Gong’s Real-time assistance leverages AI and machine learning to help sales professionals have better conversations and drive more business
Gong.io launched the first of its kind Real-Time Conversation Intelligence (RTCI) for B2B sales teams. RTCI provides sales representatives with a competitive edge by alerting them and assisting them in real time with a variety of pain points related to a sales opportunity that includes customer objections, competitive comparisons, pricing sensitivity, and a host of other potential deal breakers.
Delivers shorter sales cycle and better sales
Amit Bendov, CEO, Gong.io
Gong.io’s CEO, Amit Bendov said, “Thousands of sales professionals and their managers, who use Gong, will now receive real-time assistance to help them win more deals. This platform will enable sales teams to have better sales conversations, shorten sales cycles, and drive more business. Until now, conversational intelligence was the domain of only the largest enterprises with the biggest pocketbooks. We’re democratizing the sales conversation intelligence field by bringing it to the individual sales representatives. There is a wealth of knowledge within each sales organization and within our conversation intelligence platform.”
Harnessing the Power of AI
The company was recently recognized as a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s CRM Sales 2017 report. Gong uses AI and machine learning powered conversation intelligence to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls. It recognizes effective patterns from tens of thousands of hours of spoken sales conversations, to help B2B sales teams win more deals. Gong will demonstrate its latest conversation intelligence platform on the upcoming Sales Machine conference being held in June for next generation sales leaders.
AgilOne offers Oracle Cloud customers a 1:1 personalization across channels through Oracle Responsys
AgilOne, a predictive marketing, and customer data platform launched a Customer Data and Engagement Hub on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
The platform helps marketers to create a single customer profile, apply predictive intelligence to customer data, and orchestrate Omni-channel personalization delivered through Oracle Responsys, an email marketing and cross-channel orchestration solution from the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
The company is also a Silver level and Cloud Standard member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).
Easily Integrate online and offline sources
Oracle Marketing Cloud customers can leverage AgilOne’s single customer profile to integrate data from all online and offline sources. That allows cleansing, deduping, and then enriching data into one profile to be used for all marketing engagement.
AI driven insights for customer segmentation
The application’s predictive analytics and insights provide marketers with deeper customer insights. Most importantly, it enables marketers to apply machine learning to these insights in order to understand customer segments and identify revenue opportunities.
Personalization across all digital channels
With out-of-the-box integrations for Oracle Responsys, Oracle DMP, Oracle Maxymiser, and Oracle Datalogix, AgilOne enables hyper-personalized Omni-channel marketing that boosts customer lifetime value. AgilOne offers AI driven customer intelligence to Oracle Marketing Cloud for 1:1 personalization across channels through Oracle Responsys. This includes digital channels such as web personalization, email campaigns, mobile and social engagement, and display advertising, and offline channels such as in-store personalization via the app’s Omni-channel engagement feature.
New funding from Salesforce Ventures will be used to accelerate the growth of next-generation cloud consulting firms as part of the SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative
Within hours of announcing the Salesforce Cloud Partner Relationship Management Platform (PRM) app, the world’s leading CRM platform has announced a new $50 million fund from Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce Ventures is the company’s corporate investment group. The new SI (system integrator) Trailblazer Fund will be set aside to empower the next-generation cloud consulting firms towards building superior service capabilities for the future. The funding is aimed at accelerating the growth of cloud adoption and drive greater customer success.
In conjunction with the fund, Salesforce is also launching a new SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative to provide portfolio companies with resources and training to build out their service capabilities for the future.
New SI Trailblazer Fund Supercharges Consulting Ecosystem Growth
The new $50 million SI Trailblazer Fund will provide the next generation of cloud consulting companies with the capital required to build and scale their Salesforce services capabilities for the future—and empower customers to transform their businesses with Salesforce.
John Somorjai, EVP of Corporate Development and Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce, says, “Consulting firms play a pivotal role in the Salesforce ecosystem, implementing Salesforce solutions that meet the needs of customers of all sizes, industries, and geographies.”
As a leading online community consulting partner focused on the social community space and the Salesforce Community Cloud, 7Summits will use this investment to further fund its growth plans.
Arxxus is a leading provider of Salesforce professional services in Australia that will leverage this investment to further expand its services capacity in the mid-market sector and its expertise in the public sector.
