Tag: Dashboards

SalesLoft Outcomes & Cadence Dashboards

Sales Engagement Platform vendor SalesLoft released a pair of reports that assist with attribution and deal engagement: Outcomes Dashboard and Cadence Outcomes.  SalesLoft claims that it is the “only company that can tie customer touchpoints and activities to actual revenue outcomes like deals won, revenue per customer, and revenue per reps.

Unfortunately, “sales outcomes have been notoriously hard to track within the industry, especially over the past year when sellers worked remotely.  They’ve joined data about buyer engagement + opportunity data and put it…front and center in SalesLoft.  Now, teams are better equipped to know what’s working so they can stop guessing and get better results.”

Kaelen Delaune of PR firm Kickstand Communications

The Outcomes Dashboard associates the last activity to revenue.  The new dashboard helps managers identify top performers, focus on opportunities for improvement, and coach toward desired outcomes.

Traditionally, sales metrics focused on how many calls were made, emails sent, appointments set, and meetings held.  While this intelligence is useful, it measures process inputs, not their efficacy.  By associating these inputs with results, managers can identify which activities are moving the revenue needle and which ones are sub-optimal or under-deployed by reps, requiring coaching.

“Every sales team is trying to drive outcomes, not activities. Until now, outcomes have been hard to track,” said Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer for SalesLoft.   “When teams know what’s working, they can stop guessing and get better results.”

The Outcomes Dashboard helps managers project where they stand versus plan, identify the top performers and those in need of coaching, and improve forecasting.

Cadence Outcomes identify which cadences are driving meetings booked and opportunities created, helping managers and reps fine-tune and run cadences that move deals forward.

“Now that we have outcome data, we can provide richer analytics. The Outcomes Dashboard lets managers see how their teams are performing versus goals. We continue to invest in data insights for customers, through analytics like the Outcomes Dashboard, and through explainable AI, like the Deal Engagement Score, which is also now available.”

Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer at SalesLoft

In a conversation with GZ Consulting, Fields emphasized the value of multi-channel cadences, noting that multi-channel approaches provide a forty percent lift in outcomes.  Thus, SalesLoft is looking to “make it as easy as possible to sell” through the deployment of “multiple channels across a single platform.”

The Outcomes Dashboard and Cadence Outcomes are available in all of SalesLoft’s packages. SalesLoft also released Deal Engagement Scores to GA.  These employ over thirty factors for evaluating engagement across cadences and deals.

Last week, SalesLoft acquired InStereo, a professional services partner. InStereo provides go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

SalesHood Coaching Command Center

SalesHood Launches Coaching Command Center for Front-Line Managers to Scale Virtual Sales Coaching

Sales Enablement vendor SalesHood released Coaching Command Center, a set of templates, reports, and prompts to assist front-line managers in elevating the performance and win rates of their teams.  

“We’re excited to release more innovation for virtual sales coaching,” said SalesHood CEO Elay Cohen.  “We’re committed to helping front-line managers be better at developing their remote teams and boosting their win rates.”

In a call with GZ Consulting, Cohen emphasized that SalesHood focuses on productivity and outcomes for both sales reps and front-line managers, looking to raise the bar for all managers.  The new Command Center is a coaching dashboard that analyzes performance and what sales reps are doing.  It fosters managerial actions through celebrations, risk identification, and recommending Next Best Actions.  A meetings-in-a-box feature supports coaching huddles and hands-on training, with recorded calls as input, and coaching to-dos.

According to Cohen, “curated coaching can be prescriptive” and should be performance and data-driven.  It should also be scalable and repeatable, making it easy to schedule classes, coaching, and call reviews.  Templates facilitate discussion and coaching.  Open questions and training sessions are noted, and sales reps are notified if task assignments have not been addressed before the next one-on-one.

Along with templates, SalesHood provides a library of sales training tools, including battle cards, product playbooks, and win stories.  Video recording guidance helps non-training professionals (e.g., product managers, competitive analysts, sales operations) chunk content into modules and cover key topics.

