Page 1021 – SalesTech Star

SalesTech Interview with Irina Soriano, VP of Enablement at Seismic

Paroma Sen

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March 16, 2023

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SalesTech Interview with Irina Soriano, VP of Enablement at Seismic

Irina Soriano, VP of Enablement at Seismic talks about the future of sales enablement:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Irina, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Seismic.

I serve as the Vice President of Enablement at Seismic, the global leader in enablement, where my global team and I have ownership of making the company’s go-to-market engine more effective, more efficient, and more successful to ignite growth within the organization. We’re the enablement team at the enablement company – so meta! Before Seismic, I spent the first ten years of my career working at the same company in various sales and enablement roles around the world. Now, as an executive leader, I aim to empower women in the workplace and help work towards ending the pay gap and achieving full gender parity.

Additionally, I am the New York Chapter Lead for WiSE (Women in Sales Enablement), a non-profit organization, and run monthly meetings for enablement professionals in NYC. I’m also a member of Sales Enablement Society, an organization that identifies best practices for successful outcomes and enhances the operations of the sales enablement business.

We’d love to know more about your top of mind thoughts surrounding sales enablement / enablement tools and the type of platforms that are going to dominate the market over the year.

Enablement isn’t going anywhere and is increasingly becoming a must-have in the workplace. In particular, the current economic uncertainty has companies from all industries leaning on enablement tech. Specifically, financial services firms must optimize efficiency while prioritizing digitization to meet customer demand and boost revenue – and enablement tech can help.

Many companies are moving to prioritize enablement in 2023, with 61% of respondents saying that testing new enablement tools is a priority for their company and 62% saying that implementing new enablement tools is a priority this year.

How do you feel sales and other departments can optimize how they use these platforms to further their objectives?

In the wake of the Great Resignation and ongoing talent shortage, it’s crucial that new hires become productive as quickly as possible – especially if they’re in a revenue-generating role. Enablement departments must have a heightened focus on creating training programs that boost new salespeoples’ success at scale.

Enablement bridges the knowledge gap that new employees face – setting them up for successful conversations with customers and reducing time to ramp into new roles. Notably, 85% reported that having quick access to coaching and training content keeps them from second-guessing themselves during customer engagements, while 54% said that it saves them time locating information.

The quick access to training and information leads to more time serving customers and moving deals forward: Respondents reported that enablement tech frees up time to focus on revenue-generating activities rather than looking for answers or assets (80%), and helps them provide a better customer experience (78%).

We’d love to hear some of the key highlights from Seismic’s recent research on this theme, ‘The Value of Enablement Report’?

The 2023 Value of Enablement Report revealed that companies are increasing enablement tech investment in response to economic turbulence. It also revealed how enablement drives efficiency despite the current ecosystem, with findings indicating that enablement technology is mission-critical to success in the current economic climate and most companies are looking to increase their investment in enablement in 2023.

And it’s no wonder why: the data indicates that teams save 13 hours per week thanks to their enablement tech stack, which frees up time for revenue-generating activities including selling to prospects, meeting with existing customers, and closing deals. What’s more, almost all (99%) of those that use enablement technology say that it makes their job easier.

If you had to share five predictions for the upcoming state of B2B sales and salestech, what would they be?

Despite recent economic turbulence and talent gaps in the workforce, enablement technology will continue to be essential for improving efficiency and productivity. These tools have become widely adopted in recent years (9 in 10 U.S. survey respondents use enablement technology at work), allowing teams the ability to streamline workflows, optimize efficiency and boost productivity.

Conversely, those that don’t adopt the tech will struggle to operate efficiently and provide an exceptional customer experience. Those who don’t use enablement technology report wasted time and reduced productivity, particularly regarding their inability to access the content they need when they need it. Notably, respondents without enablement technology spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing, or revising content. This places them at a severe disadvantage as pressure increases to close deals faster and more frequently.

Companies that don’t implement enablement technology risk losing part of their workforce – especially the younger generations. And as Gen Z continues to enter the workforce, this will only become a bigger problem for companies lacking a suite of enablement tools. 72% of US respondents to the study say they would leave their jobs over a lack of coaching and training. Furthermore, Gen Z are 34% more likely than Gen X to say they would leave their company due to a lack of tools to support their success.

Enablement will become a bigger factor for job-seekers in the coming years, and companies who offer enablement tools to their people will have an upper hand in attracting new talent. Almost half of job seekers (48%) report they wouldn’t even work for a company that doesn’t use enablement tools, with the majority (59%) of these respondents being in the US.

