Tag: ABM

ZoomInfo Sales Efficiency and LTV/CAC Ratios

ZoomInfo has been talking about its LTV/CAC (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio for a few years and is now boasting about its sales efficiency ratio.  For every dollar the firm invests in Sales and Marketing, it is growing $1.50 to $2.00 in revenue with even better results on the retention business side.  These values are well above the SaaS industry average and indicate that the firm should increase its revenue operations investment.

“On the new business side, we aim for somewhere between one and a half to two X return for every dollar that we spend on a customer. And then on the retention and growth or account management side, we look for a six to eight X return for every dollar that we spend there. It’s a super-efficient go-to-market motion.  Most software businesses, you put a dollar in, you get like 70 cents out in the first year.  We’re putting a dollar in and getting one and a half to two X out.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

Schuck described their go-to-market efficiency as one of their “big strategic levers” when acquiring firms with less mature go-to-market motions.  ”So when we find companies that don’t have a very sophisticated go-to-market motion, that aren’t truly optimized in the way that they get clients, they’re not doing one and a half to two X efficiency or a 15 X LTV to CAC.  Those are great fits for us.” 

ZoomInfo has a track record of improving sales efficiency, helping unlock value in acquired assets where the go-to-market motions are aligned.  “In our big acquisitions – RainKing, ZoomInfo, and, most recently, Chorus.AI — we really felt like we could leverage the go-to-market motion to accelerate growth within those companies. That’s a key piece.”

When DiscoverOrg acquired RainKing, which had a $40 million ARR, he was convinced that DiscoverOrg could treble their EBITDA to $30 million and accelerate their top-line growth within six months.  Within one year of acquiring RainKing, DiscoverOrg’s market valuation grew from roughly $600 million to $2 billion.

One of the inherent advantages of SalesTech is you don’t have to teach sales reps the value and use cases of your product.  This shortens ZoomInfo’s ramp time for new reps from several quarters to four months.  “it makes it way easier for you to be able to sell to your counterpart on the other end of the line.  It’s a big difference for us,” said Schuck. 

ZoomInfo heavily hires sales reps directly out of college or soon after and trains them as SDRs, responding to inbound leads and performing outbound prospecting.  “In nine months, we start promoting them into the account executive role.  So we got value out of them in that ramp time. Then four months after they’ve gone into the account executive role, they’re fully ramped. Thirteen months from when you’ve never sold something until you’re an account executive at one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the country, that’s a really fun promotion to see.”

And because ZoomInfo is hiring sales reps to sell sales and marketing solutions, Schuck does not consider complicated or technical product categories for acquisition.  Instead, he looks for solutions that broadly meet the needs of his 20,000 customers and which are easy to understand.  Chorus.AI, the Conversation Intelligence vendor that ZoomInfo acquired last month, fits the bill: “We use it, all of our sellers use it. It’s really simple to understand, ‘Hey, we’re going to record and transcribe all your calls, and then you can go do instant coaching on the key moments in those calls’,” remarked Schuck.

The Chorus app for Zoom records, transcribes, indexes, and analyzes calls, providing insights to sales reps and sales managers. As reps no longer need to worry about notetaking, they can focus on the topics at hand and be more present during the meetings.

Terminus Chat Experiences

Terminus announced the immediate availability of its next-generation chat offering, Terminus Chat Experiences, which is native to its ABX platform.  Terminus claims that Terminus Chat Experiences drives a 700% increase in target account engagement and has already powered more than four million conversations.

Chat Experiences builds upon its 2020 acquisition of Ramble.  Built within the Terminus platform, Chat Experiences routes conversations to the appropriate rep “in seconds.”  Along the way, Terminus playbooks collect visitor data, trigger sales automation steps, and qualify inbound traffic in real-time.

Terminus Chat enhancements include new Chat views and dashboards, a new Chat engagement window, and a HubSpot for Chat integration.  Reps can monitor the website and reach out to visitors pro-actively, based upon their viewed content.

The chat builder supports both linear workflows and visual workflows.  Connectors support Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Outreach, SalesLoft, Calendly, and Google Analytics.

Other features include Chat from Anywhere one-click chat links from emails, display ads, social, and other channels; chat routing to the most appropriate available rep based upon Terminus reference data; meeting booking; and a mobile app for booking meetings and chatting when away from the desk.

“Terminus Chat Experiences has identified more than 3.7M target accounts for customers; that’s incredibly powerful,” said Justin McDonald, GM of Channel Applications for Terminus. “Combined with other channels like Ad Experiences and Email Experiences, Chat Experiences is truly a game-changer for modern marketers looking to engage target audiences at any stage of the funnel.  Being native to our platform creates a flywheel of first-party data and account matching that plays a massive role in conversion and revenue for customers.  Native chat is unmatched, and we’re proud to be the first and only ABM platform to make this possible.”

