Tag: Conversational Intelligence

Flash: Clari Acquires Groove

Revenue Platform vendor Clari announced the acquisition of Sales Engagement Platform Groove this morning.  The transaction is expected to close on August 21.  No deal details were released.

“This is the most transformative day of our history,” Clari CEO Andy Byrne told VentureBeat. “It’s a big acquisition for us.  When we started this company, our thesis was grounded in the belief that AI would revolutionize how businesses manage revenue. More specifically, our vision was to assist CEOs in answering the critical question of whether they would meet or miss revenue targets.  We aimed to offer a predictive solution to address the common issue of revenue leaks that many companies face. Our goal was to help them achieve what we call revenue precision.”

The courtship began two years ago when Clari customers began asking about Groove. Around the same time, Groove was implemented internally. The firms launched a Groove / Clari integration last year with a strong UVP.

The deal brings the firms closer to creating a full customer lifecycle platform, with Groove supporting Sales Engagement and Engagement Analytics alongside Clari’s Conversational Intelligence (Clari Copilot), Digital Sales Room, and Revenue Operations capabilities.  Clari will recommend sales actions that limit revenue leakage, which reps can execute in Groove without switching applications.  Groove engagement data will be fed back into Clari, helping identify deals at risk.

“Most CEOs have a tough time answering the most important question in business: ‘Will we meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  By bringing together Clari and Groove, revenue leaders can implement their revenue collaboration and governance strategy across all internal and external workflows, giving them full visibility and control over the company’s most important business process – Revenue.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Clari’s vision is to “bring the entire revenue process into one unified platform so our clients can consolidate, simplify, [and] accelerate” their go-to-market.

According to Clari CMO Kyle Coleman, every CRO, CFO, and CEO he has spoken with over the last six months has emphasized the need to consolidate, simplify, and accelerate their revenue cycle.

“We’re really excited to be able to lean onto this macro trend of consolidation.  But it’s not just consolidating for the sake of saving money.  It’s consolidating for the sake of reducing complexity, simplifying, and improving your revenue results,” Coleman explained to GZ Consulting.  He is ”really confident” in the firm’s expanded capabilities and sees them as “exactly what revenue teams [want] right now.”

From 2013 until 2021, Clari focused on building revenue reporting and a revenue database (RevDB) with time series data.  Information is gathered from CRMs, emails, calendars, etc., with Groove soon feeding its activity data.  RevDB also ingests external data from data warehouses and Clari’s digital sales room functionality.  Data is stored and analyzed in RevDB with support for six products:

“Clari’s RevDB architecture has been a long-term investment by Clari and is the secret sauce that powers the company’s unmatched revenue AI (RevAI) capabilities,” stated Clari.  “With Groove added to the Clari portfolio, revenue teams will get real-time insights and suggested actions across every revenue workflow to create and convert more pipeline, while company leaders will be able to see every input, tie every activity to results, and precisely predict revenue outcomes.”

Clari with Groove brings together six product categories to serve the full revenue team.

“We’re augmenting the CRM with information that reps are never going to create manually.  And then we’re pulling that into our database to build our machine learning and AI models,” explained Coleman.

Last year, Clari acquired Conversational Sales Platform Wingman and added it to its deal monitoring and analytics workflows.  The integrated service was recently rebranded Clari Copilot.

“It expanded the workflows that we’re running for revenue teams, bringing call recordings into the flow of work,” remarked Coleman.  “You can actually hear and see what the customer is saying…Making CI less of a call recording solution for a call center and really more of a purpose-built solution for revenue teams.  While we’re doing that, we’re also adding this whole new dataset into the revenue database that makes us very capable for NLP and prescriptive AI…The RevAI capabilities we have made us capable of recording all these new AI use cases…We have all these different types of AI that we leverage across the platform.  We have the predictive components.  We have the generative components, and we have the natural language processing.  And we’re finding the right ways to expose that…in the flow of a rep’s work [and] in the flow of an executive’s work, so they’re actually getting the insight they need when they need it.”

Groove, already a Clari partner, allows sales reps to go from forecast and deal risk alerts to integrated actions, providing feedback loops and recommendations as a “closed loop of Insight and Action.”

When I spoke to the firms last year about their partnership, they presented an excellent joint value proposition presentation.  This messaging continued forward into their acquisition briefing.

A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them.  Revenue leaks exist across the entire revenue lifecycle.  For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time by Clari, allowing reps to take action via Groove to bring the deal back on track. 

When Clari identifies a deal slipping for competitive reasons, it can suggest a play be executed in Groove.  Likewise, Clari can identify sub-par win rates, overly generous discounting, and low conversion rates for early-stage opportunities.

As Groove is native to Salesforce, it records all activities in real time, providing “full-funnel forecasting” and analytics to Salesforce and Clari.  Groove activity will also begin feeding into Clari’s RevDB time-series activities and conversations database.

“We can tie our campaigns through to revenue in Salesforce, and that is something that they (Groove’s competitors) cannot do,” argued Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant.  “Then all of that rich data, tying engagement through to revenue, is pulled into Clari and used in the analysis, and that is available today.”

Coleman explained that while you can’t win a deal at any moment, you can certainly break a deal.  And once a deal is lost, “it’s very difficult to un-lose” it.  Thus, “if you don’t do the right thing at the right time – handle the right objection or pull the right person in or do the right kind of follow-up” – the deal could be jeopardized.  Therefore, “handling revenue critical moments expertly and in a prescribed way” and governed by best practices is critical in addressing revenue leaks.

“Having all of that insight into all these moments that exist and then having confidence that every one of your employees is going to be able to execute on them?  Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.

Clari customers benefit from a consolidated selling platform for prospecting and engagement.  The platform will turn insight into action, allowing sales reps to kick off a Groove Flow immediately.  They will also better understand “top-of-the-funnel effectiveness and tie it to down-funnel results.”

Clari customers “can use it [Groove] both to fill the funnel and execute the funnel, turning insights into action in real-time – closing that loop and knowing what’s happening at the top of the funnel.”  Revenue teams can tie activities to revenue results and “hone and change” their revenue process.

