Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong released Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake. The new solution delivers conversational insights captured from the Gong Conversational Sales platform to business intelligence tools. Insights capture activities, calls, and emails.
“Business leaders are under pressure to make the right strategic decisions that will help their companies thrive, especially in this challenging climate. But they often rely on manual data like CRM or field or customer surveys, which are subjective and go stale quickly,” said Gong CRO Ryan Longfield. “By teaming with Snowflake to bring this rich data and understanding from Gong directly into the broader set of insights, we are making it easier for leaders to improve their [go-to-market] strategy, productivity, and execution, all based on data that’s rooted in customer interactions.”
Gong rep productivity.
Historically, it has been challenging to determine which initiatives drive deals forward and increase the likelihood of winning a contract. As a result, sales reps have had few incentives to enter detailed activity and results information into CRMs. Furthermore, activity and engagement data have been stove-piped in different platforms or not captured digitally. Thus, only 54% of GTM leaders report having clear, real-time visibility into deal progression (April 2022 Harvard Business Review study sponsored by Gong).
Gong has automated the delivery of its sales insights to Snowflake, making it “easier for senior business leaders to have a view into revenue intelligence insights along with other key business metrics as they evaluate strategic decisions.” Joint customers can set up a no-code Gong Insights instance with data flowing automatically to their existing BI tool for dashboard and report development. Pre-built reports are also provided.
“Having access to the right data is critical to ensuring strategic decisions can be made that lead to growth,” said Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan. “By building on Snowflake, Gong is able to securely and seamlessly integrate its data into the rest of a company’s dataset, giving executives a clearer picture of the information they need to run their business.”
Use cases include churn risk factor analysis, most at-risk accounts, and identifying under and over-resourced accounts.
Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake is generally available.
Gong Insights is also available as a CRM Enrichment process that syncs Gong data with the Salesforce Data Cloud or HubSpot. Finally, Gong Insights is displayed as an Initiatives Board within the Revenue Intelligence platform. The Dashboard “gives teams visibility into team adoption, as well as the ability to understand how initiatives resonate with their target market and correlate to business impact.”
UK-based Revenue Intelligence vendor Kluster closed on a £4 million ($5 million) Series A round led by the Foresight Group. Other investors include SuperSeed and Cognism CEO James Isilay. The round raised total funding to $6 million.
Kluster helps sales teams monitor sales data and trends. Kluster’s AI aids sales managers in building quarterly and annual roadmaps that include hiring plans, targeted call counts, prospects to reach, and opportunities to generate. These KPIs provide a set of plans and objectives for the upcoming period. Kluster then monitors performance against the plan, updating the forecast, and recommending actions to reach objectives.
Kluster also supports stress testing, executive dashboards, and scenario modeling.
The funds will be deployed towards establishing an American presence and building out its go-to-market and executive teams.
“It has never been more important to plan and execute revenue strategy than it is today,” said Kluster CEO Dan Thompson. “With the recent VC bubble, the metrics that mattered went from growth, burn, and margins to growth, growth, and growth.”
Continued Thompson, “The bubble burst, and companies have now rediscovered the importance of rigorous planning, robust strategy, and comprehensive revenue reporting. Which is why I am delighted to partner with Foresight and deepen our relationship with SuperSeed, to bring our solution to this problem to the global market.”
The AI boom helped Kluster “get through the door,” said Thompson. “AI is pretty buzzy, but fundraising is always tough, and it was definitely more rigorous than it would be in the past.”
Kluster has grown to 30 employees since its 2016 founding. Half of its revenue comes from the US and Canada. It claims to have a net revenue retention rate above 100% and strong word of mouth, with referrals generating 40% of its income.
“They (Kluster) have a strong product-market fit, and I’m relieved to see a platform that enables companies to forecast revenue more accurately,” remarked Foresight MD Jack Eadie. “Kluster’s team is shaping the future of sales, and I am eager to see what they develop next.”
Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients. Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering. Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”
Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce. Churn risk is also assessed.
Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.
Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.
Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales. Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.
“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm. “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers. Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”
Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.
“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah. “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent. Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”
Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021. It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.
Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.
Pricing starts at $100 per user per month. Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.
