Tag: RCM

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q2 2023 Release

LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago.  As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers.  New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.

LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality.  However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”

LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.

Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities.  Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).

The new Sales Navigator Account Hub.

The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities.  It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.

“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis.  “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data.  Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”

The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:

  • Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
  • Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence.  Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
  • Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub.  Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
  • Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them.  Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent

Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1.  Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category.  The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.

Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor.  Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole.  The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.

On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.

“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.

At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts.  Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.

“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare.  “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals.  Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies.  With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities

New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages.  These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).

Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:

  • Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
  • New connections to colleagues
  • LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
  • LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
  • Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website

“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment.  If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance.  If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix.  “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”

Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”

Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.

Other Search enhancements include:

  • A simplified saved search UX
  • A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
  • A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
  • Current job title and past job title filters

The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions.  Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.

LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year.  The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment.  At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.

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).

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q1 Release


LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out its Q1 product, focusing on relationships, personas, and enhanced buyer intent functionality.

The new Relationship Explorer surfaces “hidden allies” and best paths into accounts, helping sales reps avoid cold outreach and “spam cannon techniques.”

“Instead of a blanket approach where you target everyone at an account, you can laser in on the people who are most likely to take a meeting with you based on their persona and what connection they have to you,” explained LinkedIn Senior Director of Product Mitali Pattnaik.  “You can also use it to multi-thread deeper into accounts by finding the next-best person to reach out to.  This creates a more efficient experience for buyers and sellers alike.”

Sales Navigator has long supported introductions and TeamLink (colleague) suggestions, but it has never fully leveraged the value of its economic graph for warm communications.  The Economic Graph supports 900-million-member profiles across 61 million companies, along with current and prior employment, educational background, posts, etc.

Sales Navigator has a second advantage: its profiles are maintained by its members, ensuring that profiles are kept up to date and contain rich data around education, interests, skills, employment history, etc.

“Teams have relied so heavily on cold outreach largely because they’re leveraging sales intelligence tools that are limited in showing how to get a foot in the door of an account.  These tools are chock-full of stale data: everything from incorrect contact info to the wrong person in the wrong role.  With reliance on tools full of stale data, reps end up spamming all potential prospects with a spray-and-pray strategy, leading to an abysmal 1-2% response rate,” argued Pattnaik.  “Looking forward, sellers are going to need to be smarter and reach out with a more personalized approach.”

Relationship Explorer recommends prospects at an account, leveraging the interactions and trends across its professional network “to provide sellers with optimal paths to connect with their target personas at their target accounts.”  As a result, Relationship Explorer saves time prospecting, cross-selling, and upselling at accounts, helping reps find the best contacts at target accounts.

The feature offers up to eight “of the most relevant individuals” based on their target persona and relevant, actionable insights (called spotlights by LinkedIn) based on interactions between members and organizations.  Spotlights highlight both biographic and dynamic information, including recent job changes, LinkedIn postings, and past customers.  As such, they provide timely reasons to reach out and content to include in their outreach.

Relationship Explorer suggests the best contact at an account based on the user-defined persona.

Relationship Explorer is available in all Sales Navigator editions.  However, while it displays a dozen spotlights, not all are available in each edition.  For example, Past Customer spotlights are only available in the Advanced Plus edition.

Personas help users identify their target audience by function, seniority level, geography, and current job title.  They are available on the Homepage, Search, Relationship Explorer, and Account pages.

Users can define up to five personas which act as templates for homing in on ideal prospects.

Persona definitions on the homepage.

Pattnaik suggested several use cases for personas:

  • Creating highly targeted Personas matching target customer profiles.
  • Leveraging Personas in Search, Homepage, or Account Pages to identify the most relevant opportunities.
  • Identifying warm paths and decision-makers at targeted accounts with Relationship Explorer.
  • Using insights from Account Pages, including Persona growth, to prioritize accounts composed of leads matching Personas.

Persona functionality is available to all users.

Over the past few releases, Sales Navigator has built buyer intent into its service.  Its latest intent-based feature is Product Category Buyer Intent, which identifies buyers searching for products in their category.

Product Intent Categories

Previous Sales Navigator intent was based upon research into a vendor.  Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category but may not know a vendor or its offerings.  The two types of intent data can be compared to understand the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.