Groove customers also benefit from platform unification as they prioritize activities, simplify forecasting, and enjoy a better understanding of deal status.  They will leverage analytics that tie activity to revenue impact, thus improving outcome predictions.

Furthermore, leaders will receive “end-to-end visibility of the revenue process by connecting sales engagement with conversion.”

“The goal is to consolidate all revenue-critical technology for all revenue-critical employees,” stated Coleman.  While the focus is on supporting the revenue team, Clari is finding that other stakeholders, such as finance and product management, also benefit from the ability to track sales activity.

For antitrust reasons, Clari has not discussed pricing with Groove for the six products but expects to have it locked down by the end of the month.  Reps will be quickly trained on the combined offering, and a unified team will be at Dreamforce.

“We’re bringing all of our quota carriers together for a two-day super deep dive – everything you need to know about the Groove product [and] everything you need to know about the combined platform.  We don’t want our sales reps to show up uninformed when they take the first meetings, and we expect there to be a healthy amount of demand coming in for this combination,” explained Coleman.  “We’re on this path to be a truly multi-product company.  And part of that journey is creating a true co-sell playbook.  When does it make sense to sell the full platform?  When should it be Groove standalone?  When should it be Groove plus Copilot?”

“The ultimate goal from a Go-to-Market standpoint is to be the single revenue platform that’s used by all revenue employees,” continued Coleman.  “We feel really good about this vision that we have to be the most used platform.”

Clari already has $1.5 trillion in revenue under management and over 1,500 customers.

Groove co-founders Chris Rothstein and Austin Wang will join Clari and oversee the Groove product line’s strategy, product direction, and customer success.

“I’m incredibly excited about the power of combining Clari’s Revenue Platform with Groove’s best-in-class pipeline creation and conversion capabilities,” said Rothstein.  “Together, we will create more pipeline and enable sellers to act on opportunities with incredible speed and effectiveness.  Revenue teams are looking to win more, faster — and Groove and Clari are bringing the rocket fuel.”

The first stage of the Groove integration is planned for October.

“This acquisition will create a sense of urgency in the market that leads all key players to step up their focus to create their own version of a revenue orchestration platform,” opined Forrester Principal Analyst Seth Marrs.  “It’s a significant win for all companies looking to improve sales performance.”

“Consolidating to create a more comprehensive platform is the best option in this environment,” continued Marrs.  “Those that don’t, face the less appealing prospect of a down round or going out of business.”

“B2B sales tech buyers want to take advantage of AI for sales and simultaneously reduce complexity in their tech stack,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Dan Gottlieb.  “Clari with Groove now has the pieces to deliver a complete revenue hub with interconnected workflows and deep data integrations.”

Gong Engage (Generative AI + Sales Engagement)

Engage’s generative AI models help personalize customer engagement efforts while streamlining email composition.

Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong unveiled Gong Engage, its entry into the Sales Engagement space.  SEPs have been adding Conversational Sales tools for several years, so Gong adding SEP functionality should not be surprising.  After all, Gong began as a conversational sales solution before widening its scope to Revenue Intelligence.  Also, one of Gong’s top rivals, Chorus, is owned by ZoomInfo, which has been building ZoomInfo Engage for several years.

“Gong Engage serves as a single solution to streamline sales engagement for revenue teams by delivering AI-based sales guidance from the first touchpoint with a prospect to deal close,” wrote the firm.  “Engage helps teams create and accelerate pipeline by delivering increased productivity with AI-driven automation and guidance, high-quality outreach to engage entire accounts, and a single sales engagement solution to streamline revenue workflows.  Gong’s proprietary AI delivers three times more accuracy than off-the-shelf AI models.”

Engage supports core SEP features, including a web-based dialer, workflows, and email templates.  It also sports generative AI models for deal prioritization and extracting call highlights, action items, and outcomes.  AI features include:

  • Call Spotlight, Gong’s generative AI functionality that composes call briefs, account highlights, and action items from sales conversations
  • Automated call outcomes and email response classification that automatically categorizes calls and emails and syncs these insights with the CRM
  • Assisted writing, which helps reps personalize their outreach based on persona

“Engage’s contextual, account-based approach for prospecting and selling exceeds the limitations of traditional lead-based tools that encourage mass outreach with little targeting.  Instead, it delivers a complete understanding of an account, including all touchpoints, relevant CRM information, and conversational history,” stated Gong.

Gong emphasized that it didn’t jump on the generative AI bandwagon following the breakout success of ChatGPT but has been working to integrate generative tools into its platform for over a year.  Furthermore, its focus on sales-focused NLP offers it a leg up on vendors marketing generic ChatGPT tools or lacking years of AI expertise and product development.

“Gong launched in 2016 to harness the power of AI to rid customer-facing people of their day-to-day drudgery.  We have been working with LLMs for over a year and see it as a major breakthrough.  But highly accurate, domain-specific AI that delivers a deep understanding of what’s going on within a sales organization and the next steps needed to win deals is more elusive,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov. “AI is the core of Gong’s platform, and our new models exemplify the sales-driven advancements we’re bringing to market to help our customers transform their teams and accelerate revenue growth.”

Along with conversational sales expertise, Gong offers Smart Trackers, a set of AI-based customized signals.  Launched last year, Smart Trackers help revenue teams “identify deal risks and opportunities, understand the effectiveness of strategic initiatives, replicate best practices, and get ahead of emerging market needs.”

Gong Recommended Contacts

Engage’s Recommended Contacts feature analyzes historical deal data to recommend contacts for outreach.  It feeds contact data from LeadIQ, Cognism, and Apollo based on target personas.  Recommended contacts may be added to flows (cadences), or sales reps can reach out via email, phone, or LinkedIn.

Engage also displays buying signals from over 120 Gong Collective integrations “to help teams stay on top of their pipeline, no matter where signals are coming from.”

Along with consolidating conversational sales, sales engagement, and revenue intelligence in a common platform, Engage supports partnerships that include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Chili Piper, and Calendly.

Engage workflow and dashboard features include Pipeline Views for viewing key tasks and insights across open opportunities, an Analytics Dashboard for sales management, and team collaboration tools for sharing and assigning tasks across teams.

