People.AI announced availability of The Wire, their new artificial intelligence service for sales reps which suggests next best actions. According to the firm, “Like a brilliant personal assistant who’s always on top of his game, The Wire uses AI intelligence to remind you when to follow up on key accounts, suggest next-best-actions, warn you when a rep or account is falling behind, let you know when customer champions switch jobs, and ensure you’re always prepped for every meeting.”
The Wire
suggests emerging opportunities, opportunities requiring attention, and
champions that have departed to other companies.
The Wire flags opportunities that are in jeopardy of slipping due to inaction.
Managers are
alerted when sales reps are falling behind targets. A Rep Ramp Alert “helps you
move from data-aware to data-driven, proactively leveraging industry data to
guide and coach your teams.”
Ramp Alerts identify reps that are lagging behind best-in-class recent hires and suggest when a one-on-one meeting may be required.
The Wire also supports meeting intelligence with meeting prep reminders and post-meeting note capture and CRM sync.
UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions recognized significant growth in the technology sector in 2018, with tech sector revenue up 255% in 2018. Artesian attributed the growth to the “vast return on investment that can be achieved by leveraging millions of data points to create new relationships, establish credibility, address individual pain points and wider market challenges, and create new opportunities.”
The Artesian
social selling platform provides users with a rich set of sales triggers
combined with company intelligence.
“Technology
companies are increasingly investing much of their valuable brain power into
crafting long-term, powerful relationships from the start of the customer
journey,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “By harnessing technologies such as
Artesian they’re uncovering opportunities to act in more contextually aware,
empathetic and personalised ways and in turn are seizing opportunities to
differentiate in an entirely different way, rather than focusing on features,
benefits and brand reputation alone.”
Yates continued
describing Artesian’s value proposition to technology sales reps:
“Harnessing the most valuable company information, market data and customer insights means Artesian’s technology customers can build innovative propositions for their products and services, prioritising ideas based on solving actual business challenges in each customer segment they serve. The sheer pace of change in the technology sector, including new entrant disruption, means enterprise providers can quickly fall behind if they’re not able establish deep, value-based relationships, especially when they may not be able to react as quickly within product development as their smaller competitors. Artesian’s growth in the sector highlights a shift in focus towards customer experience and value-based selling. Our technology customers are great examples of how to stay relevant and grow, even in a challenging political and economic environment.”
Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates
Artesian’s technology customers include Oracle, Amazon Web Services, SAP, BT, Infinity Tracking, and Canon.
Artesian Solutions has also shown strength selling to British banks and insurance companies. Another 2019 object is the infusion of artificial intelligence into financial services onboarding and compliance tools. The firm has 30,000 users located in the United Kingdom and United States.
Sales Navigator now supports custom Account and Lead lists.
LinkedIn rolled out its Q4 Sales Navigator release in November, but I failed to blog about it. (Q1 will be covered next week in this blog.) The release contains several nascent initiatives including custom lists and the collection of “Reports To” data to assist with organizational mapping. Other feature sets include three new alerts, an improved accounts center, PointDrive activity logging, and additional SNAP connectors.
LinkedIn is
beginning to collect data around who reports to whom. As sales reps or
others learn about reporting relationships, they can add them to executive
profiles. The data is then shared across the LinkedIn contract with
co-workers but not more broadly. Following after last quarter’s support
of buying committees, it is evident that LinkedIn is looking to infuse
additional project and reporting relationships within Sales Navigator.
“We’re
laying the foundation for full-blown org charts by adding a new “Reports To” field
on the Lead Page,” blogged Head of Products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions Doug
Camplejohn. “Once you learn who someone’s manager is, you can add that
info to their page by searching for a name or browsing our recommendations. Any
additions you or your colleagues make will only appear to those in your
company’s Sales Navigator contract. So, the next time you or a team member
looks that lead up, you’ll see who they report to, who added that connection,
and a reporting history.”
An unlimited
number of custom lists of accounts or leads may be built within the LinkedIn
desktop or mobile app. Users may post notes on saved leads or accounts and
filter the lists by people who have changed jobs in the last 90 days, people
who have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, companies who have had senior
leadership changes in the past 3 months, etc.
