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Biggest AI Collaboration Ever: IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein Unified for Fast-Track Adoption of Cognitive Applications

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty via Salesforce

IBM has partnered marketing cloud specialist Salesforce to deliver a unified AI- powered solution, bringing together IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein. Both AI platforms will be deployed using a new integration practice formed by Bluewolf, an IBM company.

As part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer. Bluewolf’s new Solution Accelerators for AI integration will develop new industry-specific functions used by enterprise clients to fast-track adoption of cognitive applications seamlessly.

Listen More: Rapid7 Uses Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Learning for Customer Success

Get Started with Watson on Salesforce Einstein

It’s been a few weeks since IBM CEO Ginni Rometty attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. From that same event, her clarion call to innovators about building technologies around cognitive learning and artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have made its first visible impact. Marc Benioff, obviously wanted to be the first thought leader in the martech industry and realize this unified vision.

The unprecedented unification of two AI technologies – IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. The partnership has been forged with an objective of leveraging human intelligence for critical missions and not for time-consuming siloes management. AI will, therefore, make smarter, faster and ROI –specific decisions, freeing humans for ground-breaking innovations.

Currently, IBM is a strategic investor in Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce, helping the #1 CRM develop a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities.

Read Also: Salesforce Introduces Service Cloud Einstein AI to Transform Customer Service Interaction

Customers of both companies will be able to access advanced insights from Watson directly with the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform. It will combine deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson’s structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.

IBM and Salesforce to Apply Cognitive Technologies for Every Business

Apart from IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration, the two technology giants also announced the release of IBM Application Integration Suite for Salesforce and addition of Bluewolf Dedicated Consulting Services and Expertise for Cognitive Solutions into Salesforce’s existing CRM platform.

IBM Watson + Salesforce Einstein
IBM Watson + Salesforce Einstein

Ginni Rometty, chairman, President and CEO, IBM says, “Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies,”

“This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people—through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. Now, with yesterday’s announcement, the power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers.”

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce says, “The combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter and our customers more successful,” said “I’m thrilled to form an alliance with IBM—no company’s core values are as close to Salesforce’s as IBM’s. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Mission Critical Objectives of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein Integration

Serve real-time predictive insights across organization

To bring predictive insights from unstructured data, inside or outside an enterprise, together with predictive insights from customer data delivered by Salesforce Einstein to enable smarter, faster decisions across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.

Combine customer data for campaign success

To combine customer behavior data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, helping retailers automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers.

Enhance business reach of IBM Watson on Salesforce App Exchange

To extend the business reach of IBM Weather Insights for Salesforce. The Weather Company will power a new Lightning component on the Salesforce AppExchange to provide weather insights that inform customer interactions and business performance.

Unify Cloud and On-premise data

To bring together on-premise enterprise and cloud data with specialized integration products for Salesforce, surfacing that data directly within the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform.

Provide macroeconomic information for smarter decisions

To unify client data, such as individual investments and risk profiles, with financial trends and public macroeconomic information from IBM Application Integration Suite right within Salesforce to make smarter decisions for her customers.

The proliferation of AI into technologies for marketing, sales and customer service activities has been rapid. As Google CEO Sergey Brin puts it – “The revolution in deep nets has been very profound, it definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there. I feel like the Luddite in the room.”

By partnering with Salesforce, IBM intends to take away that “Luddite” feeling out of every CMOs mind.

