(Continued from Part I)SalesLoft also announced that Calendly’s founder and CEO Tope Awotona joined SalesLoft’s Board of Directors. Both RevTech firms are based in Atlanta. Porter and Awotona met seven years ago at Atlanta Tech Village.
“It was clear from day one [that] he was an incredible leader who had a clear vision harnessed around delivering delightful customer experiences,” posted Porter on LinkedIn. “Most of us know the success of Calendly and have learned of Tope‘s fascinating story. We’re stoked to partner together and grow from his strategic wisdom, leadership learnings, and product-focused excellence. Our ultimate goal together is helping our current and future customers deliver revenue excellence at scale.”
Salesloft Calendaring Functionality
Porter and Awotona discussed potential conflicts of interest, but those concerns were laid aside. While SalesLoft has calendaring features similar to Calendly, SalesLoft maintains an open architecture and partner ecosystem with Calendly as a partner.
Porter echoed a recent Gartner observation that SalesTech is in a period of “mayhem” where customers are looking to consolidate their revenue platforms to simplify workflows and operations. Porter sees SalesLoft as being at the vanguard of this preference for broad, open platforms.
“There’s been massive trends towards digital selling that have taken place,” said Porter. “And then there’s another trend that we’ve seen emerge, which is companies have been using so many different revenue tools, but they really want to consolidate on a very few that they love, and that’s where SalesLoft comes in.”
Continue to Part III which discusses Porter’s long-term plans for SalesLoft.
Sales Engagement Platform SalesLoft announced that it hit the $100 million ARR mark, following 50% growth over the past year. Since announcing its unicorn valuation in January ($1.1 billion), the firm has grown revenue by nearly 40%. Last quarter, it “far exceeded its financial plan.”
It took roughly nine quarters to double their ARR.
SalesLoft ranked 1210 on the Inc. 5000 2021 list. SalesLoft revenue grew 401% over the past three years, a 71% CAGR.
“Everything we’re doing is coming back to, ‘how do we empower our customers to deliver their customers with an amazing sales experience?'”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
SalesLoft, which opened an EMEA office in April 2019, has grown revenue 125% in the European market over the trailing twelve months. It plans to increase its European staff by 120% over the next year and open a German data center.
Its top markets in EMEA are the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany.
SalesLoft benefited from being the first SEP with a European office. While the revenue team can create content in any language, the UI remains English only. Their NLP is English only, but Porter anticipates supporting additional languages for conversational intelligence “in a very short time.”
SalesLoft is also enjoying strong growth in APAC even though it lacks a physical presence in the region.
“While we don’t have physical locations in Asia, we have many customers there and in Australia,” Porter told GZ Consulting. “We have many customers that are US-based businesses with operations there. So we’re global in our customer base and usage of the application, but we don’t have feet on the street in the Asian or Australian market yet.”
The pandemic has driven demand into new segments as companies are looking to establish new communications channels with the loss of trade shows and face-to-face meetings. Customer growth has been “across the board.” SalesLoft has “really expanded to Main Street” as firms realized they needed to adopt a “digital sales motion.”
The pandemic “brought about some, incredible businesses that traditionally took a little bit longer to buy Sales Engagement,” explained Porter. “We’ve got companies like 3M and Liberty Mutual and McGraw Hill and S&P and carpet manufacturers. It’s moved outside of tech to manufacturers, health care, financial services, [and] a number of different professional services. That’s been one of the great lessons learned post-pandemic.”
“As companies have pivoted to a full digital selling motion, SalesLoft has become a mission-critical partner and platform,” wrote the firm. “Only SalesLoft combines the three most critical products in digital selling – Cadence for managing multi-channel communications, Conversations for recording and analyzing meetings, and Deals for managing opportunities and pipeline.”
Continue to Part II which discusses the addition of Calendly CEO Tope Antowana to SalesLoft’s board.