ATG provides quote-to-cash (CPQ) advisory and implementation services and will leverage the investment to continue providing CPQ and billing expertise, services, training and tools to leading Salesforce partners as they build their practices across North America, EMEA and APAC.
Somorjai adds, “This new fund will foster the next-generation of SIs and supercharge the growth of the Salesforce ecosystem.”
SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative Empowers Consulting Firms with Resources and Training to Scale Their Businesses
Launching in parallel with the SI Trailblazer Fund, the new SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative will provide SI Trailblazer portfolio companies with access to a wide-range of concierge resources, training, and tools including —
Accelerated onboarding experience
With guided interactive training through Trailhead, priority access to boot camps and workshops and a Partner Onboarding Specialist, consulting partners can join the Salesforce Partner Program and get ramped up quickly.
Tyler Prince, EVP of Worldwide Alliances and Go-to-Market Innovation, Salesforce, agrees, “Growing customer demand for Salesforce has created a critical need for more Salesforce-trained consulting partners as part of the thriving ‘Salesforce Economy.”
Tyler also mentions, “The new SI Trailblazer Fund and SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative will help fuel our consulting partner ecosystem and empower the next generation of high-growth cloud consultancies.”
Marketing and sales mentorship
Portfolio consulting companies can learn marketing best-practices with courses delivered by Salesforce experts; utilize a Partner Marketing Specialist to build custom marketing plans; and access Marketing Development Funds (MDF).
Implementation guidance
With mentoring from tenured partners and assistance in developing Salesforce solutions (including Fullforce and Lightning Bolt), portfolio companies are empowered to deliver successful implementations—creating thriving businesses.
New SI Trailblazer Fund and Alliance Initiative Supports Thriving ‘Salesforce Economy’
The cloud represents an enormous opportunity for partners to transform every industry, create jobs and accelerate economies around the world. In fact, according to IDC, Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will drive more than $389 billion in new GDP impact and 1.9 million new jobs worldwide by 2020.
Salesforce Fund Helps Partners in Seizing New Opportunities
Currently, growing demand for Salesforce solutions is creating new opportunities for consulting partners to empower companies to transform their businesses by focusing on their customers. In fact, consulting partners are seeing their Salesforce practices grow more than 50% annually. However, this increased demand is also creating a need for new partners that can provide an additional skilled capacity to deploy the full family of Salesforce offerings to customers.
Focus Remains on Creating Largest Ecosystem of Enterprise Cloud Companies
So far, the Salesforce’s strategic venture arm has exclusively focused on creating the world’s largest ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies. Since 2009, the leader in marketing clouds has forged strategic partnerships to collaborate and accelerate the growth of over 180 technology startups. Some of the portfolio companies that Salesforce Ventures has helped to grow business include Mulesoft, Gainsight, Twilio, Box, Anaplan, DocuSign, Informatica, Optimizely and more.
Time for Cloud Companies to Adopt Customer-at-the-Center Mandate
Currently, the greatest challenge for marketing cloud platforms is the rate of adoption and the subsequent return on investment (ROI). As we see at MarTech Series, most CMOs and MarTech innovators expect a definite convergence of martech, sales tech, and ad tech in the very near future. In an interview with MTS, Adam Corey, VP, Marketing at Tealium highlights the complex and fragmented ‘Big Bang’ in MarTech.
Corey says, “I don’t expect to see a slowdown in the number of technologies available as I think martech as an overall space is becoming more complex and fragmented. But at the same time, brands need to adopt a customer-at-the-center mandate and that means that experiences and insights must be connected to every aspect of the customer experience.” Salesforce’s funding to cloud consulting firms could solve much of that complexity and fragmentation.
Coupled with Salesforce Trailhead — Salesforce’s free online learning platform, the new SI Trailblazer Fund and Alliance Initiative also supports the thriving “Salesforce Economy” with an infusion of capital and resources to empower partners to drive customer success. Salesforce, however, continues to stay away from the IPO buzz despite rumor mills working overnight to churn some oil out.