Read Also: Equals 3 Sees Rapid Growth with “Lucy”, a Cognitive Companion for Marketers

Brainshark Extends Native Salesforce Integration with New Sales Enablement Capabilities

Brainshark, Inc., delivering SaaS-based sales enablement and readiness solutions, today announced an enhanced integration with Salesforce, enabling salespeople to share content in Brainshark with Salesforce contacts from within Microsoft Outlook. Building upon Brainshark’s long-established training and coaching integration with Salesforce, the new capabilities enable salespeople to:

  • Find recommended content for the intended email recipient based on Salesforce record attributes, such as role and industry
  • Easily email relevant Brainshark sales content, such as case studies and product videos, to Salesforce contacts and opportunities in the context of the sales cycle
  • Track content engagement, including when and how long an asset was viewed, and sync those interactions with Salesforce records, enabling reps to take the next best action based on more complete and accurate information

“By connecting the content, data and technology across these systems, sales enablement leaders are not only making it much easier for their reps to sell but also gaining deeper insights into what content and training contribute to better sales performance,” said Rachel Goldberg, senior director of product marketing at Brainshark. “These enhancements exemplify Brainshark’s continued focus on helping organizations improve sales effectiveness from the CRM systems they use every day.”

Brainshark has also been certified by Salesforce as Lightning Ready. Lightning is the latest platform from Salesforce designed to provide a consistent, intuitive and flexible user experience on any device. Now companies can easily access Brainshark training, coaching and content resources from both Salesforce Classic and Lightning.

In addition, Brainshark now provides sales reps and managers with more flexible access to learning content in Salesforce Classic, Lightning and Salesforce1.

Meltwater Executive Alerts: The Latest Real-Time Business Update Tool for Senior Executives

Meltwater, the leading B2B data analytics company, announced the launch of a bespoke business intelligence tool – Executive Alerts. Meltwater Executive Alerts tool, which is created specifically for senior-level executives, provides critical insights about their company, competitors, and industry, distributed and shared directly over smart devices. The latest addition to the media intelligence platform comes within a fortnight of Wrapidity’s acquisition, heralding the arrival of a new league of B2B collaboration and decision-making tools in the coming months.

Read Also: Meltwater Acquires Wrapidity to Add AI Capabilities into Media Intelligence Platform

Meltwater Executive Alerts delivers real-time insights, providing senior executives top 5-10 critical events in the company, market and in the competition on a daily basis. Executives can now understand the momentum and the story behind each alert, accessing them as they happen on the most preferred smart device.

Zubair Timol, Director of Strategy EMEA, Meltwater, says – “Senior executives across all functions and sectors need accurate, real-time data from outside of their company to make sound decisions, and Executive Alerts empowers them to do just that.”
Meltwater Executive Alerts also integrates with email, Slack, text and other enterprise collaboration tool, allowing executives to pull reports and documents with a single click.

As companies increasingly look to unify their marketing and sales processes by gaining real-time insights across the organization, the latest Meltwater Executive Alerts is a worthy addition to the growing stack of technologies. With businesses moving into hyper-connected ecosystems, tools like the one Meltwater just released offer infinite opportunities for teams to derive more value out of their B2B collaborations.

Though IoT and  Cloud connectivity remain the first-generation technologies for most companies, introducing Meltwater Executive Alerts enable businesses to collaborate seamlessly not just with the employees but also the vendors and partners.

Equals 3 Sees Rapid Growth with “Lucy”, a Cognitive Companion for Marketers

Marketing solutions company Equals 3 launched ‘Lucy’ in May of 2016. Billed as a cognitive companion for marketers, Lucy is a machine learning-based intelligent assistant that makes use of IBM’s Watson platform, and applies it to solve marketing problems. Lucy is seeing significant adoption, and was recently named a “Ad Tech/Marketing Tech/Financial Tech to Watch” finalist by Advertising Age. MarTech Series caught up with Equals 3 co-founder Scott Litman, to see Lucy in action, talk about their growth since launch, and the benefits of using the IBM Watson platform.

Lucy works by using the natural language processing and predictive analytics powers of IBM Watson, and integrating APIs from hundreds of disparate data sources, thus allowing marketers to quickly leverage first and third party data. Litman believes that because Lucy can accomplish in hours what would previously take days or weeks to do, this represents a huge leap for the way marketing teams operate. He said that Lucy integrates more APIs than any other Watson product, “sifting through massive amounts of data to provide the most relevant answer to a virtually limitless amount of questions.”

