At Oracle Industry Connect, Industry Peers Join Together to Share Deep-Domain Expertise
Oracle announced its 5th-annual Oracle Industry Connect conference. The event brings together business leaders and experts from across industries to share deep sector expertise and strategies for innovation and organizational transformation. In addition to leading customer executives, the conference will feature keynotes from Oracle CEO Mark Hurd and Bob Weiler, executive vice president of Oracle’s Global Business Units. The event takes place April 10-11, 2018 at the Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York City.
Mark Hurd
“Oracle delivers the widest range of industry-specific applications in the cloud,” said Hurd, adding, “From creating smarter construction sites with IoT, to empowering retailers to deliver better customer experiences with inventory management, our unmatched industry expertise and solutions are driving our customers’ success.”
At Oracle Industry Connect, industry peers join together to share deep-domain expertise and best practices on the mission-critical applications that are core to their businesses and their success. Ninety percent of the breakout session content is comprised of Oracle customers providing insights on identifying and overcoming complex industry challenges.
The keynotes will be followed by seven industry-specific tracks for business leaders in communications, construction and engineering, energy and utilities, financial services and insurance, hospitality, life sciences and healthcare and retail.
Some of the Keynote Speakers Include:
Amy Brady, Chief Information Officer, Executive Vice President, KeyBank
Connie Santilli, Vice President Enterprise Systems and Strategy, GAP
David Sipes, Chief Operations Officer, RingCentral
David Wilson, Chief Innovation Officer, Bechtel Corporation
Michael Webber, Deputy Director of the Energy Institute, Co-Director of the Clean Energy Incubator
Ray Bennett, Chief Global Officer, Global Operations, Marriott International
William Pratt, Chief Information Officer, SiriusXM Radio Inc.
“Cloud computing is the foundation of how businesses can truly transform themselves,” informed Weiler, adding, “Smart companies will leverage powerful industry-specific solutions to innovate, delight their customers and drive new revenue streams.”
Reply Team Edition Allows Sales Reps to Effectively Collaborate on Prospects, Email Campaigns, Manage Workload and Permissions Between Team Members, and Perform Account-Based Selling in Teams
Reply, a sales acceleration platform for SMB to automate one-to-one communication at scale, is launching the Team Edition. Reply Team Edition is a new functionality for sales professionals to accelerate sales in teams. Currently, this is available for all Reply subscribers at no additional cost.
Currently, Reply provides its sales acceleration platform for SMB teams, which automates one-to-many communication and scales cold outreach capability, while keeping it completely personal.
At the time of this announcement, Oleg Campbell, CEO and Founder of Reply, said, “The Reply Team Edition enables sales professionals to make the most of teamwork and maximize efforts to accelerate sales in Reply.”
High-performing sales teams are 2.1x more likely to be very good or outstanding at their prospect collaboration capabilities according to Salesforce research, while in-person communication still remains sales’ top channel for connecting with customers.
Challenges for SMB Sales Teams in Driving Better ROI from Their Sales Campaigns
To Get a Response from Prospects
The most impactful ROI-challenge for SMB sales team is to get a response from prospects. Whatever sales tactics you may use – inbound, outbound, or account-based selling – it’s all about sending relevant messages, providing value and help, and streamlining communication to the exact action prospects should take. When I say ‘communication’, I mean a sales campaign, which is a series of messages crafted and tailored to address the needs of a particular target audience.
To Prospect Relevant Leads
Prospecting the relevant leads is definitely related to the first challenge. We have two perspectives here: on the one hand, this is about extremely targeted leads for outbound sales while staying aligned with marketing efforts for inbound. On the other, lead qualification is crucial for a sales team to focus on hot, bottom-of-the-funnel leads while passing the rest to nurturing campaigns.
To Scale Sales Efforts Without Growing the Team
Once you’ve identified a target audience and tailored messaging for a sales communication sequence, think about how you can scale these efforts to build something like an automatic lead generation conveyer. This is the point when sales acceleration tools, like Reply.io, come into play by helping to reduce your time and effort spent executing your campaigns while ensuring your emails are opened and replied to.
By automating sales prospecting, you’re able to reach more people in less time, send fully personalized emails so that you don’t sound like a machine, A/B test your message, track ‘Interested’ responses, and check out team performance.