New Command Center tools include programs and coaching activities, team leaderboards, curated team videos, prioritized coaching activities, and coaching templates.

The graphical program tracker displays a data-driven timeline with drill-down tasks, helping front-line managers view programs and coaching activities.  The program tracker assists with one-on-one coaching through automated activities, notifications, tips, and scorecards.  A notification flag appears in the right corner of the top banner, letting managers immediately access pending coaching activities.  For example, if there is a recorded pitch for review, the manager can review the video and offer feedback.

Team Leaderboards summarize team performance across engagement, completion, and performance metrics.

Team videos are submitted and reviewed by managers for comments and celebration.  Videos include pitches, demonstrations, presentation dry-runs, deal wins, and stories.

Prioritized coaching activities are delivered to front-line managers on desktop and mobile devices (iOS and Android native apps) with automated coaching activities for pitch practice, role-playing, quizzing, assessments, and story submissions by their team.

SalesHood is packaged with a set of customizable templates for deal reviews, one-on-ones, and even quarterly business reviews.  Templates are customizable to reflect the industry, markets, and sales strategies of firms.

“Right out of the box, SalesHood provides solutions for more structured, more efficient, and more lucrative sales team management,” claims the firm.

“Sales coaching creates space for collaborative skill and deal development conversations.  Effective sales coaches give sales professionals the responsibility of ownership and accountability for their deal strategies from planning to preparation to close…

No longer will you be in the dark on how your reps are pitching to customers or handling common objections. You’ll be in the know as to how and if they are onboarding effectively.  Are they retaining product knowledge?  Do they understand the crucial competitive plays?  Is their messaging creating interest?  Is it aligned with the corporate message?”

“SalesHood Sales Coaching Demonstration” video

Aragon Research predicted that by the end of 2021, 55% of enterprises will have deployed digital sales coaching and learning.

“High-performing sales organizations are now making sales coaching and learning a daily habit,” says CEO of Aragon Research, Jim Lundy. “Top salespeople are constantly practicing, and the best managers conduct regular coaching.”  Despite the known correlation between coaching and performance, managers and their teams have been unable to embed this practice into their daily workflows.

Aragon Research placed SalesHood in its Leader quadrant for Sales Coaching and Learning (July 2020), scoring the highest on strategy, but below the other leaders on performance.  Aragon listed a broad set of SalesHood strengths, including sales coaching and learning, sales content management, and front-line manager enablement.  However, the firm noted that SalesHood lacks market awareness.

Seismic Fall Release (Part II)

Sales Enablement Platform vendor Seismic included a set of new reports, dashboards, and alerts in its fall release. Seismic users may deploy pre-built dashboards or build custom reports and visualizations specific to their business requirements.  Other new tools include report auto-sharing and data change alerting.  [Part I covered Seismic’s approach to bottom of the funnel metrics.]

Seismic offers multiple levels of reporting:

  • Out-of-the-box reports and dashboards
  • Bespoke reports built from out-of-the-box reports
  • Business Intelligence (BI) integrations for Tableau, Domo, and other BI services
  • Snowflake Secure Data Sharing.  

Bespoke dashboards are available by persona and role.  Reporting supports KPI filters and widgets that let users drill down to answer specific questions.

Five role-based dashboards support content owners, CROs, CMOs, sales managers, and platform admins.  Seismic’s Content Analytics “now includes actionable, curated, out-of-the-box reports, and visualizations tailored to the distinct challenges of specific roles,” blogged Seismic Product Marketing Manager Elaine Stone.  There are no “superfluous metrics to distract you or slow you down; just the relevant reports and visualizations you need to understand what’s happening and take informed action, leverage your discipline’s best practices, and create your own custom reports to go deeper.”