There is no lack of companies and their CEOs that go through the motions of woke capitalism, turning it into performative theater to satisfy customers, partners, and investors. Only over time do you see which firms are sincere in their efforts at stakeholder capitalism and which ones view such positions as a way to goose profits and burnish their image.
BP was a perfect example of greenwashing until they befouled the Gulf of Mexico.
I’ve known Kyle Porter, CEO of Sales Engagement Platform SalesLoft, for about nine years. I was impressed when he mothballed his first product because it wasn’t aligned with his belief in sales authenticity. It was a gutsy move. While he didn’t burn his boats (i.e., immediately remove the product from the market), he stopped selling the service and phased out the product while fulfilling current contracts.
Early on he set out five principals for his company. He has discussed them at user conferences and posts them on SalesLoft’s company page:
So when Kyle announced that SalesLoft was internalizing the cost of its carbon footprint by paying for carbon offsets, I asked him about it. He framed the discussion as part of a broader social mission:
“From the beginning, this has been a mission-led business. I didn’t found a company because I wanted to make money in sales, I founded a company because I knew that a business would be the greatest vehicle that I could create to make an impact on the world. And that starts with our customers and changing their lives. It extends to our employees and providing them with a place where they can learn more, grow more, do more, find fulfillment, and serve others. And that extends to our ecosystem and the places that we serve.
If I’ve got influence and capabilities, why not yield those to make the world a better place at the same time…
Einstein said the purpose of life is to serve. I believe that a leader’s role is to serve, and I believe that I’ve been entrusted with a unique story, with capabilities, with resources, with a great business. And it’s my job to be a steward of that and use it to make the world a better place.
So when you look out, you see that we emit 35 billion metric tons of carbon, and SalesLoft is emitting carbon, as well, through our server ecosystem, through our travel, through our office space HVAC. We have an opportunity to take it seriously, and we have an opportunity to have a net-zero impact on the world, then we’re going to take that.
Fortunately, we were able to find a great partner [Green Places] who helps us offset our carbon footprint, and commits us to operating in an energy efficient way.
We stand for something. We act on it. It’s one of the many things that we want to do as a business.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter (Interview: Michael Levy 8/20/21)
Now, I’m hoping that Green Places keeps Kyle’s feet to the fire on his promise to be carbon neutral. Simply paying for offsets should only be the first step in meeting environmental objectives. The real progress happens when a company works with its employees, vendors, and partners to reduce their carbon emissions. I have no doubt that Kyle is sincere, but even those with the best of intentions need to be advised on next steps and best practices. Just as SalesLoft provides Guided Selling and Next Best Actions to sales professionals, advisory services such as Green Places need to provide Guided Leadership and Next Best Actions to C-level execs.
The SalesTech space is fortunate to have some mensches at the helm (Kyle Porter, Henry Shuck at ZoomInfo, Manny Medina at Outreach, Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn [retired]). Sales has often been a highly competitive, self-serving profession (“coffee is for closers”). Having executives with a stakeholder perspective that preach and implement authenticity, privacy, diversity, collaboration, career development, and environmentalism positions their companies against the stereotypes of the sales profession and helps advance the profession.
Sales Engagement Platform vendor SalesLoft released a pair of reports that assist with attribution and deal engagement: Outcomes Dashboard and Cadence Outcomes. SalesLoft claims that it is the “only company that can tie customer touchpoints and activities to actual revenue outcomes like deals won, revenue per customer, and revenue per reps.
Unfortunately, “sales outcomes have been notoriously hard to track within the industry, especially over the past year when sellers worked remotely. They’ve joined data about buyer engagement + opportunity data and put it…front and center in SalesLoft. Now, teams are better equipped to know what’s working so they can stop guessing and get better results.”
Kaelen Delaune of PR firm Kickstand Communications
The Outcomes Dashboard associates the last activity to revenue. The new dashboard helps managers identify top performers, focus on opportunities for improvement, and coach toward desired outcomes.