Top Factors That Would Impact Sales Productivity in 2018
We asked Oleg about the biggest factors that impact sales productivity, and how does Reply enable the sales team to better collaborate on their campaigns. Here is what Oleg had to say —
“Sales productivity is affected by internal factors such as process gaps and miscommunication within the sales team, unclear targeting and sales goals; external factors such as misalignment between the core departments – sales, marketing and operations, to name a few.”
Oleg added, “Reply’s new Team Edition functionality allows sales team to effectively collaborate in a single environment, while accelerating sales: work together on prospects, email campaigns, schedules, create and share email and campaign templates, transfer contacts from one team member to another, stay aware of prospect activity, emails and replies.”
He further mentioned, “Thanks to the account management tools, Reply provides sales teams the ablility to perform account-based selling, and be sure that whenever a rep starts working an account, all other employees of the same organization are not being touched by other reps.”
“Whatever sales tactics you may use – inbound, outbound, or account-based selling – it’s all about sending relevant messaging, providing value and help, and streamlining communication to the exact action prospects should take.” — Oleg Campbell, CEO, Reply
Reply Team Edition Focuses on Three Main Workflows
The Reply Team Edition functionality provides sales professionals with a single environment to effectively collaborate on three main workflows —
– Inbound Sales – manage workload among team members, change campaign owners and transfer contacts from one team member to another
– Cold Outreach and Outbound Sales – work on prospect lists, stay aware of prospect activity, check out current and finished campaigns and prospect statuses, emails, and replies
– Account-Based Selling in teams – collaborate on prospect and company levels for better outreach
Team members are able to share the best performing email and campaign templates within the team or use pre-written ones with proven efficiency.
Reply’s Team Edition offers a set of tools for team owners to manage the team and specify permissions by choosing between Public or Private modes, which covers different requirements of flat and hierarchical sales team structures. Admin features allow team owners to add and remove users and enable Team Edition from any Reply account.
Insider’s AI Helps Leading Brands Like Singapore Airlines, Uniqlo and Tokopedia Drive Growth
Insider announced the launch of its Growth Management Platform (GMP), which raised a US$11 million Series B investment. Primarily, GMP helps marketers create more intelligent interactions with their customers through exposing them to the most relevant content on their preferred channels, delivering fuss-free experiences. The platform offers digital marketers a full suite of features across the entire growth funnel, from Acquisition to Activation, Retention and Revenue. Powered by deep AI and Machine Learning capabilities, the Insider platform delivers real-time insights and personalization across the web, mobile web, mobile app and ad channels.
The main cost for startups, or any company going digital, used to be infrastructure and talent; today it’s a race for growth and customer acquisition costs are now the make or break item on the P&L. Brands are pouring an increasing proportion of their marketing budget into digital channels in a bid to reach consumers in today’s fragmented media landscape. Yet too many marketing dollars are spent on the wrong customers: those that don’t convert, spend, and come back. Complex and costly marketing clouds are not a viable option for many companies. The alternative is using a range of different point-solutions to drive growth, but this creates fresh headaches for organizations that must then deal with managing multiple vendors, integrating solutions, and standardizing data sets.
Insider has set out to solve this challenge. Built on a unified data layer, Insider’s Growth Management Platform is easy to implement and use, avoiding the need for complex integrations. The platform is based on the latest technologies based on knowledge activation and neural network-based models making technology almost invisible to users. The company democratizes AI and Machine Learning algorithms to help digital marketers across industries focus on the right segments to minimize marketing costs and offer a better brand experience that ensures growth over time.
Hande Cilingir
“Customers are demanding more personal, meaningful and smoother experiences, no matter what channel they are on. Delivering a personalized experience to each and every customer at scale increasingly requires robust AI and machine learning technologies,” said Hande Cilingir, CEO & Co-founder of Insider.
“That’s why we have built the first integrated Growth Management Platform, which gives digital marketers a holistic end-to-end capability across the entire growth funnel, from customer Acquisition to Activation, Retention and Revenue. Our aim is to make it easier for digital marketers to take a leading role in driving revenue, growth and loyalty in their organizations. Above all, our mission is to help brands deliver relevant and delightful experiences that are mindful of their customers’ attention and time.” she added.
