Tag: Groove

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.”

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.

Clari Optimize and Groove Partnership

Revenue Platform Clari made a trio of announcements related to a partnership with Sales Engagement Platform Groove, the full integration of conversational sales platform Wingman, and the pending release of its Optimize module for controlling revenue leaks.  Optimize helps revenue teams diagnose and address revenue leaks, reducing revenue loss due to deal slippage, bad data, and error-prone manual processes.

“The Clari Revenue Platform gives revenue leaders the past, present, and future data they need to not just control revenue but help grow it,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne.  “Only Clari provides the full historical picture and adds real-time capabilities to act fast as well as the forward-looking projections to proactively strategize revenue precision.”

Optimize offers a “single, centralized view” of revenue metrics, including win rates, forecast accuracy, and deal cycle times.  In addition, Optimize helps revenue leaders answer questions such as “How is my team trending this quarter?  Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  How can I ensure my reps are doing the right things to produce predictably winning results?”

Clari argues that market leaders have been unable to answer these questions proactively, making it difficult to mitigate issues and risks.  Clari combines historical and external data to assist with revenue benchmarking.  Thus, Clari can reach beyond the CRM to gather account intelligence.  For example, it can look at usage data to assess churn risk.

“Optimize is all about finding revenue leaks so customers can see not just where and why they’re missing revenue, but what they can do about it. No other solution on the market has the ability to harness past time series data to provide a historical view of revenue leak.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Optimize, available soon, will provide a single view for the whole organization of revenue and insights, capturing CRM intelligence, activity data, and forecasts.  With the integration of Wingman, its recently acquired conversational intelligence subsidiary, the voice of the customer is fully embedded within Clari analytics and forecasts.

Furthermore, Wingman provides real-time coaching during sales calls, helping reps avoid mistakes and providing real-time intelligence (e.g., technical information, competitive battlecards) to sales reps.  By improving sales objection handling, parrying competitive attacks, and preventing delays due to technical follow-ups, Wingman also reduces revenue leakage.

“It’s not just about coaching your teams to sell more, or about deal reviews,” said Holly Procter, senior vice president and global head of sales at Clari.  “It’s more about running your revenue better—governing revenue-critical moments for success and collaboration across revenue-critical people, which includes buyers as well as sellers.  Nobody else offers this collaborative, real-time approach.”

The Clari + Groove Joint Value Proposition

Clari and Groove announced a partnership at Dreamforce that helps “joint customers run revenue with more precision, greater collaboration, and faster execution.”  Sales Engagement Platform Groove acts as a “system of action,” while Revenue Intelligence platform Clari acts as a “system of collaboration and governance.” Both platforms sync with Salesforce, which serves as the “system of record” for sales activity.

The partners argue that while revenue is at the heart of every business, CEOs struggle to get a handle on revenue and are uncertain about whether they will meet, beat, or miss revenue projections.

“Up to fifty percent of entire company employees are revenue critical.  They are responsible in some form or fashion for delivering revenue.” 

Clari SVP of Marketing Kyle Coleman explained to GZ Consulting

Revenue responsibility is broader than quota carriers and includes SDRs, CSMs, AMs, leadership, product managers, and engineers.  Unfortunately, “consistent, predictable execution and collaboration” across these employees remain “very challenging” due to the lack of a unified platform shared across all these roles.

“It’s also very difficult, therefore, to govern any sort of revenue process or sub-process in a repeatable way,” continued Coleman.  “What revenue leaders end up doing is every quarter, they’re trying to capture this lightning in a bottle to know whether they’re going to meet, beat or miss, but it’s sort of a scramble more often than not.”

With the Groove / Clari partnership, “we will be able to govern processes, we’ll be able to replicate the best practices, we’ll be able to do the right kind of real-time analysis that leads to action in a closed loop way so that we know that everything is happening as it should be when it should be,” argued Coleman.

A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them.  Revenue leaks exist across the full revenue lifecycle.  For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time, 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.

“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 able to be 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” that is 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 this?  Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.

“Clari has always been about providing companies with the collaboration and governance required to run revenue with maximum precision, and Groove completes the equation by enabling our joint customers to turn the insights we provide into action,” said Byrne.  “We’ve seen incredibly strong results from joint customers using our two platforms together, and this formal partnership will help us transform even more revenue organizations.”

Groove offers enterprise customers a Salesforce-native SEP that records all activity directly to Salesforce.