Traditionally, sales metrics focused on how many calls were made, emails sent, appointments set, and meetings held. While this intelligence is useful, it measures process inputs, not their efficacy. By associating these inputs with results, managers can identify which activities are moving the revenue needle and which ones are sub-optimal or under-deployed by reps, requiring coaching.
“Every sales team is trying to drive outcomes, not activities. Until now, outcomes have been hard to track,” said Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer for SalesLoft. “When teams know what’s working, they can stop guessing and get better results.”
The Outcomes Dashboard helps managers project where they stand versus plan, identify the top performers and those in need of coaching, and improve forecasting.
Cadence Outcomes identify which cadences are driving meetings booked and opportunities created, helping managers and reps fine-tune and run cadences that move deals forward.
“Now that we have outcome data, we can provide richer analytics. The Outcomes Dashboard lets managers see how their teams are performing versus goals. We continue to invest in data insights for customers, through analytics like the Outcomes Dashboard, and through explainable AI, like the Deal Engagement Score, which is also now available.”
Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer at SalesLoft
In a conversation with GZ Consulting, Fields emphasized the value of multi-channel cadences, noting that multi-channel approaches provide a forty percent lift in outcomes. Thus, SalesLoft is looking to “make it as easy as possible to sell” through the deployment of “multiple channels across a single platform.”
The Outcomes Dashboard and Cadence Outcomes are available in all of SalesLoft’s packages. SalesLoft also released Deal Engagement Scores to GA. These employ over thirty factors for evaluating engagement across cadences and deals.
Last week, SalesLoft acquired InStereo, a professional services partner. InStereo provides go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
Sales Engagement vendor SalesLoft announced that it acquired professional services partner InStereo. InStereo, founded in 2018 by Bill Galfano and Adam Post, was an early ecosystem partner that has grown alongside SalesLoft. Last year, SalesLoft named them their “Partner of the Year.”
“We were impressed by their focus on what the customer is trying to achieve,” SalesLoft President and Chief Strategy Officer Rob Forman told GZ Consulting.
As a partner, InStereo helped “B2B Sales and Marketing teams better engage with buyers to create more demand, authentically engage prospects, and convert prospects into delighted customers.”
“Bringing InStereo directly into the SalesLoft family is a key way we are investing in our customers’ success. Our customers will benefit from InStereo’s deep understanding of buyer journeys and engagement strategies. Their experience and proven enterprise methodologies will help customers operationalize the SalesLoft platform and accelerate the value of Sales Engagement across their entire revenue organization.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
InStereo focuses on go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce delivered through a pair of consulting services:
Buyer Experience Strategy focuses on the buyer’s journey, ICP, demand unit persona, and the “buyer engagement blueprint.”
“We believe customer journey maps are more than just wall art,” states InStereo. “We create buyer journeys you can activate. By understanding how buyers approach the purchase process, sales and marketing teams can better align people, process, and content to deliver just what buyers need, when they need it.”
Buyer Engagement Services pairs clients with a Strategist and Revenue Consultant to assist with enterprise software implementations. For SalesLoft, they focus on “1:1, personalized engagement via cadences” and process automation. For marketing automation, InStereo assists with nurture campaigns and optimization, and for CRM, they focus on leveraging CRM capabilities and improving data quality. Other services include SalesLoft Admin as a Service and sales development services.
“At SalesLoft, our goal isn’t to just sell software; it’s to help our customers exceed their revenue goals,” said SalesLoft CRO Steve Goldberg. “Too many times software companies focus on features and technology, not the success of their customers. InStereo shares our passion for helping our customers get the outcomes they’re looking for.”
InStereo’s customers skew towards enterprise implementations. SalesLoft “plans to take their methodologies into new areas of our business,” expanding InStereo beyond the technology vertical into financial services, SalesLoft’s second-largest vertical.
InStereo has completed over 150 customer engagements. Joint customers include Cargill, Pegasystems, and 3M.
“This past year we tripled our investment into our alliance organization and programs because empowering our partners leads to success for our customers,” said Forman. “InStereo leveraged the power of our partnership and consistently drove incredible outcomes for our mutual customers.”
