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Onvia Exceeds Over 1,000 US Government Agencies Connecting Directly with Businesses Through Onvia Exchange and DemandStar

Onvia, the leading provider of sales intelligence and acceleration technologies for businesses selling to the public sector, announced that the Onvia for Government initiative has now exceeded over 1,000 state, local and education agency participants nationwide using both Onvia Exchange and DemandStar. Onvia Exchange is the most comprehensive library of published purchasing records featuring more 1.8 million procurement documents from tens of thousands of government entities collected yearly, with over 2,500 bids and RFP packages added daily. Now, more agencies will be able to gain access without requirements to contribute data.

 This announcement aligns with Onvia’s scope of involvement at the annual NIGP Forum in Salt Lake City, which includes:
  • Partnering with National Cooperative Procurement Partners to host a complimentary networking and happy hour event on Sunday August 27th designed to connect businesses, governments and cooperative purchasing groups
  • Moderating a panel procurement for smart cities, featuring top procurement professionals and experts, on Monday, August 28th
  • Exhibit tools and technologies for business and government in booth #729

Enabling Efficiency in Public Purchasing

In Onvia’s 2017 survey of more than 600 public purchasing professionals from federal, state, local and educational governments, 40% reported being over-worked and that their top challenge was finding the time for pre-bid research and planning.

Ben Vaught - Image
Ben Vaught

“We started Onvia Exchange with a vision of growing a community of government users who use data to improve their own procurement performance. As the world becomes more transparent, we are bringing Onvia Exchange and investments in DemandStar to all state, local and educational governments in the U.S,” said Ben Vaught, Director of Onvia for Government.

Here’s how Onvia Exchange users are extracting measurable value from the tool to save time in the bid and RFP research and authoring process, while benchmarking their procurement performance against their peers:

  • “Onvia Exchange has been a very helpful tool both for our purchasing agents and client departments. It has helped us in researching bids, developing specifications and finding additional supply sources. This has allowed us to reduce our lead time in developing solicitations while increasing our competition base.” – Jim Tillman, Purchasing Manager, Broward County, FL
  • “Onvia Exchange gives the ability to quickly search and filter for comparable bids and RFPs by type of purchase or location. It has made my process more efficient and the platform is so easy to use.” – Dawn Berry, Purchasing Agent, Town of Little Elm, TX
  • “The City of Perryville is seeing an immediate impact from using the Onvia Exchange.” – Tracy Prost, City Clerk, City of Perryville, MO

Data in the Onvia Exchange is sourced, organized and displayed using the most modern search technologies and Onvia’s proprietary ontology. Users are empowered to save valuable time by identifying relevant contract examples to streamline their bid research and authoring processes, as well as to collaborate with peers in the procurement community. In addition, agency users can reduce the time spent responding to time-consuming FOIA requests with capabilities that allow for easy upload of awards records and bid results data directly through the system. This not only cuts the time spent responding to public records requests, it also enriches the datasets that both Onvia’s business clients and government agency partners enjoy.

“With Onvia Exchange and DemandStar, over 1,000 purchasing departments are already taking a data-driven approach to their procurement processes to deliver more value for the citizens they serve. Purchasing officials across the country report cutting their research time by over 50% as well as identifying more piggybacking and cooperative purchasing opportunities,” said Vaught.

Also Read: DashBid Appoints Brand Safety Czar to Augment Focus on Programmatic Transparency

DYL Announces New iPhone App

DYL, an Inc. 5000 telecommunications company, announces the release of their new iOS app in the App Store. DYL’s all-in-one phone system with integrated lead management has become the tool of choice for businesses across the United States.

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James Angel

Available in the App Store, iPhone customers will have DYL’s powerful features in a sleek, user-friendly mobile interface. “This iPhone app takes the virtual office to the next level. Our customers can work from anywhere, using their iPhones, and have all of the functionality of the DYL system,” says co-founder James Angel.

With the app, users will be able to make inbound and outbound calls from their office number and use DYL’s impressive sales automation tools while on the go. DYL’s lead management and telemarketing power dialer are both built into the app. Users can instantly call new internet leads, automatically follow-up with prospects, and set appointments from their iPhone.

DYL also tracks and records every phone call in the office — enabling users to easily pull up detailed customer records at any time. The iOS app also allows customers to send texts and photos from their business number, providing unparalleled communication while maintaining privacy.