“Groove and Clari coming together is definitely a ‘1 + 1 = 3’ scenario for revenue leaders,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein.  “Bringing together Clari’s revenue collaboration and governance capabilities with Groove’s strength in sales execution and productivity provides the ultimate value proposition: See the future with Clari and then create that future with Groove.”

Company Links: Groove | Clari

Groove Conversations and Groove+

Groove Conversations

Sales Engagement Platform Groove announced the general availability of Groove Conversations, the “first conversational intelligence product that enables revenue teams to access call recording and insights directly from the inbox and calendar instead of a separate platform.”  The firm also announced the Groove+ mobile app for iOS that helps remote and hybrid teams prepare for meetings and manage post-meeting follow-up (Android will be available later this year).  Groove+ also displays Salesforce and key meeting insights.

Groove is natively built in Salesforce.  Unlike its competitors, Groove does not sync data between a separate database and Salesforce but stores and accesses it natively in Salesforce.  Thus, conversational insights and Salesforce updates are directly managed by Groove inside Salesforce.

Groove Conversations offers call recording, transcription, and analysis without leaving the Inbox.  Additionally, insights are associated with Salesforce Activities and Opportunities.

Conversations initially supports Zoom and Groove’s OmniDialer, with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, WebEx, and other services in development.

Conversations are fully searchable, with users able to listen to the searched term or keyword-related discussion.

Analytics include talk time, keyword mentions, sentiment analysis, and talk timelines for each attendee.  In Q3, the firm plans on adding “deeper analytics and AI-driven insights.”

Additional features include

  • Picture-in-picture viewing capabilities to support multi-tasking
  • Recording, transcript, and keyword access from email, calendar, Salesforce, or the Groove app
  • Internal sharing of meetings for review and team coaching
  • Custom keywords and keyword categories (e.g., product names, competitors, feature sets)
  • Internal and external sharing of calls, with the ability to extract and share a snippet of a meeting available soon

Groove+ delivers meeting alerts powered by Salesforce data to reduce deal time.  Users can easily access deal history, account information, meeting attendees, and activity history.  In addition, meeting notes may be logged to Salesforce with voice-to-text functionality.  Reps can also update meetings, accounts, contacts, opportunities, custom fields, or unique Salesforce configurations.

“The value of Groove+ goes beyond sales to include all revenue team members,” explained Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein to GZ Consulting.  “Essentially, anyone interfacing with clients should find value from Groove+.”

Groove conducted a survey in December and January of 1040 B2B sales reps which determined that 46% of companies are not planning a total return to the office.  Thus, managing remote and hybrid sales teams will remain a top issue for the CRO.  Top concerns for remote sales reps include updating CRM platforms (48%), inputting account notes (46%), and scheduling follow-up meetings (45%).

“Now that most reps are working in a hybrid role permanently, revenue teams need to focus on maximizing the value of their CRM.  Extending the power of CRM to remote teams makes them productive and effective while also providing leaders with the visibility and insight needed to manage them effectively.”

Groove CEO Chris Rothstein

Groove Conversations and Groove+ provide remote, hybrid, and inside sales reps with immediate access to sales productivity tools, conversational analytics, and deal insights.  Additionally, sales reps can update SFDC from Groove+ and access call recordings and insights from anywhere, providing centralized call coaching, next steps, and follow-up.

Groove Conversations and Groove+ are separate offerings but will be integrated later this year.  Groove+ is available with any Groove core license.  Groove Conversations is available as a premium add-on. “When we founded Groove, we knew that building for the seller first was the key to driving widespread adoption and seller productivity,” said Rothstein.  “As a result, we are the only platform that is just as easy to use and relevant for field sales as it is for sellers working from home or in the office.  Our customers typically see over 90% adoption rates of Groove and Salesforce, realizing as much as 83% seller productivity improvements as a result.”

Groove – Vertical IQ Partnership

Google Omnibar with Vertical IQ profile link

Sales Engagement Platform Groove now offers joint customers Vertical IQ industry and economic intelligence from the Groove Omnibar.

Vertical IQ helps “banking and credit union relationship managers, advisors, and consultants build trust and strengthen sales conversations through insightful and timely industry intelligence.”