“Gong changed how revenue teams build pipeline with our customer-centric AI – now we’re changing how they engage with customers at every stage,” said Bendov. “We have leveraged our market-leading AI technology as the foundation for Gong Engage, which sets the entire revenue team up for success.  Engage is the only solution that harnesses customer interactions at scale to drive high-quality engagement and ultimately, grow revenue.”

Gong Engage will GA this summer.

Gong Insights

Gong rep adoption of new messaging.

Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong released Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake.  The new solution delivers conversational insights captured from the Gong Conversational Sales platform to business intelligence tools.  Insights capture activities, calls, and emails.

“Business leaders are under pressure to make the right strategic decisions that will help their companies thrive, especially in this challenging climate.  But they often rely on manual data like CRM or field or customer surveys, which are subjective and go stale quickly,” said Gong CRO Ryan Longfield.  “By teaming with Snowflake to bring this rich data and understanding from Gong directly into the broader set of insights, we are making it easier for leaders to improve their [go-to-market] strategy, productivity, and execution, all based on data that’s rooted in customer interactions.”

Gong rep productivity.

Historically, it has been challenging to determine which initiatives drive deals forward and increase the likelihood of winning a contract.  As a result, sales reps have had few incentives to enter detailed activity and results information into CRMs.  Furthermore, activity and engagement data have been stove-piped in different platforms or not captured digitally.  Thus, only 54% of GTM leaders report having clear, real-time visibility into deal progression (April 2022 Harvard Business Review study sponsored by Gong).

Gong has automated the delivery of its sales insights to Snowflake, making it “easier for senior business leaders to have a view into revenue intelligence insights along with other key business metrics as they evaluate strategic decisions.”  Joint customers can set up a no-code Gong Insights instance with data flowing automatically to their existing BI tool for dashboard and report development.  Pre-built reports are also provided.

“Having access to the right data is critical to ensuring strategic decisions can be made that lead to growth,” said Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan.  “By building on Snowflake, Gong is able to securely and seamlessly integrate its data into the rest of a company’s dataset, giving executives a clearer picture of the information they need to run their business.”

Use cases include churn risk factor analysis, most at-risk accounts, and identifying under and over-resourced accounts.

Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake is generally available. 

Gong Insights is also available as a CRM Enrichment process that syncs Gong data with the Salesforce Data Cloud or HubSpot. Finally, Gong Insights is displayed as an Initiatives Board within the Revenue Intelligence platform.  The Dashboard “gives teams visibility into team adoption, as well as the ability to understand how initiatives resonate with their target market and correlate to business impact.”

RingCentral: RingSense for Sales Launched

RingSense for Sales transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes meetings.

Cloud Communications vendor RingCentral entered the Conversational Sales space with RingSense for Sales.  The new service employs generative AI to summarize meetings and calls.  Initially, RingSense supports the sales function, but RingCentral plans to extend the service to other roles, including support and marketing.

“We’re going to be helping businesses make their voice, their meetings, their email interactions more intelligent, so they can automatically uncover new, actionable insights that help reduce errors, overhead, and improve performance,” said RingCentral COO Mo Katibeh. “I think of it as a force multiplier for every single employee.”

RingSense for Sales analyzes customer interactions with sales reps and surfaces insights and performance metrics.  These insights are also delivered to sales managers to assist with training and mentoring.

“Today marks an important step forward in our journey.  Generative AI is a game-changing technology that will fundamentally transform communications and collaboration.  Natural language, and voice in particular, has always been a universal interface for information, intent, and emotion that has been largely untapped,” said RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis. “Now with RingSense, we have the opportunity to inject cutting-edge AI across the entire RingCentral portfolio and make communications a powerful resource for businesses to unlock new potential and quickly extract meaningful information and insights.”

RingSense for Sales supports:

  • Automated follow-ups to drive productivity: RingSense’s AI gathers interaction summaries, notes, and follow-ups.  It then syncs them with the CRM.
  • AI-generated summary scoring: Interaction-level scoring and reporting call out which conversations should be prioritized by managers, helping them identify coaching opportunities.
  • Integrations with 3rd party apps: RingSense for Sales integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and call and video meeting providers.
  • Ability to track keywords and phrases (trackers): Sales admins can set RingSense to track keywords and phrases such as competitor names, objections, trends, or product features.  RingSense can also focus on relevant concepts instead of just keywords and calls out positive and negative deal signals.

“Over the last few years, RingCentral has developed a rich set of AI models that delivers conversational speech analysis and emotional sentiment recognition to the RingCentral platform,” explained the firm.  “Last year, RingCentral rolled out numerous AI-powered video meetings capabilities and was first to market with Advanced Meeting Insights and Summaries, which uses AI to enable a user to quickly catch up on a missed meeting or use the tool for automated note taking.”

RingSense for Sales captures topics, summarizes calls, and assists with deal coaching.

RingCentral also rolled out a set of AI APIs for accessing RingCentral transcriptions, summarizations, sentiment analysis, and interaction analysis for voice, video, and chat.  These APIs will be available to their 85,000 registered developers and 350 third-party applications.  RingSense, like RingCentral, is an open platform.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is the fuel that will fundamentally transform how we think about digital transformation today.  The era of deploying enterprise AI in isolation while wrestling with outcome uncertainty is over,” said Aragon Research CEO Jim Lundy.  “RingCentral has created an enterprise-grade AI with a results-based design.  Last year, they embedded this unique AI into their MVP platform to help make employees more productive.  Now, with RingSense, they’ve taken it to a whole new level by focusing on bespoke use cases the industry truly needs.”

RingCentral has long partnered with incumbent Conversational Sales vendors such as Gong, Chorus, Wingman (Clari), ExecVision (Mediafly), and Outreach.  Many of these vendors have been offering conversational sales tools for three to five years.  In addressing their delayed entry into Conversational Sales, Senior Product Marketing Manager Keith Renison listed the following advantages of the RingSense offering:

  • RingSense is easy to purchase, deploy, and configure.  Get ready for faster time-to-value without the expensive startup, platform fees, and model retraining costs.
  • AI-generated summaries, topics, and follow-ups are automatic.  This accelerates the disposition of customer interactions creating huge efficiency gains.
  • Out-of-the-box “trackers” with higher quality pattern matching.  Trackers can be customized or created from scratch.  Tune your system to what you’re listening for and make adjustments along the way.  AI does the rest.
  • AI-generated summary scoring at the top level helps find the important conversations without sifting through conversations manually.  
  • RingSense is built by a trusted leader in cloud communications. 