The launch of Insider’s Growth Management Platform has been backed by a US$11 million investment led by Sequoia India, which has partnered with some of the fastest-growing startups across India and Southeast Asia, including Tokopedia, Go Jek, Carousell, Byju’s and Zomato. Existing investors Wamda Capital and Dogan Group also participated in the round.
Pieter Kemps
“We were impressed with Insider’s AI platform, and the profound impact on their customer’s key metrics: lower customer acquisition costs, higher retention, faster growth. These customers quickly started to use more and more products from the Insider platform. That has put Insider on a fast growth trajectory, especially in Asia,” said Pieter Kemps, Principal at Sequoia India (Singapore) Pte Ltd.
Insider will use this investment to double down in Asia, where it has experienced exceptionally strong demand.
The Territory Management Capability Adds Depth and Breadth to the LeanData Routing Platform, Empowering Sales and Marketing Ops Teams to Effectively Manage Sophisticated Lead Routing Strategies
LeanData, a leader in Lead-to-Account Matching, Routing and Marketing Attribution, announced a new capability that adds depth and breadth to its industry-leading Routing Platform. LeanData’s Territory Management capability empowers sales and marketing teams to execute go-to-market strategies that seamlessly automate complex territory lead routing and distribution.
At the time of this announcement, Hendrick Lee, Vice President, Product, LeanData, said, “We are seeing many mid-market and enterprise-sized companies focus their growth strategies on rapidly expanding and optimizing their sales territories. LeanData’s Territory Management capability automatically routes leads to the appropriate team or individual based on sophisticated territory definitions.”
How Does The LeanData Routing Platform Enable Sales and Marketing Ops Teams?
As high-growth companies expand into new territories, regionally, nationally, globally, it is imperative to speed the automation of lead routing for teams or individuals with specific sales territories and target accounts. The Territory Management capability adds depth and breadth to the LeanData Routing Platform, empowering sales and marketing operations teams to effectively manage sophisticated lead routing strategies, including account-based, round-robin, or territory to accelerate time to revenue.
Hendrick Lee added, “LeanData’s Routing Platform is now the first end-to-end solution for managing customers most comprehensive Lead Routing processes. This announcement furthers LeanData’s product innovation and commitment to facilitate meaningful connections between data and people to get to revenue faster.”
As part of LeanData’s robust Routing Platform, enterprises can now leverage the Territory Management capability to seamlessly route leads based on specific territory definitions, enabling sales and marketing teams to:
Build and maintain territory and segment definitions seamlessly by using ready-made templates that can be uploaded directly into LeanData’s Routing Platform
Speed the lead management process by ensuring leads are automatically routed to the right representative based on their companies’ territory assignments
Monitor lead assignment by territory to ensure that leads are being generated across all territories to accelerate revenue growth
Create strong alignment and data confidence between sales, channel and marketing teams
Tiffany Yick-Whitney, Director, Marketing Operations, Financialforce, said, “LeanData’s robust Routing platform is a critical component of our integrated sales and marketing technology stack. As we (Financialforce) prepare to expand our sales territories, it is critical for us to leverage a solution that would enable us to create our own sales territory definitions and automatically route leads to the right reps based on those definitions.”
Tiffany added, “LeanData’s Territory Management feature is the solution we need to deliver Leads to the right team or person, and ultimately empower our sales and marketing teams to align around the data to deliver personalized experiences to our customers at every touchpoint.”
Currently, LeanData provides industry-leading solutions, including Lead Routing, Account Matching, and Marketing Attribution, deliver in-depth account insights to sales and marketing teams, enabling them to increase pipeline, maximize marketing ROI and drive revenue.
InsightSquared Also Named a Leader in Sales Analytics
InsightSquared, the most-awarded provider of sales intelligence solutions for high-growth technology companies, announced that it has been named a Leader in G2 Crowd’s Grid Report for Business Intelligence Platforms, outranking 33 industry vendors to place first in Customer Satisfaction. The company was also recognized as a Leader in G2 Crowd’s Grid Report for Sales Analytics and received 11 additional awards across the two categories, including Best Support, Easiest Admin, and Best Results.
