Tag: Product Launch

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.

ClickDimensions Launches Sales Engagement

RevTech Vendor and Consultancy ClickDimensions rolled out its Sales Engagement service that works alongside its other Dynamics 365 sales and marketing services.  ClickDimensions is looking to unify sales and marketing motions, particularly among SMBs.

“ClickDimensions Sales Engagement makes this unification possible, giving teams control over leads and better visibility into revenue-driving activities.  Once these teams are better aligned, companies see an average revenue increase of 34%,” stated the firm.

ClickDimensions aims to “democratize best-in-class tools for all companies” and unify sales and marketing strategies.  According to ClickDimensions, Sales Engagement “offers a unified approach for sales and marketing teams and eradicates the potential for customer drop-offs and miscommunication between each team as leads progress through the funnel.  The result is greater sales team efficiency, higher-quality buyer journeys, and increased customer loyalty and revenue.”

ClickDimensions Chief Growth Officer Margaret Wise explained to GZ Consulting that many of their Microsoft Dynamics customers “aren’t the digital leaders.  They are often digital laggards.  They are often in manufacturing, associations, and nonprofits.  They’re not bleeding edge typically from a marketing perspective.”

So, the question for Wise becomes, “How do we provide solutions that are accessible, integrated, easy to use, and affordable for that specific kind of customer that doesn’t want to be bleeding edge on the latest and greatest?  They want something dependable, easy, [and] that they can find resources for.”

At SMBs, CEOs often take an active role in the technology purchasing decision “because it is tied directly to revenue and growth,” continued Wise.  “A lot of the change urgency is being driven out of the C-suite.”  Thus, their messaging needs to address C-level issues around lead generation and revenue management.

ClickDimensions argues that these laggards often lack a digital strategy, have uncoordinated social media marketing, and mostly transmit one-off email messages.

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement, which runs natively in Dynamics, offers templated emails sent through Outlook, sales sequences, lead scoring, and next-best-action recommendations.  When combined with ClickDimensions Marketing Automation, revenue teams have a “complete view of every step of the customer journey.”

Sequences can be built for initial meeting requests, prospecting, follow-up, inbound, events (both invitation and follow-up), periodic check-ins, account review, and upcoming renewal.  This breadth supports sales and customer success teams across the customer lifecycle.

Sequence analytics are also provided with step-level results (e.g., calls, bounces, opens, replies) and post-activity disposition capture (e.g., interested, not interested, interested – not now).

Sequenced tasks include manual and automated emails, phone calls, LinkedIn, and generic tasks; however, they do not yet support dialer or LinkedIn integrations. 

Admins also set up sequence-based rules for scenarios such as reply action for sequenced emails and bounce handling.  Admins can also set sequences to automatically trigger or wait for sales review before triggering.

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement sequence status at the contact level across leads.

“The modern buying journey has completely transformed from what it was a mere three years ago, which means companies need to adapt how they sell – and fast,” stated ClickDimensions CEO Mike Dickerson.  “Launching ClickDimensions Sales Engagement is our way of responding to these industry challenges, equipping our customers with critical tools to boost revenue, and unifying sales and marketing teams around a digital-first customer experience.”

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement is a “natural progression and the perfect complement to its flagship solution, ClickDimensions Marketing Automation,” continued the firm.  “The platform helps marketers optimize campaigns, automate follow-ups, create lead nurturing processes, and target leads to sales.  From there, ClickDimensions Sales Engagement will help salespeople with the next best action, automating outreach to leads and redirecting leads to marketing for further nurture if they’re not ready to purchase.”

ClickDimensions Marketing offers one-to-many outreach during the nurture phase (e.g., newsletters, marketing campaigns, event invitations).  Later, ClickDimensions Sales Engagement supports one-to-one or one-to-few communications with prospects and customers.  Marketing Automation can send leads to sales reps based on triggers or lead scores, and Sales Engagement offers a button to return prospects to nurture for leads that are not in active buying cycles.  Thus, the problem of MQLs being ignored and dropped by sales as not qualified has a logical resolution – return the lead to marketing nurture and support a “non-linear customer journey.”

The passing back and forth of leads between sales and marketing enables a “continual process until the actual opportunity progresses,” said Wise.

ClickDimensions Marketing Automation supports email marketing, campaign automation, surveys, events, landing pages, forms, SMS, and Social.  While the company now offers marketing automation and sales engagement, its long-term plans are to provide a “full RevTech solution” built on the Dynamics platform.  This future platform and services organization will be built both organically and via acquisitions and support embedded AI for sentiment analysis, next-best actions, opportunity scoring, and activity capture.

ClickDimensions is a Microsoft VAR and consultancy with a global footprint across 76 countries and 3,500 customers.  Half of its revenue is derived in the EMEA region, with most of the rest in North America.  It serves a broad set of industries, with no segment representing over 25% of its customer base.

ClickDimensions also offers consultancy services that provide “fractional access to skilled resources that are in short supply.”  Services include onboarding, training, and execution; demand generation; customer data services; and marketing operations.

ClickDimensions Sales Engagement sequence options include pausing the sequence and managing responses to engagement activity.

Vainu for HubSpot

Vainu for HubSpot Data Mapping rules.