Investments in enablement technology will increase. 85% of respondents say their company plans to increase or retain its investment in enablement technology in 2023. Specifically, 67% are looking to increase solutions with their existing vendor, while 63% plan to implement enablement tools in additional departments.

About Seismic
About Irina

About Seismic

Seismic Introduces the Seismic Enablement Cloud™, the First ...

Seismic is a global leader in enablement that helps organizations engage customers, enable teams, and ignite revenue growth. Since 2010, Seismic has pioneered the sales enablement category, with more than a million users and 2,200+ customers globally. Last year, the company introduced the Seismic Enablement Cloud™, a first-of-its-kind unified platform that provides go-to-market teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to effectively engage customers and drive growth.

About Irina

Irina Soriano is the Vice President of Enablement at Seismic, Irina’s global team makes the company’s go-to-market engine more effective, more efficient, and more successful to ignite growth within the organization.

Missed The Latest Episode of The SalesStar Podcast? Have a quick listen here!

Episode 156: Purpose-led Advertising Fundamentals with Julia Hitchman, Chief Commercial Officer at Good-Loop

Episode 155: How Employee Recognition Programs Can Keep Salespeople on Their Toes: with Kevin Yip, Co-founder and President of Blueboard

Episode 154: B2B Business Development Tips for 2023 with Brian Bero, cofounder and VP Sales, Strike Graph

Why Customer Success Is a Revenue Driver—and How to Drive More of It

Alli Tiscornia

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March 16, 2023

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Why Customer Success Is a Revenue Driver—and How to Drive More of It

Once a cost center; now a revenue driving powerhouse. For Customer Success, it’s been quite the journey—and all in 10 years or less. Today, recurring revenue is top-of-mind for every B2B technology CEO, making Customer Success (CS) a star team within every SaaS organization.

In 2023’s economy, where retention matters even more, Customer Success teams are making an outsized contribution to company balance sheets, with their evolving toolkit of best practices, operations and technology taking the best teams from strength to strength.

Is your Customer Success team hitting their stride when it comes to revenue?

In my 20-year career of leading customer-facing, revenue-building teams at companies like ChurnZero, I’ve learned what enables CS teams to hit their full potential—and seen some recurring mistakes that prevent them from doing so.

It all starts with the domains that a Customer Success team should own—customer data, customer relationships, and customer lifecycle—and the three revenue-driving responsibilities that flow from them: adoption, optimization, and expansion.

Don’t MISS!

Episode 150: The Future of Customer Success with Allison Tiscornia, Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero

Adoption: the foundation of recurring revenue

Once a customer is up and running thanks to your implementation team, the work of Customer Success begins.

The whole premise of SaaS was to get rid of shelfware that people bought but never used. Yet, customers also buy SaaS products and don’t get heavy adoption out of them—and if your customer isn’t using your product, they’re not renewing, especially in times like these.

Customer Success teams turn these situations around. They’re in the business of understanding your customers and their needs, mapping them to your product usage data, and figuring out what’s going on. They’ll remind customers why they bought your product and what success looks like to them and match their goals to the right product features to use. The best CS teams are expanding to own customer education and partnering with marketing to create high-quality content that drives adoption.

The result: more adoption, more value for customers, higher retention rates, and more recurring revenue.

Optimization: leveling customers up to build value

Once customers are adopting your product, your CS team should be optimizing the way they use it to achieve their current and future goals. Which additional features could they turn on? Are there other teams within their company who could benefit?

Optimization is where consulting—an essential CS skillset—comes into play. A good Customer Success manager (CSM) is adept at uncovering your customer’s business drivers and goals to introduce the strategy conversations that lead to deeper product usage and customer loyalty.

Expansion: building recurring revenue beyond retention

If your Customer Success team doesn’t own expansion, you’re missing out on revenue. Unlike account managers or salespeople who have limited touchpoints with customers, CSMs have the relationships to know where each customers’ company is going, and the product knowledge to know how you can help them get there.

CS can point salespeople and account managers to opportunities in accounts, but why should they need to? They’re already your customers’ trusted consultants and coaches, which makes it easy to suggest the right additional products, features, or licenses. If you’re concerned about CSMs handling enterprise accounts with multimillion-dollar deals, you should hire sophisticated CSMs who can handle conversations in commercial terms.

Not a revenue goal? It’s not for Customer Success

If there’s still a lingering view of CS as a cost center within your organization, take a look at what they’re doing outside of adoption, optimization, and expansion. If it’s a significant workload, it’s likely detrimental to their revenue potential and to your customer experience too.

