Tag: Buying Teams

ZoomInfo Copilot Launched

ZoomInfo Copilot delivers account-based insights, buyer recommendations, and next best actions to sales reps.

ZoomInfo formally launched its Copilot service, which embeds GenAI capabilities within its GTM platform.  The firm claims that Copilot “turns every seller into your best seller.”

Over 20,000 users have participated in the Copilot beta, and “their results and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive.”

ZoomInfo claims its users report being 60% more productive with Copilot. They also reduced time spent on research and manual tasks by ten hours per week, and 71% uncovered new opportunities at existing accounts.

Furthermore, ZoomInfo Copilot surfaced signals related to 45% of the open opportunities in their CRM.

ZoomInfo Copilot improves the efficiency and efficacy of sales reps. (Source: Q1 2024 $ZI earnings presentation).

“In today’s GTM environment, data by itself isn’t enough. Modern sales is becoming a science. It’s not enough to know who your buyer is — you need to know what they care about, exactly when they are in market, and what problems they’re facing right now,” posted ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck on LinkedIn.  “And this information is out there in the form of digital buying signals. We have more information than ever about our buyers, but there’s too much noise.”

While signals such as sales triggers, visitor intelligence, and intent data sets continue to expand in depth and accuracy, delivering them in a coherent, holistic, and actionable way has proven difficult. Simply being told that somebody visited your website or there was an executive change at a prospect isn’t actionable because valuable signals get lost in the noise.  Most individual signals do not assist with prioritization, identifying the buying committee, or writing an email that cuts through inbox noise.  That is why sales assistants such as ZoomInfo Copilot will be warmly greeted.

“We built ZoomInfo Copilot to change that — to push these insights directly to sellers, teeing up outreach for the best leads at exactly the right moment,” continued Schuck. “Copilot turns ZoomInfo from a contact lookup tool into a platform that surfaces the key insights sellers need to take action against each day.”

Copilot also supports AI-guided prospecting that prioritizes sales rep activities on a redesigned home page.  The ranked list of target accounts, based on historical deal analysis, employs sales triggers such as intent signals and executive scoops (ZoomInfo’s term for business events) to prioritize outbound activity.

CRM deal analysis identifies the “DNA of your best-fit customers and uses ZoomInfo’s leading go-to-market data to identify the best-fit accounts for you,” said CPO Dominik Facher.  “Copilot generates natural language explanations of why an account has been prioritized so you have all the context to successfully engage.”

Copilot supports Salesforce and HubSpot for building target account lists, with additional CRMs planned in subsequent releases. Data is ingested from the Opportunity and Account record types.

To further assist prospecting, ZoomInfo surfaces buying committee members “who are most likely to engage,” which admins can curate and push out to their frontline sellers.

Sales Intelligence vendors have long said that their offerings helped reps know “who to call, when to call, and what to say.” However, this data was often raw information that needed to be analyzed by reps and messaged to prospects on an individual account basis. Not only does Copilot prioritize activities across their book of business and suggest the next best actions, but it can even recommend the channels on which individual buyers are most likely to respond.

“Marketers can access a ranked and prioritized list of the companies and buyers in-market, based on millions of signals analyzed and prioritized by ZoomInfo Copilot’s AI every day, directly from the homepage feed,” blogged Schuck. “ZoomInfo Copilot’s intelligent recommendations are presented in the language of today’s sellers to make taking action as easy and intuitive as possible. Users can explore each opportunity in more depth and engage with those opportunities directly from the Homepage Feed.”

Users can select between different persona definitions and filter by CRM presence and “likelihood to engage.”

Copilot sports an AI Email Assistant that employs GenAI to compose messaging around selected insights.

The Copilot includes an AI Email Assistant to simplify outbound, personalized outreach.  Emails are generated based on the seller’s objective, previous account context, additional context offered by the sales rep, and ZoomInfo insights.  The sales rep can select from three generated options and adjust the length or tone.  Users have the option to email one or multiple individuals and can specify which insights should be used when generating the email.

Copilot assists with buying group discovery, “Pulling insights from websites, case studies, earnings call summaries, and many more real-time signals, ZoomInfo Copilot automatically creates buying groups of individuals who are most likely to engage and align with their ideal customer profiles.”

Copilot shortens the time to value for new users by automating personalization, including ICP and persona definition.  Traditionally, new Sales Intelligence platform users spend hours customizing the platform, defining target personas, ICP, companies of interest, topics of interest, etc.  Much of this process is automated by Copilot, allowing sales reps to immediately begin deriving value.