All twenty InStereo employees will be joining SalesLoft, including their two founders and Carrie McGrew, InStereo’s VP of Strategy. In addition, Galfano will be joining the CRO Leadership Team as the SVP of Consulting Services.
SalesLoft did not provide any pricing deals on the acquisition.
Sales Engagement vendor SalesLoft announced Deal Engagement scores, a “machine-learning capability [that] gives frontline managers an unbiased way to prioritize deals based on the calculation of over 30 data elements captured across Cadence, Conversations, and Deals.”
Instead of a black-boxed score, SalesLoft provides recommendations and an explanation of the score, helping sales managers identify opportunity issues and risks and take actions to improve close rates. Thus, Deal Engagement Scores serve as early warning signs that deals may be going south, allowing them to take proactive actions that improve close rates.
Deal Engagement Scores are shown over time and include a set of stage progression indicators such as days since the last meeting, days until the next meeting, and close date pushes. A seven-day summary details recent engagement activity and deal progression.
“It’s not enough to have just a Cadence product,” said Frank Dale, SalesLoft’s SVP of Product Development. “With Cadence, Conversations, and Deals on one platform, we collect data across the full buying cycle, from the first email, every call, meeting, and communication, through to deal closure and renewal. Only SalesLoft can analyze all of this data to predict revenue outcomes. No other Sales Engagement provider can offer this.”
SalesLoft published the 35 metrics that feed into their Deal Engagement Scores.
35 data elements are fed into their machine-learning model to prioritize and identify opportunity issues and risks. Engagement is measured across emails, phone calls, and meetings, with interactions measured by level. Over 120 million customer interactions were fed into the machine-learning model. As a machine-learning capability, the model continues to improve and adapt.
“Having this capability allows front-line sales managers an instant gut check on specific health for deals in flight,” posted CEO Kyle Porter on LinkedIn.
Deal Engagement Scores are available to early access customers with Deals functionality in the Enterprise and Sell plans. It will GA by June.
Sales Engagement Platform vendor SalesLoft became the latest SalesTech unicorn, following a $100 million equity investment led by Owl Rock Capital. Insight Partners, HarbourVest, and Emergence also joined the round. The Series E funding raised SalesLoft’s valuation to $1.1 billion, nearly doubling its April 2019 Series D valuation of $600 million.
The funds will be dedicated towards “transforming the sales industry and helping the world’s companies sell more successfully.” SalesLoft will invest in “new vertical markets, AI / ML-driven insights and product innovation, and further international expansion.”
SalesLoft had a successful 2020, setting up the firm for the valuation raise. While they were doing well before the pandemic, it provided a “tailwind” that accelerated the need for Sales Engagement solutions.
“The effects of Covid have been a tailwind due to the effects of digital selling,” Porter told TechCrunch. “All sellers immediately became remote. But now the genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. It’s meant that inside sales are now all sales. Whether the opportunities are mid-funnel or upgrades or renewals, we are establishing ourselves as the engagement platform of record because it’s all becoming digital and all sellers are finding more success.”
SalesLoft, which had focused on the mid-market, is enjoying significant success selling to enterprise clients, including Google, LinkedIn (also a strategic partner), Cisco, Dell and IBM. Other clients include Cargill, 3M, and Standard & Poor’s.
Last year, SalesLoft doubled recurring revenue and expanded the breadth of its offering. When SalesLoft went fully work from home last year, it forced them to rely more fully on their platform. “It was an opportunity to immerse ourselves in our own best practices,” blogged Porter. “And since then, our sales cycles have shortened by 40% and we’ve exceeded our growth plans. Many of our customers are experiencing similar results.”
SalesLoft was also named a leader in Sales Engagement in “The Forrester Wave™: Sales Engagement, Q3 2020.”