LinkedIn does not yet support custom list uploading. Custom Sharing is part of the Q1 release.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator added three new alerts
LinkedIn added three new alerts:
Someone at a saved account viewed your profile
A saved account has just raised funding
A saved lead has engaged with LinkedIn posts from your company
which
accompany six current alerts:
A saved lead started a position at a new company
A saved lead has a new position within the same company
A saved lead viewed your profile
A potential lead recently joined a saved account
A saved lead has accepted your connection request
A saved lead was mentioned in the news
Alerts are
now included in the main menu bar of both the desktop and mobile editions. Camplejohn
noted that LinkedIn has improved the “signal-to-noise ratio” of its alerts.
“Think of
our Alerts as a trusted sales advisor tapping you on the shoulder with
information about your saved leads and accounts when it’s most important and
relevant to you,” said Camplejohn.
LinkedIn has
simplified its admin experience and “made it much easier to do tasks from
assigning users to managing groups.” LinkedIn also unified its
administration module across Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Learning, and LinkedIn
Recruiter.
Advanced
Searching was added to the Sales Navigator mobile app, bringing it to list
building parity with the desktop application. Earlier this year, LinkedIn
enhanced its company and lead profiles, also bringing them to parity with the
desktop application.
“LinkedIn’s recent updates to its Sales Navigator management tool makes it a more robust platform for sales teams. More importantly, the moves to bring more of its desktop features to the mobile app are evidence that LinkedIn finally understands how crucial a mobile experience is when designing a sales tool focused on lead management.”
Amy Gesenhues, MarTech Today
PointDrive,
Sales Navigator’s multi-media sharing application, will begin writing activity
history back to Microsoft Dynamics. Salesforce PointDrive sync will come
in 2019. PointDrive presents documents and video to end users as a
landing page and tracks views and shares.
“Now when
you send that pricing proposal to a prospect in PointDrive and members of the
buying committee engage with it, you’ll be able to see that activity in both
Sales Navigator and your CRM,” blogged Camplejohn.
LinkedIn continues
to expand its SNAP
partnerships, adding Zoom as their first
web conferencing partner. Users can now hover over an attendee name and
view Sales Navigator intelligence including their profile photo, title, and
common connections.
The Zoom LinkedIn SNAP integration provides meeting attendee insights and connections from within Zoom.
Four vendors
launched v2 SNAP integrations which provide broader access to Sales Navigator
actions:
In the
Salesforce Winter Lightning release, admins will be able to configure Sales
Navigator and add support for Person accounts without having to go to the
AppExchange.
This year, Sales Navigator focused on improved functionality and display for accounts, leads, and list building in their mobile and desktop applications; SNAP integrations; GDPR compliance and security; CRM opportunity management and buyers circles; alerting; employment analytics; and PointDrive CRM integration. Details on earlier releases are available in my blog: Q1, Q2, Q3.
Owler promises 60 second access to the platform with one-click Salesforce permissioning.
Sales and competitive intelligence vendor Owler is readying to launch Owler Pro, its first end-user premium service. Pro reads the open Leads, Accounts, and Opportunities in Salesforce and begins delivering automated alerts to sales reps. Owler Pro supports single-click sign-on so no Salesforce admin support is required. The service is currently in beta test and includes a redesign of their Instant Insights email alert design.
“In short, it’s an ad-free, streamlined way for Saleforce.com users to automatically sync their active opportunities with Owler, and auto-follow those companies on Owler. So, a sales person’s Daily Snapshot will always be relevant to the deals they are currently working on.”
Owler CEO Tim Harsch
The service is designed for sales reps, but Owler plans to support competitive intelligence analysts, marketing professionals, and senior level executives in the future.
Owler Pro,
which is expected to launch in mid to late February, is priced at $12.99 per
month or $119.88 annually. During the beta, users receive one free month,
but they are undecided on whether that offer will continue following general
user rollout.
The premium
service also alerts on a broader set of topics. While the free version
focuses on M&A activity, funding events, and exec changes, the Pro edition
adds an additional dozen triggers:
Product Launches
Joint Ventures
Partnerships
Awards
New Offices
IPO Announcements (a precursor to the closing of the actual funding)
Record Earnings
Earnings Announcements
Restructuring
Key Employee Departures
Key Employee Hires (in addition to primary leadership which are included in the free version)
Layoffs
According
Harsch, the goal is to “arm sales reps with sales triggers.”