“When someone gets onboarded, we build out what we call a customer context database. We essentially go and do a lot of research on that company, what are their value props? What are their pain points? Who are their end users?  And then we start to infer what topics, buying committees, types of companies that they’re interested in,” ZoomInfo VP of Data Strategy Brandon Tucker explained to GZ Consulting. “And then as they start to engage with the signals, or set some of those configurations on their own, they start to get even more relevant insights.”

ZoomInfo Copilot supports GenAI account queries.

A GenAI chat interface answers account questions, “giving users the answers they need quickly using conversational AI. Users can request answers on a range of account-level topics to get up to speed as quickly as possible.”

Copilot “meets you where you are,” including desktop, weekly email digests, Slack alerts, Chrome extension, and a mobile app.

“ZoomInfo Copilot also allows salespeople to seize time-sensitive opportunities in real-time with Breaking Alerts delivered through Slack,” blogged Schuck. “These alerts can be shared across multiple channels, allowing teams to quickly triage emerging opportunities and act decisively on high-quality intent signals.”

The Personalized Target Account Digest alerts users when prospects are “showing the right signals” and explains why now is a good time for reaching out to the prospect.  Users can drill down into greater detail, compose an email, or export a prospect to the CRM. 

Thus, “signals drive your actions,” said Facher.

ZoomInfo Copilot ingests ZoomInfo’s first- and third-party data to deliver “detailed overviews of specific accounts, including pain points and use cases, upcoming deals, important contacts, a summary of previous engagements, and more.”

“Finding the time to understand every account is a tall ask,” stated Facher.  However, “Copilot effortlessly summarizes the need to know and the nice to know for any account, based on ZoomInfo, your CRM, and the engagements you’ve had with your customers, like emails or calls, to generate a holistic picture of an account’s health, its history, and the opportunity.”

Thus, reps can have a “detailed understanding” of any account “in seconds” and establish a “shared foundation” of account knowledge across the account team.

“Get briefed, get aligned, and get selling,” concluded Facher.

ZoomInfo contends that its Copilot has a significant advantage over other offerings due to the breadth and quality of its reference content and engagement data.

Account AI summarizes the account with multi-dimensional views.

“What sets ZoomInfo’s Copilot apart from any other solution in the market is that it is sitting on top of our AI-ready trusted data foundation that drives decisions, personalization, and confidence,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “AI is only as good as the data it’s built on, and most solutions are layered on top of static CRM data.”

Schuck argued that ZoomInfo is well-positioned in the emerging Copilot space as it offers high-quality data for maintaining enterprise software platforms and grounding its Copilot.  Among its verified data assets are third-party reference data, second-party intent data, and first-party engagement and conversational insights:

  • 110 million global company profiles
  • 410 million contacts
  • Technographics
  • Streaming Intent
  • Scoops (Business Events and Earnings Call/Filings Summaries)
  • Technology Site Intent Partnerships with G2, TrustRadius, and TechnologyAdvice
  • Conversational Sales Transcripts (Chorus)
  • Chat Transcripts
  • Websights (Visitor ID)
  • MarketingOS engagement data

“Copilot takes signals like website visitors, spikes in job postings, earnings call transcripts, contract renewal dates, and expert calls that indicate spending or competitive threats, then uses advanced entity resolution and matching to combine them with customers’ first-party data,” stated Schuck on ZoomInfo’s recent earnings call. “It then applies AI technology to model and inform users immediately about which companies are in the market for their product and how and why you should engage with them.

“For our customers, understanding firmographics alone is not sufficient to understand whether or not your next buyer is about to be in-market for your product,” continued Schuck. “It’s only when you surround that core data with signals that you’re able to predict who your next customer should be.”

ZoomInfo feeds data and buyer signals into Copilot to identify the right buyer during the buyer research process.

Copilot looks to identify in-market accounts and buyers during the research phase, relying on a broad set of hidden buyer signals (e.g., intent, competitive research, job postings, earnings calls, website visits) before the buyer raises their hand.  The research window is the period during which sales and marketing have the greatest opportunity to influence the problem framing and preliminary vendor list.

But cold-calling into the TAM absent signals is very wasteful, as roughly only 10% of the ICP is in the market.

“Very few of the buyers that you’re looking for are in-market during the time you’re looking at them, and the ability to pinpoint those isn’t very easy today,” explained Product Marketing SVP Jam Khan to GZ Consulting.  “So you can use predictive analytics.  You can make your best guess when you have a fairly broken MQL system. ABM vendors have tried to come up with a different point of view, but it doesn’t quite replace the MQL.”

Copilot looks to identify the “chasm of opportunity” between signal generation and the first point of contact.

“The bridge we’re trying to gap is the difference between being first in a deal and being second in a deal,” argued Khan. “You’re never going to have a crystal ball that lets you anticipate before a buyer ever even starts making their decision. But that short little window is the difference between winning and losing.”