Bombora in D&B Hoovers

Search Results include Bombora Intent Badges.

D&B Hoover’s customers can now view and build lists of in-market accounts using the Bombora intent file.  Users can set up SmartLists (dynamic lists) with a combination of account and intent data to identify in-market ICP accounts.  The list is then displayed on the sales rep’s desktop and daily email digest.

Target lists can be assembled from over 175 selects that span company, contact, intent, and technographics.  Bombora intent data is gathered from over 4,000 B2B media website and span 7,000 pre-defined topics.  70% of the websites are exclusive to Bombora.

Dun & Bradstreet provides a sophisticated approach to selecting intent topics that tie to business strategy.  Instead of simply choosing the obvious topics, the firms recommend that customers employ topic clusters, “a group of like-minded Intent topics [that are] representative of all facets of a product or service.”  Clusters would include

  • Brand/Products (core): Brands, products, key functions
  • Competitors/Partners: Brands and products of competitors and partners
  • Industry/Vertical: Strongly associated categories, use cases, and product/service capabilities
  • Pain Points/Challenges: Pain points, issues, expected outcomes
Multiple intent topics may be monitored in a SmartList.

Dun & Bradstreet has removed intent scores, which are often confusing.  By creating clusters, topics are either surging or not, with no interpretation required.  Instead, the number of clustered topics serves as the indicator of surge strength.

The firms recommend that content be adjusted based on the number of intent topics identified for a prospect.  Sales and Marketing should “serve higher-level or awareness-based content to those showing interest in one or two topics, and lower-funnel content to those showing interest on many topics.”  Furthermore, prospects with many surging topics are probably closer to making a purchase.

D&B Hoovers also added 4 million direct dial numbers to their database, bringing the product total to 6.2 million.  Direct dials contain a set of standard and mobile numbers, so users should hover over the direct dial number to determine the phone type.

“As more business contacts work from home, direct dials are essential to engage customers in real-time, from anywhere,” wrote Product Management VP Phil McWade.  “Access these numbers in the lists you’ve already created, when viewing a Contact Profile, or within Contacts Search & Build a List results.”

D&B Hoover’s coverage has grown to 209 million global companies and 235 million contacts

Gong Expands into Europe

Gong’s Five Operating Principles of Revenue Intelligence.

Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong announced plans to open its first European office in Dublin.  It already has over one hundred European clients, including Aircall, Hopin, GoCardless, and MOO.

“After many international companies reached out to us, looking for access to the insight uncovered by our revenue intelligence platform, we knew it was time to meet global demand in a strategic and thoughtful way,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov.  “With a physical presence in Europe, we can continue to demonstrate our category leadership, support the massive growth we’ve seen in the past year, and deliver the product customers are asking for.”

The new office will be managed by Gong’s newly appointed VP of EMEA, Wendy Harris, who previously led European sales for CarGurus and Dropbox.  The firm is hiring for sales, marketing, customer success, and G&A positions.

“Gong’s revenue intelligence platform is transforming the way companies do business by empowering sales organizations to adopt data-driven strategies,” she said. “Joining a high-growth company and leading its global expansion in my hometown of Dublin is truly the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Gong supports 26 languages, including French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese, with additional languages planned.  The Revenue Intelligence platform captures and analyzes phone, email, and meeting conversations, providing insights into deals, people, and the market.

Gong has also been building out its partner network, including Bain & Company, Sandler, and SBR Consulting.

Gong’s June Series E valued the firm at $7.25 billion.  Over the past year, it grew its headcount by 89% to over 700 employees.  The Israeli firm was founded in 2015. The firm will see stiffer competition from Chorus, which was acquired by ZoomInfo two weeks ago. ZoomInfo provides it with deep pockets, global data enrichment, workflow tools, a chatbot, and a sales engagement platform.

Gong Employment Growth (Source: LinkedIn)

SalesLoft Acquires Professional Services Partner InStereo

Sales Engagement vendor SalesLoft announced that it acquired professional services partner InStereo.  InStereo, founded in 2018 by Bill Galfano and Adam Post, was an early ecosystem partner that has grown alongside SalesLoft.  Last year, SalesLoft named them their “Partner of the Year.”

“We were impressed by their focus on what the customer is trying to achieve,” SalesLoft President and Chief Strategy Officer Rob Forman told GZ Consulting.

As a partner, InStereo helped “B2B Sales and Marketing teams better engage with buyers to create more demand, authentically engage prospects, and convert prospects into delighted customers.”