Owler also
recently rolled out a Lightning Data solution which performs a monthly match
and append against Salesforce Accounts. 36 fields are supported including
the top three competitors and social media links. The service is priced
at $25 per user per month for all users in the instance.
The
Lightning Data solution includes a free self-assessment report which analyzes
Owler’s match and append rate against Salesforce Accounts and includes segmentation
data.
Owler has 2
½ million active users, up from 1.1 million a year ago. Nearly half of
users are located in the Sales or Marketing department and forty percent are
directors or above. An additional 17% describe themselves as Analysts,
Consultants, or Specialists.
Owler user base demographics
Owler is also available through its API partners including CrunchBase, SalesLoft, SugarCRM, and Salesforce Lightning Data.
Owler
collects data on over 11 million companies including four million full
profiles.
Technology Intelligence vendor Datanyze rolled out an Account Intelligence capability which provides a set of buying signals via a dashboard and daily email alerts. Amongst the sales triggers covered are Acquisition Events, Funding Events, Technology Adds/Drops, Job Postings Added, and Recent News Articles.
Datanyze CEO Ilya Semin said that the firm is looking to expand beyond lead generation into Account Based Marketing. “We could do a really good job identifying companies that our customers should go after, but when they already have a list of companies they want to talk to they use the ABM model, meaning there’s already a list of accounts. How can we help? With an ABM approach we didn’t really have a solution. This new feature, Account Intelligence Dashboard, is designed specifically for companies that use an ABM approach.”
ABM lists can be uploaded as CSV files of ABM domains, generated as a targeting report, gathered from Datanyze tags or matched against Salesforce Opportunities, Leads, or Accounts. Users can then select which technology adds and drops are relevant to their campaigns and account plans.
“Traditionally, the approach for salespeople is, ‘Hey, let me go find the accounts that I want to target and let me see if they’re interested in my solution or product.’ The account-based approach is when companies, usually marketing departments, identify a list of companies that will definitely be a good fit, the sales rep is responsible for a territory and will be given a list of 100 accounts that they need to talk to in the next year. Using our Account Intelligence Dashboard, they can upload this list of 100 accounts, and every time there is a good buying signal it will give them context to reach out to this company.”
Datanayze CEO Ilya Semin
Along with Account Based Sales, Datanyze positions the service for competitive intelligence (tracking technology and events at your competitors) and customer success monitoring (identifying growth and opportunity events as well as monitoring complementary and competitive technology).
The service is free to Datanyze Small Team ($500 per month for ten users) and Enterprise customers. A limited free version will be available in a few months.
Artesian Solutions implemented a set of technological upgrades to its sales intelligence service which provide speedier searches, more accurate sales triggers, and improved capacity. Artesian now employs Elasticsearch for its news and social media storage. According to the firm, “This has enabled it to dramatically scale up server capacity, boost the performance of its advanced architecture, and provided the ability to analyse, filter and deliver results from raw unstructured data. Search results that previously took 10 seconds now take just 10 milliseconds.”
Artesian Solutions enhanced their sales triggers with improved scoring and ranking algorithms while improved caching and load balancing allow the firm to expand concurrent users ten-fold without a degradation in performance.
The net result of these architectural enhancements is a 25X increase in historical content available for analysis and research and a five-fold increase in the speed of news query engines.
“We constantly feed back into our engineering team the learnings, preferences and needs of our customers, and in return they always deliver robust, superior performance enhancements that not only accelerate our R&D programme, but solidify our position as the market leader in sales intelligence software,” said Artesian CTO Steve Borthwick. “We’ve boosted the performance and accuracy of the Artesian platform across the board, improving raw speed and our ability to handle a significant number of simultaneous users, as well as optimising their ability to uncover those all-important golden nuggets of sales insight.”
The PersistIQ Activity Feed provides a real-time stream of prospect actions from within PersistIQ, Salesforce, Gmail, and Chrome.
Sales engagement service PersistIQ recently partnered with Lead411 to provide integrated contact prospecting. Unlike other sales engagement platforms, prospecting is built directly into PersistIQ. Content includes name, company, title, city/state, address, email, LinkedIn profile, URL, and phone. A maximum daily records feature pulls records into PersistIQ without overloading sales reps with too many prospects.