Copilot looks to “solve for the chasm” and give sales teams a first-mover advantage.  While this “window of opportunity is really small,” it is the difference between hitting .200 and .300, analogized Khan.  “To the extent where you’re able to act on those, that’s the difference between hitting your number and missing your number.”

Thus, other GenAI or Copilot offerings that pull data from the CRM face a trio of problems when generating recommendations. CRM data is limited to what has been keyed into it. As this data is historical (and reps hate maintaining CRM data), it is likely to be outdated, stale, and inaccurate.

“Third, it lacks the outside signals and insights that drive modern go-to-market motions. ZoomInfo Copilot delivers a full picture built on the foundation of the world’s most accurate and up-to-date business data, publishes real-time insights, and turns that into personalized and relevant content,” stated Schuck.

“Copilot is one of the best pieces of software we built at ZoomInfo, across ease-of-use, end-to-end understanding of our customers’ pain points and product market fit. We have had leading AI models in production for years,” crowed Schuck.  “We expect to monetize Copilot and we’ll roll it out in a thoughtful way, focusing first on the customers who are most likely to get significant value out of the advanced platform. Our go-to-market teams are excited to bring this to their customers, and I have a lot of conviction around the upgrade paths in our customer base.”

Earnings Scoops, the latest content set to be collected and fed into Copilot, extend ZoomInfo’s technology and business event Scoops into SEC filing analysis.  The service ingests 10-Ks (annual), 8-Ks (Material announcements), international filings, and earnings transcripts. It then outputs a set of condensed topical summaries.  Earnings Scoops leverage GenAI to analyze customer and prospect competitors, goals, initiatives, pain points, and SWOT elements.  They are also fed into its beta Copilot service.

Earnings Scoops are assigned metatags from a set of 150 Scoops topics that assist with searching and Copilot customization.  This additional tagging helps tailor Scoop presentation to each firm’s ICP and is displayed in a Scoops Topics column (see a subset of topics from Meta’s recent earnings on the right).

“Many organizations still struggle to provide frontline sellers with actionable go-to-market insights distilled from the myriad of available signals,” said IDC Analyst Roger Beharry Lall. “While AI can sift through mountains of data, solutions must be built on a foundation of fresh, accurate, and clean data in order to deliver meaningful intelligence. Suppliers like ZoomInfo that can combine robust data sets with novel AI capabilities will help customers lead their markets by enabling engagement to the right people with the right message at precisely the right moment.”

While Schuck is confident in Copilot and ZoomInfo’s ability to monetize it, Schuck does not believe it will significantly grow revenue in H2.

“It’s going to take longer than that. I have a lot of confidence because I personally pitched this product across dozens of our customers, across all segments, and all industries,” argued Schuck.  “From a product market fit, I don’t think we’ve been ever so close to fit as we have been with Copilot, outside of the core company and contact data. And so, I have a tremendous amount of confidence that we’re going to be able to turn that enthusiasm into monetization, but I also expect it to happen over time.”

The Homepage prioritizes accounts with next best action recommendations.

Vidyard Rooms

Vidyard Rooms Invitation and Security Levels

Vidyard formally launched its Vidyard Rooms digital sales room (DSR) to beta.  Vidyard Rooms are available at no charge for both free and subscription clients.  However, Vidyard plans to introduce paid DSR plans in the future.

Vidyard Rooms support personalized videos, tailored demonstrations, recorded meetings, documents, and proposals.  Users can comment on and tag content.  Sellers are notified when new buyers join the room and when content is consumed.

“At Vidyard, we are always looking for ways to help sellers and go-to-market teams create more productive relationships with their buyers,” said COO Jonathan Lister.  “With Vidyard Rooms, we are doing just that – empowering sales professionals to build personal relationships at scale and educate key stakeholders in a way that is timely, convenient, and collaborative.”

Vidyard described it as the first “video-first DSR,” but I’m not sure that video-first provides a significant value add as all DSRs support video (and many include chat).  There are three primary values of DSRs:

  1. Collaboration
  2. Expedited deal onboarding and journey stage transition (i.e., looping in the legal department or handing off from an account manager to a customer success manager).
  3. Engagement metrics. 

There is also a latent opportunity for building out the demand unit, but vendors have not focused on that.  None of these requires a video-first platform but building out the demand unit and engagement metrics call for the DSR to be native to an SEP, ABX platform, or Revenue Intelligence platform that ingests multi-channel signals.  Furthermore, Vidyard is integrated with most of the major vendors in these categories.

As such, Vidyard Rooms are likely to be used primarily by SMBs and in enterprise sales segments that have deployed asynchronous video but not cutting-edge RevTech platforms.