“Bringing InStereo directly into the SalesLoft family is a key way we are investing in our customers’ success.  Our customers will benefit from InStereo’s deep understanding of buyer journeys and engagement strategies.  Their experience and proven enterprise methodologies will help customers operationalize the SalesLoft platform and accelerate the value of Sales Engagement across their entire revenue organization.”

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter

InStereo focuses on go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce delivered through a pair of consulting services:

  • Buyer Experience Strategy focuses on the buyer’s journey, ICP, demand unit persona, and the “buyer engagement blueprint.”

    “We believe customer journey maps are more than just wall art,” states InStereo.  “We create buyer journeys you can activate.  By understanding how buyers approach the purchase process, sales and marketing teams can better align people, process, and content to deliver just what buyers need, when they need it.”
  • Buyer Engagement Services pairs clients with a Strategist and Revenue Consultant to assist with enterprise software implementations.  For SalesLoft, they focus on “1:1, personalized engagement via cadences” and process automation.  For marketing automation, InStereo assists with nurture campaigns and optimization, and for CRM, they focus on leveraging CRM capabilities and improving data quality.  Other services include SalesLoft Admin as a Service and sales development services.

“At SalesLoft, our goal isn’t to just sell software; it’s to help our customers exceed their revenue goals,” said SalesLoft CRO Steve Goldberg.  “Too many times software companies focus on features and technology, not the success of their customers.  InStereo shares our passion for helping our customers get the outcomes they’re looking for.”

InStereo’s customers skew towards enterprise implementations.  SalesLoft “plans to take their methodologies into new areas of our business,” expanding InStereo beyond the technology vertical into financial services, SalesLoft’s second-largest vertical.

InStereo has completed over 150 customer engagements.  Joint customers include Cargill, Pegasystems, and 3M.

“This past year we tripled our investment into our alliance organization and programs because empowering our partners leads to success for our customers,” said Forman.   “InStereo leveraged the power of our partnership and consistently drove incredible outcomes for our mutual customers.”

All twenty InStereo employees will be joining SalesLoft, including their two founders and Carrie McGrew, InStereo’s VP of Strategy.  In addition, Galfano will be joining the CRO Leadership Team as the SVP of Consulting Services.

SalesLoft did not provide any pricing deals on the acquisition.

Groove Auto Contact Capture

Sales Engagement Platform Groove announced a new Auto Contact Capture feature that identifies missing Salesforce contacts cc’d on emails or meeting invitations.  Groove helps fill out the buying committee, capturing intelligence around members at the periphery of deals while reducing rep data entry overhead.

Beyond demand unit identification, Auto Contact Capture monitors engagement across the buying committee.  “This ensures that every contact involved in the buying process receives a consistent, timely, and relevant experience from their first engagement,” wrote Groove.

“Now more than ever, businesses need to be able to get a complete picture of their sales pipeline in order to maximize revenue,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein.  “By consolidating revenue intelligence and advanced activity capture into one unified sales engagement platform, Groove empowers businesses to close more deals and intelligently refine their sales processes.”

Groove captures and logs revenue intelligence from emails, calendars, meetings, and LinkedIn communications.  Users control which categories are captured and logged to leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and cases.  While Groove does not offer direct contact enrichment, records can be enriched through subscription partners such as ZoomInfo.

To ensure data integrity, Groove performs duplicate checking that begins with the email but includes additional heuristics.  Groove will not create a contact if the email does not match a domain already existing as an account in Salesforce.  Groove also maintains user and domain-level blocklists to ensure that only relevant business contacts are created via Auto Contact Capture.

Groove does not provide user alerts concerning captured records, but “it’s easy for reps to identify contacts that have been automatically added to Salesforce,” Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein wrote to GZ Consulting.  “Each contact created through Auto Contact Capture has a custom Groove field that is marked as true (Is Created by Groove), allowing for quick analysis and reporting on all contacts created through this new feature.” 

Groove has focused on expanding its revenue intelligence capabilities over the past year.  Recent enhancements include activity sync, reporting, and analytics features.  In March, the firm rolled out real-time opportunity and pipeline management and enhanced ROI reporting.

“Through this expanded capability set, Groove enables revenue leaders to make real-time, data-driven business decisions based on real campaign results at both the individual and team level,” stated Groove. Groove is built natively in Salesforce and uses SFDC as its data store, acting as an engagement layer on top of Salesforce.  Thus, there is no data sync process between Groove and Salesforce.