Salesforce introduced the Sales Cloud Partner Relationship Management– a novel intelligent sales app, built on the native CRM platform. Sales Cloud PRM leverages Einstein AI to enable channel partners to close deals faster
Within hours of Marketo announcing its Marketo Accelerate program to empower partners, Salesforce has unveiled the Salesforce Cloud Partner Relationship Management Platform (PRM) app. The new intelligent sales app is built natively on Salesforce CRM platform and aims at empowering B2B companies to turbocharge channel sales.
Accelerated sales efforts will now be delivered with personalized experiences within the Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce is empowering its partner community to gain better insights into their sales opportunities and generate maximized ROI leveraging AI and analytics. Earlier this month, Salesforce had announced the rebranding of Krux to Salesforce DMP that feeds on AI and delivers tangible ROI to marketing efforts.
The new app will enable companies that rely most on distributors and resellers–including those in manufacturing, high-tech, and telecom–trust Salesforce to supercharge their sales
According to Accenture, nearly 70% of a high-tech company’s revenues comes from indirect channels, and it will continue to grow. Moreover, companies are interested in investing 3-5% of their revenues into indirect channel incentives in coming months. The key point to note from this report is the growing emphasis on empowering ‘Line-of-Business’ owners to make smart buying decisions through rewarding partnership and joint opportunity programs.
via Accenture Improving-The ROI of Indirect-Channel Incentives
Salesforce PRM Offers Accelerated Channel Performance and Better User Experience
Salesforce PRM app will arm partners, vendors, and resellers with fully-personalized sales tools and information to sell faster, smarter and stay agile in a hyper-growth market. Coding-based in-app marketing tools are time-consuming, and therefore, Salesforce PRM app could effectively blow away the disconnect existing between legacy partner portals and direct sales tools.
Einstein High Velocity Sales Cloud
Mike Micucci, GM and SVP, Salesforce Products, elaborated on the disconnected bridge in marketing automation and CRM. Mike says, “Traditional partner portals tend to be pieced-together (with) legacy systems that are generic and disconnected from CRM. This results in substandard channel performance and ultimately a poor user experience.”
The new PRM app will allow companies to easily build modern, branded partner communities with clicks, not code. In contrast to legacy partner portals that are built on inflexible, archaic systems creating disconnected silos, Sales Cloud seamlessly brings together both partner and direct sales functions.
Mike adds, “Sales Cloud PRM is the solution companies have been looking for—a turnkey app that enables them to extend the world’s best CRM to their partners.”
To deliver Sales Cloud PRM, Salesforce is bringing together new and existing technologies, including —
New Guided Setup Wizard
The latest feature enables channel managers to easily configure, customize and deploy their app in days. Using the interactive wizard, channel managers will be able to seamlessly configure lead distribution, deal registration, marketing development funds and AppExchange Components, such as Xactly for compensation management and NetExam for a learning management system. Additionally, channel managers will be able to automatically assign partners into tiers and provide targeted promotions and customized content based on those tiers.
This integration within Salesforce CRM allows channel managers to easily create a customized, branded partner experience faster than ever before. Terry Wise, Vice President, Amazon Web Services says, “Empowering our AWS Partner Network (APN) partners is a top priority for us.”
Terry adds, “As part of our strategic relationship with Salesforce, we count on Sales Cloud PRM to provide our APN partners with the tools and content needed to scale their business quickly on AWS.”
Channel managers will be able to drag and drop existing website content, graphics and videos ensuring that it stays as up-to-date as a company’s website. Lightning CMS Connect will be in beta in June 2017.
Representing one of the oldest customers of Salesforce, Tony Dyck, Director of IT Technical Delivery at Box says, “We were able to quickly deploy, and immediately saw an increase in partner engagement and efficiency, leading to an increase in sales coming from our partner channel.”
Sales Cloud PRM is ideal for companies looking to accelerate partner sales without unnecessary cycles and cost.
Einstein Content Recommendations
The AI layer comes to the rescue of sales reps, leveraging machine learning to surface files that enable channel reps to be more productive. For example, if a partner views a new product description document, Einstein will be able to recommend files, including logo graphics, product placement instructions and pricing documentation for that new product.
Neil Burch, Enterprise Applications and Business Analytics, CalAmp identifies the advantage of working with Sales Cloud PRM. Neil says, “We will be able to quickly and easily increase partner collaboration and gain visibility into our channel so we can accurately forecast our indirect sales.”