Yesterday, I posted about Vainu’s new Global Database. The firm also announced its Vainu for HubSpot connector for matching and enriching company data against its global reference database.

“Most sales and marketing teams want to be data-driven.  They want to run ABM campaigns, apply modern lead scoring models, and automate many parts of the sales process.  SalesOps and Marketing Ops professionals are there to facilitate all that, but there’s one common challenge they’re facing: CRM data is messy and outdated,” observed Vainu co-founder Mikko Honkanen.  “With that struggle in mind, we thought it would be a good time to launch a new HubSpot connector at the same time that we’re launching Vainu Global…so that it’s easy for companies using HubSpot to get their CRM data cleaned, updated, and enriched.”

As companies are being matched against Vainu’s new global database, not registered Nordic filings, the match field is URLs, not business IDs or VATs.  With forms, contacts are matched against email domains.  If a company is not already in HubSpot, new Accounts are created, and the Contacts are associated with the new record.

“This means it works very well with HubSpot CRM, because domain is often the company property that a business will have for almost all of the company records they have in their CRM, which means that it’ll be easier to match the companies in HubSpot to our database,” contended Honkanen.

During beta testing, match rates were as high as 99%.  For non-matched records, the firm offers on-demand matching against missing domains.  If they are valid domains, Vainu adds profiles to its company directory.

Along with standard firmographics, account enrichment includes Vainu’s Custom Industry segments, global web traffic ranking, and Vainu segments (e.g., website keywords or phrases).  Profiles generally have four to eight industry labels, helping with targeting.

Other fields include technographics and domain redirect information.  Redirects are often implemented after acquisitions or rebrands and are useful for assigning contacts.

Vainu for HubSpot Send to CRM

Vainu offers a field mapper for assigning Vainu data to HubSpot and setting update rules.  For example, admins can set field update logic to always update, update if null, or never update.  Vainu custom fields that are not in HubSpot are automatically created.  Along with companies, admins can map contacts, tasks, notes, and deals. 

Thus, admins can build a campaign and upload it to HubSpot with task assignments.  The inclusion of tasks and notes helps specify campaign details, such as recommended collateral and case studies, with the Vainu Custom Industry and Technology Intelligence assisting with messaging.

If companies do not exist in HubSpot, Account records are created.  If they exist, then the existing records are enriched. 

By default, HubSpot does not overwrite current account owners.

Updates can be performed on a scheduled basis or executed as a one-time batch operation. 

Vainu intelligence with tasks and notes displayed in HubSpot.

Vainu Launches Global Database

Vainu Global Database Attributes

European Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu unveiled its new Global Database this week, a domain-based company dataset spanning over 65 million companies.  The database was built through web-crawling and includes standard firmographics, technographics, Vainu Custom Industry Codes, social links (Facebook and LinkedIn), and web-based insights (keywords and phrases that describe the company). 

Domains are mapped to headquarters locations, with additional locations captured during the site crawl and displayed as part of the profile.  A countries of operation field helps with market entry planning (e.g., which companies in our ICP have operations in specific countries?).  Vainu also captures website languages, helping determine which markets companies are targeting.

“If you’re selling a product or service where the buying decision is made on a business unit/regional level, having this type of data in your CRM is crucial,” argued co-founder Mikko Honkanen.  “It helps your sales reps to pick upsell and cross-sell opportunities and in general, makes it easier to maximize the revenue potential of your customer portfolio.”

“Unfortunately, finding good data for regional offices has been challenging in the past,” continued Honkanen.  “Most companies will only list their main office on their social media accounts, and it’s been difficult for salespeople to manually add office data from company websites to their business systems due to the limitations in the availability of data properties.”

Filtering with Vainu’s proprietary industry codes and associated Confidence Scores.

Vainu offers over 900 proprietary industry codes, including emerging industries such as SaaS and Artificial Intelligence not available in other taxonomies.  When screening, the system defaults to high-level confidence, but users can more broadly search by accepting companies with lower industry tagging confidence.  In addition, users may select one or multiple categories, employ Boolean logic (e.g., SaaS AND Executive Recruitment), and modify their selects with web-based insights.

The crawler and platform UX are English only.

Discrete sizing data is not provided, with companies mapped to five employee ranges.  Vainu employs an “ordinal regression and classification approach” to its model that factors in web traffic, the number of office locations, detected web technologies, mentions of specific key phrases, etc.

Honkanen argues that its methodology may be off by one size band but is unlikely to make large errors.  “Our own internal testing indicates that our model generally outperforms other employee count models, but it truly shines when it comes to minimizing the large, important mistakes.  What that means is that it might be difficult for the model to choose between 51-200 and 201-1,000 if the company has roughly 200 employees, but it has an easy time avoiding big and important mistakes, such as enterprise companies being classified as micro companies.  In other words, our model still makes mistakes, but those mistakes are often small in magnitude, i.e., the model might predict the nearest neighbor.”

Vainu has been building and tuning the database for over a year, helping it distinguish between product sites (e.g., Tide) and company sites (e.g., Proctor & Gamble).  It is growing at 100,000 companies per day and recrawls sites every sixty days.  Users can set up saved searches that identify new companies, upload them to HubSpot, and alert the sales rep.