Mary Shea was named co-CEO of Mediafly, where she will join Carson Conant in managing the Revenue Enablement company. Shea joins with a solid RevTech pedigree. She was a Principal Analyst at Forrester and Chief Evangelist at Outreach. Shea first met Conant as a newly minted Forrester Principal Analyst in 2015 and later served as a company advisor.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Mary join us as co-CEO. I’ve known Mary for over a decade and have benefited immensely from her deep knowledge of the revenue enablement landscape, her prescience in identifying the next big trend, and her vision for the future of B2B buying and selling,” said Conant. “Mary brings deep empathy for the day-to-day challenges sellers face and a forward-leaning sensibility for the brand experience B2B companies need to create for buyers. She will be a force multiplier for the Mediafly team and our customers.”
Shea argued that the RevTech unicorns “amassed large financial war chests” that helped them develop market recognition but that Mediafly and Boathouse Capital took a slower “Midwest approach” that relied more on individual investors than institutional funds.
“While this non-traditional route likely cost Mediafly some market recognition, today this ‘Midwest’ approach appears wise,” argued Shea. “Fast-forward to the past 6-10 months. As competitors and adjacents hunkered down and paused innovation to slow ‘burn’ to avoid ‘down rounds,’ Carson and the Mediafly team quietly acquired and integrated five companies — revenue intelligence provider InsightSquared, conversation intelligence providers ExecVision and Sonero, the enablement workflow solution, UserIQ, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.”
These acquisitions brought together underfunded assets with “great and complementary tech and talent” but which “lacked robust distribution channels,” argued Shea.
While Mediafly emphasized its contrarian approach, it is not immune to the layoff bug. It confirmed layoffs last Friday, attributing them to post-acquisition efficiencies, not the current tech slowdown.
“Today, the pendulum swings in the other direction as we made the difficult decision to let go of a number of talented individuals to achieve the efficiency desired after an intense year of acquisitions and integrations,” posted Conant on LinkedIn. “With these actions, Mediafly will be in a strong position as a uniquely profitable, revenue enablement company.”
Conant listed three organizational goals: “an unwavering commitment” to its customers, product innovation and category leadership, and profitability and operational excellence. Mediafly did not indicate the scope of the layoffs.
Mediafly offers a set of modules that can be purchased as standalone solutions or as part of an integrated suite. Functionality includes enterprise content management, revenue and conversation intelligence, value realization, coaching, deal management, and forecasting. To supplement this functionality, it developed a partnership ecosystem spanning seventy-five solutions across the RevTech space.
Mediafly has acquired six RevTech companies to build out its platform quickly. In 2022, it acquired and integrated revenue intelligence platform InsightSquared, conversation intelligence provider ExecVision, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.
Mediafly noted that customers are increasingly consolidating their tech stack with Mediafly while reducing their technology spend by thirty percent or more and enjoying “improved revenue team performance.”
Customers include PepsiCo, Nestle, Databricks, Honeywell, Sealed Air, Zscaler, and TransUnion.
“I’ve watched Mediafly for many years and always thought of the company as a hidden gem. Mediafly has grown organically and through acquisitions and has quietly compiled the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market — everything B2B teams need to successfully navigate today’s complex buying journey,” said Shea. “With this push towards a unified revenue enablement platform, it’s now time for Mediafly to step out of the background and help more B2B organizations create confident sellers who can deliver efficient predictable growth. I’m hitting the ground running — if you’re looking to improve seller effectiveness, buyer engagement, or consolidate your tech stack, take a fresh look at Mediafly.”
Shea announced the following goals over the next few months:
Expand and deepen the value we deliver to customers.
Partner with more large global brands.
Rebrand and rename our company.
Create provocative and actionable thought leadership.
Innovate through organic and inorganic product development.
Shea sees the RevTech industry at a “critical and exciting crossroads which includes the rise of digital buying and selling, sweeping generational shifts, rapid technological advancement, the proliferation of tools focused on efficiency, and market and tool consolidation.”
To compete in this dynamic environment, Mediafly “will continue to build onto our platform, integrating each new asset through a modern and scalable data architecture, complete with a revenue business intelligence layer.” As a result, Mediafly’s Revenue360 solution will become “the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market.”
Revenue Grid’s New Revenue Leaks Funnel visualizes lost opportunities across the funnel.