Onboarding, for example, should reside with implementation specialists. Transactional support requests need to be handled by your support team, not by CSMs.

Failure to specialize is a critical issue for CS and revenue leadership. It tends to happen in younger companies who don’t think they need to hire for specialized roles yet. Rather than hire one implementation person, one support person, and one CSM, they hire three CSMs as generalists. It may work for a short amount of time, but it will hold you back as your product develops and matures.

What your Customer Success team needs to build more revenue

Adopting a purpose-built Customer Success platform like ChurnZero, which helps CS teams build revenue efficiently and at scale, is a high priority—but it’s not your first priority. Having your CSMs understand your product deeply is also a critical need, as is having a CS operations role to direct their focus to the work that matters most.

The top spot, however, belongs to accountability, in the form of revenue numbers. If your CS team doesn’t own the numbers associated with adoption, optimization, and expansion, it’s difficult to optimize their performance, build the cross-functional links they need, or bring your CS leader into the C-suite. Accountability for revenue numbers is what truly sets your CS team up for success.

The top three metrics for your CS team should be net revenue retention (NRR), gross revenue retention (GRR), and the health of your book of business, or how many accounts are red, yellow, or green. Every CSM should have a GRR number associated with retaining their accounts. For expansion, they should have an upsell number—not necessarily a quota, but a goal or KPI. For adoption, the right number varies widely from business to business depending on your product and how customers use it.

Don’t get left behind on Customer Success

In 2023, we can all agree that it’s cheaper to keep and retain your existing customer base than to continually fill the leaky sieve of churn with new customers. But let’s think bigger in terms of what Customer Success can do—particularly around expansion. If you still haven’t convinced your VP of sales that CS should own more revenue, a downturn economy is the perfect time to do it—and the earlier you get started, the better.

Are You Suffering From an Overload of SalesTech?

Paroma Sen

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March 16, 2023

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Are You Suffering From an Overload of SalesTech?

The salestech market is a burgeoning ecosystem, whatever function a sales rep or sales ops personnel needs to pursue, there’s a tool for it. Be it, forecasting, direct dial systems, CRMs, CDPs, analytics – there’s a platform for everything.

But that does not signify that it’s time for sales teams to adopt all of those available sales technologies out there. What matters is, the adoption of a leaner salestech stack that can tie into other functions and goals (customer success, customer service, marketing and others) while helping teams unify their data and reports with a common business objective in mind.

Asking the right questions at the right time, to the right team members and stakeholders after analyzing where lags lie in your current sales process are crucial to achieving this.

In order to maintain a lean and mean salestech adoption process that eventually helps prove ROI and doesn’t peak costs without enabling end goals; here’s what can help –

Identify your Core Sales Cycle and Process

What works for one brand might not work as well for another in terms of a process. A B2C brand might find a lot of success selling their products via platforms like Instagram but a B2B technology sales rep will likely have more success over email, LinkedIn and cold calls based on recent reports.

Before adopting a salestech stack, what matters is for sales teams to unify on goals and processes at the brand level.

Will the brand like to pursue emails, cold calls, LinkedIn and then direct mail as their key channels: this itself helps identify the core salestech systems that will be needed and those that will eventually need to be integrated with centralized CRMs/CDPs to align marketing-sales efforts at the corporate level.

Or, will the brand want to pursue a stronger LinkedIn, Email, Webinar, Online event cycle to pursue prospects: this then triggers the need for a different set of salestech tools.

Having a core framework in place will then allow sales teams to have the same salestech seats and tools without causing silos among sub teams.

Based on the above, a current list of your SalesTech with a list of what else is needed helps identify added costs

Freemium versions of certain salestech and martech systems can allow you to do a part of your activity, to scale all of it and keep data and reports in central systems without exceeding data storage limits, paid packages or premium packs will be needed. To keep costs under control here, ensuring you know what your core process will look like helps a team identify what salestech from the existing adoption list can help while giving a better idea on what they may potentially need to add to their tech stack down the line to help with tech budget and operational estimates.

Evaluating whether current tools can do the job to reduce added adoption of salestech where needed

Most salestech and martech systems offer integrations, plugins to keep things unified. In other cases, it is possible that existing salestech tools will actually have these ‘’hidden’’ features that can serve the purpose. Before going down the path of bagging a new salestech contract for a sales team: evaluating what is needed versus what is already part of the tech stack and then doubling down on whether existing systems have features or whether with the upgrade of the current package will allow those features to be unlocked can reduce new salestech onboarding and training costs as well.