Vertical IQ publishes 530 plain English industry overviews and 3,400 local economic analyses. The research is utilized by relationship managers in the financial services sector and strategic sales reps looking to better understand the needs and concerns of customers and prospects. Vertical IQ profiles also assist marketers in better understanding pains at various C-level functions within an industry, offer a set of industry-specific questions for sales reps and relationship managers, and help customer success teams understand the pains and concerns of their customers.

“It’s not uncommon for reps to speak to a hundred people a day across multiple verticals, and our integration with Vertical IQ gives them the industry intelligence they need to have impactful conversations every single time,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein. “With Groove and Vertical IQ, reps can now get access to industry knowledge in a single click from wherever they work.”

Industry intelligence is available to joint customers at no additional charge with single sign-on functionality.

The firms are initially targeting financial services and banking organizations, a core market for Vertical IQ. According to Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein, displaying Vertical IQ profiles to relationship managers is a “powerful use case.” RMs often lack industry-specific expertise but need to understand the basics of many industries, including pain points, trends, financial ratios, and CxO concerns.

However, the firms see a broader set of beneficiaries (e.g., relationship managers, sales professionals, customer success professionals), regardless of their industry. The Vertical IQ sweet spot is professionals that sell into, support, or analyze a broad set of industries. Vertical IQ provides “the insights users need to better understand a specific industry before, during, and after meetings,” continued Klein. “As we continue to enhance the integration, we believe some of the key content will be challenges, trends, financial benchmark data, and the content related to call preparation.”

“Groove’s flexibility and ease-of-use make it an effective sales engagement platform for relationship sellers, which is why we’re seeing such strong demand for this integration from our joint customer base,” said Vertical IQ CEO Bobby Martin. “This integration is just the beginning of our vision for empowering the modern sales professional.”

While Sales Intelligence platforms have long offered market research and industry overviews to their customers, the Groove – Vertical IQ partnership is the first integration of industry overviews into a Sales Engagement platform.

The joint service is generally available.

Flash: Groove Series B and Product Enhancements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Groove CEO Chris Rothstein

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

Groove Custom Objects for Salesforce.

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

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

Groove VP of Product Sonia Sarao

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

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

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

Groove OmniActions

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

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

Groove Auto Contact Capture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Groove Activity Capture

Groove – Seismic Integration

Selecting Seismic content for inclusion in a Groove email flow

Groove and Seismic announced an integration partnership to “deliver relevant, approved, [and] compliant” Seismic content and LiveSend links within the Groove Sales Engagement Platform.

“Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather is an expectation from customers in today’s digital-first B2B sales environment,” said Preseetha Pettigrew, Seismic Global Vice President, Strategic Alliances.  “This integration with Groove streamlines the seller workflow, allowing frontline teams to focus on nurturing relationships and deliver greater value to clients.  I look forward to seeing how our joint customers benefit from this partnership.”

The integration delivers relevant content and CRM data within the Groove workflow and assists with intelligent content discovery.

“In today’s increasingly digital and remote B2B sales environment, this integrated solution bridges a critical gap between the point of engagement and Salesforce that helps companies quickly realize time-to-value, without a heavy lift from their IT or application development teams.  And easing the transition to remote selling is critical. Gartner’s 2020 Future of Sales research projects that 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.”

Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein

Speaking to their joint value proposition, Groove Director of Communications Jason Klein said the firms share a “customer-first approach” to engaging clients in a “customized, data-driven, and scalable way while maintaining high compliance standards.”

Seismic Spring Enhancements

Sales Enablement vendor Seismic rolled out a set of platform enhancements last month that are “designed to help organizations capture every revenue moment and drive effective, efficient buyer engagement across all digital channels.”  The release included Seismic Aura, their new AI Engine for sales content.

Seismic Aura employs AI and machine learning to surface “new business opportunities and increase seller efficacy.”

“Over the last year, we’ve witnessed an incredible shift to all-digital buyer engagements. At Seismic, we’ve anticipated this change for some time now.  Our platform exists to make go-to-market teams more effective, whether their buyers are face-to-face or remote,” said Chief Product Officer Krish Mantripragada.  “The next challenge for technology leaders like Seismic will be to enable businesses to thrive in this new era of digital-first selling.  The innovations we’re launching at [Seismic’s virtual conference] Shift, along with the product updates we have coming later this year, bring sales and marketing teams closer together, helping them reach new customers and engage with existing customers in a compelling manner regardless of where they are.”