“By merging your bottom-of-the-funnel data with other cross-functional data sets such as CRM, HR, and customer success, your go-to-market team will have a holistic, yet singular, source of truth to answer its most challenging business questions.  Armed with shared answers, you’ll be equipped to build executive alignment, boost confidence in the teams’ ability to hit numbers, and scale best practices that truly move the needle…Proof of their team’s impact on revenue becomes the Holy Grail—the key to justifying headcount and budget.”

Seismic Product Marketing Manager Elaine Stone

“With Seismic, we’ve been able to gain visibility into ‘dark data’ — all the data you usually can’t access and can’t analyze.  There’s no greater repository of dark data than around the use of content in sales and marketing.  We use Seismic to shine light on that data,” said Eric Duerr, Domo VP of Marketing.  “When we create content, we can look in Seismic to determine what’s being used by sales, and what’s working and what’s not with prospects and customers.  And we can ensure sellers are using the most effective content as possible to support the customer journey.”

Snowflake Secure Data Sharing is supported out-of-the-box, delivering “an extra layer of insights” and reducing the time spent on data prep tasks such as merging and loading data.  Snowflake improves “time to insights” with “ready-to-query” content data.

“Snowflake Secure Data Sharing enables frictionless, secure sharing of live data within an organization and between organizations, so users can unveil insights to help transform their sales process and deliver meaningful business value,” said Snowflake VP of Customer Product Strategy, Matt Glickman. “We’re excited for Seismic and their customers to leverage Snowflake for fast, easy, and secure access to their content analytics.”

Seismic also enhanced the integration with Percolate, its enterprise content marketing platform, allowing marketers to measure content performance across their sales and marketing channels.  Marketers can determine how sales reps are consuming and using Percolate content published in Seismic.

Improved analytics and reporting associate work to outcomes, optimize content and go-to-market strategies, drive data-driven decisions, identify what is and isn’t working, and quantify and communicate platform adoption and ROI.

Seismic grew 537% between 2016 and 2019 and placed 234th on the 2020 Deloitte Fast 500 Technology list.  With the Grapevine6 acquisition (covered tomorrow), the firm now has over 1000 employees across fourteen offices.  Its 600 enterprise clients include American Express, ADP, SunTrust, T-Mobile, and IBM.

Before I finished writing this post, Seismic acquired Grapevine6 and launched LiveSocial.

SalesLoft Acquires Costello

Costello Dashboard within SalesLoft

Sales engagement vendor SalesLoft acquired Costello earlier this week.  Costello, which describes itself as an opportunity management software company, supports quick deal updates, guided selling playbooks, pipeline collaboration, and real-time CRM sync.  Other features include deal management, dashboards, and dynamic note-taking.

SalesLoft said that the acquisition “furthers SalesLoft’s mission to help account executives not only prospect and build pipeline, but manage their day and their deals, from creation through close.”

“Combining Costello and SalesLoft gives all sellers, whether they’re pipeline builders, closers, or responsible for upsells and renewals, a platform to deliver the ultimate buyer experience and close more revenue.  Sales engagement is now the place all reps can start and end their days,” said SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter.

“Sales Engagement isn’t just about generating pipeline.  It is about all the people who engage with customers and prospects throughout their journey.  We are working with our customers to constantly evolve what sales engagement can do for them.  It now represents the complete workflow application for sellers.  It’s a giant leap towards solving the sales challenges I hear from revenue leaders all the time.”

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter

Costello has been available as a SalesLoft application partner since last year.  “The companies will continue to support existing Costello customers, invest and enhance product capabilities, and natively integrate Costello capabilities into the SalesLoft platform,” stated the firm.

Solution matrix posted by SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter

SalesLoft listed four sales challenges that are addressed by the merged company: updating opportunities, app switching, new hire account messaging, and simplified pipeline review.  

During calls, Costello acts as a “real-time co-pilot” that ensures sales reps ask key questions, handle objections, and tell relevant customer stories.