Knowing what to measure

Adopting a variety of salestech can enable sales people but not measuring how those salestech tools enabled better sales can lead to an over adoption of technologies. After a sales cycle or process is defined and then let’s say: a team decides to drive their process with an added direct mail sending stage, knowing how much the direct mail campaign led to more sales in that month or quarter is crucial to understanding whether the process and tool (combined) enabled business goals or just drove unnecessary costs.

Trying to adopt all-in-one solutions

All in one solutions might cost more but they allow teams to have fewer tools to navigate. The secret today is not about adopting too many martech or salestech systems, but in having lean systems that drive end goals.

Tools like Apollo.io for instance, allow sales team members to find direct dials and other relevant prospect information while also giving sales reps features like email sequences automation, a VoIP to call through and even a sub domain email send facility to protect their main emails.

End Note: It’s an exciting time for salestech only if you know what to use!

To get the desired ROI from any salestech: a sales rep needs to know how to use the tool to the best of its capability. Too many salestech platforms can limit how much of each feature will be used because sales reps won’t have the time to optimize how they use all those various products.

Keeping your salestech lean and keeping it aligned to immediate sales processes and constantly re-evaluating how each of them is enabling sales people to do what they were hired to do – sell – can help businesses have a healthy salestech and sales cycle for the long term.

Experts say Automation of Merchandising with IT Solutions Contributes to Gain in Retail Sales

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Experts say Automation of Merchandising with IT Solutions Contributes to Gain in Retail Sales

European companies are increasingly introducing IT tool to automate the operations of merchandisers at retail outlets. Experts says how automation affects sales

Retail sales reached $6.6 trillion, making this a hyper-competitive market. To stand out from the competition, many retailers rely on merchandising to work right. For these purposes, European companies are increasingly introducing new IT tools to automate the operations of merchandisers at retail outlets. Experts described how automation affects sales.

Manufacturers that do not use custom software will have to rely on conventional methods such as sending images via email or messengers. This process is lengthy and associated with a large number of mechanical operations and cannot eliminate the human error. And this will inevitably result in a loss of market share and lost revenues.

“Companies that do not use IT solutions for merchandising may find it difficult to get up-to-date information about customer preferences. They will not be able to improve their processes.”

— say retail automation experts from IBA Group IT Company.

Retail merchandising software enables better data collection and analysis. Companies can use the information they obtain to develop better strategies to help improve customer satisfaction. Also, IT solutions allow ensuring compliance with planograms. This helps to use retail space more efficiently. In addition, such tools allow users to quickly make photos of shop equipment and process images using computer vision.

One of the promising solutions in the European market is Goods Checker, an IT product for merchandising automation. It gives companies a competitive advantage in merchandising at the point of sale and allows them to analyze state of the shelves in real time. It is a SaaS solution for FMCG manufacturers and distributors that automates all stages of merchandising. Goods Checker allows generating real-time analytics from merchandise shelves.

Solutions such as Goods Checker provide executives with detailed analytics from various perspectives. Now the top management of European companies can rely on accurate and up-to-date data in their decision-making.

“Note that the audit of store merchandising using computer technology takes 60% less time. In addition, automation improves data quality: information has uniform structure, is not duplicated, cannot be lost, and its confidentiality is secured”, say retail automation experts from IBA Group IT Company.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Veeam Software Announces Strategic Partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp.

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Veeam Software Announces Strategic Partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp.

Veeam now expands delivery of trusted Modern Data Protection and recovery for mission continuity within the public sector

Veeam Software, the leader in Modern Data Protection, announced a strategic partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp., the Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Veeam’s preferred public sector distributor, expanding public sector access to the Veeam Data Platform (VDP), which provides customers with the data security, data recovery and data freedom keeps their organizations running. VDP will be available through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and GSA Schedule, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions (ITES-SW2), Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP V), The Interlocal Purchasing System (TIPS), National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint, E&I Cooperative Services Contract, OMNIA Partners and The Quilt contracts.

“From outages to cyberattacks, the public sector is facing more challenges than ever before,” said Anand Eswaran, CEO at Veeam. “There is a lot of anxiety about the gap between how quickly an organization needs to get systems back online after an incident occurs, and how long it actually takes. That’s why our mission at Veeam is keeping customers and their businesses running. It starts with securing their data and ensuring that if the worst does happen, they can recover rapidly whether their data is on-premises, in the cloud or both. Central to that mission is working with great partners like Carahsoft to give public sector customers the confidence to know they can keep running no matter what happens.”