Revenue Intelligence vendor Revenue Grid announced its Spring 2023 release, with a new Revenue Leaks Funnel headlining the announcement. Other features include Forecast Evolution Reports, Signals Builder enhancements, sequence management enhancements, and custom calendaring fields.
The Revenue Leaks Funnel is available as a Salesforce-native, out-of-the-box report that helps revenue teams “magically spot invisible revenue leaks, understand where they occur during the selected period, and measure the magnitude of the leaks happening across the pipeline.”
The Revenue Leaks Funnel displays how opportunities progress between stages with the average stage time. Slipped deals can be spotted and brought back on track. Leaks are called out by stage, helping management identify where deals are being lost and address stage-related issues. Revenue Ops and managers can view funnel dynamics for the previous week, month, quarter, or year.
A new Forecast Evolution Report compares different fiscal periods and tracks forecast changes. Changes over the past week are displayed, with viewing at the team or rep level. In addition, users can “see the patterns across the forecast categories over time and detect any trends in revenue leakage.”
The Signals Builder defines custom signals of specific types and assigns them to specific recipients. Revenue Grid provided the following examples:
Custom Recipient: Account Executive assigns webinar leads to BDR (custom recipient) who has to process them first and add leads to the specific post-event sequence.
Sales Leader: An opportunity was created with a value exceeding $50,000.
Sales Manager: An opportunity is less than 15 days away from the close date and is at the “Proposal Price Quote.”
Sales Representative: A Lead was created more than 30 days ago but has not been contacted yet.
A new sequence-related productivity report helps sales managers monitor sales rep action items (e.g., replies, to-do lists, notifications) and coordinate their performance. Managers can view and compare activity across their sales team.
Other sequence enhancements include searching and adding prospects to sequences from Salesforce, sequence pausing, and adding a prospect owner as a step owner in a sequence. Operations teams can add custom fields to booking confirmation forms, including text fields, labels, and checkboxes. Forms automatically fill in the email and name on Book Me confirmation pages for recurring events.
Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari announced Automatic Call Summaries to its Wingman Conversational Sales module. The new RevGPT functionality, powered by ChatGPT, supports call summaries, next steps, and suggested actions in Slack in a conversational format. Users can view the call or send follow-up emails from Slack.
Wingman already offers real-time cues and battle cards for overcoming objections during calls. Furthermore, it alerts managers to “high-impact coaching moments that define deal outcomes, like pricing hurdles, competitor mentions, and more.”
“Are you going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue? That’s the single most important question in business — and today’s introduction of RevGPT represents a quantum leap forward in helping companies get revenue answers. By training generative AI to harness the industry-leading store of conversational intelligence and historical revenue data contained in RevDB, we’re giving revenue teams the ability to identify sources of revenue leak and take corrective action at scale and with extraordinary speed. RevGPT will quickly become the indispensable guidance system that empowers every revenue-impacting employee to achieve more.”
Clari CEO Andy Byrne
By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari’s database of revenue under management, RevGPT will enjoy a feedback loop that continuously improves Clari’s recommendations. This “flywheel effect” will offer “better answers, better actions, better outcomes, and faster time to revenue.” Future functionality includes “recommended prompts for every revenue-critical team — sales, revenue operations, customer success, marketing, finance, and leadership — enabling even greater productivity gains and revenue outcomes.”
RevGPT will soon recommend and automatically assist with follow-up actions, including drafting emails, scheduling meetings, updating CRM systems, and revising forecasts.
Wingman supports the following integrations:
Syncs with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive
Records, transcribes, analyzes/summarizes Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet
Alerts via Slack and Teams. Alerts and guidance are also displayed in its desktop app.
“This is just the beginning of Clari’s RevGPT generative AI capabilities that are purpose-built to run revenue,” said the firm. “And we’re not stopping here. Soon you’ll be able to ask RevGPT to compose an email follow-up for you with just one click.”
Clari promises to address “revenue leaks,” including the difficulty of “combing through mountains of data buried in legacy systems — CRM software, spreadsheets, BI tools — to find, analyze, and take action on the information that can help them in revenue-critical moments.” By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari reduces “time to answers and action,” resulting in greater revenue precision and reduced time performing revenue-based search and analysis.