Lucy - Cognitive Companion for Marketing

With Lucy, businesses can capitalize on this cognitive capacity to automate time-consuming tasks, boost productivity, allowing sales & marketing to focus on revenue generation. Activities that require a lot of man hours, such as pulling together customer profiles, researching potential markets, and building media plans, are completed much faster. Litman feels that Lucy is a unique solution in that there is no other AI based assistant which can integrate data from proprietary third party data licensed by their clients.

In the 9 months since launching Lucy, they have seen significant adoption from enterprise brands and global agencies. Six of the top global agencies are working with them, he said, naming WPP and Havas Media as two of the biggest clients. This success he thinks is because there is no other AI based solution with this level of “cognitive and emotional (more on that below) ability,” and because of Watson’s “fantastic ability to scale.”

Equal 3 currently offers three use cases for sales and marketing teams to use Lucy – research, segmentation, and media planning. Litman pointed out that Lucy is customized for each and every client, because depending on the data of the client, the AI needs to be trained to understand it. Understanding of language combined with the training of data from various structured, unstructured and licensed data sources of each client, is how Lucy can answer with precision exactly what the user is looking for.

Lucy Cognitive Companion

Litman thinks Lucy is a great tool for actually putting to use all of the data that clients invest in, but don’t utilize. With the amount of data a Fortune 1000 enterprise can generate, it’s virtually an impossible task for human teams to glean insights at scale and speed. “The real value is that Lucy saves time in the minutiae of market research.”

He showed how it pulls together a report in minutes, by finding graphs, data, articles and media by searching thousands of documents across the client’s disparate data sources. However Lucy does not crawl public domain data, so only sources owned or licensed by the client can be tapped.

While demonstrating the segmentation ability of Lucy, Litman emphasized on how it allows marketers to build 1:1 personalization at scale. “Lucy creates unique audience segments which allows us to get to a level of emotional understanding of the customer.” This is done by using psychological models developed by Carl Jung, to segment customers based on their emotional profile.

So customers are segmented not just on the basic filters like geography and demographics, but Lucy also segments them into in-built emotional personas such as Magician, Sage, and Rebel etc. “These segments represent a much better way to create personal customer experiences at every step of the way. By looking at a customer on a 1:1 level and analyzing what they are talking about, marketers can run tighter, smarter journeys, and run personalized campaigns and social ads for target segments.”

Lucy by Equals 3

How do they plan to compete with new AI technology from tech giants, and what does the future look like for Lucy? Equal 3 is positioning Lucy as a companion tool, says Litman, which can sit side-by-side with the largest systems used by enterprises, and removing the need for marketers to login into several interfaces. He added that they benefit from having great relationships with the third party data providers of all kinds, including business databases, web data, social data, news sources etc.

For now, he says, Equal 3 is focused on adding new features and expanding their growing client base.

Meet Zoe™ – a Collaborative Chatbot by Totango to Engage Employees for Customer Success

Technology is the answer for everything humanely erratic. The biggest challenge marketing and sales teams face in their workflow are the lack of coordination and unified vision. As Scott Salkin, CEO of Allbound, mentioned in our interview series — “Companies are lacking that “single pane of glass” to let them see how their martech activities are performing across platforms and channels.” Eventually, the gaps in collaboration magnify in the form of poor customer success rate.

Providing quick-fix answers to every critical revenue stream in the business, Totango unveiled a collaborative chatbot named Zoe™. The chatbot, which has a natural language, conversational interface, gets everyone in the organization to participate and impact customer success.  Totango’s Zoe™ provides every employee access to all aspects of customer data.

via Totango Zoe

via Totango Zoe
via Totango Zoe

“There’s nothing on the market that can unlock a company’s true potential to drive customer success the way Zoe™ can, ” asserted Totango Co-founder and CEO, Guy Nirpaz, while introducing the product at the fifth Annual Customer Success Summit in San Fransisco, C.A.