Company data is available through a web-based platform, API, CSV downloads, and connectors (HubSpot today, with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the Global Database roadmap). 

Users can also upload lists of domains for matching and enrichment.  When downloading data, they specify file formats, controlling which fields to download and their order.

As they offer a LinkedIn field, users can quickly create and upload LinkedIn Matched Audiences to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager with high match rates.

The database does not contain contacts, but Honkanen argues that Vainu’s company data is superior to firmographics from other services.

Honkanen provided several reasons for not offering contacts, “We don’t want to be a vendor that provides bulk contact data…We don’t want to promote salespeople to do spam.  Also, it is very challenging to do that in a GDPR-compliant way.”

Instead, the company wants to promote “smart, Account Based Marketing” that supports very specific industry and keyword screening and LinkedIn audience campaigns.  From the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, users can target by persona.  Users can also match against existing HubSpot contacts with pre-existing consent tied to Vainu-enriched firmographics.

“If you’re looking for a combination of high-quality firmographic and website-based insights, we’ve got you covered,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang.  “Our global data offering includes numerous important data points, such as location, industry, company size, technologies, website keywords, and website traffic, that, according to our customers who have tested several offerings, other vendors cannot provide at a similar quality.”

While other databases, including Vainu’s Nordics database, are built around business ids, the global database is built around domains, with the firm capturing multiple locations related to domains.  Business ids are preferred for KYC and credit scenarios as the data is tied to legal ids, but domain data matches well against CRMs and emails.

Vainu contends that domain-keyed databases are better for ICP/TAM analysis as subsidiaries and branches aren’t double counted, providing a more accurate view of market opportunity.  Vainu claims that ICPs built using Vainu Custom Industry codes and website-based insights during beta testing consistently achieved 90% accuracy.

The Global Database resides on a new platform and is available as a distinct product with separate licensing and administration from its Nordic registered-data services.

Pricing starts at €12,000 per annum, with a one-time setup fee starting at €1,000.  Instead of seat-based pricing, Vainu is pricing based on the number of records uploaded or maintained.

Vainu Company Profile

Vainu Resources

Salesloft Forecast Launched

Salesloft’s new Forecast module ingests deal data from multiple platforms, allowing sales professionals to review deals and take actions necessary to stay on track.

Salesloft continues to extend its value proposition beyond sales engagement and conversational intelligence into deal forecasting and revenue intelligence.  Its new Forecast capability, bundled with the Enterprise edition, is available as part of Salesloft’s Spring ’22 Release.  Other spring enhancements include Multi-language Support for Conversations, Out-of-Office Detection, and mobile updates.

Salesloft noted that forecasting remains a “disjointed and manual process” often conducted with spreadsheets.  Sales professionals must collect information from disconnected systems and often deliver inaccurate numbers that waste “valuable selling time.”  What’s more, manual processes provide few insights for improving sales results and aren’t actionable.  Thus, significant resources are expended coming to a forecast number, but by the time the CSO or CRO rolls it up to the CEO, the forecast is a black box number based on quickly aging data with few actionable insights.

The disjointed forecasting process (Source: Salesloft)

“Forecasting is a critical process for every revenue organization,” said Salesloft CPO Ellie Fields.  “But when sellers use spreadsheets, there’s a high risk of user error and acting on old data.  Spreadsheets aren’t scalable, are incredibly manual, ungoverned, and only serve as a snapshot in time.  There’s no context to help sellers look ahead.”

In a presentation to GZ Consulting, SVP of Product Management Frank Dale emphasized that Salesloft is looking to stay in the “revenue lane” focusing on “what happens between the buyer and the seller.”  Forecasting falls within the revenue lane as it “leverages the data generated from interactions between buyers and sellers.”  Furthermore, forecasting should not be separate from revenue generation.  It isn’t simply calling a number but “taking action to make that number.”

The revenue lane “covers all core selling jobs” and tasks, including driving demand, generating pipeline, managing deals, and engaging customers.

“Revenue teams don’t want a forecast.  They want a real-time, adaptive week-by-week action plan to beat their number.  That’s not what forecasting is today.  Forecasting, as it is done today, sucks.  For most revenue teams, it is something they have to do, not something they want to do.  That’s because the tools they have available make just getting to a forecast number difficult and time-consuming.  What’s worse is that they don’t often trust the number they arrive at.  That’s a big problem.  It’s hard to know where to spend your time when you’re not sure if what you’re looking at is accurate.”

Salesloft SVP of Product Management Frank Dale

The Salesloft Modern Revenue Workspace is built on three pillars: Connecting with buyers, improving interactions with customers and prospects based on the data that is generated from interactions, and aligning the team around best practices.  Forecasting falls into the alignment pillar but is designed to support connection and feedback.

“There is a huge gap.  The gap is not necessarily about calling the number, but it is more about the action plan on that number,” explained Senior Director of Product Management Anshu Chowdhery to GZ Consulting.  Salesloft set two goals for its Forecast launch: A shared workflow for gathering deal intelligence and turning it into a forecast; and the ability to achieve that number. 