Last year, Clari identified $26 billion in annual revenue leakage across its 550 customers. Overall, the Boston Consulting Group estimates companies suffer $2 trillion in annual revenue leaks due to missed revenue capture, sales waste, and lost enterprise value.
Clari is offering thirty-day free trials to RevGPT, “ChatGPT’s cousin with a quota,” to revenue leaders. The functionality is live.
Wingman pricing and packaging
Wingman offers three packages: Growth ($60/user/month), Accelerator ($90/user/month), and Enterprise (starting at $110/user/month), with the firm planning on including RevGPT in the Accelerator and Enterprise editions.
Sales Execution Platform Outreach unveiled a series of product enhancements and dashboards at its Explore+ web conference earlier this month. New features include Smart Email Assist with Generative AI, a Create Pipeline Calculator, Buyer Topics and Reactions in Kaia, Deal Grid, Deal Overview, Success Plan Methodologies, and Data Sharing with Outreach.
“The industry has never had a single place to generate and manage pipeline, run sales cycles from creation to close, coach reps, and forecast – until now,” said the firm.
Over the past decade, sales teams have acquired a set of SalesTech solutions that create a “hairball” of point solutions that work poorly together and suffer from siloed data and regular system switching. Furthermore, a unified data platform supports advanced workflows, AI models, and account insights for sales coaching and deal management.
Outreach has enjoyed solid adoption of its new platform since launching it ten months ago. Multi-product adoption is strong, with over 400 customers using two or more products. Furthermore, multi-product adoption is driving platform ARR, which has grown by over 100% in the past two quarters. Since the platform was launched, Outreach’s new logo deal size has increased by 16%.
Outreach repositioned itself as a Sales Execution Platform as it expanded beyond Sales Engagement (Source: Outreach Analyst presentation).
“Today, Chief Revenue Officers are facing two major problems: pipeline coverage and conversion. They need to create an adequate amount of pipeline, and close it at a greater rate,” said CEO Manny Medina. “That’s why Outreach has been on a journey to expand our offerings to solve our customers’ biggest problems today. Our goal is to provide sales leaders with a single platform to manage all of their deals – from creating more pipeline to closing more deals. Today’s announcements at Explore+ are an important milestone in our platform journey, and we look forward to continue innovating for the 30 million B2B salespeople around the world to help them unleash their selling potential.”
Outreach Smart Email Assistant
The Smart Email Assistant generates automated email replies that go beyond email templates. AI factors in previous conversations between the buyer and seller when generating responses. By automating email responses, “sales reps can focus their time on editing and personalizing the AI-generated content, instead of drafting these emails from scratch.”
A new Pipeline Calculator recommends prospecting activities to fill pipeline gaps. The calculator utilizes historical pipeline data to determine the number of prospects that should be added to sequences to meet their quota. In addition, the historical conversion rate assumptions are displayed and adjustable. Thus, the assumed conversion or win rates can be adjusted to accommodate market shifts or new processes or messaging that boost historical results.
Outreach Pipeline Calculator
Outreach continues to develop Kaia, its conversational sales module, with the addition of Buyer Topics and Reactions. AEs and sales managers can revisit meeting recordings and review the buyer’s reaction to fourteen relevant sales topics, such as budget, legal, or support.
“Using AI, Outreach is able to understand the contextual utterance of relevant sales topics in any meeting or email – ranging from pricing to product to next steps to support – and can understand when the buyer raised an objection at any point in the meeting,” explained the firm. “It delivers invaluable insight into what is really happening in meetings, down to each moment, and at scale across all meetings.”
Success Plans now support popular sales methodologies, including MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, and SPIN Selling, helping reps “consistently and continuously qualify deals and align with champions to mitigate deal risk.”
Outreach added a single-pane-of-glass opportunity viewer called Deal Grid. Reps can view their deals sorted by health score and value to focus on their best opportunities. They can also edit fields such as Close Date, Amount, Stage, and Forecast status (e.g., omitted, commit, best case, most likely) with information synced to the CRM and forecasts updated.
