.”

Nektar supports email and domain exclusion lists to prevent mining confidential information (e.g., legal, investor relations, partner development).

Nektar is generally available as a native Salesforce solution, with HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics on the roadmap.  In addition, all of its system integrations are native, providing higher quality and performance.

Nektar.AI closed a $6 million seed round last summer, raising its total funding to $8.1 million.  The round was led by B Capital Group, with Nexus Venture Partners, 3One4 Capital, and angel investors also joining.

Nektar has not disclosed pricing, but it is per user per month with SaaS-based pricing billed quarterly or annually.

Nektar is a fully remote company with 32 employees across seven countries with plans to hit fifty employees by the end of this year.  Although emerging from stealth, it already supports over 1,500 users. 

Nektar’s goal through year-end is to focus on its go-to-market strategy and North American hiring.

Nektar activity tracking at the account level

Data capture as an AI tool is becoming increasingly important. It probably isn’t a standalone offering but an underlying capability for populating the CRM with harvested digital intelligence, monitoring buyer engagement, and building out the buying committee. As such, it is core to both CRM data enrichment and revenue intelligence.

I have seen a series of data capture announcements from vendors of all sizes: big (Microsoft Viva Sales), medium (People.AI, Introhive), and small (e.g., Nektar, Winn.AI). I also covered People.AI and Winn.AI this week.

ZoomInfo Adds Chorus to Its Product Line

ZoomInfo has not been shy about acquiring companies in its bid to become a leading revenue acceleration company.  This morning, they announced the acquisition of Chorus.AI, a leading Conversation Intelligence company.  While most of its deals have been small, Chorus has the opportunity to leverage ZoomInfo’s company and contact intelligence with rich engagement data and analytics, placing the firm at the center of the rapidly growing Conversation Intelligence market.

Chorus employs machine learning and AI to “capture and analyze” calls, meetings, and emails, digitizing customer interactions, and capturing insights for revenue teams and sales management. As a result, sales reps can be more present during calls as they no longer need to capture action items and take notes while leading sales meetings.  Automating insight capture allows them to be better engaged during the call, avoiding those awkward pauses for note-taking.

While not discussed in the press release, combining Chorus’ NLP with Insent should raise bot performance and become another leg of conversation intelligence at the top of the funnel. 

The expanded ZoomInfo will support and assess a broad set of digital touchpoints for intent and engagement:

  • Chorus: Email, Phone, Meetings
  • ZoomInfo: Visitor Intelligence, Webforms, Chatbots (Insent), Intent (Clickagy)

Chorus also assists with buying committee discovery.  While ZoomInfo has long supported contact discovery at the account level, monitoring engagement to determine who is involved in deals and who is being referenced in conversations is the next major step in buying committee discovery, moving it from educated guesswork to a scientific approach.  Once committee members are identified, Chorus monitors conversations for sentiments, motivations, and concerns, helping gauge deal health.  ZoomInfo will supply Chorus with rich company and contact information fed to customer CRMs and continuously maintained by ZoomInfo’s APIs and connectors.

Chorus Momentum Insights

Chorus’ Momentum Insights, released in December, helps revenue teams understand customer relationships, improve their forecasting, identify which interactions propel deals forward, and flag deal risks.

“Momentum Insights will unlock learnings never before available from the CRM to harness the most valuable dataset available—conversations with customers,” said Chorus CEO Jim Benton at the time. “This will empower revenue teams to solve complex problems which require strong relationships, and relationships ultimately drive revenue.  Reps get exactly what they need to engage and personalize their efforts, while leadership is able to trust the unbiased data aggregated from each opportunity to inform critical business decisions.”

“By integrating keyword trackers from Chorus into ZoomInfo, revenue teams will also be able to create audiences based on insights from conversations, flag deals and renewals that could be in jeopardy, and trigger alerts to address concerns in real-time,” stated ZoomInfo.

The deal added $18 billion to the company’s TAM, raising it to $70 billion.  The acquisition is “expected to be accretive to growth immediately, generate adjusted operating profits within 12 months, and be accretive to cash flow in the second half of FY 2022.”

“ZoomInfo is the only company that can marry a best-in-class data layer with world-class go-to-market applications,” said CEO Henry Schuck. “The acquisition of Chorus will accelerate our vision to deliver a modern go-to-market platform that brings together best-in-class intelligence with comprehensive data management, workflow, and engagement software, empowering companies to effectively execute their revenue-generating strategies. With the largest Conversation Intelligence patent portfolio in the industry, Chorus will advance each aspect of our vision by surfacing a new category of insights, illuminating new workflows, and enabling more targeted engagement at scale.”