Costello displays a Deal Dashboard and Deal View from within SalesLoft for pipeline management.  Deal Status elements include deal stage, days in stage, days active, and deal amount.  Costello also calls out Deal Gaps (missing deal fields, days past due), Stakeholders (buyers’ circle with roles and concerns), Call Summary with notes, and a deal timeline.

Costello is SalesLoft’s second acquisition.  They previously acquired NoteNinja which served as the basis for their meeting scheduling and intelligence functionality.  SalesLoft plans to natively integrate Costello functionality into the SalesLoft platform while investing and enhancing product capabilities.

SalesLoft supports over 2,300 companies and has grown revenue 1,000 percent over the past three years.  The firm has 450 employees.

“Sales Engagement platforms have started to make significant progress with sales organizations.  When we look across our dataset of high-growth early-adopters, 69% are leveraging a Sales Engagement platform today. As the sales engagement platform market looks to expand to the more widespread market of sales reps, we expect the platform’s feature set will also expand beyond traditional prospecting channels to serve all the day-to-day needs of the sales rep including enablement, planning and forecasting and productivity.”

Craig Rosenberg, Co-founder and Chief Analyst of TOPO

Financial details were not disclosed.

Outreach Unleash

At its Unleash user conference, Outreach rolled out its expanded Galaxy partner ecosystem that “offers deeper partner integrations and enables sales teams to more effectively access multiple sales tools directly from the Outreach platform.”  Outreach also announced a set of new partners including Vidyard (1-to-1 video), Intercom, (chat) and Sendoso (direct mail) along with a set of new plugins for composing emails, event streams, and link encoding.

Outreach Galaxy provides:

  • “More visibility on information and actions performed by third-party applications like video views or website chats.  Outreach Galaxy puts actionable information at reps’ fingertips so they can have more contextual conversations.
  • ‘Next best actions’ enabled through integration partners.  Outreach automates customer touchpoints and can trigger or be triggered by external information fed into Outreach.
  • Greater ability to meet changing buyer preferences.  Outreach is the system of action for modern sales teams, and now enables reps to communicate with buyers through even more mediums.“

“Sales is evolving to become more personal and accurate.  You must use the right channel for the right engagement for the right prospect and customer,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “A sales engagement platform must be multichannel and have the ability to optimize on each depending on the customer.  Now you can do that, with Galaxy.”

Tactile Marketing Automation vendor (Translation: Direct Mail Swag) PFL also announced an Outreach integration.  Sales reps include a direct mail or reward step within Outreach sequences.

“We’re all inundated with thousands of digital messages a day, but studies show that touching something physical stimulates our emotions and ultimately improves the perception of a brand,” said PFL CEO Andrew Field.  “We are joining the Outreach Galaxy partner program to put the power of direct mail and high impact packages directly into the hands of sales reps so they can engage prospects and customers.  Together with Outreach, we are pioneering a new approach to B2B marketing that empowers sales reps to do what they do best: stand out, get noticed and close more deals.”

Outreach listed a set of future partners including Alyce, BombBomb, Clari, LeanData, OneMob, and Tiled.

When composing emails, third-party content is immediately accessible.  Vendors leveraging the new plug-in capability include Vidyard and Sendoso.

The new events stream plugin feeds third-party events to the Outreach activity feed.  These events can then act as triggers for additional action.

An Enhanced Team Performance Dashboard is planned for 2019.
An Enhanced Team Performance Dashboard is planned for 2019.

Link Encoding provides website or content viewing intelligence related to Outreach sequences.  For example, the new plug-ins help Vidyard “record and send videos within your Outreach email.  And when your prospect views the video, that activity triggers your next task so you can immediately take action to convert at the highest level.”

In 2019, Outreach will roll out an enhanced Team Performance Dashboard and expanded Sequence Analytics to help sales managers and sales operations professionals better determine best practices.