Through the new Veeam and Carahsoft partnership, public sector customers will have access to the newest product releases from Veeam, including the new Veeam Data Platform, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication™ (VBR) v12, provides best-in-class secure backup and fast reliable recovery that keeps business running. It brings together the latest features offered from Veeam into a single robust solution that is offered in three enterprise-grade editions for protecting Cloud, Virtual, Physical, SaaS and Kubernetes applications across complex and expanding IT environments and the increasing set of challenges facing every organization from outages to errors and ransomware.

Read More: ICM in recessionary times

With cybersecurity attacks on the rise amidst an ever-evolving threat landscape, backup and recovery is often the last line of defense for federal, state, local and tribal governments, and higher education institutions. Aligning with Carahsoft will expand Veeam’s ability to help the public sector reap the full benefits of Modern Data Protection to safeguard critical missions.

“As technology advances, so does the threat landscape. It’s important that the public rely on partners who are committed to evolving alongside their needs and the market, while also maintaining the highest standards of performance and security,” said Craig P. Abod, Carahsoft President. “With the addition of Veeam to our offerings, we are now able to provide the public sector with leading Modern Data Protection solutions through our reseller partners and contract vehicles to support agencies’ data challenges as they become even more complex.”

Veeam and Carahsoft will co-host a Federal Ransomware Webinar on March 30 at 2 PM ET. Part two of the webinar series includes a live simulation, and discussion about ransomware lessons learned and best practices to survive a ransomware incident.

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Searchspring Wins 2 x BigCommerce APAC Partner Awards

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Searchspring Wins 2 x BigCommerce APAC Partner Awards

Searchspring Continues its Winning Streak into 2023, Recognised with 2 x BigCommerce APAC Partner Excellence Awards

Searchspring, the global leader in site search, product merchandising, and ecommerce personalisation, wins 2 x BigCommerce APAC Partner Awards in the Best User Experience and Customer Growth categories.

The BigCommerce Partner Awards recognise each solution partner’s commitment to customers, the impact of their solutions, and the exceptional use of BigCommerce platform technology.

Kate Massey, Head of APAC at Searchspring, comments, “If there is something you want to be known for, it’s being the technology solution that helps online retailers achieve the most outstanding growth while providing the best user experience – both for those retailers and their shoppers. I am incredibly grateful to our team for their relentless dedication and passion in driving success for the amazing leading and emerging retail brands we proudly call our customers.”

The BigCommerce awards evaluate top-performing partners’ impact on the ecommerce community for each region within a global network of thousands of agency and technology partners.

Massey continues, “I’m thrilled to see this recognition amongst so many fantastic partners within the BigCommerce network. This is all thanks to the wonderful BigCommerce clients who have trusted us to be the technology partner powering the ultimate shopping experience on their ecommerce stores.”

These prestigious awards continue the Searchspring winning streak, coming hot on the heels of the NORA Australian Retail Solution Partner Awards announcement. The Searchspring team took home the NORA accolade for Best Ecommerce Platform 2022 at the Sydney event on November 30, 2022.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Q-nomy Unveils cubu, the Latest Innovation in Customer Experience Management, at Partners Conference

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Q-nomy Unveils cubu, the Latest Innovation in Customer Experience Management, at Partners Conference

cubu™ is an all-in-one customer journey management solution for businesses of all sizes, offered as a SaaS solution by Q-nomy.

Q-nomy, a global provider of customer journey management solutions, announced the launch of its latest product, cubu™, at its annual Partners Conference on March 15, 2023. Cubu is a revolutionary new product that combines appointment scheduling, customer flow management, and customer interaction management in one integrated solution.

“cubu is a game-changer for businesses looking to streamline their customer journey and improve the customer experience. With cubu, businesses of all sizes can manage all customer interactions in one place and automate their service processes with ease.”

Designed to streamline the customer journey and improve the customer experience, cubu is the simplest and most intuitive all-in-one solution on the market today. It is suitable for organizations of all sizes, from small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprise organizations.

cubu provides a single platform for managing all customer interactions, whether they occur in-person, over video, or through other digital channels. The product enables businesses to schedule appointments, manage customer flow, and interact with customers through digital signage, e-tickets, text messages, and other communication channels.

cubu also includes workflow automation capabilities, allowing businesses to automate processes and adapt to changing business needs with ease. The product’s true omnichannel support and codeless automation of business processes make it a simple and smart way to manage customer engagement.