Salesloft Forecast capabilities include

  • Forecasts are rolled up across the organization. 
  • Users can drill down to opportunities and track changes in the pipeline.  They can also take action from within Forecast.
  • An AI-driven forecast model employs “sales engagement data and historical performance to dial in on what’s likely to land, and what you can influence.”
  • Forecasts are based on AI models and engagement data gathered by Salesloft. 

“What we’re building is an integrated, whole system,” remarked Dale.  “We’re integrating all of the activity capture from Cadence, all of the conversation data and capture from our conversation intelligence product, the CRM data from our deals product, and then the ability to turn around and take action again through our cadence product once you’ve made the call.”

“This forecasting product is built on top of [our] Deals product,” expanded Chowdhery.  “Deals bi-directionally syncs with Salesforce.  So, everything that lives on Salesforce is in Deals, and that’s the significant advantage of [our] forecasting solution.  We are able to sync everything and pull all information, not only from Salesforce but across our platform – every engagement that’s happening on the cadence side or conversation side.  The sales leader has the ability to view that timeline and identify…[whether] no conversations happened in the last thirty days; this deal is at risk; what should I do in order to win that deal?”

A Weekly Opportunity Changes view lists all of the changes to amounts, close dates, and stages over the past week and how those changes impact the forecast, providing a dynamic view of weekly activity.

Dale stated that Forecast provides value across the revenue team.  Frontline sales management has greater visibility into the pipeline, and Forecast provides sales reps “a true read on what they need to do to land and hit their number.”  In addition, both reps and managers benefit from reduced busy work in managing pipeline updates. 

Dale contends that daily administrative work for reps is reduced by an hour by streamlining the forecasting and updating process.

While Forecast focuses on new business forecasting, future enhancements will support renewal forecasting and run-rate forecasting (i.e., intra-period deals).  Also, Salesloft will continue to build out its analytics and plans to release Vulnerable Opportunities Notifications for flagging at-risk opportunities.

Forecast provides a common workflow that rolls up deal intelligence across the organization.  Users can drill down into specific deals and take actions, greatly improving insights and actionability.  “This is a seamless workflow for the reps and honestly, across the entire revenue organization to submit their forecasts and submit their number,” said Chowdhery.

Salesloft’s Forecasting workflow.

A modern forecasting system must be part of your sales execution system,” blogged Fields.  “The information about your deals in flight – who’s contacting the customer, what meetings were had and what was said, how the customer responds — is the foundational information that your forecast rests on.  If you’re using a sales engagement platform, all of that activity is already being tracked automatically, without your sellers needing to spend time logging their activities.  Meetings and calls are recorded and searchable so you can review that pivotal moment with the buyer.”

“Forecasting under-delivers when the end result is just a number,” continued Fields.  “The end result should be a set of actions you can take to deliver better results.  To do that, you need to not only see a number, but you need to see areas of softness and strength, important deal gaps, and opportunities.  You need to recognize that the East team will need your support this quarter, but that the West will probably overachieve.  You need to know where to spend your team’s time most productively to get over the line.”

Dale emphasized the importance of cross-product workflows aligned with “things people actually want to do.”  Unfortunately, vendors often build technology that “chases a problem” or is designed to answer checklist questions about functionality.  Salesloft “starts with problems people have and then builds solutions to match that.  So anytime you see us build something like forecasting, we’re building it based on what people are actually trying to do.”  Forecasting was built because it was a regular customer request.

Submitted forecasts show progress towards goal and a comparison vs. the prior week.

Forecasting builds on Salesloft’s pipeline management and deals product, including its AI-powered Deal Engagement Scores released last June and Deal Progression Indicators released last November.

Salesloft claims that its new Forecast module transforms forecasting “from a burdensome task into a strategic action plan to close more revenue.”  Revenue estimates and deal close dates are derived from real-time data and employ “multiple forecasting techniques to make it easy to see where the team’s performance is trending.”  AI helps identify missed opportunities and deals at risk, letting reps mitigate deal risk and factor it into pipeline estimates.  As Forecast is native to Salesloft’s Modern Revenue Workspace, managers can assign follow-ups or add deal notes within the Salesloft workflow.

“With Forecast, customers have the visibility, intelligence, and workflow to close deals more consistently and act upon unrealized opportunities,” stated the firm.

“Forecast by Salesloft is an intelligent solution with strong data governance, so there’s less room for errors,” stated Fields.  “Sellers can forecast and take action on those deals from the same platform.  When sales managers have real-time visibility and the ability to drill down, coaching sellers and taking action happens naturally, leading to better deal outcomes.”

ZoomInfo Elaborates on MarketingOS during Earnings Call

ZoomInfo continued its rapid growth, posting GAAP revenue of $222.3 million, up 59% year-over-year.  Growth was both organic (52%) and via acquisitions (7%), with a net retention rate of 116%, up from 108% in 2020.  Revenue grew 13% on a sequential basis.

Roughly half the increase in net retention was due to new functionality, and half was due to improvements in gross retention and lower down-sell rates associated with the initial shock of COVID in 2020.

High-level MarketingOS functionality (Source: ZoomInfo briefing)

CEO Henry Schuck is bullish about their new MarketingOS offering as part of RevOS.  Since acquiring Clickagy 16 months ago, the firm has been building out ABM expertise in its engineering, product, strategy, and customer success teams to bring the new marketing suite to market.