Opportunity Viewers are a common feature of Revenue Intelligence platforms (e.g., Clari, RevenueGrid, People.AI), but with Sales Execution and Revenue Intelligence platforms expanding into each other’s domain, Deal Grid was an anticipated new feature. Opportunity viewers help reps review their deal status, update the CRM, and prepare for meetings with sales managers. They solve the problem of serially jumping between Opportunity records in Salesforce (which the firm has moved to resolve with similar functionality).
Outreach released several new reports and dashboards:
Create and Close Dashboard: Provides AEs and sales managers with a high-level forecasted revenue summary of the existing pipeline and highlights pipeline gaps and risks.
“The insight-laden dashboard shows the forecasted revenue from existing pipeline, and highlights pipeline coverage gaps for the current and future quarter, which helps reps proactively mitigate risk earlier and drive to success,” said Outreach.
Outreach Pipeline Calculator
Deal Overview: An overview of open opportunities with a deal summary, an engagement timeline, deal health, sales methodology insights, next steps, and the shared plan. The engagement timeline displays all sales activities and a heat map detailing customer engagement trends.
Outreach Deal Overview
Pipeline Dashboard: Displays all “relevant pipeline details to life in a single, sortable view, allowing sales managers to stay on top of their quarter.” The dashboard includes a pipeline activity summary by stage, projected finish, revenue to date, quota, and top deals with deal health scores.
Outreach Pipeline Dashboard
Outreach also announced bi-directional syncing with HubSpot. Earlier this month, it unveiled expanded Outreach Data Sharing with Snowflake.
Despite recent layoffs, Outreach continues to build its customer base. FY 2023 revenue (FYE Jan 2023) passed $200 million across 6000 customers. Outreach’s scale benefits its clients as it records over 25 million action/outcome pairings per week, helping refine its machine learning insights and recommendations.
Demand Generation Effectiveness displays the most effective channels by various metrics
RevSure, which describes itself as a Pipeline Readiness solution, announced enhancements that “provide marketing teams with increased insights into data and around lead-to-revenue projections.” The new capabilities help marketers increase their spend efficiency and focus expenditures on campaigns and actions with the highest ROI.
RevSure helps go-to-market teams “share a single source of truth” concerning the health of their pipeline. It also automates reporting tasks and offers recommendations for converting leads into qualified sales opportunities.
“With a united full-funnel view, you can effortlessly pull all of this data into one place, so you can easily analyze the impact of each campaign and lead source at a glance. Did your latest low-cost webinar lead to a high amount of pipeline and bookings? You may want to consider scaling your efforts or investing in more webinars. On the other hand, did that conference you attended 8 months ago and spent tens of thousands of dollars on not lead to the pipeline and bookings you were hoping for? Might be worth crossing that conference off your list for the next year, so you can ensure you are focusing on the campaigns and channels that are bringing you the greatest ROI,” blogged RevSure.
New features offer insights into demand generation effectiveness and efficiency, helping prioritize leads and opportunities. AI recommendations call out which leads to prioritize and how to optimize campaigns. Users can drill down into campaigns or filter by title, industry, segment, or channel. The Demand Generation Effectiveness is a color-coded tree map of “what is working and where is it working,” explained RevSure Head of Marketing Kacyn Goranson to GZ Consulting. “It will show you generated lead volume, gross cost per lead, or booking value, so you can quickly slice and dice your marketing efforts” and determine “what is actually effective” across the funnel.
RevSure also provides stage conversion analytics, cohort analysis for campaign efficacy, and marketing campaign / KPI analytics.
Cohort analysis with Lead Insights
Lead prioritization is based on firmographics (e.g., location, size, industry), persona, engagement data from MAPs, intent, channel, campaign data, and lead source. Data is sourced from Apollo and customer-licensed intent datasets.
To improve demand generation effectiveness, RevSure now ingests Salesforce campaigns and lead sources, along with Google AdWords and LinkedIn Campaigns. These additional data sources are available for campaign budget analysis. Users can “easily calculate and determine” conversion velocity, pipeline, and booking value.
“Today’s marketers have a gap in their data toolsets and are currently lacking AI-based models, and many CMOs are tasked with adopting and driving what will be effective, and winning, data strategies,” argued RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra. “Using RevSure helps provide marketing teams with intelligence and insights into their sales pipeline, and data that empowers them to strategically defend marketing budgets and pivot campaigns based on sales performance – both of which can be critical to sales success in the current economic climate.”