“We are excited to announce the launch of cubu, our latest innovation in customer experience management,” said Eran Reuveni, Q-nomy’s of Product and Business Strategy. “cubu is a game-changer for businesses looking to streamline their customer journey and improve the customer experience. With cubu, businesses of all sizes can manage all customer interactions in one place and automate their service processes with ease.”

The launch of Cubu was presented to Q-nomy’s partners during the company’s annual conference, which took place on March 14-15 in Dubai.

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Beroe and ProcureAbility Partner to Provide the Utilities Industry With AI-Enabled Market Intelligence

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Beroe and ProcureAbility Partner to Provide the Utilities Industry With AI-Enabled Market Intelligence

Beroe Inc, a global SaaS-based procurement intelligence and analytics provider, today announced they have entered into a strategic partnership with ProcureAbility that combines Beroe’s commodities and indirect spend market intelligence and analytics with ProcureAbility’s research, advisory, and procurement execution services.

As volatile costs, inflation, and supply chain disruptions threaten procurement strategies and operations of the utilities industry, accurate and in-depth market intelligence can help bring much needed stability, growth, and operational excellence. The Beroe-ProcureAbility partnership brings together a deep knowledge of the utilities industry, comprehensive procurement advisory services, and the leading AI-powered market intelligence platform to help the utilities industry make informed sourcing decisions.

“We are excited to partner with ProcureAbility to deliver world-class market intelligence specifically to the utilities sector. The combination of our AI-enabled platform and ProcureAbility’s widely adopted Transmission & Distribution, Generation, MRO, and other category coverage when backed by their delivery teams, multiplies the value to the utilities industry manifold,” said Vel Dhinagaravel, CEO at Beroe.

“ProcureAbility’s partnership with Beroe is a first-of-its-kind industry collaboration that offers the utilities industry unparalleled access to procurement-focused market intelligence powered by AI and human intelligence,” said Conrad Snover, CEO at ProcureAbility.

This partnership will provide subscribers with access to on-demand intelligence for 250+ categories unique to the utilities industry.

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Nitro Named eSignature Leader by GigaOm Analysts for Second Consecutive Year

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Nitro Named eSignature Leader by GigaOm Analysts for Second Consecutive Year

***Analyst firm’s Radar Report for eSignature solutions highlights Nitro’s* *extensive security, compliance, seamless customer experience and best-in-class pricing***

Nitro Software, a global leader in SaaS eSignature and PDF document solutions for businesses, announced that Nitro Sign was again named a Leader in the GigaOm Radar Report for E-Signature Solutions.

“The global adoption of eSignatures took off during the pandemic, and it only continues to accelerate”

Nitro Sign provides organizations with high-trust electronic signatures that meet or exceed global security and compliance standards, including multiple layers of protection and identity verification. The scalable solution also offers flexible integrations and APIs.

Identifying Nitro Sign as an industry Leader for the second year in a row, GigaOm acknowledged that the Nitro platform supports highly secure, end-to-end digital document processes with a seamless customer experience.

GigaOm’s 2023 Radar Report for E-Signature Solutions awarded Nitro Sign high scores for its:

extensive compliance support, offering direct eID integration for over 30 jurisdictions
leading data field configuration and analytics functionality
best-in-class pricing tiers with minimal add-on fees
automation and digitization across document workflows
scalability and security due to its high-trust global data center strategy, extensive security provisions and tamper-proof seals at the signature (rather than envelope) level

GigaOm also noted that Nitro’s broad portfolio can support even the most complex use cases.

“The global adoption of eSignatures took off during the pandemic, and it only continues to accelerate,” said Nitro Chief Product Officer, Sam Thorpe. “Businesses of all sizes, around the world, benefit from the agility, efficiency and productivity eSignature technology enables. And while Nitro delivers a seamless customer experience, as the GigaOm Radar Report attests, there’s far more to our eSignature solutions than just enabling people to sign documents on their devices. Nitro has done the hard work behind the scenes to deliver an easy-to-use, high-trust solution that ensures our customers have the proper security, can avoid fraud and stay compliant.”

GigaOm’s Radar Report notes: “To be a significant player in this space, an e-signature solution must not only support the core e-signature process (preparation, distribution, execution) but also offer extensive compliance support, scalability for high-volume use cases, and flexibility across a range of countries, languages and interfaces. Functionality that simply allows a user to draw a signature on a document is not sufficient to be considered in this report.”