“Categories are created with AI by combining related keywords into one central category, which is then tied to products using publicly facing product descriptions.  For example, “fintech” and “financial tech” are individual keywords, which the AI model can combine into a single category,” explained Pattnaik.  “Intent is then connected using buyer’s members’ profile as well as recent buying activities on LinkedIn.com to help sellers find the buyers who are likely looking for a solution like theirs.”

LinkedIn is rolling out several new Buyer Activities that will be displayed on Account Pages and the Buyer Intent Account Dashboard.  Additional intent categories are rolling out over the next quarter:

  • LinkedIn Ad Engagement: Clicks and view activity data.  Both of these data points are private, so sellers will only be able to see the general profile of the buyer.
  • InMail Acceptance for a colleague: Displays the public identity of individuals who have accepted InMails from other sellers on the same contract.
  • Company LinkedIn page visits: Clicks on the company page.  Page visits are a private activity, so the buyer is anonymous.
  • LinkedIn profile visits to colleagues and leadership: A new activity that shows sellers when a potential buyer visits the profile of a colleague on the same contract or company leadership.  This is also a private activity.

Buyer Intent is available in the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions of Sales Navigator.

Users can now search against any account list or use an account list as a suppression list.  Other new search filters include:

  • Past Customer (Advanced Plus only)
  • Past Colleague
  • Executive TeamLink – leverages the networks of a company’s executives (Advanced and Advanced Plus only).
  • Viewed Your Profile
  • Product Category Buyer Intent

LinkedIn also enhanced its Sales Insights (LSI) service with the improved matching of companies to CRM accounts and Adjustable Growth Time ranges.

LinkedIn admitted that its previous LSI matching logic may have been inaccurate as it only matched against a few standard CRM fields.  LSI now supports CRM custom ingestion that improves match rates with customer-defined match fields.  There is also an option to force matches based on LinkedIn Ids or URLs.

LinkedIn Sales Insights Field Mapping

Adjustable Growth Time Ranges can be set to 3, 6, 12, and 24-month increments.

Introhive – BoardEx Partnership

Introhive and BoardEx announced a partnership that will “enable shared clients to uncover more high-quality connections and business opportunities that accelerate growth.”  The partnership will assist with discovering opportunities, deepening relationships, increasing internal collaboration, and mitigating risk.

“We are excited to offer our clients a joint solution with BoardEx,” said Diana Sapienza, Global Head of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances at Introhive. “With Introhive’s advanced AI-powered relationship mapping, automation, and enrichment capabilities and the BoardEx alerts on role and/or company changes at the executive and board level, our clients can better manage their ever-growing networks to spot opportunities sooner and grow their businesses faster.”

BoardEx, a division of Euromoney People Intelligence, employs a team of over 300 global research analysts focused on mapping relationships between more than 1.5 million business leaders and decision-makers.

“Having a resilient network is critical to the success of any business, and that resiliency relies on the ability to understand and leverage the most impactful professional relationships,” explained Jubayer Kalam, Head of Product for BoardEx. “We are excited to partner with Introhive by embedding BoardEx data and insights directly into their environment for our mutual clients.”

Introhive, which describes itself as a Relationship Acceleration Platform, released a set of enhancements last month that include a new Salesforce Sales Activity Dashboard, Business Intelligence Webhooks, MS Dynamics hygiene tools, and an Outlook Intelligence Panel Search.

Introhive Sales Activity Dashboard for Salesforce

The new Sales Activity Dashboard “cuts through the noise of activity data and delivers the signal directly to sales professionals and leaders alike,” blogged Lead Product Marketer Julie Taylor.  “At a glance, Sales Leaders can get a sense for the type and volume of activities their teams are investing their time in, and individual sellers can keep a pulse on their own activity levels to see where they stand.”

The Sales Activity Dashboard is available at both the team and individual rep levels.  The report summarizes calls, meetings, and email volumes over the past seven and thirty days.

Global View of Relationships Dashboard is one of Introhive’s new BI webhooks.

New Business Intelligence Webhooks include a Global View of Relationships, Account Relationships Dashboard, and Activities Dashboard.

Introhive’s Cleanse for Microsoft Dynamics added contact record merging and archiving stale records.  The service already supported CRM contact data entry and updates. “Understanding your data provides your team with powerful capabilities. 

Your success lies in the ability of your people to understand your data and use it to make better decisions,” explained Taylor.  “The faster you can make sense of your data by transforming it from information to insights, the further you and your team can go.”