“In all of our prelaunch diligence, we heard over and over again that the applications that marketers were leveraging to do account-based marketing were falling short for one main reason,” detailed Schuck.  “The data being leveraged in those platforms was both inaccurate and incomplete.  And that’s no surprise.  Today’s ABM platforms were all designed to leverage a company’s own first-party data that exists in their CRM or marketing automation system.”

“And in 15 years of running ZoomInfo, I’ve never heard a rep manager or revenue leader describe that type of data as either complete or accurate.  Yet without accurate and complete data, marketers aim advertising dollars at the wrong company and target the wrong people at those companies.  They deliver fruitless leads to sales, which erodes confidence and fails to build alignment between sales and marketing.  So, we built MarketingOS the same way we build every application with our best-in-class data at the foundation of the application layer…

For today’s B2B revenue teams, data, insights, technology, and orchestration are core to the motion they use to market and sell their products.  But these capabilities are siloed.  Some can be found in marketing tech or revenue operations, while others are in the sales tech stack.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

MarketingOS also benefits from ZoomInfo’s longstanding presence among sales teams, improving the credibility of marketing data and removing channel conflict induced by sales and marketing standardizing on different third-party reference databases.

According to Schuck, the RevOS positioning helps reps better explain ZoomInfo’s broad value proposition:

“What RevOS does for us, and what the different platform and product pillars do for us, is it gives us a cohesive story that we can tell all across our business from our enterprise business to our mid-market business to our SMB business. And we believe that the products that we’ve put together have applicability across customers of all sizes…What it does from an enablement perspective is it gives our sellers the ability to go into those conversations in a way that allows them to articulate the broad spectrum of the platform in a way that our customers are understanding much more clearly.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

It test-marketed the RevOS positioning in December and January and found that the updated messaging raised both the win rate and average sales price.  RevOS messaging helps reps position Chorus, RingLead, and Engage at the beginning of conversations.

ZoomInfo now presents itself as a best-of-breed platform that replaces disparate elements of the sales and marketing tech stacks.

ZoomInfo, which announced the RevOS ABM Platform last week, is positioning itself as a best-of-breed platform for revenue teams.  ZoomInfo offers a unified platform for sales and marketing, removing the need to stitch together many point solutions that address individual workflows or problems.  With over 10,000 MarTech solutions alone (according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec), selecting and integrating many services has become increasingly difficult.  Conversely, go-to-market platforms such as ZoomInfo ABM Platform manage data, workflow, analytics, forecasting, and communications.

ZoomInfo is not looking to displace systems of record such as CRMs or MAPs but to synchronize with them and enrich their data.  For the past few years, it has been growing beyond traditional sales intelligence (companies, contacts, technographics, event triggers) to workflow, data orchestration, and engagement tools (webforms, visitor intelligence, programmatic marketing, chat, triggered workflows, sales cadences, engagement analytics, conversational intelligence, pipeline forecasting, etc.).  In 2021 it shifted from content acquisitions (e.g., Zoom Information contacts, Clickagy intent, Everstring business graphs) to orchestration (e.g., RingLead) and Engagement (e.g., Insent chat and Chorus Conversational Intelligence and forecasting) acquisitions. 

Likewise, ZoomInfo’s expanded product offerings support Sales Engagement, Recruitment, and ABM.

“We significantly expanded our offering by developing an application layer on top of our best-in-class data assets and acquiring and quickly integrating chat conversation intelligence and orchestration technology into the platform,” explained Schuck.  “These innovations enabled us to add more new customers than ever before and drove increasing levels of sales to existing customers and record net revenue retention of 116%, up from 108% in 2020.”

From a GTM perspective, ZoomInfo is not looking to verticalize its platform but focus more on functional specialization.  As a result, the new RevOS platform positioning focuses on four functions: Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Recruitment.

“It’s more aligned around personas that we sell to,” explained Schuck.  “The new packaging and models that we’re rolling out are aligned around persona, so a sales persona, a marketing persona, an operations persona, and a recruiter and talent acquisition persona.  And that’s the way we really think about our offering and the way that we take them to market.”

Market Flash: ZoomInfo Releases MarketingOS and Unveils RevOS Packaging

ZoomInfo provides a set of data-enabled services for sales, marketing, recruitment, and revenue operations under the RevenueOS brand.

ZoomInfo announced the immediate availability of its new MarketingOS ABM Platform.  The service is part of a broader RevOS offering that supports marketing, sales, operations, and recruitment.  MarketingOS consolidates ZoomInfo’s legacy marketing capabilities, bringing together two recent acquisitions, Insent and RingLead, with new programmatic and audience management functionality.

ZoomInfo also refined its positioning statement from Revenue Acceleration to Revenue Operating System.  It stated that RevOS is “the World’s only revenue operating system of its kind.”

“Our comprehensive B2B database is the key differentiator that sets MarketingOS apart from other ABM solutions,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck.  “ZoomInfo’s unique data science algorithms allow marketers to connect with the right prospects at precisely the right time.  No other solution on the market combines the power of data-driven insights and marketing-optimized workflows like ZoomInfo’s MarketingOS.”

