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People.ai Raises $7 Million Series A to Deliver the World’s First Predictive Sales Management Platform

STS Staff Writer
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Team People.ai
Team People.ai

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.”

Read More: Salesforce DMP will Transform the Flywheel of Marketing Technologies

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.

AI-First Startup Cien is Salesforce’s Customer Hero

STS Staff Writer
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Cien Inc Rob Kall presentation
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-2

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.

BuzzBoard Hires Lem Lloyd as SVP of Revenue and Business Development

STS Staff Writer
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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.

Helpshift Adds New Integration Capabilities on the Salesforce AppExchange

STS Staff Writer
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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.

Helpshift Partners with Salesforce App Cloud
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 + SalesforceHelpshift’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.

Oracle Utilities Unveils the Perfect Customer Platform for the Modern Utility

STS Staff Writer
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New customer to meter offering slashes tech costs by 25% and combines full power of customer information systems and meter data management systems

Oracle has unveiled the Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter solution for its customers. Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter is a comprehensive meter-to-cash solution for today’s customer-first utility. It is the first offering to combine a market-leading customer information system (CIS) with a market-leading meter data management system (MDMS) into one solution with a single user interface.

Read Also: Oracle MME Proves Customer Experience is the Holy Grail of Marketing Success

Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities says, “Oracle Utilities continues to partner with utilities around the globe to solve the issue of increasing complexity in this rapidly transforming industry.”

Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter leverages a single shared technology stack. This new solution can reduce utility costs due to faster implementation times, fewer integration points, and greater operational efficiencies.

Improved CX with Streamlined Business Processes

Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter delivers all of the benefits of a complete meter solution. It is a powerful customer platform that enables utilities to more immediately and efficiently extracting value from advanced metering infrastructure data. The whole idea of introducing Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter is to improve customer experience.

Read Also: Interview with Cory Treffiletti, CMO – Oracle Data Cloud

Smith adds, “Simplifying meter-to-cash processes is an important part of those partnerships. This new solution does exactly that: it allows utilities to get up and running in a matter of months with a complete meter-to-cash solution and allows them to leverage that complete solution to streamline business processes and easily stay ahead of rapidly evolving business drivers impacting how they serve their customers.”

Benefits of New Oracle Utilities Solution

Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter is redefining the utility customer platform by enabling utilities to:

  • Implement a full meter-to-cash solution in a matter of months
  • Leverage one technology stack and reduce technology costs
  • Achieve service excellence in every customer interaction with a single, intuitive user interface
  • Deliver a powerful, streamlined customer experience across every channel
  • Expand smart meter programs seamlessly and derive more value from AMI data

With this streamlined approach, utilities can more easily design customer-centric, personalized programs and services, and prepare for the continued growth of smart meter programs. This holistic solution lays the groundwork for an evolving utility that wants to roll out smart meters in the future, without a major IT project.

Meet Rising Customer Expectations for Metering

“Utilities that leverage data to deliver an improved customer experience and more personalized programs – such as tailored time-of-use billing, or targeted home energy management advice – and do this with a single, integrated solution that combines customer and meter data, will be well poised to take advantage of the continued growth of smart meters and a smarter, more customer-centric grid”, according to Roberta Bigliani, Vice President, IDC Energy Insights.

With rising customer expectations and expanding smart grids, utilities are turning to modern, comprehensive technologies that deliver world-class customer engagement and operational efficiencies. Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter provides the platform to respond to evolving market dynamics and quickly implement new business requirements that span metering, rate analysis, billing, collections and customer programs.

For example, as electric utilities face increasing distributed generation they may test new rate structures to better manage demand. With Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter, months of customization can be reduced to hours of configuration and utilities can easily test and implement the changes necessary to evolve.

Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter consolidates advanced usage and billing capabilities for all meters – from scalar to interval – so utilities can manage those meters and their data in one place and derive greater value from grid investments.

DiscoverOrg Honored with 2017 TechOregon Growth Company of the Year Award

STS Staff Writer
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DiscoverOrg, the world’s leading sales and marketing intelligence provider, announced it has received a 2017 TechOregon Technology Award as the Growth Company of the Year. Presented by the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO), the 33rd annual awards recognize the state’s most successful companies for their accomplishments, leadership, and commitment to the industry and community. John Gardiner, President and CFO of DiscoverOrg, accepted the award at the Oregon Technology Awards ceremony held May 11, 2017 at the Portland Art Museum.

The TAO Company of the Year Award features five subcategories —

  • Pre-Revenue
  • Emerging
  • Rising Star
  • Growth
  • Enterprise

The Growth subcategory recognizes an outstanding company that has achieved $20-$100 million in revenues. In 2016 DiscoverOrg posted record growth, with $71 million in annual recurring revenue and 41% revenue growth. 

“We’ve been watching DiscoverOrg’s upward trajectory over the past 10 years and are very happy to recognize them as the Growth Company of the Year,” said Skip Newberry, President and CEO of TAO. “The level of excellence and achievement we are seeing in Oregon and Southwest Washington’s technology community is astounding, and DiscoverOrg is one of the companies pushing others to even greater success.”