Introhive Series C

Relationship Intelligence platform Introhive closed on a $100 million Series C.  The round was led by PSG, with Bank of America Securities joining.  Existing investors The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Aegis Group Partners, Evergreen Coast Capital, and Mavan Capital Partners also participated.

Introhive will be deploying the funds for strategic acquisitions, expanding its global footprint, and growing its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

“At the moment, our primary goal is to grow as fast as we can possibly grow,” said Global VP of Sales Adam Draper.  “And we don’t want pure organic growth to be the limiting factor.  So with this amount of money, it just gives us the option (to buy) companies that maybe did well in a certain vertical but couldn’t expand beyond that…or maybe had some sales hiccups, or whatever.”

Introhive, based in Fredericton (New Brunswick) and Miami, anticipates growing from 300 employees to 400 over the next year.

“For us, (the raise) is about continuing to evolve our platform, innovating on technology, staying ahead of our competitive product roadmap, and ensuring the success of our employees,” said Draper.

Introhive Funding History (Source: Owler)

The round follows a strong 2020 during which Introhive claims to have doubled its revenue to over $20 million.  It is projecting $100 million by the end of 2023, said Draper. 

During the pandemic, Introhive refined its sales processes and workflows.

“We really focused in 2020 on scaling what I call the operational, the core parts,” said Draper. “Anytime you’re scaling, especially in my world, from a sales perspective, it’s easy to put the sales bodies in place, but you have to have the infrastructure to support that.  And so we put a lot of time into process workflow, our tech stack, but also our strategy.”

“Our internal compass focuses on the 3 R’s – revenue, retention, and relationships – as the key ingredients to a successful and thriving business,” said Introhive CEO Jody Glidden. “Whether a company is trying to reduce customer or employee churn, make their revenue generating teams more effective or leverage the numerous untapped connections of ‘who knows who’ that exist in their company, Introhive is creating raving fans.”

“Businesses of all sizes are looking for better ways to leverage relationships and drive revenue, and we believe Introhive has built a unique and innovative set of capabilities that allows them to do this more effectively.  In our view, Jody and Stewart (Walchli, CRO) have built a world-class product and management team, and the business is well-positioned for its next phase of growth. We couldn’t be happier to join them on their journey.”

Rick Essex, Managing Director at PSG and New Introhive Board Member

Introhive looks to address the high failure rate of CRM projects by mapping relationship data and identifying opportunities.  Introhive claims to save its customers $68,400 per employee on lost productivity and automating manual work.

Introhive boosts CRM adoption through automated contact data enrichment and uploads.  It claims to uncover 350 additional contacts per user.  “The AI engine then maps these contacts to identify relationships across prospects and customer accounts.”  By reducing research and data maintenance overhead, sales and business professionals can focus their activities on prospects and clients, driving customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

Last year, Introhive processed more than one trillion transactions, captured 60+ million contacts and relationships, saved nine million employee hours, and supported users across 90 countries.

“Great salespeople are most valuable when they’re building relationships — and business — with customers,” commented Nicole France, Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  “By intelligently capturing data insights, technologies like Introhive increase the quality and timeliness of the data and help salespeople prioritize their efforts where it matters most. Sellers can focus more of their time on the insights generated from relationship intelligence and putting it to use. As a result, sales and account teams understand the needs of their customers and prospects better than ever before, resulting in more upsells, shorter lead times, and more revenue.”

Introhive has benefited from using its application.  “I think using Introhive at Introhive has always been one of the reasons that we’ve grown so fast,” said Draper.  “I remember in the early days, when we couldn’t get leads, we used our software to tap into the networks of our highly connected investors and advisors to create introductions and get some of those first sales.”

Introhive has ten offices in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Middle East, and Asia.

Introhive did not disclose its market cap.

Introhive Relationship Mapping

Revenue Grid Guided Selling (Part II)

Continuing from Part I, a discussion of Revenue Grid and its approach to Guided Selling.

Revenue Grid looks to take the CRM system of record and supplement it with insights and actions that move deals forward.  Insights are both positive and negative.  Risk flags include “The decision-maker is not invited to the demo,” “Close data has been changed for the Nth time,” and “Pricing was discussed at the meeting, but no quote has been sent.” By delivering insights to sales reps and their managers, loose ends, which could result in deal losses or delays, are flagged.  Sales reps and managers can then act upon these insights.  Revenue Grid can also make suggestions based upon internal playbooks and best practices.

