Tag: ABM

Demandbase Audience Management Destinations

ABX Platform Demandbase released one of its “largest product launches of the year”: Audience Management Destinations.  While the firm has long supported B2B Campaigns via display advertising and LinkedIn channels, Audience Management Destinations extends its reach into consumer platforms and social advertising.

“B2B buyers are people, too, and B2B marketers can and should be advertising on those channels,” said Demandbase CMO Jon Miller.

New advertising channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Bing, and Adobe Audience Manager.  Additional services will be rolled out next year.

Demandbase does not store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so its social outreach is GDPR and CCPA compliant.  Instead, Demandbase leverages LiveRamp’s identity resolution, an opted-in identifier system that matches individual identifiers across platforms.

Demandbase also expanded its integration with LinkedIn.  Previously, it only supported account-level targeting on LinkedIn, but now marketers can target at either the account or person level.

Demandbase Targeting

Marketers will build audiences using a set of selectors that include first-party data, third-party data, intent, technographics, and activities. (See the image on the right).  They can then activate campaigns to their targeted buyers across the business and social web.

“This will allow a highly consistent customer experience across social networks and other platforms,” explained Miller on LinkedIn.  In addition, the new release expands marketing’s outreach and orchestration across a broader set of channels “using the account intelligence and the Demandbase One platform.”

“We’re constantly learning about how the B2B buyer thinks and acts, and this new account-based social targeting functionality plays a role in reaching buyers more holistically,” said Miller. “By viewing the buyer not just as someone within a target account or in a buying committee, we recognize that buyers are individuals, too.  This mindset shift — and the corresponding ability to engage with them as such across business and social platforms — gives our customers yet another advantage in today’s B2B go-to-market landscape.”

Demandbase claims that it is the only system that runs both “people and account-based plays from one system.”  Marketers can target specific audiences and “then automatically apply the most effective sales and marketing tactics to advance the account in its journey, across every touchpoint, and with the most relevant messages.”

Demandbase augmented its company and contact intelligence in April with the acquisitions of InsideView and DemandMatrix.  The two firms supplemented Demandbase’s firmographics, contacts, and technographics and provided Demandbase with a set of sales intelligence, B2B DaaS, and ICP/TAM tools. 

Demandbase supports its own intent data along with partner datasets from Bombora and G2.  TrustRadius is coming soon.

“Demandbase’s solutions are stronger in certain areas and helps drive top of the funnel engagement or audience targeting, while InsideView has been more focused on bottom of the funnel data.  We realized the two companies are quite complimentary and we could combine our customers to offer a much more complete solution to all of them.  Today we have an integrated top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel marketing and sales data provision to allow customers to look at the full funnel and identify a more appropriate addressable market, including what kind of technologies those companies use.”

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti to MarTech Series this week

The three companies combined to create a four-cloud solution that supports Advertising, ABX Marketing, Sales Intelligence, and Data.

“What’s exciting about this is the ability to provide all of this to customers as one solution,” continued Milletti.  “We have done a lot of work since the merger was completed to combine all of our technologies and go to our customers with information on how much more we can do for them.”

Demandbase combined its Demandbase One platform with InsideView and DemandMatrix to support four clouds.

Qualified Signals

Conversational Sales and Marketing vendor Qualified announced select availability for its new Signals intent product.  Qualified Signals delivers sales intelligence gleaned from company websites, helping them identify in-market accounts and prioritize their outreach.

Qualified Signals is an “AI product that combines website engagement with Salesforce data to surface the buying intent of a B2B company’s target accounts; helping sales reps focus on exactly the right accounts to generate more pipeline and revenue,” blogged Qualified CRO Robert Zimmerman.

When ABM was proposed as the successor to lead-generation marketing, it focused on defining the ICP and targeting accordingly.  While the ICP concept is still important, it fails to recognize that at any one moment, most ICP accounts are not in-market.  Thus, a further refinement was in order, deploying intent (e.g., visitor intelligence, chatbots, third-party B2B website activity) and engagement data (e.g., email responses, meeting attendance, sentiment) to prioritize accounts so that sales reps focus on the accounts that are in market and marketing continues to nurture ICP accounts with low-level intent signals.

“Sales reps need a simple way to identify the accounts with high purchase intent so they can maximize pipeline more efficiently,” argued Zimmerman.  “Meanwhile, target accounts are poking around the website and signaling buying intent, but sales reps have no idea.  This is a missed opportunity because website engagement is a critical predictor of purchase intent.  It demonstrates patterns of website activity that indicate whether an account is sales-ready.”

