Tag: Sales Enablement

Showpad PitchAI

Sales Enablement vendor Showpad announced PitchAI, its response to the problem of overloaded managers that lack the time to consistently provide timely feedback and coaching around sales pitches.

“Delivering the perfect sales pitch is one of the most challenging sales skills to master—both for inside and field sellers.  A sales pitch must be confident, impactful, and quick,” stated the firm.  “It should grab a buyer’s attention, capture trust, and leave a curiosity gap.  A great pitch doesn’t happen by accident—it takes practice, preparation, and feedback.  Yet, sales managers and enablement teams aren’t always able to provide the thoughtful and attentive evaluations and feedback reps need to develop their pitch.”

According to a 2018 Gartner Leadership survey, only 42% of sales managers feel equipped to develop their staff.  Furthermore, “sellers feel the shortcomings of managers as well.  Just 38% of sellers report their manager helps them develop the skills they need for their role today, while only 34% report their manager helps them develop the skills they need for the future.”

PitchAI employs AI to record and analyze sales pitches, providing consistent, on-demand coaching.  Feedback is instant, allowing the rep to iterate, refine, and build confidence.

Furthermore, PitchAI analyzes the seller’s “credibility, sincerity, and knowledge through non-verbal communication” and coaches reps on improving their messaging and presentation.  Each pitch is benchmarked against top sellers across the industry “to provide context to PitchAI’s rating and performance scores.”

PitchAI evaluates reps across four dimensions:

  • Speed: How fast or slow the pitch delivery is and whether it’s understandable.
  • Body language: How trustworthy, friendly, and approachable the seller appears.
  • Silences: How and when to add or remove pauses.
  • Happiness: How enthusiastic the pitch comes across overall.

Tips are industry and language-specific.  Showpad noted that “long silences make for a bad pitch in German, but a good one in Portuguese.”

PitchAI banner messaging includes advice on what adjustments to make.

Outreach – Corporate Visions Partnership

Corporate Visions Sales Transformation Strategies.

Sales Execution Platform Outreach and Revenue Consultancy Corporate Visions announced a partnership to “help companies transform enterprise organizations’ sales for the modern era.”  Corporate Visions, which recently acquired win/loss analytics vendor Primary Intelligence, offers science-backed revenue growth services for sales, marketing, and customer success. 

Along with hosting conferences and training, Corporate Visions helps firms “articulate value and promote growth” in three ways:

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

“I have been a fan of Corporate Visions and their work since the beginning of Outreach.  Their commitment to research-backed solutions for sales challenges and solid track record of implementing solutions across GTM teams that lead to results is unmatched.  Their work has resulted in increased revenue and profitability for many of the world’s biggest companies,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “That’s why Outreach is partnering with Corporate Visions to empower Chief Revenue Officers to unlock sales productivity so they can efficiently create pipeline and predictably close more deals.”

The partnership aims to increase deal velocity, improve sales quota attainment, and generate higher win rates.  Corporate Visions will offer a quartet of Outreach-based services around tech implementation strategy, sales messaging optimization, skills coaching, and sales forecast process & measurement.

“By leveraging Corporate Visions’ best practices as organizations implement Outreach’s platform, enterprise sales leaders, from the CRO down, will ensure that every action their team is taking consistently builds enough pipeline coverage for the next quarter without sacrificing today’s deal velocity or pipeline conversion rates,” wrote the firms.

Resources

Outreach

Corporate Visions

Volaris Acquires ClickDimensions

ClickDimensions new SEP supports sequences and templates.

Private Equity company Volaris Group acquired SMB RevTech vendor ClickDimensions from PE firm Accel-KKR.  The acquisition comes two months after the firm launched a Sales Engagement Platform.

“We view this acquisition as a great opportunity for both Volaris and ClickDimensions to provide innovative solutions for the ever-evolving MarTech and sales enablement industries,” said Jay Hoffman, Group Leader at Volaris. “I’m eager to work alongside ClickDimensions’ leadership team to propel their strategy forward and continue to serve their global footprint of customers and partners.  We’re pleased to welcome ClickDimensions to the Volaris Group.”

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.  It will 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.  Its solutions integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Sales.  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.

“With the strength and global scale of Volaris behind us, we envision a bright future for ClickDimensions and the customers and partners we serve,” stated Mike Dickerson, CEO at ClickDimensions. “We look forward to continuing development of our product suite and further solidifying our long-term commitment to the Microsoft ecosystem, innovation, and SMB market.”

ClickDimensions will continue as an independent organization. 

“Small to medium businesses are just as keen as large enterprises to acquire and build deep, loyal customer relationships, and ClickDimensions has put the capability to do so into the hands of thousands of companies worldwide,” said Rob Palumbo, Managing Partner at Accel-KKR, which invested in ClickDimensions in 2016.  “It has been gratifying to help ClickDimensions grow just as the company itself has helped thousands of small to medium businesses grow and expand.  We look forward to cheering ClickDimensions and Volaris from the sidelines.”

Attention Closes on $3.1M Round

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

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

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

Attention Battlecards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seismic Recommendations in Microsoft Viva Sales

Seismic content and training recommendations are presented during calls.