In short, AI, historical data, and real-time data are employed to build a set of insights and recommended actions.

Revenue Grid goes beyond engagement metrics at accounts. It delivers a broad set of insights that include competitor mentions, lack of recent decision-makers responses, meetings without agendas, quarterly and monthly trends, and team performance.  In January, sentiment analysis will be added to their insights.

An Opportunities view provides real-time pipeline visibility across all accounts.  Reps can quickly update any opportunity information with the updates synced with the CRM.  Sales reps and managers then have a single-pane of glass displaying current opportunities.  Managers are notified of deal size changes, close dates, and scores and can track activity flow.

The Opportunities view includes signals, next steps, last touch, and overview data, providing a quick synopsis of where each deal stands.

Conversational Intelligence records and transcribes voice and video calls, then indexes and analyzes meetings for insights.  Corporate email communications are also analyzed for insights.  Revenue teams and managers can review call transcripts and listen or view significant moments during the call, with summary topics and insights called out.  Conversational Intelligence is also available for coaching and onboarding sales reps.

Conversational Intelligence recordings and transcripts are saved to accounts and opportunities.

A meeting scheduler fronts Conversational Intelligence.  Reps can insert multiple time slots with clickable times in their emails or offer a calendaring link.  Events are automatically synced between Salesforce and Outlook or Gmail.  Other features include calendar delegation (i.e., setting up an admin or CSR to schedule meetings), recurring event scheduling, and group calendaring across the organization.

Salesforce email synching captures emails, scheduled meetings, contacts, tasks, and attachments.  Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Custom Objects are available for syncing, and multiple records may be updated.  Salesforce admins can set up activity auto-log rules, triggering Salesforce processes.

Sales Coaching offers a team performance view that displays revenue booked by reps alongside leads processed and time spent on external meetings, inbound external meetings, and outbound emails.

A Forecasting report evaluates the target, best case, and committed revenue for the team with plan, commit, and open pipeline values for each rep.  Managers can also compare past periods to find trends and set triggers to send notifications when thresholds are exceeded.

An Activity view displays inbound and outbound communications from sales and marketing over time with adjustable time windows.  Unfortunately, the activity graph does not rescale, making it difficult to view activity over an extended period.

Revenue Grid also supports Relationship Intelligence, showing an Account relationship map and flagging individuals in the organization with established relationships for introductions or briefings.

Revenue Grid’s sales engagement features include multi-channel sequences, email templates, and email tracking.  Channels include email, phone, SMS, and LinkedIn.  Sequences may be managed directly from within Salesforce, Outlook, or Gmail.  All Revenue Grid capabilities are available in the native Salesforce mobile app, including email analytics, notifications, and sequences.

Admins can perform A/B testing of sequences.

Revenue Grid detects replies from one or multiple recipients, out of office notices, opt-outs, and bounces.  It then pauses or halts sequences automatically.  It even halts sequences if the recipient is mentioned in an email or meeting invitation.

An email sidebar displays Salesforce data directly within inboxes and suggests relevant, actionable Signals.

Continue to Part III.

Revenue Grid Guided Selling

Revenue Grid which describes itself as a Guided Selling vendor, offers a hybrid platform with sales engagement, revenue intelligence, relationship intelligence, meeting management, and conversation intelligence.  Unlike many startups in these spaces, Revenue Grid comes to market with fifteen years of experience building native platform integrations behind the firewall and in the cloud.  It then layers on top reports, analytics, and an Outlook/Gmail/LinkedIn sidebar for identifying opportunities at risk, next steps and missed actions, engagement scores, and pipeline analytics.

“Algorithmic guided selling leverages emerging AI technology and existing sales data to guide sellers through deals, automating manual sales actions while reducing the need for individual seller judgment in the sales process,” wrote Gartner.  Guided Selling is data and process-driven, with Next Best Action recommendations that make CRMs actionable.

Guided Selling intelligence is gathered from CRMs, emails, calendars, phone calls, and videos.  Engagement is measured across these channels and delivered as a set of insights and revenue signals that support Guided Selling.  Signals are Next Best Actions based upon AI recommendations and sales playbooks.  