Clicktale, an enterprise-class experience management platform, was quick to adopt Zoe™. Confident on the value it brings to table, Shai Rybak, VP Customer Success, Clicktale, remarked, “Our entire team at Clicktale now has immediate access to customer data directly within Slack through Zoe™. Employees from all departments can make better decisions to impact our customers quickly and positively.”

Many customer success professionals at leading companies like Autodesk, Zoom and Taboola use Totango’s platform to actively monitor their customer health. engage well and connect the dots of customer data.

In the last year, more established enterprise companies are turning to customer success to support their digital businesses. The next step is for companies to enable customer success across all functions,” says Nirpaz.

Zoe™ was launched to meet growing potential of SaaS software subscription market expected to grow twice the size of the $60 billion growth in 2014, by 2019.

 

OTT-Ads Startup BrightLine Adopts Nielsen Marketing Cloud to Enable TV Advertisers to Hypertarget Viewers

BrightLine-Nielsen partnership allows marketers to run TV ads with personalized messaging to audience sub-segments.

 

BrightLine, the startup which has pioneered interactive TV advertising solutions for OTT and streaming TV devices, has selected the Nielsen Data Management Platform (DMP), a core Nielsen Marketing Cloud application, to enable marketers — for the first time — to deliver personalized TV advertisements to millions of U.S. households.brightline-logo

BrightLine which had a $20 million Series A round of financing in Sept 2016, says it already delivers interactive TV ad campaigns for a number of Fortune 100 companies and leading brands. Jacqueline Corbelli, Co-founder and CEO of BrightLine had said during the funding round that they will use the investment to expand the platform for targeted, programmatic TV ad buys with measurable return at scale. “We see huge demand by advertisers to take advantage of connected TV media opportunities, as they create higher engagement levels than any other advertising format.”

Using Nielsen Marketing Cloud capabilities, said the statement from BrightLine, will enable marketers to personalize their advertising across Over-The-Top (OTT) TV content delivery platforms such as Roku, Samsung, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation. Access to Nielsen data will improve relevance and marketing impact as content providers can more effectively monetize their connected TV offerings.

This new addressable advertising capability offers a win-win for both advertisers and broadcasters claimed BrightLine, because brands can tailor their ads for different households based on specific interests and behavior powered by Nielsen Marketing Cloud’s data, which has over 60,000 audience segments. “We are entering an age of hyper-targeted brand experiences on our TV screens, with leading marketers adopting household addressable TV ads — it’s part of this golden age of TV we call tvtopia. BrightLine’s dynamic engageable ad platform allows marketers the ability to provide personalized TV ads to target audiences based on their specific interests and behavior,” said Jacqueline Corbelli, co-founder and CEO of BrightLine.

BrightLine Advanced TV Ads

“Brightline chose Nielsen Marketing Cloud because our next generation DMP gives them direct access to not only world-class Nielsen audience data, but also advanced machine learning and adaptive modeling that will continuously optimize their clients’ audience segments,” said Nielsen’s Damian Garbaccio. “This ensures that OTT-TV audiences will receive the most relevant and timely messages and help generate superior advertiser ROI.”

Nielsen Marketing Cloud is integrated with a wide spectrum of marketing applications across dynamic personalization, programmatic, website, mobile, video, search, email and social media platforms.

Salesforce Names Simon Mulcahy as the New CMO

In a major leadership change, Salesforce has announced a new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) following the departure of former executive Lynn Vojvodich. The leading marketing automation company named Simon Mulcahy as their new CMO. This is the second stint as CMO at Salesforce for Mulcahy. He held the position as an interim executive between April and December 2016.

“Lynn Vojvodich has decided to leave Salesforce to pursue interests outside of the company,” said a Salesforce spokesperson. “We appreciate Lynn’s contributions to the success of Salesforce, and wish her the best in the next phase of her journey.”