Channel Marketing Automation
The new app extends the power of Marketing Cloud to every partner, enabling them to build, track and analyze email campaigns to deliver 1:1 customer journeys on any device. Companies will be able to ensure partners are using the right messaging and collateral by empowering them to be their own marketing department.important to fully capture our opportunity for revenue growth and expansion in our channel business by providing our partners with 24-hour access to product resources, lead management, deal registration and support.
Explore Data and Derive Actionable Insights with Customizable App for Sales
For an accelerated sales pipeline, it is important for companies to fully capture existing opportunities for revenue growth and expansion within channel business. Providing partners with full-time access to product resources, lead management, deal registration, and support is the most desirable way to achieve the pace.
The announcement extends the world’s #1 SFA, Sales Cloud, even further to empower companies to accelerate their sales with smart, customizable apps for every sales function. Sales teams of every kind are improving forecasting and collecting cash faster with Salesforce Quote-to-Cash. Field sales reps are accessing their CRM with the Salesforce1 mobile app while on the go. Sales managers are exploring data quickly and getting actionable insight with Sales Wave Analytics.
Salesforce Quote-to-Cash
Currently, digitally powered sales reps are using Einstein High Velocity Sales Cloud to quickly identify the best leads, eliminate busy work, and boost pipeline to increase sales. New Guided Setup Wizard, Einstein Content Recommendations, and Channel Marketing Automation are expected to be generally available in the second half of 2017.
May 2017 has turned out to be a phenomenal month for B2B sales and predictive analytics platform. Following the news of latest funding rounds for Mintigo, Terminus and Demandbase, the maker of world’s first predictive sales management platform too announced its successful closure on investment from venture partners. People.ai announced $7 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Index Ventures and Shasta Ventures also participated alongside existing investors Y Combinator and Ron Conway’s SV Angel. Nakul Mandan, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, will join the Board of Directors of People.ai.
People.ai improves the way sales teams hire, ramp, coach and manage new resources using AI and personalized dashboards.
People.ai Aims at Solving the Exact Sales Problems
People.ai is a sales management platform powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that helps companies to improve the performance of their sales teams by surfacing insights and delivering recommendations about coaching, ramping and deal analytics. The platform helps sales teams to work smartly with AI-powered coaching and personalized feedback, enabling the business to generate revenue for customers. People.ai completely removes the ordeal of data entry, thereby increasing overall sales productivity and providing clear, actionable, insights for closing more deals.
“The People.ai team includes veterans from industry leaders such as Salesforce, Marketo, Mixpanel and SAP SuccessFactors,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, founder and CEO of People.ai. “We’re here to change the way sales leaders are managing their teams by helping them make better and faster decisions. CEOs have told us they’re constantly looking for new ways to drive more revenue from their sales teams. People.ai solves that exact problem. We’re giving sales leaders a repeatable formula they can use to win more deals and build a world class sales team.”
Mission Possible: Do Sales Based on Insights from Data and Not Intuition
Nakul Mandan of Lightspeed Venture Partners, says, “Sales management continues to be one of the largest enterprise software markets. However, most of the current offerings in the market are about workflow automation or providing intelligence around which prospective customers to target. People.ai takes a refreshing approach to space with the view that a lot of sales management comes down to people decisions around hiring, coaching and managing sales reps in the right direction.”
The predictive sales platform has so far signed 50+ customers including Salesloft, Gainsight, and MemSQL, since graduating from the Y Combinator summer batch 2016. Nick Mehta, Chief Executive Officer at Gainsight, informs, “People.ai has given us the ability to gather valuable insights into our sales cycle. We took the insights gathered in Q4 2016, applied them to Q1 2017 and were able to exceed our revenue targets.”
Nakul adds, “By taking a data-driven approach to sales management, People.ai empowers sales leaders to do something that hasn’t been possible until today: make their people decisions based on data, not intuition.” Lightspeed Venture Partners has helped scale several category-defining enterprise software companies such as AppDynamics, Nutanix, and Mulesoft.
The new funding is expected to fuel cutting-edge innovations at People.ai. Currently, the AI-driven predictive sales management platform provides 360-degrees insights into sales activity as well as automatic syncing with powerful Salesforce ecosystem. The overall objective of the firm would be to foster transparency and personalization for a super-charged sales-friendly performance.