Over 500 Outreach customers have has already built integrated solutions using the Outreach API.  The firm has over 40,000 weekly active users performing 47 million actions.

Outreach added Out of Office reply detection.  The firm noted that 18% of email responses are out of office emails.  Amongst out of office messages, 25% include an alternate contact name with over half the names being manager titles or above.  The Out of Office reply detection extracts the return date and alternate names then pauses cadences until the prospect returns.  The sales rep is notified of automated actions.

“Modern sales means using technology to interact with buyers in the ways they expect.  Outreach has the responsibility to enable this, but we can’t do it alone.  The solution is a variety of different technologies.  Unfortunately, these solutions aren’t well coordinated, if at all.  They’re used on multiple computer windows, by multiple departments, using different devices.  We owe it to our mutual customers to string everything together, for reps to do their jobs on one single pane of glass with each action informing the next.”


Outreach Strategic Programs Manager Stephen Farnsworth

Medina defined Outreach’s objectives as making “things simpler.  Making every rep successful.  Every manager amazing” and “elevate the profession.”  To help define and promote the category, Outreach published a book titled “Sales Engagement: How the World’s Fastest Growing Companies Are Modernizing Sales through Humanization at Scale.”

Outreach supports over 3,000 customers.

Fiind Predictive Visualization Tools

Predictive analytics company Fiind rolled out a set of product enhancements at the beginning of March to assist with company analysis, framing discussions, and identifying potential product issues.  According to the company, “Fiind helps businesses find their customers efficiently using machine learning – by enabling marketers and sellers tune into signals that customers send prior to buying. Fiind’s library of over 100 million signals serves as a Customer GPS with answers to questions such as who is likely to buy (and what and why).”

The company announced the following additional insight visualization tools for sales reps:

  • Pitch Points – Guidance on signals and supporting points to script effective Sales pitch.
  • Forum Talks – Topics (technologies, complaints, issues, etc.) classified based on the discussions in the forums.
  • Success Stories – Case studies/success stories on tech usage
  • Top Picks – Visualize corporate hiring patterns
  • Survey Results – Run a survey (externally) and display the key findings (e.g. DB Admin for a DB product)

The Pitch Points feature identifies company insights and frames them within the context of a company’s product offerings.

Fiind Pitch Points assist with account messaging.
Fiind Pitch Points assist with account messaging.

Forums helps identify potential pain points based upon public forum discussions while case studies/success stories extract intelligence from published case studies.

Customer Complaints identify potential pain points.
Customer Complaints identify potential pain points.

Company Hiring patterns are useful for discerning the underlying technology and emerging staffing requirements at companies.

Fiind Company Hiring patterns
Fiind Company Hiring patterns

Fiind predictive scores and insight visualization tools are available via browsers, email alerts, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft Dynamics.  They can also provide a “personal briefing agent” within Office 365 or Google Apps.

SalesLoft: New Partners, Connectors, and Features

The new Call Studio service provides continuous monitoring of sales calls via a new dashboard. Managers and trainers can listen to calls, whisper advice in the a rep's ear, or join the call.
The new Call Studio service provides continuous monitoring of sales calls via a new dashboard. Managers and trainers can listen to calls, whisper advice in the a rep’s ear, or join the call.

Prior to SalesLoft’s Rainmaker user conference, their VP of Product Marketing Sean Kester provided me with a demo and overview of the enhancements to their Account Based Sales Engagement Platform.  The key product announcement is their new Live Call Studio which allows managers to monitor outbound calls.  The firm will also be demonstrating enhanced Salesforce and Gmail connectors which support sales engagement intelligence and the Twilio dialer.

Amongst their new partners are Zoominfo, TalkIQ, and Vidyard which will provide company and contact details, call transcription, and video messaging services.

The other new feature is a “Draft on Behalf” service that allows reps to create emails to be sent from executive inboxes.