CEO Henry Shuck has been open to both large and small deals, so long as the combination of ZoomInfo and the acquired company drives significant growth in revenue at the acquisition.  A few decades ago, the term was synergy, but that phrase was used so often to describe failed deals that it is now verboten when describing acquisitions.  However, ZoomInfo with Chorus has the opportunity to grow significantly faster than as a standalone organization.

As with the recently acquired Insent.AI and Clickagy, Chorus will benefit from access to the breadth, depth, and quality of ZoomInfo’s B2B dataset and access to ZoomInfo’s Go To Market strategy and efficient sales processes.  With an LTV / CAC ratio greater than ten, ZoomInfo should be able to efficiently cross-sell and upsell Chorus’ analytics across its 20,000 customers.

Chorus also sets up ZoomInfo’s new Engage platform to challenge market leaders SalesLoft and Outreach.  Chorus is one of the leading Conversation Intelligence firms.

“We are thrilled about the opportunity to join forces with ZoomInfo and bring Conversation Intelligence to every revenue team,” said Jim Benton, Chorus.ai CEO, who will join ZoomInfo as SVP, Emerging Products. “ZoomInfo has a bold vision of delivering a world-class go-to-market platform that empowers companies to drive better execution and more revenue. Chorus will play a vital role in helping deliver on that promise with deep, A.I.-driven insights based on real interactions with prospects and customers, a previously untapped source of crucial data about their relationships.”

Frost & Sullivan named Chorus a 2021 Customer Value Leader in Conversation Intelligence.  “Frost & Sullivan finds Chorus’ value proposition is multi-faceted as it offers vital benefits for various personnel, including sales, customer success, sales development, and frontline managers, as well as long-term solutions designed to promote employee skill growth,” wrote Samantha Fisher, Best Practices Research Analyst.

The deal was priced about $575 million in cash.  The purchase price includes a cash tax benefit related to the asset purchase of more than $100 million, ZoomInfo said. The transaction will be funded with cash on hand and $500 million in additional financing.

ZoomInfo Acquires EverString (Part II)

On Friday, I began coverage of ZoomInfo’s acquisition of EverString. Continuing with part II…

Over the past few years, ZoomInfo has been rapidly building its go-to-market intelligence through acquisitions and capital investment.  Initially, ZoomInfo (then called DiscoverOrg) rolled up competitors iProfile and RainKing, but in February 2019, they acquired ZoomInfo, a leading global contact information source.  The firm also managed two tuck-ins last year: NeverBounce email validation and Komiko Inbox AI.

After going public in June, ZoomInfo acquired intent data service Clickagy in October before acquiring Everstring.

ZoomInfo is exceptionally strong across many of the core B2B data categories, including

  • Global contacts (e.g. emails, direct dials, phone numbers, bios, social links, job function, and job level)
  • Technographics (e.g. vendors, products, projects, IT professionals)
  • Intent data (1st Party IP-matching and the recently acquired Clickagy real-time intent signals)
  • Sales Triggers (e.g. M&A, Exec Changes, Partnerships)
  • Org Charts (human-verified and modeled)

However, ZoomInfo has lagged behind other vendors in firmographics and linkage.  The Everstring acquisition plugs this gap across core firmographics, SMBs, and company linkages, putting the firm in a stronger sales intelligence, digital marketing, and B2B DaaS position.  The expanded company universe will significantly improve ZoomInfo’s match rates for batch, real-time, and continuous data enrichment.

In a multinational telecom provider test, the match rate doubled to 98% due to three factors: M/L-powered matching, historical matching against outdated records, and record completeness.

“EverString’s machine learning powered entity resolution (aka matching) algorithms are designed to accept and process multiple identifying inputs from a customer’s file, such as phone number and address, alongside the company name and website, improving the likelihood of returning a matching record.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

Maintaining a historical file of inactive and out of date records provides significant value when batch processing enterprise records sitting in CRMs and MAPs.  Much of this legacy data is bad, but without a reference file with historical data (e.g. inactive and closed companies, former addresses, FKAs), operations teams don’t know which records are defunct businesses.

Everstring has nearly 100% fill rates on core firmographic fields such as employee count, revenue, and industry codes. The expanded firmographics improve field fill rates, lead scoring, lead routing, and analytics (e.g. ICP, TAM, segmentation).

Nevertheless, ZoomInfo has a few remaining gaps around public company financials and filings (e.g. SEC, Companies House, UCC) that would hold them back at financial services companies and European firms.  Everstring does ingest filing data (e.g. Secretary of State incorporations, UCC liens, 5500 ERISA filings with the Department of Labor, federal contract bids, OSHA, fleet data, UK Companies House) when building its business graph, but source data viewing is often required.