Companies to be Empowered to Advance Personalized Experiences Based on a Deeper Visitor Understanding
Evergage, a renowned real-time personalization platform company has reinforced its Evergage B2B Detect with the addition of rich firmographic data, which will allow B2B companies to enhance their personalization techniques along with their account-based marketing. The updated Evergage B2B Detect will now enable B2B marketers to engage their high-value web visitors at the account level, with no extra charge. The solution pulling in firmographic data will determine the key company attributes based on a visitors’ company background, industry, and geography. This will improve the outcome of account based marketing by delivering real-time personalized web experiences backed by relevant messages, content, images and calls-to-action.
Evergage B2B Detect delivers the following solutions:
• Generates personalized experiences based on a deep analysis of the visitors’ organizational background including company size, revenue, location, technologies in use and more
• Drives relevant content and messaging for key prospects in real time to improve engagement with targeted accounts and industry segments
• Offers valuable insights on anonymous website traffic that enables B2B marketers to effectively analyze the nature and composition of their visitor base
Unified Customer Profile from Evergage
Evergage has also updated its unified customer profile (UCP) to provide extensive account-level details to empower marketers with a comprehensive view of each visitor and the associated company along with their past and present digital interactions and journeys with the brand. The updated UCP will seamlessly draw information such as company logo, revenue, description, the number of employees, social media links, and contact details.
Bob Peterson, senior research director of account-based marketing at SiriusDecisions said, “According to the recent data in our ABM command center, investment in ABM is expected to be strong again in the next 12 months, with more than 60 percent of respondents stating that their future ABM expense would be greater or significantly greater than last year. We’re seeing investment in many technology areas, including predictive analytics, web personalization, and account-based advertising, among others. Sellers must find ways to deliver customized experiences to the right accounts in order to optimize their results.”
Andy Zimmerman, Evergage CMO, said, “Other companies charge a premium to use firmographic data, but we believe that high-impact personalization shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive. Evergage gives B2B companies everything they need for analyzing their anonymous traffic and delivering powerful personalization – including the ability to segment and tailor experiences for target accounts and industries. With our machine-learning algorithms, marketers can also personalize at the 1:1 level – delivering unique experiences based on each person’s in-the-moment interests, actions, and intent. No other solution provides these comprehensive capabilities for delivering spot-on, maximally relevant, real-time experiences.”
Rob Kall, Cien’s CEO, Presenting at Salesforce Essentials (PRNewsfoto/Cien Inc.)
Cien, the Fitbit for sales teams, is Salesforce’s “Customer Hero”. The leading marketing cloud company picked the AI startup for its revolutionary sales productivity and engagement tool that turn sales reps into heroes. Salesforce identifies and awards top innovative technology companies that are perceived to be heroes by customers with whom they work.
Cien was showcased at Salesforce’s Essentials event in Madrid, Spain. Rob Käll, Cien’s CEO, addressed an audience comprised of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals on the way artificial intelligence was set to disrupt their sales organizations.
Cien’s sales productivity app leverages a number of functionalities from the Salesforce platform. Benjamin Strum, Cien’s CTO, says, “We partner with all types of technology companies. In Salesforce we see a great collaborator for long-term growth. The depth and breadth of Salesforce’s offering is truly impressive, particularly for AI-first companies like Cien.”
Cien is working with early adopters of its technology in Spain and the US to incorporate their thinking in the design and development of its sales productivity app. The company has launched a global study on artificial intelligence and the future of B2B sales to validate its initial product choices. “We are engaging sales leaders around the world to quantify their level of confidence in their CRM data and their willingness to trust recommendations from an AI-powered decision engine,” explains Damien Acheson, Cien’s Head of Marketing.
Sales reps can use Cien like a Fitbit by virtue of the engaging mobile app version. Cien App is delivered to mobile through advanced AI-powered technology, delivering sentiment analytics, productivity metrics, and ROI tracking on the same screen. With Salesforce recognizing Cien in its infancy in AI for sales engagement, future looks bright for the sales app platform.