Unfortunately, website activity is a “blind spot for salespeople” that leaves them “in the dark as to where to focus their attention, how to engage target accounts, and how deals are progressing.”

Qualified Signals employs an AI-predictive model that collects “hundreds of thousands of website data points to determine which accounts are in-market to buy and sales-ready.”  Models include website activity such as mouse movement, clicks, scroll depth, page views, active time on site, chatbot engagement, live chat, voice calls, meetings booked, recency and frequency of visits, and visitor count.

“In a booming sales tech market, there are countless sales intelligence tools out there, but they often overlook the most important sales and marketing asset—the corporate website,” said Qualified CEO Kraig Swensrud.  “Signals arms sellers with an entirely new type of buying intent data, so revenue teams know exactly which accounts to pursue to crush their quota.”

The Qualified Signals Account Trend Report analyzes buyer activity on the company website across a rep’s territory, helping her prioritize activity and identify accounts where activity is cooling.

Signals are displayed to sales reps in the Salesforce Account record and convert complex buyer behavior into straightforward trends such as cooling, neutral, heating, and surging.  Trend data “can also be customized using unique Salesforce Account data to home in on the accounts that matter most, like ABM tier, account owner, region, or industry.”

Signals optionally pushes custom Account intent fields to Salesforce, which can then be built into custom reports and dashboards.

Qualified also displays Signals Account 360, a dynamic graph that visualizes purchase intent fluctuations over time for individual accounts.  Signals are expressed as a current Heat Index temperature, dynamic trend, and detailed account activity view that replays account engagement at the contact level.  The account timeline “offers a detailed, highly visual, timestamped overview of notable website events that occurred throughout the buying process,” blogged Zimmerman.

The Account 360 view combines heat index trend data alongside visitor intelligence.

Additionally, Signals supports mobile, email, and Slack alerts when an account hits client specified thresholds on the Qualified Heat Index.  Alerts may be sent in real-time or included in a daily or weekly email digest.

“Qualified Signals amplifies Qualified X, bringing purchase intent data to the visitor level within your conversational sales and marketing application,” stated the firm.  “When a sales rep prospects into a target account, they’re instantly notified when that account arrives on the site.  Plus, they have all intent data at the ready. They can instantly meet with the prospect using a full stack of meeting tools, including chat, voice, and screen-sharing.”

Due to the complexity of visitor intelligence and similar data, intent signals have mostly been fed into marketing platforms and not converted into actionable semaphores; however, sales intelligence vendors have begun enabling these signals.

“The website is no longer just for marketers; it’s now a window into your biggest sales opportunities.  Sellers have their standard indicators that an account is interested, and a deal is moving forward; but in between the standard touchpoints, prospects are poking around your website, reading a customer story, or engaging via live chat.  Sellers have had limited insight into how target accounts are exploring this property, but the website is an amazing predictor of intent.  Now, Qualified Signals will surface this invaluable insight for revenue teams.”

Qualified CEO Kraig Swensrud

Qualified Signals will GA in early 2022.

Qualified closed on a $51 million Series B round in May that Salesforce Ventures led.  The firm describes itself as “the only conversational sales and marketing platform purpose-built for Salesforce Sales Cloud.”

Qualified Insights delivered via Slack and mobile devices.

HG Insights Contextual Intent

Technology Market Intelligence vendor HG Insights announced the global availability of Contextual Intent, a “solution designed for companies seeking to leverage the power of customer buying patterns.”   Contextual Intent is available through HG Universe data subscriptions and the Snowflake Data Marketplace.  It is currently in “late-stage” beta on the HG Insights Platform, with a scheduled December launch.

Contextual Intent combines firmographics, technographics, contract intelligence (via their 2018 Pivotal IQ acquisition), and bidstream data to deliver “buyer intent data, without all the noise.”  It employs web users’ behavior and content consumption to determine which firms are researching, evaluating, or buying technology products or services.  In addition, Contextual Intent identifies in-market companies for new technology and potential churn candidates, helping prioritize outreach.

HG Insights ingests two billion intent records each week and matches them against 120 million verified technology installations for 14,000 products, solutions, and services.  The HG Insights scoring model measures the frequency of defined topics mined from locations, with observed activity tracked for nine million companies.