Continue to Part III.

ZoomInfo Acquires EverString

ZoomInfo continues building up its data assets with the acquisition of EverString, expanding Zoominfo’s coverage of companies and contacts.  EverString employs machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to build profiles on 100 million companies, 120 million locations, and 70 million business professionals. Data are ingested from both online and offline content.  The expanded company universe is five-times larger than ZoomInfo’s current company universe, with roughly 30 million international profiles.

EverString also provides ZoomInfo with over one million linkages.  “This additional data gives sellers and marketers across all verticals better access and visibility to their total addressable markets, more complete enrichment results, and additional points of contact at their target accounts.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck described the combined EverString and ZoomInfo data cloud as the “first-ever business identity graph of its size with a level of accuracy and completeness purpose-built to help go-to-market teams identify actual buying centers rather than legal entities with no purchasing power.”

Along with corporate hierarchies, EverString expands ZoomInfo’s intelligence concerning website redirects, legal entities, and aliases.  Firmographics include sizing data, URLs, social links, contact information, year founded, DBAs, FKAs, and long-tail industry keywords.

“The acquisition of EverString gives ZoomInfo a comprehensive business data graph, providing the foundation needed for enterprises to identify their total universe of customers and prospects, define their ideal profiles, leverage granular keywords and attributes to predict success, and focus their go-to-market motions.”

Director of Communications Steve Vittorioso.

Headquartered in San Mateo, EverString was founded in 2012 and has 50 employees.  It made the 2020 Inc. 5000 list with three-year revenue growth of 112%. Customers include Snowflake, FedEx, Nokia, Seagate, and Staples. 

EverString’s DaaS platform delivers firmographics, technographics, contacts, machine learning insights, and intent signals.  

EverString also offers predictive analytics which will be incorporated into the ZoomInfo platform.  Other functionality includes similar companies, ICP modeling, and TAM modeling.

Continue to Part II.

SalesLoft Conversation Intelligence

  • SalesLoft Meeting Intelligence transcribes and indexes Zoom calls to share with stakeholders.
    SalesLoft Conversation Intelligence transcribes and indexes meetings and conference calls to share with stakeholders. Photo: Zoom Meeting Intelligence

Sales engagement vendor SalesLoft rebranded its Meeting Intelligence functionality as Conversation Intelligence.  SalesLoft describes four sets of features which help reps schedule meetings and then listen to, understand, and engage with customers and prospects.  SalesLoft supports a broad set of conversation tools including appointment setting; automated recording, transcription, and indexing of calls; time-stamped notes, and call analytics.  This functionality is available for prospect, customer, and internal calls.  Managers, mentors, and trainers can join calls or whisper into a sales rep’s ear.

“Through the evolution of SalesLoft’s platform and user experience, one feature has changed so much that its prior name no longer did it justice,” wrote SalesLoft Head of Community Aly Merritt.  “Meeting Intelligence is now Conversation Intelligence, because sales isn’t just meetings – it’s every conversation and interaction.”

Call recordings can be stored in a training library or shared for coaching or questions.  For example, if a sales rep does not know the answer to a question, it can be forwarded directly to customer support or engineering for a response.

Conversation Intelligence supports both SalesLoft’s native dialer and leading web meeting applications: Zoom, GoToMeeting, join.me, UberConference, Cisco WebEx, and Cisco WebEx Enterprise.

Sales calls come in many forms: prospecting, discovery, demos, stakeholder alignment, and so on.  All of these interactions make up the foundation for the long-term customer relationship.  High-value customer relationships are made possible when prospects feel that the relationship they are entering into is mutually beneficial.

How can you build such a relationship?  By working to ensure your prospects feel heard and confident that you understand their needs.  Work to engage them throughout their journey.  After all, sales doesn’t stop when the deal closes, nor does engagement cease when a seller hangs up the phone.

▪ SalesLoft Product News

SalesLoft said that it is “designed to flex around the needs of the user based not only on their role but also on their preferred workflow.  This empowers SalesLoft customers to offer consistent value at every stage.”

“Sales meetings are the moments in the sales cycle where you have the opportunity to provide the most value for your customers.  As such, they are some of the single biggest opportunities for your team to influence revenue.  It’s where your deals are won and lost,” wrote the firm.  “Despite this, sellers often don’t get the opportunity to improve on this critical component of the sales process.  Combine this with the challenges that face sales leaders around how much time it takes to digest sales meetings, gain visibility into what’s really happening, and be proactive in the deal cycle.”