Groove Activity Capture

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

Slintel Series A

Intent-powered Sales Intelligence vendor Slintel closed on a $20 million round A led by GGV, with participation from Accel, Sequoia, and Stellaris.  The Bengaluru-based company is looking to expand its presence in the US market and strengthen its product.  Slintel, with 100 employees, plans to double its headcount by the end of the year.

The company still has cash from its $4.2 million November seed round but felt it prudent to proceed with an A round earlier than planned.

“We had enough cash in the bank, but investors came to us, and we got a pretty good valuation compared to the previous round, so we decided to take it and use that money to go faster,” said CEO Deepak Anchala.

Revenue grew 5X last year and was on pace to grow 3X before the Series A.  Anchala contends that the growth rate will accelerate with the additional capital.  “With the funding, we’re actually looking at much bigger numbers. We’re looking at 5x in our revenue this year and also trying for 4x revenue next year.”

“Slintel has one of the best go-to-market engines that we’ve seen in any startup, and the consistency with which the team has been able to deliver on their growth targets is commendable.  We’re looking at a company that’s changing the marketing and sales intelligence sphere as we know it, and we couldn’t be happier to be a part of their board,” said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel.

Anchala told TechCrunch that since the round closed six weeks ago, the firm increased its investment in product and marketing.  The advertising budget was increased, with the firm looking to generate prospects via SEO, free tools on the company website, and events.

“The next big wave in the enterprise space is (the) use of AI to rethink processes, and all AI at its core requires data.  I am, therefore, bullish on the entire data stack, including data which is either proprietary or inferred data that is not easy to replicate. Slintel is in the second category. Their ability to predict strong prospects is a relatively unique capability, and it is very easy to sell due to a direct correlation to (the) top line for their customers.”

Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners

The Slintel platform delivers technographic and company insights, buying propensity scores, contacts, and lead enrichment.  Slintel identifies thematic intent signals (i.e., sales triggers) such as upcoming contract renewals, companies that show signs of buying their products online, or companies that use their competitors’ products.  Slintel captures hard to detect signals from the web, combines this with other third-party intent signals from its partners, and surfaces these insights via integrations with Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Slack and Chrome. 

“Our customers no longer waste precious time and effort reaching out to and targeting the wrong prospects,” blogged Anchala.  “They are able to accurately determine who their high-intent buyers are, whether a target account is already using their competitor’s product / service, when the renewal date for a prospect’s current solution is coming up, or the budget restrictions that they have.  All this and more, even before scheduling a discovery call with them.”

Slintel “mines buyer insights,” said Anchala.  “We understand where the buyers are in their journey, what their pain points are, what products they use, what they need, and when they need it. So we understand all of this to create a 360-degree view of the buyer that you provide these insights to sales and marketing teams to help them sell better.”

Technology intent is based upon digital footprint tracking that analyzes when new technologies have been adopted or dropped.  Technographics span 25,000 technologies across fifteen million companies and are updated weekly.  AI models project when contracts come up for renewal, which technologies are likely to be purchased next, and when they will move forward with the purchase.

Thematic intent is based on keyword analysis that suggests company pain points.  Slintel “analyzes how many times companies have been talking about a certain keyword [and] how frequently and recently they have been emitting this pain point.”

Propensity-to-buy scores are derived from over twenty-five variables, including contract renewal dates, technology adoption/churn, keyword Intent, budgetary spending, and hiring trends.

“We have taken a contrarian approach by focusing on the buyer funnel, which is an inverse of the sales funnel,” said Anchala.  “We analyze buyer journeys and buying patterns of companies to capture early signals of buyer intent.”

“While most other data intelligence platforms provide insights based on search patterns, Slintel’s proprietary algorithm provides prospect recommendations based on technographics-powered buying intent,” states the firm.  “Using Slintel, you can predict who’s about to purchase your product and market or sell your product to prospects even before they move on to the research phase of their buying journey.”

Slintel has employees across ten cities in India and the US, with plans to remain a remote-first organization.

Slintel has been growing headcount rapidly over the past two years (Source: LinkedIn).

Slintel also announced that Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, joined their Board of Directors.

“With the global pandemic completely changing the way companies operate, B2B transactions have gone more digital than ever before,” stated Tung.  “Inside sales teams are closing high-value, multi-million-dollar deals while working remotely, and products like Slintel are enabling companies to do this by helping them reimagine their entire sales process for today’s environment.”

Drift Announces Fastlane Webform / Chatbot Hybrid

Revenue Acceleration vendor Drift rolled out a pair of sales enablement tools to facilitate rapid qualification and lead routing: Fastlane lead forms and Sales Seat intent and engagement alerts.

Drift Fastlane transitions a webform into an immediate chat for high-scoring visitors.