“Demand for Digital Sales Rooms is up 325% year-over-year as post-pandemic digitalization and a shift towards efficient growth put pressure on sales teams to transform the way they work with buyers,” said GTM Partners Chief Analyst Bryan Brown.  “With its unique video-first approach, Vidyard Rooms is a compelling new solution in this emerging market that aims to make digital sales rooms more personal, engaging, and helpful to buyers.”

Vidyard Rooms act as a centralized hub for sharing deal artifacts with stakeholders.

Nektar.AI Exits Stealth Mode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nektar activity tracking at the account level

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

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

Outreach Guide

Outreach announced the general availability of Outreach Guide, its new revenue intelligence and deal management solution.  Guide provides real-time conversation intelligence, best practice action plans, and “deal health at a glance.”  Outreach also announced administrative enhancements to its Engage product and a “deep integration” with ABX Platform 6sense.

Outreach Guide, Engage, and Commit act as the “foundation” of Outreach’s sales execution platform, supporting revenue organizations across the full customer sales cycle “from prospecting for new business opportunities to deal management to sales forecasting.”

Outreach’s Customer Lifecycle loop.

Outreach aims to create a “single system of execution” that helps revenue organizations meet their full potential and address issues with prospecting, deal management, and forecasting.

To help address this “sales execution gap,” Machine learning models “learn from the actions taken in our platform and generate data-driven, predictive, real-time insights that recommend actions for users to take to improve their sales execution,” said CEO Manny Medina.

Outreach Guide supports three core capabilities:

  • Deal Health Scores: The Deal Health Score employs machine learning to predict deal health.  It also provides deal insights, recommended actions, and where to focus.  In addition, deal Health displays positive and negative indicators (e.g., stuck in current stage, no recent inbound emails, recent executive engagement). 

    Deal Health signals deals at risk to both the sales rep and sales management, providing an opportunity to address problems and adjust forecasts.

    Deal Health scores can be viewed in the aggregate as well, providing a neutral perspective on how each deal is proceeding versus comparable opportunities.

    Deal Health scores are currently in beta.
  • Kaia Real-time assistance and conversation intelligence: Kaia offers real-time call transcription, content cards, and context-based rep enablement during Zoom and Microsoft teams meetings.  After meetings, Kaia streamlines meeting summaries with AI-captured action items and follow-ups.  As a result, Outreach claims rep productivity increases by nearly 30%, and the likelihood of scheduling a follow-up meeting jumps by 36%.

    Kaia is linguistically customized for each client, capturing product names and competitors as keywords.  During a call, content cards display real-time sales aides, such as product summaries or technical notes.  Content cards provide quick cheat sheets on product value, pricing, or integrations (see the example on the right).

    By removing notetaking and displaying content cards, Kaia allows sales reps to be more present during calls and pitch with greater confidence;  instead of pausing a meeting to jot down notes, sales reps can quickly add a bookmark or short meeting note.
  • Automated and collaborative purchasing through Success Plans: Success Plans foster collaboration between buyers and sellers with detailed online purchase action plans that include a timeline, success criteria, resources, and team views.  Collaborative action plans align stakeholders, build buyer trust, ensure timely stakeholder engagement, and provide internal stakeholders with prospect engagement and deal progress.  Outreach claims that reps who closely monitor Success Plans enjoy a 13% bump in close rates.

“The buying team has all the information related to the deal in a central place, and all teams are aligned to clearly understand each other’s goals, interactions, and requirements essential for driving long-term success, delivering an unparalleled buying experience throughout the entire selling process,” stated Director of Product Marketing Elizabeth Dailing.

Furthermore, Success Plans are available to Customer Success teams when onboarding new customers, helping streamline handoffs.

The Team view helps track who is involved from the buying team and how engaged they are, how recently they were engaged, and what content they viewed.

Outreach Guide is designed to address the “Sales Execution Gap.”

Outreach also announced a set of administrative and data privacy enhancements to its Engage service:

  1. Trigger Enhancements – A streamlined trigger builder improves the creation, management, and discovery of triggers.  The refreshed trigger builder is aligned with traditional CRM language and supports multiple values per condition, drag-and-drop action reordering, and simplified condition group creation.
  2. New Outlook-Add In – A native integration lets reps ‘Send’ emails from Outlook and send and sync “relevant emails to Outreach, as well as insert their available times or add a link to their calendar.”  Outreach will also flag opted-out communications in Outlook and prevent them from being sent or added to a sequence.
  3. Microsoft Graph Integration
  4. Data Retention in Outreach Voice Recordings – Admins can configure data retention policies such as deleting data as a one-time event or setting up regular data deletions for Outreach Voice Recordings.