In addition to the TAO Growth Company of the Year award, DiscoverOrg has received numerous other accolades over the past year, including being named an Inc. 5000 company for the 6th straight year; being added to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list; being recognized as Category Leader for Sales Intelligence and Account-Based Marketing by G2 Crowd and as a 2017 Top Rated Sales Intelligence Platform by TrustRadius; and being awarded the SIIA Model of Excellence Award for Data Quality.

“It’s an honor to be recognized for our achievements by a local tech advocate like TAO,” said Henry Schuck, DiscoverOrg CEO. “The tech community here is incredibly innovative and vibrant. A primary reason we’ve experienced such significant growth is that we belong to a community whose companies encourage one another to excel.”

DiscoverOrg, the leading global sales and marketing intelligence tool, has been named an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing company six times. DiscoverOrg’s award-winning solutions provide a constant stream of accurate and actionable company, contact, and buying intelligence that can be used to find, connect with, and sell to target buyers more effectively – all integrated into the leading CRM and Marketing Automation Tools in the market.

Qstream Unveils Next-Gen Video Coaching Approach to Improve Sales Performance

STS Staff Writer
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ATD 2017

Today at ATD 2017, Qstream has introduced video coaching as the latest addition to the Qstream Coaching Hub™. Reflecting Qstream’s data-driven approach, video coaching aligns manager video observations with knowledge and skills insights, competency ratings, and CRM-sourced performance and productivity data to provide a 360-degree view of a team’s capabilities. This complete framework enables more consistent and meaningful coaching experiences in minutes a day.

Qstream’s Video Coaching is a Treasure Map for the Sales Reps

Video questions are delivered to reps within the context of a Qstream challenge. They simply record and submit their time-bound response (up to three minutes in length) for manager review. The limited video length, coupled with Qstream’s intelligent batching and spaced viewing of videos, serve to avoid overwhelming managers with a constant barrage of lengthy videos to review, a common pitfall of video coaching solutions. Managers then rate reps’ responses for knowledge proficiency and confidence and provide individualized feedback. That assessment is then correlated with the knowledge, skills, competency, and performance data available within the Qstream Coaching Hub for the richest possible picture of the team’s capabilities.

Data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of coaching and lays the groundwork for a sustainable coaching culture.

“Video observations can be a valuable tool for managers, but when used independently of a larger coaching framework, including the data insights to support it, they can’t successfully address the biggest barriers to coaching, including who, what, and how to coach, not to mention a very real lack of time,” said Duncan Lennox, Qstream CEO and co-founder.

Qstream Sales Coaching Metrics
Qstream Sales Coaching Metrics

Duncan adds, “Qstream is addressing these challenges with the complete coaching solution available, one that leverages our analytics engine to combine knowledge and skills data with observational and performance data, all in one platform. Our data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of coaching and lays the groundwork for a sustainable coaching culture.”

Read Also: 8 MarTech Firms Selected by R/GA Represent the Future of Mobile Marketing & Advertising

Video Coaching will Improve Customer-Facing Behaviors

Qstream is the maker of sales acceleration software that uses science, data, and mobile technology to ignite high-performing sales teams. Qstream’s Coaching Hub addresses the paradox in sales coaching, underscored in survey data from the Sales Management Association: while managers rate coaching as the number one most important activity based on its impact to sales effectiveness – ranking it higher than lead gen, compensation, and sales process.

77% of firms say they don’t provide enough coaching to their salespeople. This disconnect is largely the result of sales managers having more responsibility, and less time, than ever before. As a result, many firms are turning to video solutions to evaluate and improve customer-facing behaviors, and increase coaching frequency.

Read Also: LookBookHQ Intelligent Content Platform Adds New AI-Powered Automated Actions

Teams will Gain Validated Sales Enablement Strategies

Currently, Qstream’s sales capabilities platform is used by leading brands from diverse industries. It is used to manage the effectiveness of their sales teams and front-line managers at scale. Qstream’s scientific approach has been validated in more than 20 randomized control trials to boost performance and change behaviors in just minutes a day using any mobile device.

More on Sales Enablement: Brainshark and Seismic Join Forces to Amplify Sales Enablement and Performance Solutions

“Sales organizations are increasingly turning to video coaching as an engaging and scalable way for reps to practice interactions and managers to coach,” said Heather Cole, service director of sales enablement strategies at SiriusDecisions. “Asynchronous video coaching is most effective when it is aligned to role-based sales competencies, provides an infrastructure to guide prescriptive coaching interactions and delivers metrics-driven insights to sales leadership.”

Qstream offers novel sales technologies to pace up the speed of sales onboarding, message alignment, reinforcements, and coaching. These activities are ranked important based on their impact on revenue based on delivering a complete view of the sales process. By relying on video coaching within the sales enablement stack, salespersons who use Qstream will have better customer-facing insights than ever before.

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