Companies Like Pandora, Adobe and Zillow Have Seen Sales Productivity Triple Using Outreach’s Sales Engagement Platform
Outreach, the leading sales engagement platform, has announced that it has secured $30 million in Series C financing. The funding round was led by DFJ Growth, with participation from existing investors Mayfield, MHS Capital, Microsoft Ventures and Trinity Ventures. New investor Four Rivers Group also added to the round, bringing Outreach’s total funding to date to $60 million. The Seattle-based company currently supports more than 1,200 sales teams and over 15,000 reps.
In addition to its new financing, Outreach is unveiling a major update to its platform. The New Outreach includes a redesigned user interface, embedded analytics, and expanded capabilities to serve the entire sales team. Outreach was recently named a Rising Star on the Forbes World’s Best 100 Cloud Companies List.
Series C Funding will Help Outreach Grow in New Era of Sales Excellence
Outreach’s sales engagement platform has been shown to triple the volume of meetings and increase qualified pipeline for front-line sales representatives. Outreach automates outbound selling through customized workflows and logs all activities in existing CRM systems – solving the problem of sales teams wasting time on administrative tasks which typically result in less than half of their time being spent actively selling.
Persona Sequence via Sales Workflow- Outreach
“Like many industries, technology is transforming sales from an art to a science,” said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. “Sales is no longer about following up on inbound leads and hunting for a few big deals. It is about sales excellence – predictably executing the right selling activities at the right time. Outreach is ushering in this new era of sales excellence and will continue to find new ways to increase sales productivity across a wide variety of industries.”
Vision to Expand Leadership to Scale Sales and Marketing
The new financing will be used to expand Outreach’s product development and engineering teams as well as scale sales and marketing. Sam Fort, Partner, DFJ Growth, will join the Outreach Board of Directors.
“Outreach meets a tremendous need in the sales and marketing space, as evidenced by their rapid growth and glowing customer reviews,” said Sam Fort, Partner, DFJ Growth. “The opportunity for a platform that simplifies and automates the sales process is massive and we are thrilled to have Outreach join our portfolio.”
Currently,Outreach automates and prioritizes customer touch points throughout the sales process to achieve accelerated results. Customers rely on Outreach’s sales workflow, automation, email marketing and outbound analytics to drive higher revenue per sales rep. Being funded by DFJ, the VC firm that has invested in Baidu, SpaceX, Tesla and close to 300 other companies, Outreach is expected to further grow its sales engagement platform in coming weeks.
BuzzBoard, a high-performance prospect analytics and intelligence platform, has announced the hiring of Lem Lloyd as the Senior Vice President of Revenue and Business Development. Lem brings two decades of experience in sales leadership, largely in the local commerce, small business, and listings industries. He is a key executive for BuzzBoard’s growth as an intelligence platform, helping the company increase its reach, relevancy and expand its customer base.
As SVP of Revenue and Business Development at BuzzBoard, Lem Lloyd will lead the company’s expansion into new markets and oversee corporate development and strategic partnerships.
Thrilled to be joining the company, Lem says, “With the growing dependence on big data and the coming use of artificial intelligence, there is an unmet need in the current SaaS marketplace for platforms and products that enable businesses to have more intelligent, targeted and effective conversations with potential customers,” said Lem Lloyd.
Lem has held several executive-level roles ranging from leading large sales divisions at public companies to incubating new marketplace companies. While at Yahoo!, Lem was Vice President of Channel Sales, managing more than 1,000 sales partners across multiple digital ad platforms and networks. He also served as General Manager of Yahoo! Small Business, which provided services, including e-commerce solutions, to more than 2 million SMBs.
Lem led ad sales at the on-demand home services leader Angie’s List and most recently was Vice President of Channel Sales at the predictive and programmatic marketing leader Rocket Fuel. He began his career at the media company Knight Ridder, where he was responsible for the company’s local listings businesses, including sales at the company’s owned partners: Cars.com, Apartments.com, and Careerbuilder.com.
With its focus on applying data science to the SMB sector to generate actionable insights, BuzzBoard has experienced rapid early growth from midmarket and enterprise digital media companies seeking to empower sales teams and increase sales velocity. BuzzBoard currently works with a range of more than 1,000 companies empowering over 10,000 sales reps.