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Matt Vandervort

“What’s great about the app is that you can connect with your customers without revealing your personal cell phone number. Anyone who spends a lot of time in the field — insurance agents, realtors, contractors — will love this feature,” added co-founder Matt Vandervort. “And since we’ve included the dialer on the app, you can even make cold-calls between appointments.”

 

Also Read: Verto Analytics Launches Audience Profiles- A New Media Audience Measurement Solution

SAVO and Heinz Marketing Release Complete Buyer’s Guide to Sales Enablement

The enterprise buying cycle is increasingly complex with more stakeholders involved, requiring sellers to pivot and adapt to a range of buyer interests. Implementing a sales enablement program is a proven way to ensure sales organizations are executing on their go-to-market strategy and messaging, despite constant change.

To help you jumpstart your sales enablement initiatives – or take your existing program to new heights – SAVO and Heinz Marketing created The Complete Buyer’s Guide to Sales Enablement.

 The guide is filled with resources you can use to navigate the process of implementing a sales enablement program. Some resources include:
  • Value messaging to help you position sales enablement to key stakeholders in your organization
  • An ROI calculator to estimate impact of implementing a sales enablement program
  • Tips and templates for organizing your sales content
  • A comparison chart to objectively evaluate sales enablement technology providers
  • Success stories from peers who have launched a sales enablement program
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Kelly Dotson

“The rate of change that organizations are battling in the marketplace is unparalleled. Sales organizations need to equip sellers to have a better command of information so they can adapt in real time. Organizations need tools that drive near-term improvements in seller effectiveness as we stretch sellers to master on-going changes to products, messages, territories and sales strategies. This is why sales enablement is critical,” said Kelly Dotson, CMO of SAVO.

Matt Heinz - Image
Matt Heinz

“Sales enablement is a competitive advantage for those who adopt and scale its impact internally. This guide helps you build internal consensus and drive rapid adoption and results from your sales enablement efforts,”  said Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing.

Also Read: Todd Benedict Joins Tapad as Chief Revenue Officer, North America

 

6sense Strengthens Executive Team with Proven SaaS Leaders to Accelerate Company Growth and the Industry Shift Towards AI-Driven Marketing Platforms

6sense, the industry’s leading intelligent marketing cloud, announced the expansion of its executive team with three key hires who will help lead the go-to-market strategy and further accelerate growth in the business. David Simon joins 6sense as Chief Revenue Officer; Kyle Christensen takes the helm as Chief Marketing Officer and Sanjay Kini joins as Vice President of Sales Engineering. As proven leaders of high-growth SaaS companies, including Oracle Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, and Responsys, they will support 6sense’s mission to transform marketing technology and empower sales and marketing teams with the power of big data and artificial intelligence.

The announcement comes during a period of significant innovation in the billion-dollar marketing automation industry, as advances in data science are unleashing a new breed of software companies. Led by newly announced CEOJason Zintak, 6sense has built a patented big data platform that uniquely captures buyer intent signals across every digital and offline interaction, and uses artificial intelligence to combine these signals and mathematically predict when a prospect is in-market for new products or services. Recently named the industry leader in Forrester’s recent Wave report, 6sense is enabling sales and marketing teams to drive revenue in unprecedented ways, and the company’s new go-to-market executive team will only accelerate its leadership position.

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Jason Zintak

“6sense has already built the leading platform to modernize the marketing cloud, and with Dave, Kyle and Sanjay on board, we’ve rounded out our team of experts to accelerate our growth. Customers like Box, Cisco and Dell are seeing amazing results with complete visibility into the full buyer journey and the power to predict when the next buyer is ready. We can’t wait to help sales and marketing teams everywhere achieve similar levels of success,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak.

As marketers continue to demand big data and AI technology that can help identify in-market buyers, 6sense’s new executive hires will educate the market on the significant differences between solutions that connect a full range of intent signals over time and use machine learning to predict for a specific selling opportunity window, versus other commoditized data tools that simply add more noise than signal. Simon, Christensen, and Kini will steer the company’s go-to-market strategy and operations to accelerate adoption of a platform that is delivering measurable results for 6sense customers, including a 3x lift in conversion rates for Cisco, 12x the return on media spend for Dell and a 9x increase in average deal sizes for PGi.