“The role of customer success is the responsibility of our entire team, not just one department. We are honored to receive these awards, but especially humbled by the awards for Best Relationship and Best Results as they directly reflect our commitment to have every interaction answer the question: ‘How does this help the customer?,” said Fred Shilmover, CEO & Co-founder, InsightSquared.
Based on reviews submitted by hundreds of business intelligence software users, G2 Crowd ranks vendors by customer satisfaction, market presence, vendor size, and social impact. More than 96% of users on G2 Crowd rate their InsightSquared experience with either 4 or 5 stars.
“I’ve now implemented InsightSquared at two different companies. It’s my go-to BI tool. We are able to drive all of our quarterly business reviews right from the dashboards, no PowerPoints needed. My executives like having the ability to directly access the info from Salesforce.com and appreciate the high reliability of the data,” said Melissa Warner, Senior Director Global Sales Operations, CoreOS.
InsightSquared provides sales-, marketing- and business operations professionals, together referred to as “revenue operations,” with the insights they need to help sales leadership forecast more accurately, collaborate with marketing and prospecting teams to ensure pipeline goals are met, empower sales management to coach reps more effectively, and provide executives with an actionable, retrospective analysis of sales performance.
“InsightSquared has been identified as a Leader in our recent Business Intelligence Platforms and Sales Analytics Grid Reports,” said Marty Duffy, vice president of research at G2 Crowd. “These rankings can be largely attributed to their high scores in the quality of support, ease of use, and ease of doing business with categories; making for very happy customers.”
Bridget Jay Previously Served as Director of Client Services for Qstream
Qstream, makers of software that uses science, data and mobile technology to ignite sales performance, announced Bridget Jay has been promoted to Vice President of Client Services. Jay previously served as Director of Client Services for Qstream and has been integral to developing new customer success processes and programs for the company during her 4+ year tenure.
As Vice President of Client Services, Jay manages a global team of consultants responsible for the successful onboarding, implementation, reporting and ongoing project management of Qstream customers and partners worldwide.
Rich Lanchantin
“Our ability to provide great client services is critical to the business and we’re pleased to recognize Bridget’s outstanding contributions to Qstream with this promotion. The market for sales enablement solutions continues to be very dynamic and every customer has its own unique set of requirements and success metrics. Given her experience serving many of the more than 300+ organizations using Qstream today, we’re confident Bridget is the right leader to support our continued growth,” said Rich Lanchantin, CEO, Qstream.
Qstream provides an always-on channel for continuous sales enablement that improves selling skills, reinforces product knowledge and ensures competitive advantage. Qstream is used across 80+ countries worldwide by firms such as Philips Healthcare, Sun Life Financial, and HubSpot.
“At Qstream, we aim to delight our clients. Onboarding new clients and partnering with them to align Qstream with their strategic initiatives and drive successful business outcomes is a very rewarding job. I’m grateful for this opportunity to continue leading the remarkably dedicated and committed client services team at such an exciting time for both the company and the sales enablement technology market,” said Jay.
Qstream is focused on making salespeople great at what they do, in just minutes a day, by combining performance insights, coaching support, and knowledge and skills reinforcement in one convenient mobile app. Our clinically proven approach helps sales leaders align team capabilities to their unique sales process, KPIs, and customer path to purchase while identifying gaps that put performance goals at risk.
Del Taco to Be the First Partner to Use Punchh Acquire for a Complete Customer Lifecycle Marketing
Punchh announced a brand new product for their industry-leading Restaurant Marketing Cloud platform, called “Punchh Acquire,” designed to address one of the most critical and difficult marketing needs of any restaurant: new customer acquisition. With the launch of the Punchh Acquire Beta, Punchh becomes the only unified marketing platform for both customer acquisition and customer lifetime value growth.
Punchh Acquire empowers restaurants to bring in new customers through leading consumer networks like Apple Pay, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and more. Once new customers visit for the first time, Punchh lets you get to know every customer across hundreds of locations at scale and assign them with digital identities and profiles, allowing restaurants to measure campaign efficacy and make adjustments in real-time to help move that customer up the value chain towards brand loyalty.