Simon Mulcahy via LinkedIn
Simon Mulcahy

Simon Mulcahy joined Salesforce in 2011 as the Vice President Solution Engineering and “Ignite” Customer Transformation Program. It’s the success of “Ignite’ that catapulted Mulcahy to the top leadership position in the MarTech firm, where he has held positions as SVP Innovation & Solution Engineering and EVP Retail Cloud. Simon Mulcahy was earlier an advisor at the World Economic Forum and its Head of IT Industries.

As the CMO of world’s foremost marketing cloud company, Simon Mulcahy will now be responsible for leading Salesforce’s global marketing organization, piloting its market leadership, global awareness, demand generation, strategic events and communications.

Lynn Vojvodich, an accomplished MarTech thought-leader who joined Salesforce in 2013 from Andreessen Horowitz, was unavailable for comments on her next steps. The MarTech veteran has 20+ years of experience in design engineering and Enterprise Marketing. She served as CMO at Terracotta. The Harvard Business School alumna is also the founder and former CEO of Take3, a start-up consultation firm for marketing and advertising companies.

The latest change in leadership at Salesforce will accelerate company’s expansive ambitions into 2017, allowing it to focus on market consolidation based on superlative M&A and funding strategies.

Sendbloom Joins ClearSlide Partner Program to Optimize End-to-End Sales Funnel Automation

via Sendbloom
via Sendbloom

Personalization and sales enablement may not have made the best pairing couple of years ago. In 2017, they hold the key to the most sustainable form of customer engagement that leads to conversion. The latest partnership between the leading Sales Engagement platform ClearSlide and sales automation platform Sendbloom brings together a plethora of opportunities for sales teams to accelerate their conversions and improve ROI.

ClearSlide, a leader in sales engagement platforms, can help businesses grow and differentiate with value-added solutions through its partner program. Sendbloom, now a partner, will offer users seamless access to ClearSlide’s unique sales activity and engagement data platform. Using ClearSlide’s open APIs, Sendbloom customers can automatically upload content, insert trackable content links, and leverage detailed customer engagement data within sales enablement applications and workflows.

By partnering with ClearSlide that seamlessly integrates sales content with personalized email automation, Sendbloom intends to drive persistent prospect engagement by delivering most effective content at your sales team’s dashboard.

via Sendbloom
via Sendbloom

“We’re delighted to join ClearSlide’s valuable partner program,” said Ross Epstein, Sendbloom CEO and co-founder. “Combining ClearSlide’s Sales Engagement Platform with Sendbloom helps SDRs and inside sales easily add rich digital content within their Sendbloom touches. Our partnership with ClearSlide provides an end-to-end sales funnel optimization solution combining our respective strengths.”

Michael Schultz, ClearSlide VP of marketing and business development, says, “Every sales team can immediately leverage the integration to improve prospecting connections and close rates – and marketing teams can scale the usage and ROI of sales content.”

via ClearSlide Content Effectiveness
ClearSlide Content

“ClearSlide and Sendbloom are two of our most critical tools we use for driving sales productivity,” says Jeff Van Tatenhove, Relationship Science VP of client development. “With their products now integrated, we can drive even greater sales efficiencies and effectiveness in our sales process.”

ClearSlide and Sendbloom, together, will offer a tangible solution to challenges in sales enablement, providing seamless integration between robust content management and customer engagement analytics into fully-automated prospecting campaigns. Furthermore, sales reps using Sendbloom will be able to connect with and focus on engaged buyers by leveraging ClearSlide’s marketing-approved and media-rich content.

via Sendbloom
via Sendbloom

Adding ClearSlide’s real-time notifications and analytics into its sales automation platform enables Sendblooom to provide most instant feedback on campaign performance, including insights on email opens, link clicks and engagement report. Sales reps can gain rapid insights into what is working, and what’s not, helping teams to accelerate sales cycle without losing customers.

According to the latest report by market expert Heinz Marketing, nearly 65% of the sales and marketing professionals find the existing sales processes very complex without sales enablement technology. The 2017 State of Sales Enablement study identifies 52% of the sales teams are empowered to deliver a tightly aligned sales process with the customer’s journey. 75% of the respondents in the study reported a significant increase in their sales performance using sales enablement tools in the last 12 months.