The report adds that “businesses are looking for end-to-end process capabilities rather than standalone solutions. In other words, e-signatures are viewed as a core component of broader document management suites, potentially not something an enterprise would purchase on its own. SMBs will shift more gradually to this strategy but will follow a similar path….”

In its 2023 Radar Report, GigaOm delivers comprehensive evaluations of 14 leading eSignature vendors, an analysis of each of their offerings and provides expert guidance on how to choose the right eSignature vendor for both small and medium business and enterprise requirements.

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Outreach Unveils New Features Across Sales Execution Platform, Empowering Sales Leaders to Efficiently Create More Pipeline and Predictably Close More Deals

STS News Desk

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March 16, 2023

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Outreach Unveils New Features Across Sales Execution Platform, Empowering Sales Leaders to Efficiently Create More Pipeline and Predictably Close More Deals

***Introduces* *seven new platform capabilities to help sales leaders unlock seller productivity, increase deal velocity and conversion rates, and improve rep participation and attainment***

Outreach, the leading sales execution platform helping revenue organizations create and close more pipeline, today announced seven new platform innovations across the Outreach Sales Execution Platform. These new features are designed to empower sales leaders to unlock seller productivity, increase deal velocity and conversion rates, and increase rep participation and attainment. The announcements were made at the company’s Explore+ event where more than 7,000 attendees registered to learn how to thrive in this new era for B2B sales.

“Today, Chief Revenue Officers are facing two major problems: pipeline coverage and conversion. They need to create an adequate amount of pipeline, and close it at a greater rate,” said Manny Medina, CEO and cofounder of Outreach. “That’s why Outreach has been on a journey to expand our offerings to solve our customers biggest problems today. Our goal is to provide sales leaders with a single platform to manage all of their deals – from creating more pipeline to closing more deals. Today’s announcements at Explore+ are an important milestone in our platform journey, and we look forward to continue innovating for the 30 million B2B salespeople around the world to help them unleash their selling potential.”

“Outreach’s new platform innovations empower sales teams to create and close more pipeline, faster”

In the past, sales leaders were forced to rely on point solutions to help them build healthy pipeline coverage and increase pipeline conversion. They typically purchased one solution for prospecting, a different solution for call recording or rep coaching, and separate solutions for pipeline management and forecasting. However, this sales technology sprawl is expensive, and requires reps to access a handful of different systems to work on just one deal. It also creates data silos that make it near impossible to answer important questions such as what actions lead to revenue-generating outcomes. The industry has never had a single place to generate and manage pipeline, run sales cycles from creation to close, coach reps, and forecast – until now.

With its Sales Execution Platform, Outreach is bringing to market never-before-seen capabilities in a single platform for sales leaders to manage their sales team’s workflows — from pipeline creation to deal close. Sales leaders at companies of all sizes are increasingly leveraging the Outreach Sales Execution Platform as their organization’s foundation to operationalize, observe, and optimize their investments in sales methodologies and processes. The platform provides full visibility across the buyer journey, and delivers deal insights that prompt reps to take targeted actions to increase conversion rates and close more pipeline. Turning signals into actions, Outreach’s proprietary AI/ML models result in massive gains in deal management.

New Innovations Empower Sales Teams to Create and Close More Pipeline, Faster

Improve ongoing pipeline performance with the NEW Create and Close Dashboard: Provides sales reps and sales managers a high-level pipeline coverage summary and starting point to dive into specific activities required to either close or create more pipeline. The insight-laden dashboard shows the forecasted revenue from existing pipeline, and highlights pipeline coverage gaps for the current and future quarter, which helps reps proactively mitigate risk earlier and drive to success.
Drive pipeline growth with AI-driven metrics and targeted actions in the NEW Create Pipeline Calculator: Allows sales reps and sales managers with weak pipeline coverage to gain insights into the number of prospects that would need to be sequenced in order to close their coverage gap. The calculator projects how many meetings the sequences would deliver and how much pipeline that would likely generate based on the customer’s recent sales conversion rate history.
Automatically detect buyer sentiment with the NEW Buyer Topics and Reactions in Kaia: This new feature in Kaia, Outreach’s Conversation Intelligence solution, allows reps to quickly make decisions on how to move forward with a deal based on buyer reactions during a call. Using AI, Outreach is able to understand the contextual utterance of relevant sales topics in any meeting or email – ranging from pricing to product to next steps to support – and can understand when the buyer raised an objection at any point in the meeting. It delivers invaluable insight into what is really happening in meetings, down to each moment, and at scale across all meetings.
Bring new levels of predictability to deal management with NEW Success Plans Methodologies – Integrates all of the relevant components of leading sales methodologies, including MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, and SPIN, in Success Plans. This enables teams of sales reps to consistently and continuously qualify deals and align with champions to mitigate deal risk.
Boost seller efficiency to close the right deals faster with NEW Deal Grid: A new home screen for account executives, listing all of their deals sorted by health score and value so they can prioritize their time on closing deals with greatest needs and quota impact first. It helps reps quickly update the status of their opportunities and submit forecasts. This allows speedy updates to deal status and instant sync back to CRM, saving reps time by reducing manual effort and enabling all closing activity to happen in Outreach.
View critical deal details in a single space in the NEW Deal Overview: Delivers a clear and succinct overview of a deal exhibiting key information including AI generated insights like Deal Health and buyer reactions. These are important in determining next steps for Success Plans to help a rep follow their company’s sales methodology for greater success in increasing win rates.
Boost rep participation and quota attainment with NEW Pipeline Dashboard: Provides sales leaders with the most critical revenue data on a consistent basis to accurately forecast and report expectations to the board.