“Contextual Intent is the first intent solution to contextualize data with a company’s technographic profile. Our proven, data-driven methodologies now include the use of intent data—providing our customers with what they need to accelerate growth and gain a competitive edge through contextualized buying signals. Our new solution is designed specifically for Go-To-Market teams to remove the noise from intent data and make it actionable. Context matters, and we are able to provide insights that support hyper-targeting for growth and competitive advantage.”

HG Insights CTO Rob Fox

HG Insights cited January 2021 research from Ascend2 that asked sales and marketing professionals about intent data obstacles.  Half said that data quality was an issue, and 40% stated that it was challenging to make intent data actionable.

Revenue teams can select twenty to over 100 intent topics from HG Insights’ taxonomy which spans over 4,000 technology-based topics.

Contextual Intent identifies both buyers in the market and churn risk candidates.

HG Insights employs a scoring model based on the frequency of defined topics being researched across the web for each company.  It factors in the number of locations demonstrating the activity and baselines intent over time to determine the “increases and trajectories” of research.

Like intent models from other vendors, the Intent Score is measured as the deviation from a company’s baseline and normalized from 1-100.  It is updated weekly and incorporates past and present activity.  However, interpretation of the scores differs between vendors.  Concerning HG Insights, the signal strength is deemed high when the topical intent score exceeds 84 and medium when it falls between 60 and 84.

HG Insights provides intent location, a feature that is available from only a few vendors.  Knowing the research location helps identify the potential nexus of the demand unit (or at least the individuals performing initial research).

Contextual Intent supports multiple use cases, including whitespace scenarios (researching a new category of technology for the firm), expansion (current customer is researching additional products), displacement (potential customer take away), and churn.  Contextual Insights is tagging Whitespace, Expansion, and Displacement scenarios in its data feed, with Vendor Threat, Upgrade, and Migration tags in development.

“We provide insights surrounding the buyer’s journey about when the buyer is more likely to make a purchase decision. We can provide the context of when a customer indicates moving to an evaluating phase, further into a late stage buying cycle. We provide this context as researching or evaluating. We use NLP to determine when enough activity is detected that indicates a potential buying motion, where specific vendors or products are being considered.

Darcy Moss, HG Insights Product Marketing Director

The current offering employs bidstream data, which is potentially problematic as a long-term source of data gathering.  Congress has raised questions about the practice and tying online activity to individuals without consent is a violation of GDPR (Contextual Intent is tied to locations and accounts, not individuals).

“We are always evaluating additive intent supply to diversify our signals,” explained HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss to GZ Consulting.  “We are sourcing from bid-stream as we develop and refine other techniques and methods.  Should any regulatory matters influence existing processes for us and the industry overall, we are confident that we will have a compliant and high-quality source and methodology to continue to provide Contextual Intent to our customers.”

For the direct data subscription product, customers have access to all topics regardless of their signal strength score.  Pricing for the data subscription is additive for the Contextual Intent offering.

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires NetWise Data and Eyeota (Part III)

Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I). Today, I’m covering the Eyeota acquisition.

Eyeota supports a global methodology for onboarding offline and online data in a privacy-compliant and globally consistent way without the use of personally identifiable information (PII).

“In today’s market, brands need the ability to bridge real-world insights into the digital space in order to communicate more effectively with their customers and prospective customers,” states the firm’s About Us.  “Yet the market has never been so difficult for brands to navigate.  The challenge is finding the best ways to capture and activate audience data and to do so in a way that they can be confident is authentic, trustworthy and reliable.”

Eyeota builds audiences “based on what people are buying, watching, listening, reading, and interacting with in both the digital and offline world” that takes into account consumer demographics, behavior, and psychographics.”

Eyeota supports a broad set of global ad buying platforms, trading desks, DMPs, DSPs, and ad networks, including Adobe, Google Marketing Platform, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce DMP.  Eyeota also supports social targeting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

“Eyeota’s expansive global data onboarding and activation capabilities are underpinned by our commitment to delivering audience solutions at scale, and we are proud of the work we have accomplished to develop one of the most powerful, agile, and interoperable frameworks for delivering addressable data in a privacy-conscious era,” said Kristina Prokop, Chief Executive Officer of Eyeota. “By combining forces with Dun & Bradstreet and NetWise, we will be able to offer a more holistic B2B audience platform to our clients, leveraging a powerful combination of data, technology, and insights that help clients better target and engage audiences across global markets and digital channels.”