According to another industry research, sales reps spend on average 440 hours per year looking for the right content during their sales processes. Once found, most sales teams either find the content too obsolete or complex to be aligned with customer journey.

Earlier, ClearSlide won the 2017 Business Intelligence Group (BIG) Innovation Award and was also named as the Enterprise Software Product of the Year by Aragon Research. The sales engagement platform was recognized for the success of its ION.

SparkPost Launches New Email MarTech with Next-Gen Automation and On-Boarding Capabilities

SparkPost, the leading provider of cloud-based email delivery services to apps and websites, announced the introduction of its latest technology – SparkPost for Service Providers. The new email delivering technology will allow service providers to improve their products and drive business growth. The email MarTech company aims to improve the accuracy and reliability of its technology for SaaS industry.

“We’re excited to announce this new offering created especially for service providers,” said SparkPost CEO Phillip Merrick. “This solution eliminates the burden and cost of managing internal infrastructure and accelerates revenue generation while allowing service providers to focus on creating and building a competitive advantage. We believe this offering clearly demonstrates that our business model is — and always will be — 100 percent aligned with theirs.”

via SparkPost
via SparkPost

SparkPost, as the leading email MarTech infrastructure provider, intends to offer a robust, tailor-made SaaS stack for accelerated engagements involving broader customer portfolio. The new offering enables users to overcome perennial challenges in email campaigns designed for multiple customers.

SparkPost for Service Providers brings a diverse set of features –

  • Scalable infrastructure powered by Enterprise SLA to manage uptime and peak-time capacities
  • Technical Account Manager (TAM) for proactive, fully-dedicated support that facilitates onboarding configuration and on-going service management
  • Inbox performance and deliverability management to help service providers understand the complex and arduous relationship-tracking challenges
  • Full-service deliverability management and automation of SparkPost Adaptive Email Network (AEN) to help service providers maximize their ROI
  • Fewer number of compliance breach incidents with faster onboarding, that are key to generating business success, allowing service providers to deliver enriching customer satisfaction at a reduced operational risk
via SparkPost
via SparkPost

Overall, the newly introduced SparkPost for Service Providers promises to deliver a fast-tracked path to revenue generation using next-gen automation and sub-account capabilities for omnichannel email marketing campaigns.

According to Return Path’s annual report on email deliverability in 2016, the global inbox placement rate for marketing email campaigns was around 79%, out of which only 73% emails actually reached their destinations. In 2017, email deliverability remains critical to email marketing ROI and performance. SparkPost’s latest vertical in email MarTech will help its existing clientele, which includes Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Groupon, Marketo, Zillow and more, to speed launch their campaigns based on powerful data insights and drive more customer engagement.

via SparkPost
via SparkPost

As CMOs look to automate their entire MarTech stack, email marketing will remain the vital cog in the wheel, driving personalization, contextual delivery, and conversational chatting within the integrated models. SparkPost for Service Providers, which is now the fastest feature in SaaS for email delivery, will allow users leverage the power of Big Data Personalization, Machine learning capabilities, omnichannel email experiences and encryption on a single platform.

SparkPost, in November 2016, had announced its availability in the Microsoft Azure cloud Platform-as-a-Service, providing B2B companies highly configurable add-on resources in email marketing and notification capabilities. As the fastest growing email MarTech firm, the SaaS provider announced that its API-driven email delivery service surpassed 15 billion email messages per month within 18 months of introduction.

Shaping up for 2017

SparkPost’s CEO Phillip Merrick adds —

2017 promises to be another banner year for SparkPost and our customers. As the need for reliable email delivery increases, SparkPost will keep innovating and providing businesses with the most trustworthy cloud email service available.”

Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), SparkPost provides their customers unmatched cost-effective bursting and reliability in the competitive SaaS for email delivery market. By developing a robust customer support, SparkPost, in 2016, evolved to become the world’s fastest-growing B2B email delivery service.