“Marketers typically fail because the data in most ABM platforms is both inaccurate and incomplete.  Current ABM solutions are designed to leverage companies’ own first-party data, which exists in their customer relationship management or marketing automation systems.  Without quality data, marketers pour advertising dollars at the wrong prospects and companies, and, as a result, deliver fruitless leads to sales and waste time and resources.  With ZoomInfo’s best-in-class data and intelligence at its foundation, MarketingOS enables marketers to effectively reach target accounts and drive qualified leads for sales.”

ZoomInfo Press Release, “ZoomInfo Launches New Account-Based Marketing Platform, MarketingOS,” (Feb 8, 2022)

New functionality includes social and display advertising, abandoned from tracking, and audience targeting.  Marketing can build audiences and track campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  Marketing can also build campaigns and manage them programmatically through Clickagy DSP (ZoomInfo) or TradeDesk.

Marketing OS looks to address the “Funnel Famine” suffered by traditional marketing teams.  Several issues cause Funnel Famine: crowded B2B advertising channels, dirty data, leaky black-box marketing campaigns, siloed data, and sales’ longtime distrust of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

MarketingOS addresses the issue of leads created by “The Funnel Famine.”

“Most marketing programs begin with data, whether it’s for tailoring your communications, whether it’s for sending an email, whether it’s for sending a direct mail.  It’s all about those accounts that you’re targeting and the professionals at those accounts,” explained ZoomInfo SVP of Product Strategy and Product Marketing Justin Withers to GZ Consulting.  “And the reality is that a lot of data, especially if it’s pulled from the CRM or other systems, is outdated.  It’s inaccurate.  It’s incomplete, and that can actually pollute or even inhibit the lead flow at the top of the funnel, and [it] ultimately leads to poor conversion.  It leads to leaks in the funnel, and all this hard work that marketers put in at every stage of the funnel ultimately spills out before it can even reach sales.”

The reality is that the sales and marketing funnels operate in parallel, not sequentially, as represented in traditional funnel diagrams.  MarketingOS lets marketers run account-based programs in parallel with sales running account-based sales programs “so that everyone’s aligned at every step of the funnel.”

Under current processes, sales and marketing operate in parallel to each other with little coordination and a single point of handoff for MQLs, a situation that “really doesn’t set marketing up for success…and it leaves sales in a bind,” continued Withers.  Thus, marketing complains that sales teams ignore its leads, and sales reps complain about the quality and quantity of marketing-sourced leads.  As a result, there is an “acute misalignment between sales and marketing.”

With MarketingOS, handoffs can occur at different points along the marketing funnel, based on the channel and prospect response.

Sales and Marketing are aligned around a set of target accounts both within and beyond the ICP.  Thus, an ICP account with spiking intent will be passed to sales, even if marketing has had limited conversations.  Furthermore, the rep will know that multiple individuals from the firm have visited the website or that individuals have clicked through on ads or email campaigns.

Likewise, chatbot conversations with target companies can immediately route a chat to the sales rep or schedule a call.

New functionality for managing abandoned forms can revive a prospect.  ZoomInfo claims a 60% increase in lead flow with its abandoned form tracking.

MarketingOS Audience Builder with Audience Segmentation

MarketingOS functionality includes

  • Expanded targeting that leverages the full set of ZoomInfo’s first and third-party intelligence for building and activating audiences.  ZoomInfo selects include firmographics, technographics, biographics (e.g., Title, 192 Job Functions, Job Levels), web forms, and uploaded lists (e.g., tradeshow lists).  Other selects include business events (e.g., funding data, executive changes, projects) and over 300 company attributes (advanced data-mined firmographics such as fleet size and company benefits).  Targeting also ingests account, contact, and lead attributes from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo. 
  • First and third-party intent data time outreach while buyers are in-market, helping to improve marketing and sales efficacy.  Marketers can track up to 500 intent topics, with up to 50 available at a time.  In addition, chat-based targeting is coming soon.
  • An “in-market predictive score” that identifies each prospect’s buying stage, “informing how and when marketers should engage with prospects based on their ranking and helping them to prioritize their outbound efforts on prospects who are most likely to convert.”
  • Campaign Management and Analytics.  Marketers upload their creative, build an audience, set the budget, and select their channels.
  • Webforms, infused with automated enrichment, support shorter forms with reduced abandonment rates
  • Abandoned form tracking, with Workflows passing the lead to sales or additional nurture steps
  • ZoomInfo Chat (FKA Insent), a conversational marketing chatbot that leverages ZoomInfo data to score and route leads.  Chat immediately passes high-scoring, live leads to sales reps.  The chatbot also automates meeting scheduling.
  • Visitor Intelligence, with pages scored differently (e.g., Product Pages are scored higher than Career or Investor Pages)
  • Automated workflows triggered by intent, custom intent, WebSights visitor intelligence, Scoops (e.g., business events, projects), Funding, Technologies, and FormComplete.  Workflows can also be built to expand reach across the potential buying committee by persona.
  • RingLead data orchestration to dedupe, cleanse, enrich, and route leads
  • ZoomInfo Enrich, a set of DaaS enterprise platform integrations for data enrichment and hygiene.