Shyam Rao
“Our business is all about building relationships with customers because relationships grow revenue, but you simply can’t build a relationship with customers who remain digitally invisible – both those who are visiting for the first time and the ones who have already visited but have not established a relationship with your restaurant. Once a customer makes a purchase in your restaurant, Punchh is already the single most powerful platform available for retaining and growing the lifetime value of that customer. With the launch of Punchh Acquire, our platform is now the only solution available to restaurants that allow them to turn these ‘invisible customers’ into first-time patrons and begin building personal, lasting and profitable relationships,” said Shyam Rao, CEO, Punchh.
The new Punchh Acquire product empowers restaurants to market to new customers from the moment they walk through the door through a sophisticated mix of multi-channel marketing tools that integrate with any third-party ESP, SMS, WiFi including:
eClub – enroll members and target them with tailored offers and coupons
SMS – opt-in new customers and target them with tailored offers and coupons via SMS
WiFi – turn anonymous customers into known customers when they access WiFi, and target them with tailored offers and coupons
Apple Pay – target and acquire Apple Pay users into in-store rewards programs
Bounce Back Offers – target anonymous guests with tailored offers on receipts when they make purchases, to entice them to visit again and turn them into known customers
Punchh’s network of restaurant customers includes more than 100 restaurant chains across the globe, representing more than $10B in annual spend by 20 million consumers. Four leading restaurant brands have already deployed the new Punchh Acquire product during its Beta test period, including Del Taco and others.
Punchh is also working with key partners to deliver all of the different marketing channel components used in Punchh Acquire, including Twilio for SMS, Sendgrid for email, and leading in-restaurant WiFi providers.
Company Recognized with Two AWA Awards for Its Artificial Intelligence-Powered Automotive Sales and Service Assistants
Conversica, the leader in conversational AI for business and the only provider of AI-based lead engagement software for automotive dealers, was recognized with two Automotive Website Awards (AWAs), for automating sales processes and delivering an exceptional fixed operations solution, by industry research firm PCG at the 2018 National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA) Show.
Brian Pasch
In recognizing Conversica with the sales process award, PCG founder Brian Pasch noted how Conversica’s AI Sales Assistant “engages and nurtures 100% of a dealer’s leads until the lead converts into an opportunity or the lead decide to opt out. Conversica bridges the gap between marketing and sales by improving the quality of leads handed off to sales reps so they can focus their energies on selling and closing opportunities instead of chasing leads.”
Continuing with recognition of Conversica for the company’s outstanding dealership service product, Pasch highlighted how Conversica is “successfully integrating the use of a personable and extremely helpful virtual assistant with the capability to touch far more service customers, more persistently and with greater individual attention than would be possible for dealership service staff alone. Its outreach has the impact of improving customer satisfaction, generating revenue opportunities, influencing higher service traffic, and ultimately performing as a customer retention tool.”
Both Conversica’s AI sales and service assistants are multi-year AWA award-winning products and are used by hundreds of automotive dealers to automatically reach out and qualify sales and service leads 24×7, verify contact information, collect requirements, and set appointments. The products have been significantly enhanced over the past year with the addition of multiple languages, multiple communication channels and new types of conversations that automate more of the routine outreach by automotive dealers to their customers.
“We are thrilled to be recognized again this year by PCG with AWA awards for our flagship sales and service products for the automotive industry. It’s gratifying to see that the major investments we’ve made in product capabilities are recognized for how much they have improved dealership operations, boosted showroom and service drive visits, and freed BDC reps and service advisors from the important but often challenging process of engaging and following up with every potential dealership customer,” said David Marod, Automotive Industry General Manager, Conversica.
New CMS Breaks All the Molds: Makes It Fast and Intuitive for Channel Managers to Edit Complete Partner Experience and Not Just Content in Partner Portals
Impartner, the best-selling and most-award winning pure-play Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, today announced its Spring ’18 software release, which makes it possible for channel managers to edit, in real time, not only the content but also their partners’ experience in their Partner Portals – without the help of IT. The release continues the company’s ongoing focus on providing the world’s most powerful, most nimble channel-management tools. Impartner’s completely re-engineered Content Management System (CMS) allows users to both add and change pages by program segment, tier, region, etc., with a simple drag and drop interface, and make content changes using the solution’s new fast, sleek, intuitive control interface, the Momentum BarTM. Other key features in the release include enhanced sales enablement and segmentation functionalities.