Additionally, Outreach announced an Irish Datacenter for Outreach Engage, meeting EU data residency requirements for GDPR compliance. “The EU Datacenter for Outreach Engage allows an organization’s data to be stored in a specific geographic location,” blogged Caroline Shin, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Outreach.  “This means customer-owned data associated with those Outreach instances including prospects, accounts, organizations, and workflow data such as sequences and meetings will be stored and contained within the EU infrastructure.”

LinkedIn Q4 Sales Navigator Release (Part II)

LinkedIn also addressed the lack of sharing of Sales Navigator Account Maps in its Q4 release.  The value of maps is much greater if they can be shared across the sales and customer success teams.  Sales reps will skip activities that do not have a clear return on investment (i.e., they expedite the sales process, increase the odds of a win, reduce bureaucratic steps, etc.)  Sharing account maps across the team dramatically increases their value and encourages reps to invest the necessary time mapping out the account.  Sharing also assists with account handoffs between SDRs to Account Reps and later to Customer Success teams.

“Selling is a team sport, and we know that team members need to be in the loop and connected on key accounts, especially as changes to the buying committee may be greater and more frequent right now,” wrote Senior Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions Mitali Pattnaik.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account Maps

Account Maps are available to Team and Enterprise licensors.  However, Account Maps may only be shared with co-workers on the same Sales Navigator contract; thus, partners or co-workers with separate Sales Navigator agreements still lack map sharing. 

When others update a shared Account Map, everybody is notified of the update.

Those with CRM sync turned on (Advanced + CRM in January) will enjoy additional CRM features.  Users will be able to create new leads or contacts “in more places within Sales Navigator to better match up with their workflows” and display additional context.  New features include

  • New CRM Cards within Sales Navigator Lead Pages
  • New CRM Badges that notify reps when an account or lead is matched against the CRM
  • Clicking on the CRM Badge provides additional context on Sales Navigator Leads and Accounts from the matched CRM record. For Sales Navigator Leads not found in CRM, a user can create a CRM Contact or Lead.
  • CRM Badges are now displayed in the InMail and Messaging Flow.

LinkedIn will be rolling out Q4 enhancements to customers in the coming weeks, as with other quarterly releases.

LinkedIn also announced updates to LinkedIn Sales Intelligence (LSI), its data service for Sales Operations.  LSI leverages the power of LinkedIn data to “help sales target the right companies and accelerate revenue.”  Launched earlier this year, LSI supports report building, account recommendations, and Account data enrichment.

Sales Operations now has access to industry codes aligned with the NAICS industry taxonomy used in the US, Canada, and Mexico.  Other enhancements include a new welcome flow and access to saved reports on the home page.

LinkedIn Sales Intelligence Report Builder

To assist with report building, a set of LSI Tool-Tips assist with defining Sources, Personas, Market Insights, and Exports.

LinkedIn Q4 Sales Navigator Release

The new Sales Navigator home page.

LinkedIn began rolling out its Q4 Sales Navigator release last month.  New functionality includes a reimagined home page, Priority Accounts, and Account Map sharing.  According to LinkedIn, the revised home page helps address the “moving target” that is buying team discovery during The Great Reshuffle.

“We’re in the middle of The Great Reshuffle, and 80% of salespeople have delayed or lost a deal because of a job change within an account. Selling right now is a moving target. This means, maybe more than ever, that quality data is non-negotiable, real-time alerts are critical, and knowing your buyers and what’s important to them is essential.”

Mitali Pattnaik, Senior Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions

Not only are buying committees becoming larger, but the movement of professionals increases the likelihood that key members of the demand unit depart during the sales cycle.  Reps that are blind to such changes are likely to have lost or delayed deals.

Furthermore, buyers have been inundated with messages, making it more challenging to rise above the din.  According to LinkedIn Associate Product Marketing Manager Angel Gonzalez, reps need to personalize their outreach as there is a 30% decline in buyer response rates compared to pre-COVID.

“Our new Sales Navigator home page showcases customized insights for key accounts that you need to focus on right now,” posted LinkedIn Senior Director for Product Mitali Pattnaik.   “Alongside a new look and feel for the home page, the refreshed Alerts Feed helps you filter to the most relevant, timely, and accurate updates, pinpointing alerts that need immediate action. And, for those updates you want to keep an eye on, a newly created ‘Bookmarked Alerts’ tab allows you to save alerts so you can revisit at any time.”

The new home page was redesigned to present “what’s most important to each individual seller at that moment,” including intelligence on priority accounts, direct access to Account Maps, and better alert filters.

Other new features include upgraded typeahead searching and alert bookmarking.