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Kerry Cunningham

“It is clear that predictive analytic capabilities are crossing the chasm in B2B from experimental to required. In fact, these advances strongly influenced the development of the Demand Unit Waterfall. Now, it’s not a question of if organizations should employ predictive, but rather, how best to integrate a combination of deep attribute and behavioral data to drive productivity and efficiency,” said SiriusDecisions Senior Research Director of Demand Creation Strategies Kerry Cunningham

Also Read: Amplero Recognized on Constellation ShortList™ for Marketing Analytics Solutions

Bright Pattern Selected for IBM’s Watson Build Challenge

Bright Pattern has been selected in phase two of the Watson Build challenge to develop its cognitive technology business plan, Omnichannel Conversation Analytics, into a working prototype using IBM Watson APIs on the IBM Cloud. IBM will provide Bright Pattern with access to IBM development tools, business mentors and cognitive specialists to bring its concept to life.

The Watson Build challenge is IBM’s first cognitive challenge designed solely for Business Partners. In phase one, IBM received hundreds of business plan submissions from business partners around the world. In phase two, select Watson based solutions were chosen to progress to the next phase where partners will build working prototypes to demonstrate these cognitive products and services.

“The response to our first-ever Watson Build challenge for business partners has been phenomenal. We congratulate Bright Pattern for presenting a strong business plan centered around IBM Cloud and Watson and progressing to the next round of the challenge. We look forward to supporting Bright Pattern as it works on a prototype for Omnichannel Conversation Analytics, with the goal of bringing it to our joint clients,” said John Teltsch, General Manager, IBM Global Business Partners.

Bright Pattern continues to lead contact center innovation with cognitive computing applications for customer service, offering a number of beneficial call center AI features, including:

  • Voice transcription services which brings transcripts of calls into database of customer communications across channels, enabling further analysis
  • Search interactions across channels using text queries
  • Sentiment analysis, for routing of interactions, and prioritization of interactions for review and grading
  • Pattern analysis, showing frequency of subjects discussed, over time
  • Conversation analysis and automation for chat, using natural language understanding
  • Providing intelligent assistance to live agents based on the content analysis of message exchange with customers

Bright Pattern AI call center applications leverage IBM Watson cognitive technology comprising an array of APIs and services for natural language understanding, sentiment analysis and emotional analysis, and speech to text transcription in eight languages.

“We are glad to help enterprises focus more of their resources on customer satisfaction by accelerating prosaic tasks using AI technologies. IBM’s Watson Build is a great opportunity for us, and we are perfectly aligned: the cognitive features we listed for participation in Watson Build were in our product development plan already and we had developed most of them before we even signed up,” said Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO of Bright Pattern.

IBM Cloud technologies, including Watson APIs, help Bright Pattern Contact Center users leverage a broad range of cognitive technologies to improve customer experience on a pay-as-you-go model, with full control of the associated costs.

Also Read: IBM Watson Brings New-Age Fan Experience and AI-Based Analytics to Wimbledon

SaaSOptics Adds Advanced Salesforce Integration for Refined Customer Subscription Visibility

SaaSOptics has announced a new, advanced version of its plug and play connector with Salesforce.com for improved workflows and customer subscription visibility. SaaSOptics is the only subscription management platform designed specifically for growing B2B SaaS and subscription-based businesses.

Driven by customer demand, the integration extends the benefits of the SaaSOptics order-to-renewal process workflow and enables cross-functional collaboration between QuickBooks and other general ledgers, and SaaSOptics. It also delivers visibility of financial data beyond finance and sales to account management and customer success teams, providing one source for customer financial records.

As the industry standard for SaaS subscription management, over 350 customers trust SaaSOptics to manage over $2.1 billion in revenue.

Tim McCormick
Tim McCormick, CEO at SaaSOptics

Tim McCormick, CEO of SaaSOptics, said, “Connecting the dots between Salesforce and customer financial data is critical for SaaS businesses to win new customers, upgrade existing accounts and manage customer renewals. Having a single source of truth for your customer financial data is essential for growth. With this integration, we are closing the gap that often exists between sales, finance and customer success teams by providing greater visibility with a common view of a customer’s orders, contracts, transactions, invoices, payments and renewals – accessible by all of your Salesforce users.”

The SaaSOptics Salesforce  integration brings subscription-based businesses greater cross-team visibility and enhances workflows with capabilities that:

Automate the order-to-renewal process

Orders or closed opportunities automatically sync from Salesforce to SaaSOptics, taking manual entries out of order management, simplifying workflows and ensuring data accuracy.

Provide instant access to customer order details directly in Salesforce

Real-time visibility into customer orders with financial details such as invoice payment status, renewal dates and account MRR/ARR, enable quick decision making. By exposing this customer financial data in Salesforce, customers have instant access and can leverage an entire ecosystem of tools.