MarketingOS is powered by ZoomInfo’s database spanning 100 million companies, 150 million executives, technographics, intent and engagement data, and event data.

“Marketing and sales funnels work in parallel, so everyone is aligned at every step of the funnel,” explained Justin Withers, SVP of Product Strategy and Product Marketing.  With MarketingOS, “sales and marketing are working in lockstep at every stage of the journey.”

MarketingOS is one of four products branded under the RevOS banner.

Tying together intent and engagement data and processing them through ZoomInfo Workflows is the future of ABM.  Intent data is employed at the top of the funnel when buyers are in the initial research phase.  Once prospects have begun interacting with a vendor, most buyer behavior research falls under the engagement category (e.g., web forms, email responses, chatbots, conversational intelligence, etc.).  Finally, intent data helps identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the tail end of the customer lifecycle. 

Engagement and intent data are also valuable churn risk indicators, helping customer success and account managers detect potential cancelations or defections well before decisions have been made.  In addition, intent data can show a spike in research related to product-associated topics and competitors.  Engagement monitoring widens to include customer success interactions, training participation, platform usage, and general account health indicators.

“We can support your new customer acquisition with these signals,” stated Withers.  “We can support your opportunity acceleration with these signals.  We can also support your renewal, upsell, cross-sell motions based on different types of signals that are happening at those accounts.  So, it really is a full customer lifecycle marketing solution.”

MarketingOS will be available as a pair of SKUs:

  • ABM Elite+: The full ABM Platform package, including RingLead Cleanse, Enrich, and Route
  • ABM Advanced+: Package includes everything except RingLead

“The purpose behind the two distinct offerings is to simplify our primary offering for those focused on ABM engagement and marketing programs, as opposed to the more operationally focused data orchestration capabilities,” explained ZoomInfo Analyst Relations Director Michael Basilio to GZ Consulting.

MarketingOS includes ten marketing seats and three administrative seats for RingLead routing and ZoomInfo Chat.

The broader RevOS branding consists of MarketingOS, SalesOS, OperationsOS, and RecruitingOS.  ZoomInfo calls RevOS the “world’s first integrated go-to-market platform.”  All four RevOS services are generally available.

ZoomInfo’s data cloud, orchestration tools (e.g., RingLead, B2B DaaS, Workflows), and engagement tools (advertising, sales engagement, web forms, chat, and conversational intelligence) are at the heart of RevOS.

“There’s nothing more important in business than successfully executing your go-to-market strategy,” states ZoomInfo in its product collateral.  “Get it right, and your business flourishes.  Get it wrong, and you’re toast.  That’s why having one integrated go-to-market platform is so crucial.  You can think of it as your revenue operating system.”

SalesOS bundles together a set of new and legacy sales tools:

  • Sales prospecting
  • Chorus, the conversational sales platform the firm acquired in July
  • Sales insights, including Chorus Momentum
  • Sales CRM integrations and continuous data maintenance
  • The ReachOut browser extension for real-time company and contact research and Send to CRM and SEP functionality
  • ZoomInfo Engage (Sales Engagement Platform)

Sales and Marketing Alignment has been a stated goal of the two functions for at least a decade, but they have operated with different datasets, metrics, objectives, and platforms.  Thus, alignment was more vision than reality.  By aligning ABM on a common platform and reference database, alignment is no longer impaired by an organization’s tech stack and data foundation.

“Crucially, MarketingOS lets marketing teams work from a common data foundation. Only 39% of sales and marketing teams share buyer signals, and half say it’s because their sales and marketing systems don’t integrate. The shared data foundation of SalesOS and MarketingOS tightens key handoffs and unlocks true marketing and sales alignment, eliminating conflicting records, wasted effort, and missed opportunities.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck, “Introducing RevOS: The future of modern go-to-market software,” (Feb 8, 2022)

OperationsOS contains RingLead data orchestration (i.e., match, unify, dedupe, normalize, cleanse, enrich, score, and route data) and B2B DaaS services (e.g., APIs, webhooks, cloud data warehouse integrations).

Finally, RecruitingOS contains ZoomInfo Recruit, its recently launched prospecting and engagement service for HR departments and recruiters.  RecruitingOS also includes a set of Applicant Tracking Service connectors.

“Recruiters can filter and reach more good-fit candidates, use pipeline management tools to collaborate and organize the hiring process, and automate the candidate outreach process,” explains Zoominfo.  “This helps you source and connect with candidates faster, reducing the time to find and hire talent.”

Along with new product positioning, RevOS sports new logos, color palettes, styles, and a “unified in-app experience to create a singular, cohesive go-to-market solution that spans the entire suite of ZoomInfo products.”  There are also redesigned data dashboards and reports that “offer a faster, more responsive experience that allows your sales, marketing, and recruitment teams to visually demonstrate ROI and how their work aligns with broader organizational objectives.”

In short, RevOS unifies sales, marketing, revenue operations, and recruitment on the same set of data, providing “the same source of truth” and “one integrated platform for every stage of the marketing and sales funnel.” “If data is the lifeblood of the modern sales organization, then go-to-market teams must have the technology to act upon that data.  RevOS’ unified data tech stack gives sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting teams a single source of truth from which to launch their campaigns and go-to-market motions, simplifying internal workflows, reducing costs, and maximizing interoperability between teams,” blogged Schuck.  “RevOS is the next chapter in ZoomInfo’s journey as the world’s leading go-to-market platform.”