A few features have been downgraded in scope or removed, including Sales Navigator Coach and Recommended Leads and Accounts.

The new home page is available to all users.

Reps can flag priority accounts with recent engagement and growth metrics on the home page.

Priority Accounts allows sellers with large books of business such as territory or industry reps to flag their key accounts, helping ensure critical accounts receive greater attention.  Users simply “star” accounts in their saved account list for priority display.  Account activity is then displayed in a new home page section labeled Priority Accounts that summarizes headcount growth, employee count, open opportunities, and Buyer Intent.  Users can also click directly to Account Maps.

Continue to Part II which discusses Sales Navigator Account Map sharing and LinkedIn Sales Intelligence enhancements.

TechTarget: Priority Engine Enhancements

TechTarget announced a set of enhancements to its Priority Engine Sales Intelligence platform, including second-party intent data from its BrightTALK digital event platform and a refreshed user experience. As a result, TechTarget now provides intent data for 32 million opted-in technology researchers and purchasers across twice as many accounts.

Millions of BrightTALK contacts are fully integrated into Priority Engine, providing intelligence around individuals actively researching technology purchases at BrightTALK webinars, virtual events, and videos.  The expanded content provides richer intent data with additional messaging hooks for sales reps.

Prospect-level insights include content preferences, recently viewed content, and each buying committee member’s top interests.

Prospect Insights provide rich details for messaging.

BrightTALK was acquired twelve months ago.  BrightTALK hosts 30,000 new webinars and videos each year, providing multi-media content that complements TechTarget’s text-based research content.  Prospect-level BrightTALK intent data and buyer contact intelligence are now being combined with second-party intent data from TechTarget’s 140+ enterprise technology media sites, bringing the combined pool of buyers and influencers to 32 million.  As these individuals are opted-in, intent data can be tied to the individual instead of the account, allowing for improved messaging and targeting.  Not only is the enterprise software topic collected, but TechTarget gathers competitors under consideration and buying journey stage.  Furthermore, opted-in contact data ensures that the shared contact intelligence is GDPR and CCPA compliant.

BrightTALK Prospect Insights include webinar registrations, views, view times, webinar types, and titles.

BrightTALK Intent data indicates which content was viewed and the duration the demand unit member spent viewing the content.

TechTarget noted that buyers and influencers have distinct digital research styles, with some preferring multi-media content and others opting for white papers and related text-based reports and articles.  Thus, bringing in BrightTALK significantly expanded TechTarget’s ability to identify buyer intent based on different learning preferences.

“Despite strong similarities in overall audience makeup (company size, industry, and job title/function are remarkably consistent), there’s only a 10%-20% overlap in members between the databases, depending on geo,” wrote TechTarget SVP of Products Andrew Briney in April.

“Learning preference and behavior is quite different for members of BrightTALK,” continued Briney.  “While the content topics, focus, and quality is [SIC] very similar to what’s offered on the TechTarget network, BrightTALK members prefer the immersive, interactive learning experiences delivered by webinars (85%) and videos (61%) over downloadable PDF content like whitepapers (47%) and e-Books (42%). Given this preference, it’s not surprising BrightTALK members average more than 30 minutes in view-time per webinar/video.”

Priority Engine Personalized Rankings view

The enhancements also provide insights into “overall buyer content preferences (content type and topic), and interactions with customer content across multiple channels help inform more personalized sales outreach and marketing engagement strategies.”

“Priority Engine delivers the actionable purchase intent data our customers need to drive superior performance.  This new release gets exponentially more data into their hands and gives them the ability to deliver customized experiences their marketers and sellers need to thrive.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

UI enhancements include a new view that calls out “untapped, high potential accounts” for initial engagement in a rep’s territory.  There is also a new timeline for viewing account journeys and recent engagement.  The new timeline helps reps “easily monitor buying changes to better optimize pipeline, identify cross-sell/upsell opportunities and grow revenue.”

Other UI changes include a set of shortcuts located in the left-side navigation bar.  The shortcuts display the following user views:

  • Top Accounts – The 500 most active accounts and prospects (default view)
  • Untapped Potential – Accounts or prospects with whom the rep has not yet interacted in Priority Engine
  • Viewed your Content – Accounts or prospects that have viewed or downloaded company content syndicated through TechTarget’s content syndication program
  • Visited your Website – Accounts that have visited the company’s website (Inbound Converter)
  • Confirmed Projects – Any projects that TechTarget has confirmed are active in the rep’s territory based on direct outreach
  • Favorites – Accounts or prospects that you have selected to favorite in Priority Engine

Finally, the platform now contains separate modules that support sales and marketing use cases.

The Highlights view provides buying journey interactions and new contacts at top accounts.