Eyeota’s products extend the Audience Solutions business into campaign execution and “being online and participating more fully in the B2B MarTech and AdTech supply chain.”

Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in Eyeota for an estimated purchase price of $165 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment. The deal is expected to close by November 5.

Eyeota has 84 employees and grew its headcount 12% over the past year. Founded in 2010, it maintains four offices in the U.S. and outposts in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Pune, Berlin, and London.

Yesterday’s blog about the NetWise acquisition.

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires NetWise Data and Eyeota (Part II)

Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I)

NetWise offers Dun & Bradstreet a B2B-to-consumer ID Graph that helps Audience Solutions compete in this broader digital context.  The Graph includes 30 million U.S. businesses, 100 million business professionals, 250 million opted-in consumer profiles, and 70 million consumer-to-business linkages.  At the audience level, NetWise supports over 500 standard B2B segments and 150 consumer segments.

NetWise extends D&B Audience Solutions’ identity graph “across every major online channel, individual device, or a marketing platform,” said Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour.  “Just as our clients rely on the D-U-N-S Number for precision in their offline data, we’re looking to provide the same level of confidence and consistency online as well.”

NetWise adds a B2B-to-Consumer Graph for cross-channel, cross-device digital marketing.

NetWise excels at joining the offline and online worlds together to connect business personas to their online personas,” said NetWise CEO Dwight Gorall.  “We look forward to joining the Dun & Bradstreet family with Eyeota. Once together, we can work to create a complete solution for clients, enabling a full spectrum of capabilities – from audience creation to activation – at scale across many demand-side platforms, customer relationship management systems, connected T.V. or social media platforms. We are committed to helping global enterprises future proof their marketing strategies so they can thrive in a multichannel world.”

NetWise notes that it is the “original producer” of its B2B data products built from first-party data sources, including state and federal business filings, company websites, job descriptions, job postings, social websites, and business directories.  Moreover, the firm has unrestricted rights to use and sell its data.  Thus, it offers supplementary intelligence for enriching Dun & Bradstreet’s company and contact files.

According to its FAQ, “NetWise generates comprehensive and deterministic B2B segments using current job titles, company firmographics, and other self-declared business-related attributes like skills, education, certifications, etc.  This is accomplished by analyzing publicly available information and data created directly by persons in our dataset.  These data features are often multi-source validated across our compiled data.  Segments are deterministic, based on foundational information and never modeled unless explicitly indicated.”

NetWise is fully compliant with CCPA.  In addition, its Data Protection Officer is a California-licensed attorney.

Outside of the US, NetWise maintains 100 million global profiles that can be folded into WorldBase and 300 million non-EU global profiles.  NetWise does not build profiles on GDPR (EU) subjects.

Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in NetWise Data for an estimated purchase price of $69 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment.  The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter.

NetWise is based in Boca Raton, Florida and has 47 headcount (as per LinkedIn).

Continue to Part III which covers Eyeota.

Openprise $16M Series A

RevOps Automation Platform Openprise closed on an oversubscribed Series A last month.  The $16 million round was led by SIG Asia Investment, an affiliate of the Susquehanna International Group, with new investments from Banyan Pacific and Citta Capital.  Existing investors Alumni Venture Group and AI List also participated.

Funding will accelerate development on the Openprise RevOps Automation Platform and scale up the sales and marketing teams.

Openprise supports data management, enrichment, and hygiene across sales, marketing, customer success, BI, and analytics platforms.  Features include data deduplication, data onboarding, lead-to-account matching, lead routing, attribution, and account scoring.

Openprise RevOps automation capabilities.

Openprise cited a recent Gartner forecast that 75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025.  “A move from sales enablement to revenue enablement is needed in today’s rapidly shifting buying and selling dynamic to support this RevOps imperative.”

“Openprise is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the momentum in companies moving to a RevOps model,” stated Anne Marie McCallion, its PR rep.

“When companies move to a RevOps model in order to better align marketing and sales, they soon identify huge gaps in their joint processes and data that aren’t addressed by traditional marketing and sales automation solutions like Marketo, Salesforce, and Salesloft,” said Openprise CEO Ed King.  “Openprise is fueling the RevOps revolution by providing a single, no-code platform that can automate hundreds of RevOps processes and deliver go-to-market-ready data for the entire RevTech stack.”