RevSure provides sales and marketing teams lists of their top 25, 50, and 100 most promising leads and opportunities. It also displays “step-by-step recommendations” concerning when and how to follow up with them, “turning qualified leads into legitimate sales opportunities.”
Lead Prioritization provides a summary of the Top 25, 50, and 100 opportunities along with the working lead list and projected pipeline value.
RevSure already supports Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot. The HubSpot App Marketplace partnership was launched earlier this month.
RevSure focuses on the top and middle of the funnel with recommendations and prioritization tools instead of the bottom, which looks more at forecasting. “We are in the lead-to-opportunity journey,” explained Singh to GZ Consulting. “We don’t go into the forecast.”
RevSure is less than a year old and officially launched at SaaStr in September 2022. According to Singh, the firm is ahead of its customer acquisition and revenue targets.
In June, Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari acquired Conversational Intelligence vendor Wingman, bringing together two complementary SalesTech vendors. Wingman provided Clari users with additional account intelligence derived from calls, meetings, and emails. The goal was to provide “visibility plus action all the way from the boardroom to the bullpen,” said Wingman CEO Shruti Kapoor.
“The acquisition of Wingman, a leader in conversation intelligence, gives Clari’s category-leading Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversations, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes,” announced Clari. “Wingman goes beyond the limits of similar conversation intelligence tools by helping revenue-critical teams act in the moment when it matters.”
“A major part of our strategic vision is conversation intelligence, which is why we’re thrilled to announce that Clari has acquired Wingman, a leader in CI. This gives Clari’s Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversation data, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes. The full value of conversation intelligence has never been fully realized, until now. Clari helps your team move beyond siloed, departmental systems and processes that cause endless breakdowns across your revenue process and brings all revenue-critical employees into a unified platform to run revenue.”
Clari CEO Andy Byrne
“As we think about scaling our impact, it’s clear to us that we want to free up these insights for everyone who’s revenue-critical, from the bullpen to the boardroom,” blogged Kapoor. “We want to give you the ability to switch between micro (every customer interaction) and macro (the entire revenue pipeline) as easily as toggling channels on television.”
Wingman battle cards are displayed in real-time.
Wingman records, transcribes, and tags calls, storing them in a searchable library by keyword, tag (e.g., Price, Customer Pain, Blockers), or competitor mentions. Topics may be customized to capture competitors, product names, technologies, etc. Reps can also set live bookmarks across all supported video platforms.
Wingman also offers real-time battle cards, a set of short suggestions displayed in context during a call. New sales reps will be confident that they are providing accurate information consistent with company positioning. Other real-time coaching tools include long monologue alerts, word rate notices, and time-based cue cards.
Wingman game tapes provide a reference library of training snippets.
Call summaries include questions, next steps, pain points, blockers, and topics of interest. Post-call analytics include call duration, longest monologue, engaging questions that elicited a response from the prospect, and interactivity.
To assist with coaching, Wingman automatically identifies speakers and creates speech tracks, letting managers or reps focus on specific individuals. It also offers a “game tapes” library for new hire training. Game tapes provide a set of best-of-breed video samples for pricing, blockers, features, etc.
Wingman also offers Deal Central deal intelligence. Deal Central identifies deal health risks such as the lack of a decision-maker or pricing not being discussed. It is this engagement intelligence that will complement Clari’s revenue intelligence capabilities.
“We were looking at all of the signals that are important for…our customers to help them make better decisions in their revenue execution…We have had great success bringing in data from CRM systems, email systems, meeting information for calendars,” stated CTO Venkat Rangan. “One thing that we also recognized was bringing in conversational data – conversational intelligence analysis of call recordings – whether it’s voice calls or Zoom meeting calls…was going to fundamentally change the quality of the signals we bring in.”
Sales reps can also share meetings or snippets with colleagues, providing access to the customer’s voice. Reps can also share call URLs with prospects and know when prospects view them.
Wingman’s monthly pricing starts at $60 per rep. It has “no hidden setup costs, no minimum seat requirement, and no charges for sales managers & observers.”
In the summer of 2021, Wingman was named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in the Conversational Intelligence category.
When acquired in June, Bengaluru-based Wingman had 57 employees (per LinkedIn) and had doubled its ARR over the previous six months. It was founded in 2018 and claims to have over 200 customers.