RingSense is not industry specific but can be leveraged broadly across industries for analyzing digitized sales calls and meetings, said Chief Innovation Officer Kira Makagon. 

RingCentral, which has built a customer base of five million customers over the past two decades, can deploy RingSense to “empower person-to-person communications.”  RingSense helps “make sense” and “find patterns in these interactions.”

Due to the large breadth of business conversations hosted on its digital platforms, RingCentral is “in a unique position to make sense of all of the wealth of information that is flowing through our platform,” said Shmunis.  “By applying these ultra-modern AI techniques, we can really empower users of our system to make better sense as to what is happening in their own employee bases, whether it be sales agents, customer service agents, and, in certain cases, even just knowledge workers who are communicating and interacting with the outside World.”

Shmunis emphasized that RingSense is a platform with RingSense for Sales as the first offering.  As an open platform, partners can build verticalized solutions.  Shmunis suggested applications in legal, finance, and healthcare.  Open RingSense APIs are already available.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, argued that businesses suffer from poor data quality in their CRMs, with reps often limiting the information they key into Salesforce to “Met with customer.”  Thus, AI’s most significant initial impact will be improving “data discipline” in organizations.   The initial benefit of AI will be as an “input mechanism.”

“So, when I do a call with you, an AI can listen to it, summarize the meaning, put it in [the] CRM [and] update the record.  You have contact center agents.  You can do that with salespeople and customer success,” argued Kerravala.  “You could actually use AI to create a better dataset and so, in theory, good AI leads to better AI.”

Kerravala sees AI improving the pre- and post-meeting experience due to its ability to create, manage, and refine meeting data.  “Most of the vendors do a pretty good job mid-meeting.  We have virtual backgrounds, transcription, and translation capabilities.  But what happens when the meeting is over?  Help me get the meeting minutes out to people and help me prep for meetings.  That’s where I see this stuff having a pretty big impact.”

RingSense is available in three packages based on function: Observer for Marketers helps them track customer and competitive trends, Coach supports managers, and Professional provides the full complement of deal intelligence and CRM synchronization.  RingCentral did not provide any pricing details.

RingSense seats may be allocated by role with Professional supporting the full complement of deal intelligence and CRM synchronization.

Shea Named Mediafly Co-CEO

Mediafly Co-CEO Mary Shea

Mary Shea was named co-CEO of Mediafly, where she will join Carson Conant in managing the Revenue Enablement company.  Shea joins with a solid RevTech pedigree.  She was a Principal Analyst at Forrester and Chief Evangelist at Outreach.  Shea first met Conant as a newly minted Forrester Principal Analyst in 2015 and later served as a company advisor.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Mary join us as co-CEO.  I’ve known Mary for over a decade and have benefited immensely from her deep knowledge of the revenue enablement landscape, her prescience in identifying the next big trend, and her vision for the future of B2B buying and selling,” said Conant.  “Mary brings deep empathy for the day-to-day challenges sellers face and a forward-leaning sensibility for the brand experience B2B companies need to create for buyers.  She will be a force multiplier for the Mediafly team and our customers.”

Shea argued that the RevTech unicorns “amassed large financial war chests” that helped them develop market recognition but that Mediafly and Boathouse Capital took a slower “Midwest approach” that relied more on individual investors than institutional funds.

“While this non-traditional route likely cost Mediafly some market recognition, today this ‘Midwest’ approach appears wise,” argued Shea.  “Fast-forward to the past 6-10 months.  As competitors and adjacents hunkered down and paused innovation to slow ‘burn’ to avoid ‘down rounds,’ Carson and the Mediafly team quietly acquired and integrated five companies — revenue intelligence provider InsightSquared, conversation intelligence providers ExecVision and Sonero, the enablement workflow solution, UserIQ, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.”

These acquisitions brought together underfunded assets with “great and complementary tech and talent” but which “lacked robust distribution channels,” argued Shea.

While Mediafly emphasized its contrarian approach, it is not immune to the layoff bug. It confirmed layoffs last Friday, attributing them to post-acquisition efficiencies, not the current tech slowdown.

“Today, the pendulum swings in the other direction as we made the difficult decision to let go of a number of talented individuals to achieve the efficiency desired after an intense year of acquisitions and integrations,” posted Conant on LinkedIn.  “With these actions, Mediafly will be in a strong position as a uniquely profitable, revenue enablement company.”

Conant listed three organizational goals: “an unwavering commitment” to its customers, product innovation and category leadership, and profitability and operational excellence. Mediafly did not indicate the scope of the layoffs.

Mediafly offers a set of modules that can be purchased as standalone solutions or as part of an integrated suite.  Functionality includes enterprise content management, revenue and conversation intelligence, value realization, coaching, deal management, and forecasting.  To supplement this functionality, it developed a partnership ecosystem spanning seventy-five solutions across the RevTech space.

Mediafly has acquired six RevTech companies to build out its platform quickly.  In 2022, it acquired and integrated revenue intelligence platform InsightSquared, conversation intelligence provider ExecVision, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.

Mediafly noted that customers are increasingly consolidating their tech stack with Mediafly while reducing their technology spend by thirty percent or more and enjoying “improved revenue team performance.”

Customers include PepsiCo, Nestle, Databricks, Honeywell, Sealed Air, Zscaler, and TransUnion.

“I’ve watched Mediafly for many years and always thought of the company as a hidden gem.  Mediafly has grown organically and through acquisitions and has quietly compiled the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market — everything B2B teams need to successfully navigate today’s complex buying journey,” said Shea.  “With this push towards a unified revenue enablement platform, it’s now time for Mediafly to step out of the background and help more B2B organizations create confident sellers who can deliver efficient predictable growth.  I’m hitting the ground running — if you’re looking to improve seller effectiveness, buyer engagement, or consolidate your tech stack, take a fresh look at Mediafly.”