Gary Sabin
“In 2018, the vendor with the best partner experience wins. This industry leap-frogging CMS solution is 100 percent focused on making it easier than ever for our customers to be able to continually optimize their partners’ journey with an easy-to-use, consumerized interface that users have come to expect from their business solutions,” said Impartner Senior Director of Product Management, Gary Sabin, highlighting Impartner’s newly re-engineered CMS.
A Paradigm Shift for Sales Enablement
Sabin stresses this same paradigm-shifting engineering vision is the driver behind the release’s new sales enablement functionality. Vendors have long struggled to convert collateral layouts into formats that make it easy for partners to customize for their businesses by dropping in their own images, logos and text content. However, with Impartner’s new AutoSense technology, vendors can instantly scan and detect images and text in collateral material and ready them to be customizable by partners with the click of a button, removing dependence on professional services teams and running up timelines and expenses.
“Sales enablement materials are a critical part of the value partners expect from leading channel programs and one that we see driving a reported 56 percent increase in profitability for partners who have the resources they truly need to bring a vendor’s products to life in the market,” said Sabin. “By instantly making any existing collateral co-brandable, we’re removing the time, budgeting and logistical challenges that in the past, have caused vendors to limit the collateral they provide.”
Segmentation in a Few Clicks
In its previous release, Impartner ushered in a new era of precision with its SegmentAI automated segmentation engine. With this release, SegmentAI features a new wizard, which takes Impartner’s segmentation functionality to another level by making it drop-dead simple for channel managers to bring their segmentation strategies to life with a few clicks.
“Visionary channel managers are dreaming up strategic segmentation schemes as part of their secret sauce to getting the most out of their channel partners, and imagining unique differentiated programs to stand out in today’s hypercompetitive channel environment,” Sabin said. “Until now, the challenge has been the difficulty of peeling those strategies off the whiteboard and actually implementing them within their toolset.”
More Control Over the Heart of Your Chantech Stack
Self-service is also the focus of Impartner’s new configurable Single Sign On (SSO) solution. “Because a company’s PRM solution is the Grand Central train station of the chantech stack – the central hub from which partners can jump into other technologies that are constantly being added and reconfigured – our new SSO makes it easy for vendors to make the adjustments that are typical in today’s fast-moving technology landscape,” said Sabin. “Without having to turn to an outside vendor, it’s now 100 percent in the vendor’s control to add and remove technologies as they come and go – making it easy for vendors to maintain SSOs for their partners to ensure they have a seamless transition from their PRM to other technology solutions.”
The Use of Analytics and Automation Increases Sales Conversion While Reducing Costs
Atento, the leading provider of customer relationship management and business process outsourcing services (CRM/BPO) in Latin America, and one of the top five providers worldwide, has expanded the capabilities of its sales service to offer a 100% digital end to end sales solution designed to increase sales conversion and customer satisfaction while reducing costs.
The solution combines digital marketing tools with Atento’s multiclient sales portal and omnichannel platform allowing completion of the sales cycle, from attraction to sales conversion, for any type of product or service. Thanks to its sales portal and analytics capabilities, Atento helps companies define the best digital marketing and sales strategies to generate qualified leads. Acting upon these leads, through automation and its omnichannel platform, Atento engages with customers at every touch point of the sales cycle via chat, bots, apps, email or SMS with or without the intervention of human agents. The results are an increase in the sales conversion levels, enhanced customer experience and a significant reduction in the process’s total cost.
Atento’s end to end digital sales solution can also integrate retargeting strategies and actions focusing on customers who initiated a buying process but did not complete the operation. Retargeting actions for these customers can deliver up to 70% sales conversion for clients of Atento’s digital sales solution. The solution can also incorporate an anti-fraud module that allows for integration with anti-fraud and credit agencies to complete the sales cycle with total security.
Atento Digital’s mainstream offering encompasses a wide range of digital capabilities that enhance customer experience and increase efficiency across the customer lifecycle, from acquiring to managing and retaining customers. Atento Digital’s proposal incorporates the use of digital marketing tools, automation, artificial intelligence, cognitive technology based on Keepcon’s semantic engine and analytics to deliver a new level of customer experience and process efficiency for Atento’s core service such as sales, customer care, technical support, collections or back office.
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