Continued Mantripragada, “humans can analyze only so much. Buried inside data are patterns, behavior, and insights that will hold keys to your questions and undiscovered opportunities. We are combining human intelligence and machine intelligence to harness the power of this data.”

Other Spring 2021 release features include

  • CRM SmartPlays employ predictive intelligence to recommend the most effective sales plays at any moment.  SmartPlays are delivered within the rep’s CRM workflow.
  • Seismic Sidekick, a Chrome extension powered by Aura, delivers guided selling and content recommendations “based on past engagement, similar buyers, and interests specific to each contact.” Sidekick helps surface engagement opportunities and reduces time spent searching for content.
  • Dynamic Email Templates
  • Global Privacy Management supports GDPR and country-specific, multi-lingual privacy requirements and notifications.
  • Groove and Seismic announced an integration partnership to “deliver relevant, approved, [and] compliant” Seismic content and LiveSend links within the Groove Sales Engagement Platform. The integration delivers relevant content and CRM data within the Groove workflow and assists with intelligent content discovery.

Along with announcing new features, Seismic boasted about its ongoing momentum.  Their net retention rate stands at 111%.  They have over one million users at over 700 enterprise clients, including deep penetration in the financial services sector.  Seismic claims that 22 of the top 25 global asset management companies are customers, along with 7 of the top 10 US banks and 4 of the top 5 North American wealth management firms. Seismic added over 200 employees last year and opened its first Canadian office with the December Grapevine6 acquisition.  They now have more than 1000 workers across fifteen offices.

Continue to Groove – Seismic Integration.

Groove Revenue Intelligence

Sales Engagement Platform Groove expanded its analytics with new revenue intelligence capabilities that support real-time opportunity and pipeline management and expanded ROI reporting.  The new capabilities support pipeline reviews with a single pane of glass workspace populated with real-time Salesforce data.

In its 2020 State of Sales Report, Salesforce stated that “High-performing sales teams are 1.5 times more likely to base forecasts on data-driven insights.” Ensuring that data is accurate, timely, and complete has long been an issue with CRMs, requiring sales reps to spend hours each week recording their activities and updating account, contact, lead, and opportunity data.

Sales Intelligence platforms have picked up the slack around CRM data, offering DaaS prospecting and enrichment services.  Likewise, SEPs capture most sales rep activity data, reducing activity tracking overhead; however, updating opportunity data and evaluating opportunity risk remain a significant automation gap.  

Maintaining Opportunity data, which is critical for pipeline reviews and forecasting, is made more difficult by the data structure of CRMs.  One common complaint about Salesforce is the difficulty of viewing and updating opportunity data, which is fragmented across accounts.  Revenue Intelligence tools from Clari, Revenue Grid, SalesLoft, and Groove simplify the data update and review process by providing a centralized interface for updating the pipeline and reviewing it with managers.  Updates are immediately written back to Salesforce, simplifying the pipeline management process and ensuring that current opportunity data is instantly synced in Salesforce.

While Clari and Revenue Grid focus on Revenue Intelligence, Groove and SalesLoft attack the issue from a Sales Engagement perspective.  This functional overlap between categories has been evident since SalesLoft acquired Costello in 2019 and integrated Costello’s revenue intelligence capabilities.  While Sales Engagement Platforms began as multi-channel messaging services for SDRs, they have significantly broadened their scope to include Analytics, Guided Selling, Engagement Metrics, Meeting Management, and Revenue Intelligence.

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

Revenue Intelligence Platforms have also expanded their scope, assisting with opportunity risk assessment, deal forecasting, conversational intelligence, and buying team discovery.

Out of date and incomplete information is a significant issue for B2B decision-makers.  According to a July 2020 Forrester study, two-thirds of B2B decision-makers are hampered by stale, distorted, or limited CRM data.

“From incomplete sales activity data to out-of-date information stored in shadow CRMs, there are many challenges that prevent sales organizations from trusting their pipeline and conducting comprehensive reviews. Today’s release solves a critical usability challenge that Salesforce users have faced since the platform’s inception, in a way that establishes transparency and trust between the rep and the seller.”

Groove CEO Chris Rothstein

“We had major issues with getting our sales teams to document what they were doing in Gmail, and this is where Groove really shines,” said Bart Johnson, Director of User Engagement & Training at Aquent. “Groove isn’t just a huge timer saver for our reps, it also gives them ‘cross-vision’ into the different orgs and groups selling into [each] account.”