“Our goal is and always will be to help our customers win. This year has accelerated the need for revenue teams across all industries to transform through a digital selling strategy. SalesLoft is a crucial technology for sales teams to perform at their highest potential.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
SalesLoft claims to be the only SEP supporting “the three most critical products in digital selling – Cadence for managing customer communications, Conversations for recording calls and meetings, and Deals for managing opportunities.” SalesLoft helps customers build pipeline, manage active deals, and engage customers across the buyers’ journey.
SalesLoft gave a sneak peek at their 2021 roadmap in December, unveiling two new features: Deal Engagement Scores and Pre-Built Cadence Frameworks.
Deal Engagements Scores employ machine learning to calculate “deal health based on 30+ factors including activity and deal progression data.” They will assist with prioritizing deals in need of attention and improve forecast accuracy “by identifying mismatches between forecast category and deal score.
Pre-built Cadence Frameworks will improve SalesLoft’s time to value by providing a set of templates and cadences across the full lifecycle and various roles (e.g., SDR, AE, CSM). Inbound frameworks are also supported. Cadences include a preview with a visual display of the cadence, description, objective, function, and implementation complexity level. Pre-built cadences offer best practices from SalesLoft and SalesLoft’s partners.
SalesLoft’s product vision is focused on performance across both efficiency and effectiveness and looks to answer three questions:
What is our performance versus plan? Forecasting for revenue execs
Why are we above or below plan? Outcome-driven reporting for frontline managers
How can we improve and take action? Coaching, Workflow, and an AI/ML Recommendation Engine for sellers and frontline managers.
“We know which sales activities lead to the best revenue outcomes,” stated Porter. “Our data science team is bringing insights and best practices into the platform to tee up next best actions and benefit our customers.”
Forecasting and outcome-driven reporting are part of the SalesLoft vision. Coaching and the Recommendation Engine are areas of continuing development. SalesLoft is already delivering an “integrated, efficient workflow.”
SalesLoft is moving to quarterly releases. The next release pack is scheduled for March 15, 2021.
SalesLoft rolled out its winter release before Christmas. The lead feature was their Coach to Close functionality that provides frontline managers with “visibility into the specific sales stages where their sellers need the most help.” Coach to Close aids managers in identifying and proactively coaching reps on the deals that are critical to exceeding quarterly targets.
Coach to Close analyzes stage-to-stage conversion rates at the rep and team level, helping managers identify where deals are being lost and then “quickly drill down into each deal to proactively coach reps through those problem stages.”
“There are always a handful of deals that make or break a quarter. Helping your sales reps progress and close those deals is your number one priority as a sales leader,” said SalesLoft CRO Steve Goldberg.
Coach to Close provides Deal Analytics (i.e., team and individual conversion rates), a Deal Activity Timeline that tracks account engagement across the buying cycle, and Deal Details that summarize communications, including email, phone, and recorded videos.
“We are giving our customers the power to unlock and understand their sales data. With outcome-driven reporting and AI/ML-based activity prioritization, sales managers can now spend their time in the areas that will generate the most impact.”
Frank Dale, SalesLoft VP of Product
The other central element in the winter release was integrated support for Microsoft Dynamics 365. Sales reps can log emails, calls, LinkedIn activities, and other cadence steps directly from MSD. The Dynamics integration is now generally available.
“Dynamics customers are asking for help as they transform to a digital selling motion,” said Goldberg. “This integration allows companies to leverage all the data in their Dynamics instance to more effectively and efficiently prospect and sell to their customers.”
Other new winter release features include
Multi-touch cadence workflows that allow reps to communicate across multiple channels at the same time. For example, a sales rep can send an introductory email and then Connect on LinkedIn. Users can run the steps in any order, and emails can be scheduled for later in the day.
Bulk edits in workflow management to quickly update users.
Filter by Salesforce Opportunity Data lets users filter and sort recorded conversations by Opportunity Stage or other variables. Users can “easily leverage Salesforce Opportunity data to identify milestone conversions, filter and save views, or access recordings directly from the Opportunity view with our new unified workflows.”