Shea announced the following goals over the next few months:

  • Expand and deepen the value we deliver to customers.
  • Partner with more large global brands.
  • Rebrand and rename our company.
  • Create provocative and actionable thought leadership.
  • Innovate through organic and inorganic product development.

Shea sees the RevTech industry at a “critical and exciting crossroads which includes the rise of digital buying and selling, sweeping generational shifts, rapid technological advancement, the proliferation of tools focused on efficiency, and market and tool consolidation.”

To compete in this dynamic environment, Mediafly “will continue to build onto our platform, integrating each new asset through a modern and scalable data architecture, complete with a revenue business intelligence layer.”  As a result, Mediafly’s Revenue360 solution will become “the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market.”

Clari RevGPT

Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari announced Automatic Call Summaries to its Wingman Conversational Sales module.  The new RevGPT functionality, powered by ChatGPT, supports call summaries, next steps, and suggested actions in Slack in a conversational format.  Users can view the call or send follow-up emails from Slack.

Wingman already offers real-time cues and battle cards for overcoming objections during calls.  Furthermore, it alerts managers to “high-impact coaching moments that define deal outcomes, like pricing hurdles, competitor mentions, and more.”

“Are you going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  That’s the single most important question in business — and today’s introduction of RevGPT represents a quantum leap forward in helping companies get revenue answers.  By training generative AI to harness the industry-leading store of conversational intelligence and historical revenue data contained in RevDB, we’re giving revenue teams the ability to identify sources of revenue leak and take corrective action at scale and with extraordinary speed.  RevGPT will quickly become the indispensable guidance system that empowers every revenue-impacting employee to achieve more.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari’s database of revenue under management, RevGPT will enjoy a feedback loop that continuously improves Clari’s recommendations.  This “flywheel effect” will offer “better answers, better actions, better outcomes, and faster time to revenue.”  Future functionality includes “recommended prompts for every revenue-critical team — sales, revenue operations, customer success, marketing, finance, and leadership — enabling even greater productivity gains and revenue outcomes.”

RevGPT will soon recommend and automatically assist with follow-up actions, including drafting emails, scheduling meetings, updating CRM systems, and revising forecasts.

Wingman supports the following integrations:

  • Syncs with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive
  • Records, transcribes, analyzes/summarizes Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet
  • Alerts via Slack and Teams.  Alerts and guidance are also displayed in its desktop app.

“This is just the beginning of Clari’s RevGPT generative AI capabilities that are purpose-built to run revenue,” said the firm.  “And we’re not stopping here.  Soon you’ll be able to ask RevGPT to compose an email follow-up for you with just one click.”

Clari promises to address “revenue leaks,” including the difficulty of “combing through mountains of data buried in legacy systems — CRM software, spreadsheets, BI tools — to find, analyze, and take action on the information that can help them in revenue-critical moments.”  By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari reduces “time to answers and action,” resulting in greater revenue precision and reduced time performing revenue-based search and analysis.

Last year, Clari identified $26 billion in annual revenue leakage across its 550 customers.  Overall, the Boston Consulting Group estimates companies suffer $2 trillion in annual revenue leaks due to missed revenue capture, sales waste, and lost enterprise value.

Clari is offering thirty-day free trials to RevGPT, “ChatGPT’s cousin with a quota,” to revenue leaders.  The functionality is live.

Wingman pricing and packaging

Wingman offers three packages: Growth ($60/user/month), Accelerator ($90/user/month), and Enterprise (starting at $110/user/month), with the firm planning on including RevGPT in the Accelerator and Enterprise editions.

Clari acquired Wingman and its conversational sales capabilities last June.

Resources:

Outreach Explore+ Announcements

Sales Execution Platform Outreach unveiled a series of product enhancements and dashboards at its Explore+ web conference earlier this month.  New features include Smart Email Assist with Generative AI, a Create Pipeline Calculator, Buyer Topics and Reactions in Kaia, Deal Grid, Deal Overview, Success Plan Methodologies, and Data Sharing with Outreach.

Outreach emphasized the breadth of its Sales Execution offering that began with Sales Engagement and has expanded to include Conversational Sales, Digital Sales Rooms, Success Plans, Coaching, Generative AI Emails, and Revenue Intelligence.  This full-funnel approach addresses sales teams’ top two issues: pipeline coverage and pipeline closing.

“The industry has never had a single place to generate and manage pipeline, run sales cycles from creation to close, coach reps, and forecast – until now,” said the firm.

Over the past decade, sales teams have acquired a set of SalesTech solutions that create a “hairball” of point solutions that work poorly together and suffer from siloed data and regular system switching.  Furthermore, a unified data platform supports advanced workflows, AI models, and account insights for sales coaching and deal management.

Outreach has enjoyed solid adoption of its new platform since launching it ten months ago.  Multi-product adoption is strong, with over 400 customers using two or more products.  Furthermore, multi-product adoption is driving platform ARR, which has grown by over 100% in the past two quarters.  Since the platform was launched, Outreach’s new logo deal size has increased by 16%.

Outreach repositioned itself as a Sales Execution Platform as it expanded beyond Sales Engagement (Source: Outreach Analyst presentation).

“Today, Chief Revenue Officers are facing two major problems: pipeline coverage and conversion.  They need to create an adequate amount of pipeline, and close it at a greater rate,” said CEO Manny Medina.  “That’s why Outreach has been on a journey to expand our offerings to solve our customers’ biggest problems today.  Our goal is to provide sales leaders with a single platform to manage all of their deals – from creating more pipeline to closing more deals.  Today’s announcements at Explore+ are an important milestone in our platform journey, and we look forward to continue innovating for the 30 million B2B salespeople around the world to help them unleash their selling potential.”

Outreach Smart Email Assistant

The Smart Email Assistant generates automated email replies that go beyond email templates.  AI factors in previous conversations between the buyer and seller when generating responses.  By automating email responses, “sales reps can focus their time on editing and personalizing the AI-generated content, instead of drafting these emails from scratch.”