SalesLoft closed on a $15M Round B last month.  The firm said that the funds would be used towards product, marketing, and opening an office in San Francisco.  The 2017 product focus includes improved orchestration between sales, marketing, and supporting executives; enhanced insights and reports; expanded governance tools; role based workflow assignments; greater connectivity; and enhanced analytics.

Call Studio

Call Studio provides live coaching and feedback to help managers shape a consistent message.  Call Studio assists with new hire training as well as upsell and cross-sell training for more experienced sales staff.  The Studio displays a set of conversational tiles which track all current calls along with duration and participants.  A manager can listen in on any call and provide feedback afterwards, whisper advice into the rep’s ear during the call, or join the conversation.  Managers and trainers do not need to be at the same location as the Sales Development Reps (SDRs).  Conversely, reps can digitally raise their hand if they need assistance and will feel more confident as they ramp up.

Kester noted that “Front line sales is one of the most difficult positions in a business. Live Call Studio reduces on-boarding time, coaching time, and increases rep effectiveness with the ability to coach from anywhere. Live coaching can quickly identify learning and advancement opportunities so that reps can stay motivated and be more productive.”

Call Studio will officially be launched at their Rainmaker conference during the first week of March and is currently live at ten accounts.

Draft on Behalf

SalesLoft will also be unveiling an as yet unnamed “Draft on behalf ” service which allows sales reps to write an email to be sent from company execs.  The note includes subject, message, and recipients.  The rep also provides an explanation of the request.

Once written, the CxO is sent an email with an overview of the request and a button to open the message.  Executives can also view pending messages stored in a “Requests” tab queue.

A "Draft on behalf" Requests tab provides a queue of pending CSR-written emails for review and transmission.
A “Draft on behalf” Requests tab provides a queue of pending CSR-written emails for review and transmission.

The “Draft on behalf” feature will initially be available in Gmail with plans to extend the service to Outlook down the road.

SalesLoft Connect

Recently enhanced connectors include SalesLoft Connect in Gmail and Salesforce.  The Gmail Connect tool displays SalesLoft in a new right-handed sidebar.  SDRs can click-to-dial from within Gmail and view the live feed for the prospect.  Other SalesLoft Connect for Gmail features include contact search, launching emails, and adding the message to SFDC.  The contact profile includes a set of functions including

  • Add or remove from a cadence (templated SDR multi-channel messaging workflows)
  • View recent notes and activity
  • Flag as Do Not Contact
  • Link to social profiles
  • Open and edit SalesLoft profiles
  • View additional contact information

Connect in Salesforce is both Classic and Lightning-ready providing access to SalesLoft Cadences within SFDC.  Features include the contact profile, SalesLoft Dialer, Cadence view, prospect activity view, and bi-directional synching between SalesLoft and Salesforce.

New Partners

Finally, SalesLoft will be showing off three new ecosystem partners at Rainmaker.  SalesLoft looks for partners that will offer a freemium strategy within their service, so that even SMBs can obtain benefits from SalesLoft partnerships.

Vidyard supports quick custom videos which help “humanize” SDR emails along with video playlists.  Thus, an SDR could attach two short demos and a personalized introductory message.  According to Kester, “adding a highly engaging video thumbnail to your email cadence in SalesLoft will help your emails stand out, boost click through rates, and send response rates soaring.”

Vidyard functionality and workflows for SDRs.
Vidyard functionality and workflows for SDRs.

Vidyard tracks which videos were watched and notifies sales reps.

Free Vidyard allows users access to all their features with limitations on the total number of videos hosted in their libraries along with some sharing limitations. The paid version offers a more robust library, organization, and hosting feature set.

TalkIQ provides integrated call transcription.  Features include a summary tab, cross-call searching, audio clips, and coaching commentary.  Premium features include analytics and admin-defined algorithms that automatically pull calls based on specific criteria. These calls will be displayed in a premium dashboard.