Integrations with Zoho CRM and Qotient talk tracks are coming soon.
November integrations included 6Sense (account data and insights), MonsterConnect (outsourced dialing team), and Vertify (CRM and MAP lead reply analytics).
If the past six months haven’t convinced you that you need to digitize your processes, then I’m not going to try to convince you of that here. Simply putting your head in the sand and waiting for the pandemic to end will leave your business highly vulnerable now and after the pandemic. Your competitors now understand that sales, marketing and support need to be digitally mediated. Instead of trying to convince you of this, I’m going to skip the digital strategy pitch and offer multiple digital strategies for revenue teams to consider.
Sales Engagement platform help unify your communications across all of your revenue teams. Sales Engagement platforms support
Automated Cadences that schedule multi-channel communications across email, voice, social, and direct mail. Features include e-mail templates, phone scripts, playbooks, click dialers, power dialers, voice mail drops, inbound call routing and alerting, and LinkedIn SNAP integrations.
A/B testing for refining your email templates and cadences.
Reporting and analytics for tracking remote sales performance, analyzing message performance, and identifying what coaching individual reps need to elevate their performance
Account Prioritization which dynamically adjust call/email lists throughout the day.
Next Best Actions for moving accounts forward and identifying strategic gaps and risks
Sales Coaching for both reps and managers
Integrated Meeting Scheduling
Some vendors have Meeting Analytics built into their service (Outreach KAIA and SalesLoft) while others partner with conversation intelligence vendors. Calls are recorded, transcribed, indexed, and analyzed; allowing sales reps to be more present during meetings. AI-based real-time analysis provides live coaching during calls with recommendations and short advice cards.
Integrated Partnerships for conversation intelligence, social media integration, e-gifting, video, chat, etc. Some vendors have formal app partners (Outreach Galaxy, SalesLoft App Directory) while others integrate a smaller set of partners without building a formal partner ecosystem.
While they initially focused on the SDR team, Sales Engagement platforms now support the full revenue team including account executives, managers, operations, and customer success.
Sales Engagement solutions require significant training and setup, so if you are considering them now, you need to act quickly to have one in place by December.
There is still time to implement one or multiple solutions before the end of this year. They will help you close out the year and gain some momentum for 2021. Over the next few weeks, I will be discussing additional digital tools for consideration including sales intelligence, sales enablement, personal video, e-gifting (tactile marketing), chatbots, and opportunity management.
BrainSell announced the immediate availability of their SalesLoft Plug-in for Sugar Sell. The native integration provides SalesLoft multi-channel, cadence-based sales engagement from within SugarCRM. The plug-in supports data syncing for Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Emails, Calls, and user data. SugarCRM customers can create, update, and convert leads inside of SalesLoft.
“With the Sugar Sell integration, mutual customers gain an automated data flow between both systems. This means users maximize efficiency with less manual data processes and streamlined employee workflows,” wrote BrainSell.
“SugarCRM’s no-touch, time-aware customer experience platform acts as the nucleus of your company’s tech ecosystem to help companies create customers for life. We’re proud to have a partner like BrainSell focused on innovating the way they help customers grow. This integration completely streamlines and optimizes sales and development reps’ productivity by giving them tools like SalesLoft designed specifically for their role, all while ensuring data is pushed back and forth between Sugar Sell.”
Clint Oram, Chief Strategy Officer of SugarCRM
“At SalesLoft, we take pride in the deep partnerships we have with companies like BrainSell to maximize the value our customers gain from using our solution,” said Sean Kester, SalesLoft VP of Platform Strategy. “With partners like BrainSell, we’re excited to expand the value of our platform by enabling our customers to integrate all their data in Sugar Sell, all while positioning sales teams to continue working within SalesLoft.”
The integration is available through SugarOutfitters for $2,495 per year for an unlimited number of users. The connector supports SugarCRM 7.0.0 and above.
Last month, BrainSell released a similar plug-in for Outreach. It is also available through SugarOutfitters for $2,495.