Simplify complex order change requests

A standardized workflow and ability to initiate contract change requests from Salesforce directly to the finance team for efficient management of complex order changes.

Increase renewal rates

Auto-create renewal opportunities in Salesforce, based on user-defined time periods with instant and timely visibility into renewals and contract details.

Provide access to accurate customer financial records

Instant access to real-time customer financial data, metrics and reporting saves time and drives faster cross-team decision making and increased productivity.

The SaaSOptics, bi-directional Salesforce integration is easy to use and doesn’t require complex configuration to get started. For more information on how the powerful combination of Salesforce and SaaSOptics can save time, increase productivity, uncover opportunities for growth and empower sales, finance and customer success teams, visit SaaSOptics.

Currently, SaaSOptics provides an affordable and flexible subscription management platform for growing SaaS and subscription-based businesses. Founded in 2009 by entrepreneurs who lived the challenges of running their own SaaS business, SaaSOptics is the only solution that can scale with a growing business, providing the day-to-day financial management capabilities needed, and the auditing, reporting and analytics that are critical for future growth.

AppDirect Appoints Michael DiFilippo as Chief Financial Officer

AppDirect, the company transforming the way the world buys and sells business software, announced the expansion of its leadership team with the addition of Michael DiFilippo as Chief Financial Officer. DiFilippo is a seasoned executive with nearly 30 years of finance and operations experience, including extensive knowledge around raising capital, integrating acquisitions, and overseeing financial strategy and operations for high-growth companies. Prior to AppDirect, he most recently served as CFO of the SaaS Division at Citrix Systems.

 At AppDirect, DiFilippo will be responsible for the Finance, Legal, Human Resources, and IT functions, driving the underlying planning and strategic processes that will enable AppDirect to continue its rapid growth in response to increasing global demand for cloud software. He will also serve on AppDirect’s senior leadership team, reporting to co-CEOs Daniel Saks and Nicolas Desmarais.
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Daniel Saks

“Michael is a fantastic addition to lead our talented finance and accounting team. His vast experience helping venture capital-funded cloud technology companies grow will be a tremendous asset to our organization. We welcome him to the senior leadership team and look forward to working together as we take the company to the next level,” said Daniel Saks, Co-CEO and President, AppDirect.

Prior to joining Citrix, DiFilippo held CFO/SVP Administration positions at venture-backed startups MuleSoft Inc. and Intelleflex Corporation, where he successfully led all G&A functions and gained valuable fundraising experience. DiFilippo holds an MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a BS from Pennsylvania State University.

Also Read: Veteran Technology Executive Mark Godley Appointed President of LeadGenius

Mindmatrix Brings Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Channel Marketing Automation & Channel Sales Enablement on a Single Platform

Mindmatrix, a leading native Channel Enablement Software Provider in the industry, is offering all the 3 core elements of Channel Enablement on a single platform. These elements are —

– Partner Relationship Management (PRM)

– Channel Marketing Automation

– Channel Sales Enablement

Most other vendors either enable one or two of the three core elements; or have partnered with others to offer all the three elements. For Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Mindmatrix offers partner portals and tools for partner recruitment, training, onboarding and certification, incentive and rewards management, opportunity management, lead routing and MDF management.

Mindmatrix helps corporate marketing teams support channel partners more effectively through its channel marketing automation module. Mindmatrix’s channel marketing automation segment offers tools for centralized local marketing, lead generation, social media marketing and channel marketing asset management.

Mindmatrix also offers tools that simplify the channel sales model, making it easy for channel partners to sell. These features are a part of its sales enablement module for channels and include Playbooks, Distributed CRM Integration, E-Contract Signing, Guided Sales Solution Selling and CPQ Engine.

Maria Chien, Service Director of Channel Marketing Strategies at SiriusDecisions, says, “As suppliers invest in channel solutions to automate workflow, scale program capabilities and streamline processes, they should include interoperability as a key consideration for delivering a positive partner experience. A core tenet of a positive partner experience is the ease of doing business, which is largely driven by the optimization of the workstreams associated with each partner touch point. Channel organizations must evaluate current and future technology investments to determine which tools are necessary to support channel business needs, paying special attention to possible integrations with existing technologies.”

Currently, Mindmatrix is the only single, fully integrated platform offering complete sales and marketing enablement for direct and indirect sales. Mindmatrix combines Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Channel Marketing, Asset Management, Sales Enablement, and Marketing Automation for the complete enablement of your sales and marketing teams. This unified platform takes you through every step in the sales process from lead to revenue, enabling your sales channels to sell more, faster.