Seismic and Microsoft announced an integration partnership that will embed Seismic’s sales enablement workflows within Microsoft Viva Sales.  Seismic will provide “content production, collaboration, task automation, and engagement intelligence for Viva Sales users across the meeting experience to help drive deals and relationships forward.”  The goal is to “streamline” buyer engagement at relationship-based sales teams.

Microsoft Viva Sales became generally available on October 3.  Viva Sales is “a new seller experience application that brings together any customer relationship management technology (CRM), Microsoft 365, and Teams to provide a more streamlined and AI-powered selling experience.”  The new solution is designed for the hybrid work environment where reps leverage video conferences, chats, emails, and documents to close deals.

The partnership supports AI-powered virtual meetings.  The Seismic Enablement Cloud will initially recommend content and training for post-meeting call summaries.  Future functionality includes content and training recommendations, pre-built digital sales rooms, and meeting analysis powered by Seismic.

​​“We’re united with Seismic in our commitment to empowering sellers through relevant content and an improved seller experience.  Our plan to integrate Seismic with Viva Sales will help sellers have more personalized customer engagements whether they are in the office or on the road, with a helpful assist from the AI-driven insights and content,” said Lori Lamkin, CVP, Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications.

Viva Sales customers include Adobe, Crayon, and PwC.

Resources: Seismic | Viva Sales Profile

Abstrakt Salesloft Connector

Abstrakt’s playbooks and real-time coaching are available within Salesloft

Abstrakt announced an integration with Sales Engagement Platform Salesloft to deliver its real-time call coaching and automated playbooks for calls initiated on Salesloft.  Abstrakt also offers real-time call transcription and passes call details to the contact record after each call.

Playbooks guide sales reps with the “correct questions, relevant customer stories, or high-level demo points for every possible scenario.”  Playbook questions are highlighted during a call, and responses are immediately tagged.  Playbooks can be configured by team, rep role, persona, and stage. 

“Our partnership with Abstrakt shows commitment to our customers by bringing a first-of-its-kind, real-time call coaching software to our platform,” said Devin Schiffman, VP of Alliances at Salesloft. “Real-time is a critical element of sales coaching, and this strategic partnership will continue to drive more opportunities for our customers.”

Abstrakt real-time coaching and playbooks help sales reps focus on prospects “without missing qualifying questions.”  It also provides recommendations for managing objections within 0.2 seconds.

Call recordings and transcripts are available within a few seconds of call completion.  The service also provides talk tracks, talk ratio metrics, topic tagging, and playbook completion percent.

Next Step Items are on the Abstrakt roadmap.

Abstrakt is available as both a standalone and Salesloft integrated solution.  Salesloft is Abstrakt’s first integration partner.  Outreach and HubSpot connectors are coming soon.

“When we looked into the market, we knew we wanted to do two things: work with the leader in the sales engagement space (Salesloft) and make sure Abstrakt filled a void in their current offering (which we do),” said Abstrakt CEO Greg Reffner.  “I am very excited about the opportunity to provide a great experience for all Salesloft & Abstrakt customers.”

Abstrakt supports sales, recruitment, and insurance agent use cases.

Abstrakt is priced at $100 per user per month, with a ten percent discount for annual payment.  Volume discounts are available.  There is no surcharge for the Salesloft connector.

Abstrakt will have five employees by the end of the month with a distributed workforce.  It has managed its initial product development with Beeso Studio, a startup studio in Omaha Nebraska. Abstrakt launched in April 2021 and operated as a paid beta until early this year.  Crunchbase lists them as receiving $730,000 in pre-seed funding.

SalesHood Engage Buyer Sites

SalesHood Added Engage Buyer Sites, a digital sales room application.

Sales Enablement vendor SalesHood launched ENGAGE, its Digital Buyer Sites, at the end of June, but hasn’t formally press released the service.  SalesHood emphasized its ease of setup and access for ENGAGE sites and its ability to “quickly activate” sales content and improve its effectiveness.

CEO Elay Cohen explained that a key differentiator for SalesHood is that it is “100% built on the same platform, providing a single sales enablement system for sales and marketing teams.”

Engage sites can be public or private and are set up with a couple of clicks.  To facilitate access, domains may be whitelisted.  Authentication is supported via Google SSO, Microsoft SSO, or an email with a magic link.  Contact information is collected from all contacts that access the buyer site.

Sales reps can send buyer site invitations via email with personalized messages or shareable links.  Buyers can also request access to a site if they do not yet have access.

ENGAGE captures buyer intent and sentiment as it gathers video-watching time, time on slides, downloads, shares, feedback, etc.  Reps can attach both pre-recorded videos and custom recordings.  Other content includes meeting recordings, meeting transcripts, and mutual action plans.  In addition, the firm noted that chat support would soon be available.