A new Pipeline Calculator recommends prospecting activities to fill pipeline gaps.  The calculator utilizes historical pipeline data to determine the number of prospects that should be added to sequences to meet their quota.  In addition, the historical conversion rate assumptions are displayed and adjustable.  Thus, the assumed conversion or win rates can be adjusted to accommodate market shifts or new processes or messaging that boost historical results.

Outreach Pipeline Calculator

Outreach continues to develop Kaia, its conversational sales module, with the addition of Buyer Topics and Reactions.  AEs and sales managers can revisit meeting recordings and review the buyer’s reaction to fourteen relevant sales topics, such as budget, legal, or support.

“Using AI, Outreach is able to understand the contextual utterance of relevant sales topics in any meeting or email – ranging from pricing to product to next steps to support – and can understand when the buyer raised an objection at any point in the meeting,” explained the firm.  “It delivers invaluable insight into what is really happening in meetings, down to each moment, and at scale across all meetings.”

Success Plans now support popular sales methodologies, including MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, and SPIN Selling, helping reps “consistently and continuously qualify deals and align with champions to mitigate deal risk.”

Outreach added a single-pane-of-glass opportunity viewer called Deal Grid.  Reps can view their deals sorted by health score and value to focus on their best opportunities.  They can also edit fields such as Close Date, Amount, Stage, and Forecast status (e.g., omitted, commit, best case, most likely) with information synced to the CRM and forecasts updated.

Opportunity Viewers are a common feature of Revenue Intelligence platforms (e.g., Clari, RevenueGrid, People.AI), but with Sales Execution and Revenue Intelligence platforms expanding into each other’s domain, Deal Grid was an anticipated new feature.  Opportunity viewers help reps review their deal status, update the CRM, and prepare for meetings with sales managers.  They solve the problem of serially jumping between Opportunity records in Salesforce (which the firm has moved to resolve with similar functionality).

Outreach released several new reports and dashboards:

  • Create and Close Dashboard: Provides AEs and sales managers with a high-level forecasted revenue summary of the existing pipeline and highlights pipeline gaps and risks.

    “The insight-laden dashboard shows the forecasted revenue from existing pipeline, and highlights pipeline coverage gaps for the current and future quarter, which helps reps proactively mitigate risk earlier and drive to success,” said Outreach.
Outreach Pipeline Calculator
  • Deal Overview: An overview of open opportunities with a deal summary, an engagement timeline, deal health, sales methodology insights, next steps, and the shared plan.  The engagement timeline displays all sales activities and a heat map detailing customer engagement trends.
Outreach Deal Overview
  • Pipeline Dashboard: Displays all “relevant pipeline details to life in a single, sortable view, allowing sales managers to stay on top of their quarter.”  The dashboard includes a pipeline activity summary by stage, projected finish, revenue to date, quota, and top deals with deal health scores.
Outreach Pipeline Dashboard

Outreach also announced bi-directional syncing with HubSpot.  Earlier this month, it unveiled expanded Outreach Data Sharing with Snowflake.

Despite recent layoffs, Outreach continues to build its customer base.  FY 2023 revenue (FYE Jan 2023) passed $200 million across 6000 customers.  Outreach’s scale benefits its clients as it records over 25 million action/outcome pairings per week, helping refine its machine learning insights and recommendations.

Corporate Visions Acquires Primary Intelligence

Sales Research and Advisory firm Corporate Visions acquired win/loss analytics firm Primary Intelligence.  Primary Intelligence’s TruVoice platform conducts surveys, online interviews, and live phone interviews.  In addition, buyer feedback is displayed in Competitive Intelligence platform Crayon and available in battlecards, newsletters, and dashboards, providing “more depth, context, and insight from the buyer’s perspective.”

TruVoice can also be used for customer experience, competitive analysis, and churn analysis.

Primary Intelligence has collected win/loss intelligence through manual post-mortem deal interviews for twenty years.  Automating the process both lowers the cost of intelligence collection and widens the scope of intelligence collected.  Survey response rates are between 25% and 35% due to the request coming from the sales rep.  Online surveys run ten to fifteen minutes and are dynamically adjusted based on the responses.  TruVoice collects both qualitative and quantitative responses.

Primary Intelligence Buyer Insights provide a roll-up of win/loss insights at an account. Users can drill down to “direct evidence” from the interviews.

“We’ve taken the live interview model that we have honed over our entire existence and turned it into an online experience, where we call it an online interview.  But it really is something that a respondent can do in ten minutes on a mobile device.  There are some quantitative questions for them to record voice responses, which we then transcribe and…publish that data.  And then we still do the live interview.”

“The value of win-loss-no decision analysis at scale is that you have continuous, near real-time feedback on a higher percentage of accounts for improved insights and confident strategy adjustments across all of your revenue teams,” said Primary Intelligence CEO Ken Allred.  “But the biggest breakthrough is having the ongoing rep-by-rep, deal-by-deal intelligence to drive situational training and enablement.  This eliminates the bias of reps providing their own feedback or requiring managers to review hundreds of hours of call recordings.”

Gong and Crayon Partnerships

Primary Intelligence recently partnered with conversational sales platform Gong to integrate in-cycle deal intelligence.  Primary Intelligence delivers a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard links and links to call transcripts that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements.  The Gong integration ensures that conversational intelligence from deals is available alongside post-deal analysis, providing a clearer view of why deals are won or lost, comparative strengths and weaknesses versus competitors, and improved messaging.

“Our approach in the last five years or so has been [asking] ‘How can we take the operational lift and automate as much as possible?” explained Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway to GZ Consulting.  “Now it’s a process that begins in Salesforce or whatever CRM you’re using.”

The Performance Gaps view displays competitive strengths and weaknesses as seen by buyers and displayed by priority.

Primary Intelligence also recently partnered with Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon, marrying competitive and win/loss intelligence in a common platform.  The joint solution “helps teams better understand their competitors.”

“In today’s competitive climate, competitive intelligence and win-loss analysis are essential for B2B companies looking to increase win rates,” stated the firms.  “While win-loss interviews and surveys with buyers are filled with critical competitive insights, getting these insights updated into competitive intelligence deliverables, such as battlecards, has traditionally been a slow, manual process — until now.”