“Clari’s acquisition of Wingman will help customers turn recorded conversations into a strategic asset for spotting revenue leak and driving revenue precision. At a time when leaders are looking to unify their teams and their tech stacks, adding Wingman solidifies Clari’s position as the only enterprise platform for running the end-to-end revenue process,” boasted Byrne. “Wingman’s conversation intelligence technology leads the market in real-time guidance and coaching capabilities, providing actionable insights when sellers need them most to help close deals faster. Revenue leadership can scale teams, methodologies, and go-to-market strategies with confidence knowing that all team members will have the latest messaging and collateral at their fingertips, in every conversation.”
Rangan said that Wingman was a strong fit to Clari across multiple dimensions: technologies, market approach, and culture.
Kapoor noted that the combination allows for conversational analysis at all levels. Users can Zoom into a single conversation and deal health, while managers and executives can zoom out to pipeline analytics, revenue forecasting, and deals at risk.
Bringing the organizations together was the “best and fastest way to get there together,” argued Kapoor.
Initially, Rangan would like to focus Wingman enhancements on the emerging and commercial segments due to a strong alignment between Wingman and customer needs. The Wingman roadmap also lays out steps to make Wingman mid-market and enterprise ready. Longer-term, conversational intelligence signals will be fed from Wingman into Clari and “serve all of the revenue workflows” across the boardroom, senior management, front-line management, and sales reps. Conversational intelligence will feed the forecasting and pipeline inspection processes.
Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst at Forrester, was bullish on the transaction, noting that Clari has “stayed away from deeper revenue intelligence capabilities that focus on interaction execution, preferring to aggregate that information from other tools and present it in Clari.” However, he sees four reasons that the acquisition makes sense:
Adding CI eliminates a key dependency – While Clari had access to 28% of interactions via email and calendaring, it relied on third parties to capture 45% of interactions via phone and web conferencing.
It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
Valuations have come back to Earth – Six months ago, this deal may not have made financial sense, but “with funding drying up, this is the perfect time for late-stage market leaders with large war chests to acquire technology companies at a reasonable price.”
This new capability aligns with Clari’s stated strategy – Deal health analytics derived from unstructured conversations will augment Clari’s vision of “predictable revenue growth.” It will also capture and analyze internal deal review calls and potentially update deal progress and commit status automatically. While deal status CRM updates are not a current capability, Marrs has suggested a logical future capability.
Conversation Intelligence is one of several product categories that are being merged into SalesTech platform solutions. Converging technologies include Meeting Management, Sales Engagement, Conversational Intelligence, Revenue Intelligence, and Digital Salesrooms. Clari now offers three of these (it also supports digital sales rooms via its 2021 DealPoint acquisition).
Revenue Platform Clari made a trio of announcements related to a partnership with Sales Engagement Platform Groove, the full integration of conversational sales platform Wingman, and the pending release of its Optimize module for controlling revenue leaks. Optimize helps revenue teams diagnose and address revenue leaks, reducing revenue loss due to deal slippage, bad data, and error-prone manual processes.
“The Clari Revenue Platform gives revenue leaders the past, present, and future data they need to not just control revenue but help grow it,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne. “Only Clari provides the full historical picture and adds real-time capabilities to act fast as well as the forward-looking projections to proactively strategize revenue precision.”
Optimize offers a “single, centralized view” of revenue metrics, including win rates, forecast accuracy, and deal cycle times. In addition, Optimize helps revenue leaders answer questions such as “How is my team trending this quarter? Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue? How can I ensure my reps are doing the right things to produce predictably winning results?”
Clari argues that market leaders have been unable to answer these questions proactively, making it difficult to mitigate issues and risks. Clari combines historical and external data to assist with revenue benchmarking. Thus, Clari can reach beyond the CRM to gather account intelligence. For example, it can look at usage data to assess churn risk.
“Optimize is all about finding revenue leaks so customers can see not just where and why they’re missing revenue, but what they can do about it. No other solution on the market has the ability to harness past time series data to provide a historical view of revenue leak.”