MarketingOS supports a Campaign Manager for building, sizing, and tracking campaigns.

Drift Announces Fastlane Webform / Chatbot Hybrid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CEO David Cancel

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

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

D&B Rev.Up ABX Integrated with Folloze

Continuing my discussion of the launch of D&B Rev.Up ABX.

Dun & Bradstreet also announced that the Folloze B2B personalized marketing platform is fully integrated into D&B Rev.Up ABX.  Folloze is available in both standard and advanced editions.

The D&B Data Cloud personalizes Folloze for landing pages from both inbound and outbound prospects. D&B customer profile data supports campaigns executed on display, email, or via sales outreach.

With Folloze, Rev.Up ABX customers can create and launch “data-powered, personalized omnichannel experiences across the entire buyer journey.”  Folloze captures first and third-party account and individual behavior analytics which are fed back to the CDP.  Folloze can also orchestrate targeted campaign activities across sales, account development, and channels.

The Folloze Buyer Experience Platform

“B2B buying and selling has changed forever,” said Eric Bauer, Chief Growth Officer at Folloze.  “Today’s digital-first buyers want to be treated as partners – not campaign targets.  As such, creating the engaging account-based experiences across the entire buyer journey represents the new table stakes for every marketing team.  Our alliance with Dun & Bradstreet makes it easy for marketing and revenue teams to retool and quickly deliver dynamic contextual experiences across a wide range of digital touchpoints.”

Companies that deployed Rev.Up ABX include Thomson-Reuters, Schneider, Citrix, Rackspace Technology, and Sierra Wireless.

D&B Rev.Up ABX is GA across all five modules (the four channels plus the Advanced edition that combines the four).  The Folloze integration will GA in June.

D&B Rev.Up ABX pricing starts at $30,000. This fee includes the ability to acquire data from the Data Cloud and the embedded CDP (D&B Lattice) along with a single channel to activate a campaign such as email, sales, or web. Other Standard features include visitor intelligence, lead form enrichment, a seat of D&B Hoover’s, Salesforce and MAP import connectors, Salesforce Buyer Insights (10 seats), the Outreach connector (10 seats), analytics, and programmatic audience building.

The Advanced edition applies to clients looking to license at least three modules.  It supports broad data ingestion, social activation, paid search, and real-time visitor intelligence feeds to content management systems, along with all four channels.

D&B Rev.Up ABX 90 Second Demo (YouTube)

RevenueBase Launched (Part II)

Continuing from yesterday…

A sample RevenueBase ICP built during the initial discovery workshop (additional sections include personas and technology).

Instead of building the ICP on commonly available firmographic variables, the ICP is customer service based and defined through the discovery process.  A bespoke taxonomy is created that applies custom tags by persona, industry, size, etc.

“We want to align your database with your go-to-market strategy,” Feldman told GZ Consulting.

RevenueBase promises to “replace all of your data vendors with one solution” that “reaches every company and decision-maker across the globe that will benefit from your unique offering.”  By delivering high-quality, targeted data, revenue teams can shift from managing databases and researching prospects to creating campaigns and focusing on selling.

RevenueBase employs AI for aggregating and integrating its multi-sourced data with the AI building a quality hierarchy for selecting which field to accept when vendors disagree on a value.  The research team assists the AI modeling by collecting training data.

Data quality steps include custom research, quarterly email re-verification, and annual phone checks.  Data is delivered via a quarterly secure CSV file transfer with a 90% accuracy SLA.

Content includes standard firmographics, mined and licensed business descriptions, sizing ranges, industry codes (SIC, NAICS, and custom), contact information, and technographics.  Funding data includes total funding, most recent round amount, and most recent round date.  While full family trees are not available, locations are tied to parent companies.

Contact data includes mobile numbers, direct numbers, LinkedIn URLs, tenure at current job, work addresses, and mapped persona.

RevenueBase has already aggregated 700 million business contacts and 100 million companies, providing it with one of the most extensive sets of contacts in the industry.

RevenueBase combines firmographics, technographics, and custom data insights collected by its research team.

Intent data and sales triggers are not currently available.

RevenueBase provides opt-out notifications to its customers, letting them know when an individual has opted out of their database or the database of one of their contributing vendors.  It also suppresses California mobile numbers in support of CCPA.

RevenueBase is off to a strong start.  Since soft launching the service in October, they have generated $800,000 in revenue and have a $500,000 ARR.  Early success has allowed it to launch the service without accepting outside funding. 

The firm is still in the early stages of development.  It has focused on building its content aggregation model, custom research, and customer service/discovery model based upon Feldman’s experience as both a B2B marketer and data industry executive.  As such, RevenueBase has an advanced DaaS vision but does not yet have APIs and connectors for data delivery.  However, it has a unique approach that is gaining early market traction.  Initial customers include Siemens, PTC, Localytics, SolidWorks, and CB Insights.

RevenueBase is sold as a flat-rate subscription service between $50,000 and $100,000 per annum.  Additional fees are applied for custom research. RevenueBase is headquartered in Boston.