“We continue the push the industry forward by helping our customers and partners embrace modern selling and digital buyer engagement with our ENGAGE product,” posted Cohen on LinkedIn.  “CROs and sales leaders love ENGAGE because it powers revenue teams to use repeatable sales plays and proven content to boost sales efficiency by driving consistent sales execution.  CMOs love ENGAGE because it quickly activates their sales content and improves content effectiveness.  Customer teams love ENGAGE because it progresses (and closes) pipeline faster and more efficiently.  Buyers love ENGAGE because they can make decisions faster and on their own timelines.”

Engage is priced at $50 per user per month.  When bundled with the Learning module, the combined price is $75 per user per month.  In 2023, the combined price will rise to $100 per user per month.

The Seismic Enablement Cloud

The Seismic Enablement Cloud

Seismic rolled out the Seismic Enablement Cloud, an enablement platform for customer-facing teams.  The new service ensures that team members have the “right skills, content, tools, and insights to effectively engage customers and drive growth.”  Instead of offering a set of point solutions for content, training, and engagement, Seismic claims it is the first unified enablement platform that supports digital interactions across the entire buyer’s journey.

“For more than a decade, Seismic has helped develop and shape the enablement industry in partnership with our 2,200+ customers.  Leading organizations view enablement as mission-critical to their growth, and it has become a core part of the enterprise tech stack.  Now we are revolutionizing the space by bringing all of the pillars of modern enablement under one, unified cloud,” said Seismic Chief Product Officer Krish Mantripragada.  “In this new era of selling, customer-facing teams need more than content management and basic analytics to engage today’s buyers.  The Enablement Cloud redefines the boundaries of enablement, delivering the most comprehensive suite of products and solutions to empower the entire go-to-market engine.”

The Seismic Enablement platform supports “end-to-end workflows,” including

  • Enablement and training strategy and Planning
  • Sales Content Management from building content through asset sharing, including content recommendations, personalization, and social sharing
  • New hire onboarding, ongoing training, and AI-assisted coaching and skills development
  • Buyer experience personalization across all touchpoints and digital channels, including social media, email, and digital salesrooms
  • Content Automation with dynamic templates and quick assembly, with support for data integrations.
  • Insights concerning the “behaviors, activities, and content that increase productivity and deliver the best outcomes”
  • Integration support for over 150 solutions, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google

“Just as sales and marketing clouds have brought together several complementary products and solutions to address the needs of their respective teams, we see a similar need and opportunity for the enablement cloud – a dedicated platform purpose-built to empower enablement and GTM teams to deliver exceptional end-to-end buyer experiences,” blogged Mantripragada.  “The Seismic Enablement Cloud redefines enablement by bringing together historically siloed systems for sales content management, learning & coaching, strategy & planning, content automation, buyer engagement, and enablement intelligence into one enterprise-grade platform that supports end-to-end workflows for GTM teams.”

Seismic includes Lessonly (a recent acquisition) pitch training.

Chorus Mobile App

Chorus, which was acquired by ZoomInfo last summer, rolled out a mobile app for its conversational sales service.  The app supports core Chorus features on Android and iOS phones.  Users can listen to calls, speed them up, and pause them.  They can also share key moments with colleagues via Slack, email, and text.  Hashtags and @ mentions assist with tagging and sharing.

Managers and trainers can assign listening and provide feedback, which can be reviewed during walks, commutes, or downtime.  Users also have access to a library of best practices spanning various topics, including objection handling, pitching to specific verticals, or value discussions.

“With Chorus, reps can review top performers’ recordings on their own schedule,” said Alyson Baber, commercial sales leader at Zoom.  “They can also focus on keywords, such as a competitor’s name or pricing information, and go directly to those parts of the discussion instead of having to sit through the entire call.”

Customer Success and Account Teams can review preceding conversations, review conversations before quarterly business reviews, and share the voice of the customer or product feedback with other teams.

Chorus has over 20,000 customers.

Chorus iPhone screenshots

SalesHood Expands Training Tools with SkillsHood

Sales Enablement vendor SalesHood announced the general availability of SkillsHood, an asynchronous training platform for the entire organization.  The SkillsHood Enablement Platform “automates and scales organizational readiness and messaging alignment processes both for distributed and remote employees.”

“SkillsHood is our latest innovation created to boost employee productivity by elevating how employees learn, coach, and collaborate asynchronously across their organization,” posted CEO Elay Cohen on LinkedIn.  “The SkillsHood Enablement Platform automates and scales organizational readiness and messaging alignment processes both for distributed and remote employees.”

SkillsHood delivers personalized learning and development training for both onboarding and ongoing training.  Features include prescriptive learning paths, video role-playing, manager coaching, video storytelling, employee recognition, peer feedback, quizzes, and assessments.   Streamed content may be delivered just-in-time by role and tenure.  Other features include gamification, badging, and analytics.  The enablement platform is integrated with Domo, GoodData, Tableau, and PoweredBI.

“It’s amazing to see sales enablement mature and transform to company-wide enablement,” said Cohen.  “Now more than ever, all departments are looking for innovative ways to lift employee productivity and bring teams together virtually.”

Remote training will remain a core requirement after the pandemic.  Gartner forecasts that 48% of employees will work at least part of the time versus 30% remotely before COVID-19.