Openprise customers include UI Path, Vimeo, Zendesk, Okta, Nutanix, Freshworks, Splunk, and Zscaler.

Openprise will face stiffer competition from RingLead, which was acquired by ZoomInfo in September.

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.”

Flash: Groove Series B and Product Enhancements

Sales Engagement Platform Groove closed on a $45 million Series B led by Viking Global Investors.  Previous investors Capital One Ventures, Level Equity, Quest Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital also participated.  The funds will be deployed for international expansion and continued growth in the enterprise segment.

The round brings total funding to $61 million.  Groove did not disclose its market valuation following Round B.

“We’re experiencing explosive growth in the enterprise segment of the market,” Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant told GZ Consulting.  “This latest round of funding will enable us to invest more heavily in R&D while expanding our operations in EMEA and doubling down on the sales and marketing engine that’s fueling this growth.”

Enterprise ARR is up 114% over the past years.  New enterprise clients include Activision, iHeartMedia, LexisNexis, New Relic, TIBCO, Veeva, and Wintrust.

Although Salesforce’s first cloud was the Sales Cloud, digital selling remains an issue for many Salesforce customers.  An August 2021 Forrester report on the “State of CRM” found that 57% of respondents struggled to offer solid customer experiences due to poor integration and accessibility.

Groove, a native Salesforce Sales Engagement application, “solves this accessibility problem by meeting sellers where they already work, increasing rep productivity while ensuring over 90% Salesforce adoption,” wrote Groove.

“This notion of the sales engagement platform as a cockpit for sellers is likely to continue to drive further integrations between other sales tech categories and these platforms as the advantages of bringing everything to the seller where they sell (the original vision for CRM technology) become more widely recognized,” said Anthony McPartlin, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research in a recent blog post.

“Our enterprise customers want to enable the modern seller while ensuring the highest levels of enterprise security and compliance.  We’re capturing a significant amount of enterprise market share from our competition because our platform was built for the needs of large, complex organizations that rely on Salesforce as their system of record.  We bring automation to the seller instead of requiring that they work out of a separate system. This flexibility ensures extremely high user adoption rates, even with technology averse sellers in non-tech industries.”

Groove CEO Chris Rothstein

Groove also announced a pair of product enhancements that meet “the unique needs of complex organizations.”  The first new feature is automatic logging to custom objects.  The second new capability, OmniActions, “enables reps to complete any sales action without leaving their workflows.”

Groove Custom Objects for Salesforce.

“By seamlessly integrating valuable CRM data into specialized workflows for different roles, teams, and industries, Groove drives CRM adoption and enables revenue teams to get a more complete picture of all sales activities.  The addition of automatic logging to custom objects and OmniActions provides customers even more flexibility for executing, capturing, and properly associating activities with both standard and custom Salesforce objects.  With these new features, Groove strengthens its position as the only sales engagement platform that can easily fit into an organization’s complex and dynamic sales workflows.”

“One of the great things about Groove is its ability to flex to any organization’s sales process, regardless of how much they have customized Salesforce.  Today, we’ve made it even easier for reps to complete, assign, and track their activities without having to leave their workflows.  That means more time for reps to sell, more complete data for managers to manage their teams, and more flexibility for admins to maintain established and successful processes.”

Groove VP of Product Sonia Sarao

Groove’s Advanced Activity Capture now automatically logs activity to custom objects, “minimizing the manual work required by sellers while ensuring complete visibility into account health and opportunities.”

Activity Capture may be configured by profile, allowing for customization at the functional or team level.

OmniActions lets reps manage or execute any activity outside of their regular Flows with automated real-time activity logging.  OmniActions is fully integrated with the Groove Omnibar, supporting actions in Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, or the Groove app.

Groove OmniActions

“This combination gives sellers a 360-degree view of their prospects’ and customers’ lifecycle from details and activity to actions – all in their workflow,” wrote the firm.  “OmniActions enables revenue organizations to associate all activities with open opportunities, whether they are part of a single action or multi-step Flow.  By accurately associating all types of activities, revenue teams can take advantage of more accurate reporting and insights into the sales process.”

Groove continues its rapid growth, making the Inc. 5000 for the past three years.  It has over 70,000 users.

Market Flash: Outreach Acquires Canopy and Launches Outreach Commit (Part II)

Continuing from yesterday’s post that discussed revenue innovation and the Sales Execution Gap. Today I am discussing their new Outreach Commit and Outreach Success Plans.