“We needed a strong leader with the commitment to our values and the ambition to grow a large, successful company in this space,” said BuzzBoard CEO Umesh Tibrewal. “Lem exhibits a deep understanding of the landscape we are currently working in, but more importantly, he has a new and exciting vision of where we are heading. His impressive background has shown throughout his career that he can effectively lead companies of all sizes. We are thrilled to have him join our team.”
BuzzBoard currently offers data insights about customers to help marketers target and engage with them. It offers unique solutions for sales enablement like Identity Prospects, Custom Content, Data Enrichment and Micro-segmentation. Marketers can score each opportunity based on a range of relevant factors, including SMB size, fit and readiness to purchase. By adding Lem into the leadership cadre, BuzzBoard is expected to prepare customers to stack up strongly in the market.
Built on the Salesforce Platform, the Helpshift integration is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange
Helpshift has announced an integration with new capabilities available on the Salesforce AppExchange. This integration is meant to improve the mobile user experience by enabling service agents to deliver support to app users directly from within their Salesforce Service Cloud Dashboard – In-app!
When a customer contacts support from inside the Helpshift-enabled app, a Salesforce case is created that the agent responds to, creating an in-app conversation. Customers get notified via banners, notifications, and badges, enabling them to continue at their pace.
“As mobile becomes the primary medium customers use to connect with brands, the ability to provide customer support through all touch points is vital to creating deeper engagement and brand loyalty,” said Abinash Tripathy, Founder and CEO at Helpshift.
via Helpshift
“Organizations are seeing an explosion in demand for mobile solutions from their customers,” said Esteban Kolsky, President of thinkJar, customer strategies advisory firm, “and they quickly realize they can’t offer outdated and incomplete solutions without real-time data. Direct integration with systems of record is at the core of their strategies to support this trend.”
Helpshift has raised more than $38.2 Million and is backed by Cisco Investments, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, True Ventures, and Visionnaire Ventures.
Enterprises can benefit from Helpshift’s new integration capabilities in the following ways —
In-app Messaging
Helpshift’s new integration capabilities allow existing Salesforce customers to provide support to mobile customers, which extends their ability to reach mobile customers where it matters: Directly in the app and supported by the smartphones’ powerful notification mechanisms.
Enhanced Knowledge Capabilities
Helpshift’s FAQs optimized for the native mobile app experience are combined with the Salesforce Knowledge Base. They appear inside the Salesforce Knowledge Base through a one-time mapping and can be maintained directly in Salesforce.Automatic synchronization ensures that the FAQs are always up-to-date in the mobile app.
Agent Management
Support for mobile customers can be delivered from inside the Salesforce Dashboard. Cases are directly created in the Salesforce Service Cloud when a Helpshift customer initiates a conversation. There is no need to switch to Helpshift. No tab change, no context switch, no training is required; the process remains unchanged for the agents, ensuring zero disruption and high efficiency.
Data Management
Customer data and metadata from Helpshift is available to Salesforce agents as part of the case in the Salesforce Service Cloud.
By adding new integration capabilities within Salesforce AppExchange, the enterprise no longer has to worry about uprooting their entire customer support structure and meeting customers on mobile devices.
“Helpshift customers can provide a support experience for mobile customers and support agents can meet their needs quickly while continuing to do what they were doing within the Salesforce Platform. Everyone wins.” — Abinash Tripathy, Founder & CEO, Helpshift
“Everyone and everything is getting smarter and more connected than ever before, and companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners, and employees,” said Kori O’Brien, SVP, ISV Sales, Salesforce. Kori adds, “By leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform, Helpshift provides customers with an exciting new way to receive support experience across mobile touch points.”
Currently, Salesforce AppExchange is the world’s leading enterprise apps marketplace. The marketplace empowers companies to sell, service, market and engage in entirely new ways. With 3,500 partner apps and more than 4 million customer installs, it is the most comprehensive source of cloud, mobile, social, IoT, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies for businesses.
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Helpshift’s FAQs optimized for the native mobile app experience are combined with the Salesforce Knowledge Base. They appear inside the Salesforce Knowledge Base through a one-time mapping and can be maintained directly in Salesforce. Automatic synchronization ensures that the FAQs are always up-to-date in the mobile app.