The Great Reshuffle

According to LinkedIn, “The Great Reshuffle” has increased turnover amongst buyers and sellers, leading to greater deal risk.  Over the past three months, executive departures (Director and above) have increased by 31% globally.  Among sales reps, the rate is up 39%.  Thus, the likelihood of a deal being delayed due to a key member of the demand unit or sales team leaving has grown sharply.

Before the pandemic, the standard decay rate of contact records was between 25 and 30%.  If the rate has jumped by one-third, then the likelihood of a specific member of the buying committee departing over a three-month sales cycle is approaching ten percent.  Thus, a demand unit with six members will likely have one departure every three months, increasing the need for executive change alerts, multithreading of deals, and a deeper understanding of the demand unit.

If the deal is more complex, the odds of delays and stalled deals due to executive changes increase rapidly.  A six-month deal cycle with a dozen members of the demand unit (financial, technical, and functional decision-makers, purchasers, influencers, lawyers, compliance, etc.) could lose two or three members.  And that doesn’t even factor in the risk of churn on the vendor side.  What’s worse, single-threaded sales reps have close to a 20% risk that their champion leaves the company or assumes a different role over the deal lifecycle.

The renewal math becomes scary as well.  If the customer success team regularly interfaces with four individuals on the customer side, one or two of them may depart over the year, increasing churn risk.  Furthermore, a higher churn rate among customers necessitates greater administrative and training tasks.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that 80% of sales reps have had a deal delayed or lost due to departures.

LinkedIn Senior Director of Global Sales James Burnette argued that multithreading is key to managing deal risk.  “Multithreading – i.e., forming relationships with multiple people on the buying committee at an account – is always a best practice.”  Burnette noted that sellers with at least four connections at an account are “16% more likely to close a deal with that company, compared to sellers who have less than four connections.”

“The most beneficial thing you can do right now is to learn how to master multithreading,” JB Sales Training Director Morgan Ingram said. “Gathering champions, influencers, and talking directly to the decision-makers is the key to success when it comes to closing deals faster in a difficult environment.”

Conversely, departures can foster relationships at new accounts, so knowing that a key demand unit member has departed is important for both risk mitigation at current opportunities and accounts and building relationships at new organizations.  LinkedIn can both flag executive departures and maintain an open line of communications with a champion after he or she has settled into a new position.

“Resources are scant with so many people exiting key roles, so there are opportunities where they might not have been opportunities in the past,” Assist You CEO Robert Knop said. “Look through your connections – there are uncovered sales there.”

Lori Wizdo, Principal Analyst at Forrester, predicts that the Great Resignation will also impact marketing teams, with CMOs assembling more virtual teams consisting of freelance talent, fractional executives, and agency partners.

“We’re seeing clients in places like the Midwest having trouble keeping the talent they’ve built because their team members can get 25% more by working remotely for a New York agency. The distance and untethering from our geographies give people a lot more options, and they will minimize their pain and maximize their gain.  So, there will be some stress on those internal competencies.”

Job turnover is likely to continue in the near term. The labor market remains out of balance with 100 open jobs for every 75 unemployed professionals, driving the quit rate to 4.4 million in September, a record high.

“You’re essentially seeing demand continuing to increase without an offsetting increase in talent,” Ryan Sutton, a district director at staffing company Robert Half International. “Until some new talent comes in, until we get employees who are on the sidelines back into the market, it’s very likely this is going to continue.”

Chili Events

The name of the game in Revenue Acceleration is Digital Engagement. There are many forms of engagement that are now being captured (emails, chat, meetings, webinars, etc.), but offline events seemed to be beyond the scope of capture; however, Chili Piper, the calendaring company, has designed tools for scheduling meetings at trade shows and from trade show floors.

The new Chili Events service offers an “all-in-one Event Meetings Management solution for generating more meetings and maximizing ROI from in-person conferences and trade shows.”  In short, Chili is looking to facilitate meetings and gather engagement data from in-person events.

As in-person events return, it is vital to gather registration data as event attendees are likely to be part of the demand unit.  According to Chili Piper, “81% of conference and trade show attendees have buying authority.”

“In-person events are hugely important for B2B revenue teams,” said Chili Piper CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe.  “With Chili Events, we’re making it possible for marketing and sales to not just automate booking conference and trade show meetings with key prospects and customers, but to treat those meetings like any other digital touchpoint in the customer journey, with quantifiable results and data.”

Chili Event Reminders support a rescheduling link.

Chili Events features include URLs to pre-book meetings, meeting space availability, unified meeting calendars, automated reminders and rescheduling via email and SMS, and an event management dashboard.  Chili Events are integrated with GSuite and Outlook365. Additionally, check-ins and no-shows are synced to Salesforce Campaigns.