Fastlane combines traditional lead forms with chatbots to create “conversational forms.”  Prospects fill out a lead form with contact information enriched, scored, and routed to the Drift chatbot for high-scoring leads.  Thus, high-scoring prospects immediately move to sales rep conversations from the website.

Low scoring leads are passed to nurture or “other automated activations.”

“As a result, sellers can focus on high-converting buyers while routing lower-priority leads to nurture campaigns or other automated activations,” wrote Drift.  “The net outcome results in more qualified sales pipeline, an efficient workflow for sales reps, and overall revenue acceleration for the organization.”

If the buyers are too busy to speak immediately, they can schedule a meeting through the chatbot. Likewise, if the rep isn’t available for chat, the bot can schedule a meeting after collecting additional prospect intelligence.

It may seem odd that a firm that is a #noforms proponent would choose to begin offering forms, but not all marketers are ready to eliminate forms. 

“For most marketers, it’s the number one source of leads that they drive for their sales team.  And if they didn’t have that, sales teams would be on the hook to create nearly all of their own pipeline – which is very inefficient.  So we realized we had to do more.  We have to support our customers in every way that they work. From the inbound motion that relies on forms to the outbound motion for customers who can’t rely on marketing alone to hit their numbers.”

CEO David Cancel

There are also scenarios where a form makes more sense than a bot.  Registering for a webinar works better as a form than a bot as it is transparent about the requisite data entry.  Likewise, enabling forms with optional bots increases their flexibility and value.

Continue to Part II which discusses Sales Seat and the importance of rapid sales responses for inbound leads.

Outreach Closes $200M Round

Sales Engagement Platform vendor Outreach closed on a $200 million financing round that values the firm at $4.4 billion and brings total funding to $489 million.  The round trebled its market cap over the past year.

Premji Invest and STEADFAST Capital Ventures led the round.  Other new investors include Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Vista Public Strategies, and one of the largest U.S. asset managers based on the West Coast.  Existing Outreach investors, including Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine Capital, Sands Capital, Mayfield Fund, DFJ Growth, and Trinity Ventures, also participated in the round.

Outreach continued its rapid growth during the pandemic, with B2B firms looking to operationalize their sales outreach, improve remote coaching, refine forecasts, and monitor sales activities and engagement. 

The firm more than doubled Q1 ARR year-over-year and has signed 18 of the top 24 fastest-growing public software companies.  ARR is around $125 million, according to Nathan Latka.  LinkedIn shows them adding sixty employees a month over the past three months.

Outreach has grown to more than 871 global employees, with recently opened offices in Prague and London.  The firm is based in Seattle and has a San Francisco office.

Data Collected by Nathan Latka based on a June 1, 2021, interview of Manny Medina.

At their Unleash user conference last month, they released their real-time conversational intelligence platform Outreach Kaia along with Outreach Insights, their buyer emotive signals and sentiment service.

Outreach Success Plans, which is currently in beta, was also unveiled at Unleash.  Success Plans align buyers and sellers to improve action and predictability.  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.

“This past year represents a true moment of maturity for Outreach – we are now a mission-critical part of the revenue tech stack for customers. The bets we made years ago, including significant investments in artificial intelligence combined with prospecting, closing, and customer success capabilities integrated into one holistic platform, are what revenue organizations need most right now to be successful. We continue to lead and expand the vision for sales engagement. Now, we are poised to deliver more meaningful business outcomes for our customers than ever before – from the rep to the CRO and from small businesses to the enterprise.”

Outreach CEO Manny Medina

Outreach will deploy the additional funds to expand its sales and marketing functions to meet “the growing demand” for its Sales Engagement Platform.  Funds will also be used to build, acquire, and deliver “new revolutionary technologies.”  Finally, the funds will support expansion plans and new market investments.

“Over the past five years as I’ve served on the board, Outreach emerged as a definitive standard for sales and customer engagement – proven by thousands of companies that use Outreach every day as a critical component of their workflow and their tech stack,” said Karan Mehandru, Managing Director of STEADFAST and Outreach board member. “Companies across every industry are reaccelerating growth and hiring post-pandemic and embracing intelligent automation to power their revenue teams.”

Mehandru told Bloomberg that he expects to see multiple sales software startups succeed with “multiple winners in the category.”  Mehandru likened Outreach to a modern-day Salesforce.

“If (Salesforce CEO) Benioff were to start a sales company today, it would look a lot more like Outreach,” stated Mehandru. Mehandru did not forecast when an IPO would take place but said, “We do think going public is an important event in the company’s cycle.”

Manny Medina LinkedIn Post (June 2, 2021)