Revenue Grid describes signals as “contextual, actionable notifications that tell your whole sales org what is going well or poorly throughout your whole sales process.”  Sales reps can act on recommendations by merely clicking on the signal.

These definitions can all get confusing, but the vision becomes clearer when skipping past the inputs and technology and merely considering which sales and management questions Revenue Grid looks to address.  Revenue Grid answers a host of sales rep questions, including

  • Which deals should I focus on today?
  • How likely am I to close the deal this month or quarter?
  • How can I improve my odds of winning this opportunity?
  • Which deals are at risk and why?  
  • Did I complete all of the post-deal activities discussed on the call?
  • Have I updated all my opportunities before tomorrow’s deal review?
  • How can I prepare for a meeting?
  • Does anybody at my firm have a relationship with key decision-makers?
  • How is engagement across the account?  Am I building relationships with the key stakeholders?

Likewise, managers can answer questions such as

  • Are sales reps focused on the right things?
  • Do sales reps know what to do next?
  • How can I guide reps in each deal?
  • Which deals are moving, stalled, or at risk?
  • Do my reps know what to say at meetings? Do our scripts work?
  • How do I know my coaching is effective?
  • Which committed deals are unlikely to close?
  • How do I improve our forecasts?

Part II discusses Revenue Grid’s feature set.

Clari Revenue Insights

Revenue Operations vendor Clari announced Relationship Insights, its new Revenue Intelligence service.  Relationship Insights adds “visibility into all the buyers and sellers actively involved in sales pursuits.”  The new service helps revenue professionals assess the “true health of account relationships, more effectively manage their territories, and lead their teams in the new remote selling era.”

Relationship Insights ends the manual auditing of accounts by sales managers and interrogations of sales reps about customer and prospect relationships.  Relationship Insights lets them understand

  • Who are we talking to?
  • Are we single or multi-threaded at the account?
  • When was the last time we interacted with the executive buyer?
  • Have we engaged with the CFO?
  • Do we have the right internal SMEs working on this account?

“Our data shows that deals over $250k require an average of 19 external stakeholders to close successfully,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne.  “With Relationship Insights, we’re providing total visibility to revenue teams so they can drive exceptional execution in their deals, accounts, and territories across their entire revenue process.”

“Buying Groups: The New Norm for B2B Sales,” Clari, December 3, 2020.  Based on Closed-Won Deals.

Smaller deals require significant relationship building as well.  A Clari analysis of closed-won deals found that opportunities up to $50,000 required relationships with an average of seven external stakeholders.  Successful deals between $50,000 and $250,000 averaged ten relationships between the company and demand unit members at the closed opportunity.

“Buying groups are not only getting larger, [but] they’re also diverging in personal and organizational priorities. Sellers need to navigate this big group of influencers and decision-makers, including business line managers, IT practitioners, executives, and finance leaders.”

Hila Segal, Clari VP Product Marketing

Relationship Insights provides sales reps and sales management with a deeper understanding of the demand unit, letting them see all sales activities, including emails, meetings, and file exchanges.  This monitoring helps ensure that “all selling motions are multi-threaded.”

“An in-depth understanding of your customer relationship landscape is critical for building full buying consensus, reducing cycle time by uncovering potential blockers earlier, and increasing win-rate by getting multi-threaded (building relationships with multiple stakeholders) when your competition may have only relied on one or two contacts.”

Clari VP of Product Marketing Hila Segal

Clari Activity risk tracking identifies the risk of disengagement, providing reps the opportunity to re-engage before the deal goes south.  

“It’s not enough to see who is engaged. You need to understand the strength of the relationship over time—how many meetings did you have with a key individual, when was the last time you met with them, when is the next time you’re scheduled to connect, have they been responding to emails,” argued Segal.

Account auditing ensures that the primary personas and team members are engaged so that reps can run plays to broaden support.

Relationship intelligence also leverages the company’s varied skills and knowledge, so tracking who has been engaged on the selling side is critical.  Segal noted that successful enterprise sales “takes a village,” with many team members, including technical SMEs, product specialists, implementation consultants, and executive sponsors, helping close the biggest deals. “A clear understanding of key players in every account drives stronger account relationships resulting in more qualified pipeline, better win rates, faster cycles and more predictable revenue,” said Craig Rosenberg, Chief Analyst at TOPO.