Chili Events also supports meeting scheduling from trade booth floors via QR codes for mobile phones, computers at the booth, or register on the prospect’s behalf via Chili’s Instant Booker Scheduler.

Engagement intelligence supports multiple revenue acceleration features including engagement scoring, deal health signals, and deal risk alerts. It can also be used to identify and upload missing contacts in the CRM and build out the buying committee.

Terminus Acquires Zylotech

Terminus acquired Boston-based B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP) Zylotech and immediately launched the rebranded Terminus CDP as part of its ABM Platform. 

Terminus CDP will be led by Matt Belkin, who has “25 years of experience in building and scaling data and technology companies.”  Belkin joined Terminus last year when it acquired Sales Intelligence vendor GrowFlare.

Zylotech CTO Abhi Yadav will be Terminus’ Head of Platform Development.  Yadav is also a Guest Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.

The deal is Terminus’ fifth acquisition, backing up Gartner’s SalesTech Mayhem thesis that a handful of companies are quickly grabbing market share through strategic acquisitions and high levels of internal investment that fill missing capabilities.

Terminus’ acquisitions have focused on expanding the core capabilities of the company, not taking out competitors.  The other acquisitions were

Terminus Acquisition History

While CDPs are generally deployed to create a single view of the customer, David Raab, Founder of CDP Institute, commented that the Terminus CDP “will tie together the data silos that would otherwise result” from the acquisitions.

“CDP is becoming more widely adopted in B2B, as companies recognize their marketing automation and CRM systems are not enough to provide true data unification and sharing,” said Raab.  “By acquiring Zylotech, Terminus positions itself – and its clients – to take full advantage of the capabilities that a CDP provides.”

While data usage and spending are rapidly increasing, few marketers trust their data.  A 2017 Forrester survey found that only 12% of B2B marketers have high confidence in their data accuracy, and 84% identified data management as a top-five weakness.

“The key to a successful CDP is trust,” blogged Zylotech Director of Revenue Marketing Alex Bistran in August.  “Sales, marketing, and customer experience teams need to trust the data stored in their CDP to drive decisions, whether it’s deciding which accounts require immediate attention or which campaign messaging is most likely to resonate with a particular customer. By constantly refreshing data from your own customer interactions and combining it with validated, third-party B2B data to accurately reflect your contacts and accounts, a CDP provides a clean stream of actionable data that can be operationalized to flow through your marketing, sales, and customer service channels.  And, importantly, that can lead to a healthier revenue stream too.”

“B2B CRM data is painfully inaccurate and incomplete, and manual efforts to clean, deduplicate, and activate are slow and expensive.  This leads to poor conversion rates, an incomplete view of buying committees, and misleading ROI,” stated the firm.

“Bad data in equals bad data out. Period. We’re entering a marketing revolution – data really is the new oil, and Terminus is sitting on a gold mine. Under Matt’s leadership, Terminus CDP is poised to change the game for our customers. This level of data accuracy is critical for B2B GTM teams looking for a unified view into their customers. I’ve never been more excited about the future of marketing.”

Terminus CEO Tim Kopp

The Terminus CDP addresses the issues of bad data with auditing, cleansing, enrichment, and data management capabilities “backed by the industry’s largest global network of decision-makers and Buying Committees.”  Furthermore, Terminus CDP “dramatically” improves data accuracy, campaign effectiveness, and “wasted sales cycles.”

Buying Committee discovery is a novel UVP for a CDP but fits well within a broader ABM Platform umbrella. 

“We are in the golden age of marketing.  The breadth of technologies helping us create great experiences has never been so impressive.  But, what are all those customer experiences predicated on?  Data,” blogged Kopp.  “With Terminus CDP, our customers will have their most important account and contact data continuously cleansed and enriched. The result: our customers will be able to put their trust in their data, unleashing their go-to-market teams to accurately engage buying committees every time.”

Continued Kopp, “We’re entering a marketing revolution.  A time when sales and marketing teams don’t have to worry about data and can dedicate their energy to create phenomenal experiences that turn into pipeline.  I have never been more excited about the future of marketing.”

“Since our early days as an MIT spinout, Zylotech has been focused on delivering the data and intelligence go-to-market teams can trust and take action on,” said Yadav.  “Upon meeting Terminus, it was obvious that we shared a common vision. We are proud to join Terminus and this incredible team to jointly improve the accuracy of B2B data.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Kopp described it as a “big deal” that is a “really, really important acquisition.”  The Indianapolis Business Journal said that Zylotech was its largest deal to date.  The transaction was financed with funds from a $90 February venture round.

Enterprise clients include Google, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Dell, and Rimini Street.