“Our powerful technology gives sales teams the perfect balance between sales automation and the human touch. Providing our customers access to high-quality data inside their workflow is a natural next step as we further align tools with strategies that have been winning sales for decades.”
Pouyan Salehi, founder of PersistIQ
PersistIQ provides salespeople with communication campaigns that include emails, calls, and tasks (i.e. Cadences or Sequences). PersistIQ also executes a set of safety checks to eliminate mistakes commonly made by salespeople. Soft checks, such as whether a contact is already in another campaign, may be overridden while hard checks block email transmission. Hard checks include do not contact domains, bounced emails, and opted out emails. When sending emails, the system also provides smart variable checks to ensure emails aren’t sent with missing fields (e.g. {{first_name}} ) or misformatted HTML.
PersistIQ supports Gmail, Office 365, and Exchange email accounts. A throttle feature sends emails over a period of time instead of via large batches. Throttling helps maintain their customers’ email sender reputation scores.
Both outgoing and incoming emails are logged. The system also supports out of office management, recipient activity detection (e.g. read, click through, bounce), and time zone detection.
Sales reps can use the built-in dialer or their own phones while recording call notes.
An Activity Feed provides real-time access to prospect actions such as email opens and link clicks. The feed is available from within PersistIQ, Salesforce, Gmail, and Chrome. Activities that happen in quick succession are grouped together. A badge number in the system banner indicates new activity and number of events. Users can click from a feed item directly to the underlying campaign or prospect profile and activity.
PersistIQ provides bi-synchronous connectivity with Salesforce.com leads, contacts, accounts, and campaigns. PersistIQ content passed to Salesforce includes emails, call activity with notes, dispositions, and tasks.
Marketers and sales ops can upload Excel or CSV files with up to 2,000 contacts. A copy/paste feature may be used in lieu of file imports. PersistIQ employs fuzzy matching logic to prevent duplicates from being created.
A Chrome connector provide email detection, user notes, add to Salesforce or PersistIQ, and searching across PersistIQ and Salesforce.
The Chrome Connector provides lead intelligence and quick transfer to PersistIQ and SFDC.
Analytics include daily actions, best time to send, response time, team reports, and campaign reports.
Pricing begins at $40 per month for the Lite service (billed annually). Features include multi-touch campaigns with email, phone, and task steps; reply to previous email threads; response detection; call scripts and outlines; master and step email templates; rolling campaigns; the live activity feed; email open alerts; and individual campaign reporting. A Starter Edition is priced at $60 per month (billed annually) and adds sending windows; A/B testing; email CRM logging; prospect activity history; campaign summery reporting; custom fields; shared email templates; and API access.
The Pro edition is priced at $450 per month for five seats. Features include Salesforce synchronization; send emails on behalf of others; VOIP or Bridge sales dialer; team reporting; best time to send analytics; time zone detection; custom statuses and call dispositions; shared campaigns; roles and dispositions; and custom onboarding.
Lead411 contacts are available in four plans ranging between 50 and 80 cents per record:
250 monthly contacts for $200 per month
750 monthly contacts for $500 per month
1,250 monthly contacts for $800 per month
3,000 monthly contacts for $1,500 per month
Annual subscriptions allow users to roll over unused credits.
“Combining prospecting data and sales communication into one system that is easy to use is a big win for sales reps and teams,” said Salehi. This is the first step in what we view as the next evolution in sales technology; where data and workflow become more closely connected.”
InsideView recently rolled out a beta user interface which follows a mobile first navigation structure and includes a redesigned News Feed view for followed companies. InsideView describes the new UI as “fresh. Modern. And easier to navigate, with more engaging graphics and a common user experience across platforms – within CRM, mobile, and web.”
The color scheme utilizes a monochrome palate with splashes of red, blue and green for accents (e.g. hyperlinks, highlighted tabs, buttons). Unfortunately, much of the text is gray against a white background which may cause readability issues in brightly lit locations.
Navigation is via a left-handed navigation bar. For companies, the primary tabs are Overview, Company Information, People, and Insights. Sub-headings under Company Information are Firmographics, Industry Profile, Financials, Family Tree, and Competitors. Industry Profile has a third level of horizontal tabs, and really should be presented as a top-level navigation item.
A Search bar provides a type-ahead feature to assist with company and contact searching. The type-ahead feature begins as a Recently Viewed list of companies and contacts.