RelSci Launches Radar for Business Development (Part II)

Relationship Science (RelSci) recently announced Relationship Radar, their new relationship capital management service that marries sales intelligence with an enterprise’s network of employees, alumni, and professional relationships. I covered the feature functionality in yesterday’s blog.

The RelSci Radar release should be viewed as a V1, with a deep set of planned enhancements on the product roadmap:

  • Signature block scraping with automated contact updates
  • Contact de-duplication
  • Integration of Radar into their iOS and Android apps
  • GSuite and Salesforce integrations
  • Broader incorporation of Radar into the RelSci platform and API

Radar is included as part of the RelSci enterprise subscription.  There is no additional licensing fee beyond a $750 implementation charge that can vary slightly depending on the implementation scope.

“As part of our product roadmap, we plan to make Radar available with greater flexibility (including the option to opt-out of the front-end platform at a reduced rate), but for now Radar is only available as part of our enterprise offering,” wrote RelSci Data Product Manager Brian Hyman.

RelSci products are sold on a seat basis with volume discounts.

Pricing is based on the number of seats and configuration.  RelSci did not disclose additional details.

Relationship Capital Management software was a hot category fifteen years ago but never gained much traction due to security concerns and the rise of LinkedIn as a public network.  With security teams now more comfortable with cloud solutions, the category may be open to rediscovery.  Introhive has been successful in the space, placing 128th on Deloitte’s 2020 Fast 500 technology list, with revenue growth of 938% between 2016 and 2019.  Many of the top professional services firms have deployed Introhive, including PriceWaterhouseCoopers, with a 100,000 seat implementation across 90 countries.

“We founded Introhive with a mission to help organizations realize the full value of their relationships and better leverage the underutilized data across their business to increase revenues,” said CEO Jody Glidden. “We have evolved into a suite of artificial intelligence-based solutions that expedite growth for sales and marketing teams.”

LinkedIn Sales Navigator supports corporate TeamLink networking across LinkedIn connections of opted-in colleagues. Relationship networking is also a central feature of InsideView and Warmly, which recently received seed round funding.

RelSci Launches Radar for Business Development

Sales Intelligence vendor Relationship Science (RelSci) unveiled Radar, its latest business development solution.  Radar analyzes emails and calendars to deliver insights about interactions between colleagues and target companies.  Radar currently supports Microsoft mail platforms (e.g., Exchange, Office 365), with GSuite on the roadmap.

Each morning, business development and sales reps receive an email briefing with the latest intelligence on their scheduled appointments, even if RelSci lacks company and contact profiles for the individuals.  Briefings include the date, time, location, meeting attendee lists, and information about the attendees.  Daily email briefings can also be accessed from mobile devices.

RelSci intelligence includes the number of colleagues in touch with the individual, total interactions, last interaction date, and latest news.  Radar also displays a list of colleagues in touch with execs, sorted by connection strength.  For meetings, profiles and network connections are provided for each of the attendees.

“During these unprecedented times, it is more important than ever to help take the guesswork out of targeting prospects by utilizing RelSci with Radar to identify your strongest relationship path, coupled with full insights into your firm’s communication interactions.”

RelSci CEO Domenic Graziosi

Radar provides greater visibility into the relationship capital of a firm, delivering insights about networks across the enterprise.  Along with company and contact news, RelSci offers the best path for reaching out to prospects.         

“Radar generated insights are derived from Exchange scanning for specified users,” explained RelSci Data Product Manager Brian Hyman. “You need to opt-in for Radar to scan your interactions, meaning that the insights derived from this scanning will only be available for participants.  However, RelSci users that do not participate in Radar scanning, but are part of an organization that has Radar participants, will be able to leverage insights generated by those Radar participants.”

Security is controllable at the account level, with each user deciding whether to participate in network sharing.  

“You can opt-out of Radar entirely to prevent confidential information from being shared,” wrote Hyman. “You can also set specific sharing rules within every client account to prevent Radar data from certain users from being shared with other specified users.  You can also prevent certain content from being scanned by Radar (emails marked as personal, private, confidential, etc.).”

To expedite account setup, admins can assign accounts to Exchange distribution lists maintained by their clients.

RelSci has constructed profiles for over ten million executives and estimated the connection strength between customers and each individual.

Continue to Part II with coverage of pricing, roadmap, and a discussion of Relationship Capital Management.