Clari CEO Andy Byrne
Optimize, available soon, will provide a single view for the whole organization of revenue and insights, capturing CRM intelligence, activity data, and forecasts. With the integration of Wingman, its recently acquiredconversational intelligence subsidiary, the voice of the customer is fully embedded within Clari analytics and forecasts.
Furthermore, Wingman provides real-time coaching during sales calls, helping reps avoid mistakes and providing real-time intelligence (e.g., technical information, competitive battlecards) to sales reps. By improving sales objection handling, parrying competitive attacks, and preventing delays due to technical follow-ups, Wingman also reduces revenue leakage.
“It’s not just about coaching your teams to sell more, or about deal reviews,” said Holly Procter, senior vice president and global head of sales at Clari. “It’s more about running your revenue better—governing revenue-critical moments for success and collaboration across revenue-critical people, which includes buyers as well as sellers. Nobody else offers this collaborative, real-time approach.”
The Clari + Groove Joint Value Proposition
Clari and Groove announced a partnership at Dreamforce that helps “joint customers run revenue with more precision, greater collaboration, and faster execution.” Sales Engagement Platform Groove acts as a “system of action,” while Revenue Intelligence platform Clari acts as a “system of collaboration and governance.” Both platforms sync with Salesforce, which serves as the “system of record” for sales activity.
The partners argue that while revenue is at the heart of every business, CEOs struggle to get a handle on revenue and are uncertain about whether they will meet, beat, or miss revenue projections.
“Up to fifty percent of entire company employees are revenue critical. They are responsible in some form or fashion for delivering revenue.”
Clari SVP of Marketing Kyle Coleman explained to GZ Consulting
Revenue responsibility is broader than quota carriers and includes SDRs, CSMs, AMs, leadership, product managers, and engineers. Unfortunately, “consistent, predictable execution and collaboration” across these employees remain “very challenging” due to the lack of a unified platform shared across all these roles.
“It’s also very difficult, therefore, to govern any sort of revenue process or sub-process in a repeatable way,” continued Coleman. “What revenue leaders end up doing is every quarter, they’re trying to capture this lightning in a bottle to know whether they’re going to meet, beat or miss, but it’s sort of a scramble more often than not.”
With the Groove / Clari partnership, “we will be able to govern processes, we’ll be able to replicate the best practices, we’ll be able to do the right kind of real-time analysis that leads to action in a closed loop way so that we know that everything is happening as it should be when it should be,” argued Coleman.
A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them. Revenue leaks exist across the full revenue lifecycle. For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time, allowing reps to take action via Groove to bring the deal back on track.
When Clari identifies a deal slipping for competitive reasons, it can suggest a play be executed in Groove. Likewise, Clari can identify sub-par win rates, overly generous discounting, and low conversion rates for early-stage opportunities.
As Groove is native to Salesforce, it records all activities in real-time, providing “full-funnel forecasting” and analytics to Salesforce and Clari.
“We can tie our campaigns through to revenue in Salesforce, and that is something that they (Groove’s competitors) cannot do,” argued Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant. “Then all of that rich data, tying engagement through to revenue is able to be pulled into Clari and used in the analysis, and that is available today.”
Coleman explained that while you can’t win a deal at any moment, you can certainly break a deal. And once a deal is lost, “it’s very difficult to un-lose” it. Thus, “if you don’t do the right thing at the right time – handle the right objection, or pull the right person in or do the right kind of follow-up” – the deal could be jeopardized. Therefore, “handling revenue critical moments expertly and in a prescribed way” that is governed by best practices is critical in addressing revenue leaks.
“Having all of that insight into all these moments that exist and then having confidence that every one of your employees is going to be able to execute on this? Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.
“Clari has always been about providing companies with the collaboration and governance required to run revenue with maximum precision, and Groove completes the equation by enabling our joint customers to turn the insights we provide into action,” said Byrne. “We’ve seen incredibly strong results from joint customers using our two platforms together, and this formal partnership will help us transform even more revenue organizations.”
Groove offers enterprise customers a Salesforce-native SEP that records all activity directly to Salesforce.
“Groove and Clari coming together is definitely a ‘1 + 1 = 3’ scenario for revenue leaders,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein. “Bringing together Clari’s revenue collaboration and governance capabilities with Groove’s strength in sales execution and productivity provides the ultimate value proposition: See the future with Clari and then create that future with Groove.”