Outreach Commit, based on their Canopy acquisition, offers sales analytics and forecasting capabilities that augment Outreach’s AI-based buyer sentiment and Success Plans, providing Outreach customers with “true visibility across the entire revenue cycle.”

“The use of deep learning and big data has the potential to transform B2B forecasting in the same way it has transformed B2C forecasting. Such changes are shifting the emphasis on forecasting from predicting the number to beating the number…Reliable activity data allows sales leaders, for example, to drive more rigorous pipeline reviews and estimate forecasts with greater confidence.  It allows companies to discover and capture data about prospects and customers that previously lived in the realm of the ‘shadow pipeline’ — that murky world of secret selling that organizations have traditionally been blind to.”

Forrester Research Principal Analyst Anthony McPartlin, “Enabling B2B Interaction Visibility In A Converging Sales Tech Landscape” (June 2021)

Commit provides a flexible forecasting model with multi-level views, allowing managers to view a probabilistic model of outcomes for multiple periods and teams based upon prior win-loss histories, current pipeline, and adjustable assumptions.  Revenue forecasts are broken into Booked, Weighted Pipeline, and Intra-period high-velocity deals (i.e., projected new opportunities that are not in the pipeline but will close before the end of the period).  In addition, models can be adjusted to account for events external to the model (e.g., new product launches, tradeshow held earlier or late in the quarter, economic shocks).  The underlying KPIs that drive the models are selectable when setting them up, with the model updating every fifteen minutes.

Outreach Commit supports dynamic forecasting with bear, bull, and most likely outcomes.

Commit provides individualized rep scorecards based on company KPIs.  Managers can set targets, coach to outcomes, and level up their team.  Managerial note-taking helps them track 1:1’s, assign tasks, and track completion.

Commit supports active deal monitoring that flags deal risks and delivers insights.  “Signals notify leaders of the things they need to know today.  From opportunity risk identification to shifts in top of funnel metrics, Signals act as your eyes and ears–ensuring your frontline leaders are focused on what matters most to your business.”  Deal risk is significantly reduced when issues are flagged early to reps, and managers can provide on-demand coaching to address nascent problems.

Commit also supports Custom Signals.  Revenue Operations sets custom thresholds and unique parameters.

At a recent analyst briefing, Outreach management emphasized that they offer a tripartite value proposition: Engage (Sales Engagement), Guide (Kaia Conversation Intelligence), and Commit (Outreach Commit).

“To achieve predictable, efficient growth, every organization needs to engage with their buyers, guide their sellers through strong sales cycles, and then commit the number with confidence.”

Canopy deal terms were not disclosed.  All nine employees have joined Outreach. The startup, founded in 2019, had raised $2.1 million.

Outreach also provided updates on Outreach Kaia and Success Plans at its Unleash event.  Kaia, its Conversation Intelligence platform that was developed in-house, is adding real-time talk analytics, Comprehensive Search, Saved Search, and Outreach Voice Import.  The new capabilities will be available by the end of the month.

Call analytics provide real-time talk-time visibility, letting reps self-correct if they are speaking too much.

Comprehensive Search provides managers with access to notes, content cards, action items, and transcripts across the sales organization.  Additionally, both meeting platform intelligence and Outreach Voice cold calls are included.  Thus, “leaders can identify trends and risks across teams and at various stages of the sales cycle.”

Saved Search Alerts provide scheduled intelligence on key topics, allowing managers to track competitors, pricing, functional requests, etc.

Outreach Voice Import supports post-call analysis of Outreach Voice and Microsoft Teams.  Fully integrated support for Teams is scheduled for 2022.

Outreach warns RevOps not to trust the algorithm blindly. Instead, revenue teams should understand “the math behind every forecast to see what’s actually driving the number.”  Accordingly, Outreach maintains the fidelity of data signals such as engagement and sentiment through transparency that displays “every opportunity and signals where sellers should take action.”

“Canopy’s Augmented Revenue Analysis engine combines advanced statistical modeling with machine learning and artificial intelligence,” states the Canopy website.  “Simply put, we show our math.  Instead of black box predictions, we show you every trend and variable driving our predictions, ensuring you have access to every data point necessary to confidently call your business.”

Users can also review “where you started and where you finished,” providing a post-mortem period review that “pinpoints slippage, forecasting variance, and conversion rates across any data point from any time window.”  They can also generate “what if” scenarios with multiple assumptions.