The Insights Tab includes social integration, news filtering by agent, and keyword searching.
The Insights Tab is an updated version of the InsideView buzz tab. Users can view company news, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook in a single feed. News can be filtered to a subset of their 17 agents and be shared via email, social media, or Yammer. All four sources are keyword searchable. Twitter is fully integrated with a Twitter handle summary along with reply, retweet, and favorite. Facebook supports an integrated stream of posts with commenting support.
One of the nice features that was carried forward from the old Buzz tab is the ability to switch between company posts and posts from others for Twitter and Facebook.
In place of a static Home Page, the user is taken to the News Page which presents the user with news stories for followed companies in a grid pattern. Users may filter the topics by one or multiple Agents (sales triggers) and Watchlists. Individual articles may be shared with social media, email, or Yammer.
The News view may be filtered by Watchlist and Agent.
The Company view still lacks an export to PDF feature similar to that found in D&B Hoovers and Hoovers classic.
Users will be able to switch between the classic and beta versions through April 27th.
If your firm has an enterprise Sales Navigator team account, you can migrate your standalone account to the enterprise account and let your employer pay your subscription fees. Just realize that all of your current data (InMails, Messages, Saved Leads and Accounts, etc.) are being uploaded into the corporate account.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator adopted a new quarterly release system for 2018 and has begun rolling out its Q1 release. Yesterday, I touched upon their redesigned Account profiles. Today, I’m delving into other new features that are rolling out to clients over the next few weeks. These include self-service seat transfers to enterprise accounts, expanded alerting, and a Seniority Level preference.
The new self-service seat transfer feature allows sales reps to import their Sales Navigator information into a corporate account. Thereafter, the corporation pays for the license. Migrated content includes Saved Leads, Saved Accounts, Saved Searches, InMail, Messages, InMail Credits, Notes & Tags, and personal Sales Navigator settings. However, when a rep leaves a firm, there is no way to migrate content back to the individual account (their LinkedIn connections are untouched). While activity that took place after the rep merged their account can reasonably be considered company intellectual property, the shared information contributed by the new rep should be returned to the individual’s private account afterwards.
Alerting for the PointDrive service (an enhanced email which directs users to an HTML page containing attachments and multi-media) has been modified to provide real-time email messages when an individual views PointDrive content. Alerts are suppressed for subsequent views by the same individual. The alert’s viewer data includes name, title, company, email, and location. The feature allows reps to reach out to viewers in a timelier manner (perhaps while still viewing the content). PointDrive also provides activity reports and identifies individuals to whom content has been forwarded.
LinkedIn added a new email alert called “Saved Leads Who Viewed My Profile.” According to LinkedIn, the mobile push notification for this event has the highest click through response rate. Sales reps perceive the trigger “as a potential buying signal and want to know ASAP when this happens.” LinkedIn added the near real-time email feature because not everybody has installed the Sales Navigator mobile app. The alert includes quick account and contact details along with account employment details by function for the past six months (if available). To avoid email SPAM, users are only re-notified of visits after seven days.
LinkedIn inserted a new variable for Seniority Level in its Sales Preferences which are employed for recommendations. Sales Navigator also added the option to quickly toggle preferences on and off during Account and Contact Searches. For example, a Boston-based rep for an enterprise Martech Solution can automatically target New England executives, Director or Higher, working in Marketing, IT, Finance, or Purchasing.
Preferences are set during the Sales Navigator onboarding process.
Q1 2019 Update: This product never launched. A different product called Owler Pro is currently in beta test.
Owler is now promoting its first paid service, Owler Pro, which will be launching in a few months. Owler Pro is priced at $9.99 / month but will be discounted to $4.99 / month for the first 1,000 users (lifetime guaranteed pricing). The service is offering the following additional features:
Go straight to article, bypassing the Event Page.
Skip Owler recommended content such as competitors of your followed companies
Follow groups of companies
Customize the displayed instant insights (event triggers)
Ad free
As I haven’t seen advertising on Owler, I’m assuming that the free version will become a sponsored platform. Most of these features are fairly insignificant, but at $4.99 per month the pricing is reasonable to prevent advertising and avoid the Event Page click-through.
Subscriptions are available from the following landing page.
If you haven’t checked out Owler, the free service provides company profiles, M&A and Funding histories, competitor lists, event alerts, and user-based surveys.