Crayon and Primary Intelligence highlight competitor offerings’ relative strengths and weaknesses, providing improved positioning for sales and marketing teams.  A separate pricing module helps debunk sales rep claims that deals are regularly lost on price, providing a more accurate view of deal loss.  By helping differentiate offerings and identify why deals are won or lost, vendor offerings become less price sensitive. 

Primary Intelligence also provides views at the rep level, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of reps and where they would benefit from coaching.

“The future of sales enablement is providing custom, rep-specific coaching in the flow of work.  Ideally, those recommendations are based on actual performance feedback from real customers,” said Erik Peterson, Chief Executive Officer of Corporate Visions.  “The acquisition of Primary Intelligence will enable us to make invisible problems visible and then provide personalized coaching to individual reps and revenue teams based on how buyers and customers respond.”

“What better evidence that your strategies and spend are actually working as intended than actual customer feedback connected to wins, losses, and no decisions, as well as renewals and expansion cycles?” Peterson added.

B2B DecisionLabs

The acquisition provides Corporate Visions with 100,000 buying decisions spanning twenty years, which will be incorporated into its B2B DecisionLabsresearch and advisory business.  Corporate Visions, which positions itself as a Decision Science company, calls Primary Intelligence its “fourth lab.”  B2B DecisionLabs incorporates behavioral research, brain studies, and field trials, alongside customer feedback.

TruVoice customer feedback is Corporate Vision’s latest B2B DecisionLabs laboratory.

“We will engage our B2B DecisionLabs research director, Dr. Leff Bonney, co-founder of the Florida State University Sales Institute, to effectively leverage the incoming data points into insights using all applicable and appropriate academic research-based approaches, tools, and techniques,” explained Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions and Chief Visionary at B2B DecisionLabs, to GZ Consulting.

“Our expectation is that this steady flow of buyer-driven deal insights will completely distinguish B2B DecisionLabs among other research and advisory firms who rely on their subscriber clients to provide data snapshots and self-reported survey responses to formulate their industry insights,” continued Riesterer.  “This will be in addition to our completely unique brain study lab and ongoing field trials with actual clients.”

The Primary Intelligence dataset provides a deep set of historical and cross-industry data that captures deals both in progress and after closing.  This research complements its other three research laboratories.

“This will give our advisory clients even more confidence in the B2B DecisionLabs recommendations compared to opinion surveys and moment-in-time snapshots of data,” said Riesterer.  “It will also mean we can provide more reliable tools than you otherwise get from peer communities that only curate unexamined personal experiences and unsubstantiated claims of expertise.”

“This ongoing flow of customer-sourced data will also be used to continually expand and enhance our revenue growth services to ensure Corporate Visions’ clients always have access to the industry’s best and most updated intellectual property,” Riesterer added.

Corporate Visions offers science-backed revenue growth services for sales, marketing, and customer success.  Along with hosting conferences and training, Corporate Visions helps firms “articulate value and promote growth” in three ways:

  1. Make Value Situational by distinguishing your commercial programs between customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
  2. Make Value Specific by creating and delivering customer conversations that communicate concrete value, change behavior, and motivate buying decisions.
  3. Make Value Systematic by equipping your commercial engine to deliver consistent and persistent touches across the entire Customer Deciding Journey.

By April, Corporate Visions plans to combine automated win-loss-no decision customer feedback with automated skills coaching and customer messaging content from Corporate Visions.  Riesterer intends to launch the “first fully automated, situational enablement solution that identifies rep-by-rep weaknesses based on actual customer feedback, to direct specific, custom coaching videos to help address these challenges – in the rep’s flow of work.”

This vision shifts sales rep training from “just-in-case” event-based generic classroom training to “just-in-time” situational coaching and enablement that is customized to each rep and deal.  This training will be “always on, deficit-based situational coaching and enablement” that does not require managers to “listen to a bunch of calls or read a lot of feedback and then formulate a custom coaching plan.”

Data Anonymization

Corporate Visions has already considered which data can be employed for aggregate analytics.  Research protocols are subject to Institutional Review Board (IRB) review and approval.  Data will only be available for aggregate analysis with the consent of customers.  Unique identifiers are stripped from the data and replaced with arbitrary data identifiers, and no individual customer’s data will be published. 

B2B DecisionLabs has “partnered with Florida State University as the primary means of data analysis and have taken the steps as outlined in GDPR protocols regarding ‘Information Processors’ to ensure that data is passed to FSU without any unique respondent identifiers,” explained Bonney.  “To decrease any risk of inadvertent identification of a customer in the data, Primary Intelligence will assign the ‘ID number’ to customer data and then pass [it] to the B2B DecisionLabs and FSU research team, who will have no input or insight into how data ID numbers are assigned.  Additionally, Primary Intelligence will remove any data fields that may be used to ascertain the identity of any one customer.”

The FSU IRB will review Primary Intelligence’s anonymization protocols.

Real-time Coaching

Managerial deal coaching “just doesn’t happen and won’t happen at scale,” remarked Riesterer.  Furthermore, “because the system continues to run and generate customer deal feedback, you will be able to monitor, measure, and modify enablement interventions on the fly to see the impact and make continuous appropriate adjustments.”

Thus, the merged company will combine neural research concerning purchasing behavior and buyer studies, with in-the-moment situational coaching tailored to each rep and deal.

Primary Intelligence’s TruVoice platform

Groove Plays Announced

Groove Plays are triggered when one or multiple conditions are met.

Sales Engagement vendor Groove introduced its Plays service to the market this morning.  Groove observed that most sales engagement vendors tout flows (aka cadences and sequences) but that sequenced, linear processes fail to capture the increasingly complex nature of modern enterprise sales.  Furthermore, flows were initially designed for SDRs and appointment setting but are inadequate for meeting the broader needs of the revenue team.

Along with the introduction of Plays, Groove is shifting from sales engagement to a broader vision of “Connected Sales Execution” that unifies team, strategy, and technology.

“When my co-founder Austin and I founded Groove, we were sales leaders facing the exact challenge that Groove Plays solves,” said CEO Chris Rothstein.  “We knew that in order to digitally transform sales as a profession, we had to start by building a foundation in advanced data capture and linear-process automation.  With Groove Plays, we are introducing the next generation of Groove to solve the biggest untapped market in sales.”