Outreach Success Plans provide a shared portal for buyers and sellers to exchange timelines, success criteria, resources, and people.

Outreach Success Plans, which were announced back in May, will be generally available on October 27.  Success Plans align buyers and sellers to improve action and predictability in a shared deal room.  They act as a buying hub that allows buyers and sellers to agree on shared success criteria, objectives, and timelines.  Success Plans also support shared access to project resources, allowing new demand unit members to quickly access project documents.  Only invited individuals can participate in the Success Plans.

Success Plans provide an additional set of engagement intelligence for tracking deal risks and momentum.  The Opportunity View includes Success Plan views, comments, resource downloads, and shares, providing engagement insights specific to deal planning and document sharing.

Outreach Success Plans deliver “unparalleled visibility into pipeline opportunities and risks,” blogged VP of Product Marketing Victoria Grady.

Outreach claims that two-thirds of buyers have “stopped working with a company mid-deal, simply because the competitor provided a better buying experience.”  Thus, streamlining the document sharing process, framing the timeline, and agreeing on success criteria not only facilitates the process and improves deal visibility but improves the likelihood of winning each deal. Outreach supports 5,000 customers, including 19 of the 25 fastest-growing public companies and more than 60% of the Cloud 100.

Market Flash: Outreach Acquires Canopy and Launches Outreach Commit

Outreach Commit supports forecasting, scenario planning, and deal risk analysis.

Sales Engagement Platform Outreach expanded its value proposition with the acquisition of Revenue Intelligence service Canopy.  Outreach immediately began integrating the service into its platform, with GA expected in H1 2022.  The new Outreach Commit service “significantly expands” Outreach’s revenue intelligence capabilities, “giving revenue leaders the sales analytics and forecasting capabilities they need in today’s sales environment.”

“In the past 18 unpredictable and transformative months, we have seen the rise of a new cohort of leaders we are calling Revenue Innovators who have thrived by embracing the digital disruption of sales,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “These are leaders who had to adapt and evolve their mindset to embrace automation and machine learning as the keys to driving predictable, efficient growth – consistently and despite the uncertainty in the market.  They need tools that combine engagement with intelligence and marry together the art and the science of sales. The evolution of the Outreach platform does exactly that.” 

Outreach provides revenue innovators with “predictable, efficient growth” based upon AI guidance for more effective engagement, improved forecasting, and next best actions.  The objective is to reduce the “Sales Execution Gap” between revenue potential and actual performance based on instinct and limited data; instead, data and AI will narrow the gap.

“The Sales Execution Gap manifests itself in several ways across the business — decisions based on gut instincts, slow rep ramp times, competing priorities, random achievement, missed opportunities with little understanding as to why,” explained Medina.  “And yes, lost revenue, but also a growing disconnect between what high-performing reps want and what employers can deliver.”

“Once a seller has experienced the power of an Engagement and Intelligence platform, they won’t want to go back to inefficient, broken workflows — and they’re making career decisions because of it.”

Outreach CEO Manny Medina

Unfortunately, CRMs were “not designed for sellers.”  They are systems of record that store information but lack engagement and insights.  Firms that want reps to “live in the CRM” will drive away their best sales reps and candidates who “demand AI-driven insights and workflow automation to guide their actions in real-time.”  As more sellers become “digital natives,” this performance gap will widen.

Top-performing reps and managers that have enjoyed modern SalesTech tools will be reluctant to work without digital tools.  They expect their sales toolbox to include AI-generated intelligence, including email sentiment, live meeting guidance, real-time call analysis, and automated deal review and scoring.  They are also looking for sales engagement with templated sequences (cadences), multi-channel outreach, task prioritization, and recommended actions.  Finally, they are looking for improved forecasting, risk alerts, engagement data, and deal facilitation.

With Commit, Outreach has added forecasting and expanded risk analytics to its toolkit.

Outreach sees a bifurcation between traditional sales organizations and revenue innovators that have adopted digital communications and AI for outreach, prioritization, coaching, forecasting, and analytics.

“Revenue innovators are embracing automation and AI in real-time to provide guidance to reps mid-cycle, guide more effective engagement with customers, and entirely rethink how they forecast because they have the signals that can proactively identify risk in their pipeline and deals,” stated the firm.

Continue to Part II which discusses Outreach Commit and product enhancements announced at the Outreach Unleash virtual meeting.