From within Chrome, users will have access to Zoominfo’s ReachOut connector which provides in-context account and contact information to SalesLoft.  For example, an SDR could identify the perfect contact in LinkedIn, use the ReachOut extension to obtain contact information, and send company and contact details to SalesLoft to begin a cadence.

Note: SalesLoft is one of the four Account Based Sales Development services covered in my new 2017 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors.  Zoominfo is also profiled.

 

Predictions Become Predictive (It’s Prediction Season)

I generally avoid playing in the prognostications game.  After all, it is difficult enough to understand what happened over the past year without projecting it forward or relying on simple extrapolation.  Nevertheless, nothing prevents me from relaying a few of the more interesting sales and marketing related technology predictions during the Predictions Season (and you thought it was the holiday season!).

I will begin with James Cooke and others at Nucleus Research who wrote:

We’ve all heard “data science” creep into the CRM conversation over the past few quarters, but mostly as it relates to marketing. Although marketing was the first area to get predictive, the future for all three pillars (sales, marketing, and service) of CRM is predictive – taking advantage of the intelligence of the software to look forward, not just track progress. Some of the most interesting opportunities are in customer service, where better data about customer’s habits and the products and services they use can be used to proactively support them (think predictive maintenance of automobiles, for example). The concerns about customer data are less prevalent on the service front than in sales and marketing because they tend to opt in. The challenge for companies will be in addressing the human barriers to adopting process changes driven by more predictive and proactive CRM.

While I agree that marketing has taken the lead on predictive analytics with a focus on lead decisioning (e.g. scoring; nurturing vs. promoting to sales; customizing campaigns at the lead level based on behavioral, firmographic, and biographic forecasting) and best customer cloning (determining the “ideal customer” and providing similar leads), predictive has helped close the gap between sales and marketing.

For example, predictive scoring allows marketing to limit promotion to the top N percent of leads, resulting in much better set of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) being sent to sales.  While fewer leads are being distributed over the Sales/Marketing Wall, they are of a much higher quality.  Furthermore, because the leads are scored and the predictive companies are beginning to provide insights around those scores, sales can begin to develop confidence in the MQLs passed to them.  The funnel attrition rate from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads should decline sharply.  This is a point made by Lattice Engines and reinforced by today’s strategic partnership announcement between Infer and InsightSquared.

Infer-InsightSquared-Activity-Scorecard
The Infer Activity Scorecard within InsightSquared stratifies leads by Infer score. The tool answers the question, “How are different quality leads getting worked?”

You also will hear fewer arguments between the parties about lead quality.  Marketing has long complained that sales ignored their leads while sales complained that marketing sent too many junk leads resulting in sales quickly cherry picking the lists.  Predictive tools should help eliminate this infighting by emphasizing lead quality over volume while providing insight into which leads are dormant.

Infer-InsightSquared-Lead-Aging
The Infer Lead Aging report within InsightSquared helps answer the question “Are our best leads getting overlooked?” According to Infer, “this report lets leadership quickly zoom in on high quality leads and ensure that no good lead gets left behind.

Likewise, nothing prevents sales reps and sales ops from playing the cloning game and identifying similar companies of their own.  Historically, this was done via peer searching where reps took a single customer and found companies of a similar size in the same industry.  Ideal Profiles allow for a similar process, but one based upon the attributes of a group of customers.  These profiles are much more sophisticated in that they build their models from many customers instead of a single profile and utilize potentially thousands of business signals to determine the ideal profile.  Furthermore, many of the business signals may have been previously unknown because they were not available.

We are also seeing sales acceleration tools that

  • Make sure that customer questions and requests aren’t ignored.
  • Provide updated profiles and alerts to reps prior to meetings.
  • Warn service departments of pending customer sales calls so that the problem is given a higher priority.
  • Deliver messaging advice to reps around what to say and which products to lead with.

Thus, predictive analytics and machine learning are becoming more proactive and prescriptive.  The next few years are likely to transform marketing, sales, and customer support.