Forrester recognized this transformation in its Q3 2022 Sales Engagement Platforms Wave report, noting that Groove’s activity capture and interaction management are “top-notch.”  Groove collects and aggregates signals from interactions and scores from Salesforce and external sources such as Clari, Seismic, 6sense, and Snowflake.  “This information is used to connect buying group members and make suggestions based on broad data sets.  Groove specializes in industry-specific and customer-specific suggestions and signals.”

“We’re launching Groove Plays as a way to take your playbook finally out of your head and put it into software so that you can assist reps at the right time, rather than after it’s too late,” explained Rothstein to GZ Consulting.  “And then the second huge benefit: if you can constantly see what’s being done, what’s not being done, and what’s correlated with winning, then you can evolve and constantly get better.

Plays are designed for complex, non-linear sales processes.  Sales Operations set up Groove Plays to monitor accounts for risks and opportunities.  Plays are triggered when specified conditions are met (e.g., stalled deals, single threading, missing participants by role).

Groove Plays also monitors rep activity to see whether plays contributed to positive outcomes.  Thus, sales managers and operations teams know whether sales reps follow company playbooks and which ones are effective.  Play analytics are broken into outcomes without intervention (the playbook was followed), with intervention (the playbook was followed but after a reminder), or ignored.

Furthermore, by monitoring activity, Plays prevent reps from failing to follow critical steps (e.g., sending a follow-up message after a call, quickly turning around meeting action items).

Groove Play Outcomes analyzes the efficacy of Plays

Alerts are fed to Groove’s Master Review List, which is displayed in its Chrome extension and visible across Salesforce, Groove, and email.  In addition, timers can be set to prevent plays from automatically firing, thus reducing the likelihood that reps are overwhelmed by automated triggers.

Plays provide proactive coaching instead of waiting until account reviews or forecasts.  Delayed recommendations are generally reactive instead of proactive.  “At that point, it’s too late.  And then you react way too late.  Our goal is for you to put the rules in the system, so it’s assisting you at the right time when there are signals…so you can be more proactive and consistent,” stated Rothstein.

Plays recommend actions when specific criteria are met.  For example, a play can be built for deals with negative sentiment concerning price and slowing engagement.  The play could then recommend an ROI calculator to a prospect, helping shift their thinking from cost to ROI.

Plays can also be built around handoffs, ensuring that crucial transition steps are not skipped.

Plays are also integrated into Groove’s conversational intelligence service and generative AI, providing meeting follow-up emails based on insights.  Reps can choose to regenerate the email or add snippets.

Groove suggests “ideal email content based on insights gathered from earlier in the deal process via Groove Conversations and advance activity capture.”

Plays can also be designed around deal risk, suggesting actions if key buying committee members are not engaged.  Likewise, plays can be setup if MEDDIC steps have not been completed, the primary contact has not responded to a renewal message, or internal approval timelines are not being met.

Groove’s RIO AI engine consists of three underlying engines:

  • NLP: Analyzes emails and generates insights for coaching.
  • Association: Ties actions to outcomes across the tech stack.
  • Guidance: Suggests actions based on sales plays and generates personalized content and best engagement times.

Groove supports “Connected Sales Execution” across sales, marketing, and customer success.   RIO ingests account and activity histories with feedback loops to refine plays and recommendations.  Thus, Connected Sales Execution spans teams, processes, and technology. 

“We’re a platform to help you execute your sales strategy,” argued Rothstein.  At its heart, Groove employs AI, processes, rules, and sensors (e.g., email capture, calendar capture, logging, phone calls) that analyze activities and generate insights.

“We’ve always been a company that connects all these things: the technology and the process, the team and the process,” stated Rothstein.  “Where we can help is getting everyone on the same page, executing the playbook in real-time, and seeing what’s working and [what’s] not.”

Groove Plays is in Alpha with a planned Q2 beta.  Groove Plays will be available to all customers at no additional cost when it GAs this summer.

Attention Closes on $3.1M Round

Attention, an AI-powered sales assistant, exited stealth mode and closed a $3.1 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures.  Other participants include Frst, Liquid2 Ventures, Maschmeyer Group Ventures, Ride Ventures, and the founders of Ramp, Level AI, Truework, CBInsights, and Zoi.  The new funds will be deployed towards advanced AI capabilities and market growth for the New York City-based startup.

Attention helps sales teams “overcome inefficiencies at every stage of the sales cycle,” including CRM hygiene, sales acceleration, and revenue growth.  Attention accelerates sales rep ramp-up, drafts follow-up emails based on customer statements, improves forecasting, and automatically enriches Salesforce and HubSpot with post-call deal intelligence. 

Attention maps discussions to custom CRM fields specific to standard sales methodologies such as MEDDIC and BANT.

Attention Battlecards

Attention also provides real-time suggestions and question responses, “resulting in all sales representatives having higher rates of success and closed business.”  Recommendations include product responses to technical questions and objections handling.  The Attention AI determines common unsupported questions and builds battlecards based on sales responses.  Battlecards can also be developed or edited by the sales enablement team.

One novel feature is the ability to query the meeting transcript with a question, allowing reps to summarize or revisit the discussion around key topics quickly.

Sales reps can share call snippets with managers or SMEs via Slack, allowing them to forward open questions in the voice of the customer.

“Attention is a game-changer.  We’ve rarely seen any product like this in terms of efficiency gains and ramp-up acceleration.  We’re also blown away by how fast they’ve been releasing new capabilities.” said Peter Santis, head of sales at RocketChat.  Santis both licensed the service for RocketChat and participated in the seed round.

Founders Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg founded competing AI software startups before joining forces in September 2021 to build Attention.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Anis and Matthias as they leverage the latest developments in AI generation and natural language understanding to superpower sales organizations,” remarked Hadley Harris from Eniac Ventures.  “We love working with repeat founders and couldn’t be happier with the strong pull they’re already getting from the market.”

Attention supports communications platforms, including Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Meets, Zoom, and Zapier.

Attention’s initial customers are in the technology sales space, most commonly with 50 to 100 licensed sales reps.