Outreach recently announced two additional innovations:

Increase seller productivity via generative AI with Smart Email Assist: AI-powered automatic email response generator moves beyond email templates and auto generates accurate and relevant email copy based on the prior context of conversations between buyers and sellers. As a result, sales reps can respond faster to customers and move deals forward.
Gain new Insights with Outreach Data Sharing on the Snowflake Data Cloud: By combining Outreach’s sales data with data from other enterprise applications on the Snowflake Data Cloud, the new offering is now in public beta and helps joint customers uncover efficiencies and identify new opportunities across the entire sales cycle.

Customers Create More Pipeline and Close More Deals with Outreach

“Over the past year, our forecasting accuracy has increased by 45% — and that’s only going to increase the longer we use Outreach, said Kumbi Murinda, Director of RevOps at NewtonX. “Outreach empowers VPs to know exactly what reps are doing in their pipeline. It also gives them guidance on what deals should be pushed back or moved forward, as well as what should be closed and moved out of the pipeline completely. We wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t had that forecast accuracy.”

“Outreach has helped with discussions around the likelihood of closing, based on clear activity data,” said Salvatore Cirillo, Chief of Staff to the Revenue Officer at Renaissance. “Now we now have insights to say what’s working, what’s not, and when can we really rely on what we’re seeing in these systems to tell us if this is likely to be a deal that we’re going to win.”

These seven new capabilities are currently in development. Customers interested in participating in beta programs should connect with their account rep.

Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Irina, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Seismic.

We’d love to know more about your top of mind thoughts surrounding sales enablement / enablement tools and the type of platforms that are going to dominate the market over the year.

How do you feel sales and other departments can optimize how they use these platforms to further their objectives?

We’d love to hear some of the key highlights from Seismic’s recent research on this theme, ‘The Value of Enablement Report’?

If you had to share five predictions for the upcoming state of B2B sales and salestech, what would they be?

Missed The Latest Episode of The SalesStar Podcast? Have a quick listen here!

Don’t MISS!

Episode 150: The Future of Customer Success with Allison Tiscornia, Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero

Adoption: the foundation of recurring revenue

Optimization: leveling customers up to build value

Expansion: building recurring revenue beyond retention

Not a revenue goal? It’s not for Customer Success

What your Customer Success team needs to build more revenue

Don’t get left behind on Customer Success

In order to maintain a lean and mean salestech adoption process that eventually helps prove ROI and doesn’t peak costs without enabling end goals; here’s what can help –

Identify your Core Sales Cycle and Process

Based on the above, a current list of your SalesTech with a list of what else is needed helps identify added costs

Evaluating whether current tools can do the job to reduce added adoption of salestech where needed

Knowing what to measure

Trying to adopt all-in-one solutions

End Note: It’s an exciting time for salestech only if you know what to use!

European companies are increasingly introducing IT tool to automate the operations of merchandisers at retail outlets. Experts says how automation affects sales

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Searchspring Continues its Winning Streak into 2023, Recognised with 2 x BigCommerce APAC Partner Excellence Awards

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Introduces seven new platform capabilities to help sales leaders unlock seller productivity, increase deal velocity and conversion rates, and improve rep participation and attainment

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

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***Introduces* *seven new platform capabilities to help sales leaders unlock seller productivity, increase deal velocity and conversion rates, and improve rep participation and attainment***