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InsideSales.com Study Reveals Sales Cadences of Thousands of Companies

Sales acceleration software leader InsideSales.com announced the release of a study surveying sales industry cadences, which highlighted the patterns, frequencies and methods of responding to inbound leads. The report is the product of an analysis of data gleaned from the sales practices of over 8,000 companies in order to establish the most common number of contact attempts, response types and persistence periods.

Dave Elkington
Dave Elkington CEO of InsideSales.com

“Perfecting cadence is a core component of both the art and science of effective inside sales,” said Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com. “When sales reps lead with an unstructured cadence, they put potential sales at risk. Optimal cadences can boost results by up to 110 percent. These are not trivial improvements we’re talking about.”

Touchpoint Patterns

When it comes to outreach practices, email leads the way. The most common touch pattern was a single email with 32 percent of respondents using that method, accounting for 61 percent of first contacts.

The second most utilized cadence is a single call and voicemail (6 percent).

Spacing 

Finding the sweet spot between reaching out enough without seeming overbearing is vital.

The median gap between the first and second touch is typically the shortest, at around 16 hours, 45 minutes. After each subsequent attempt, the gap reaches its maximum between attempt numbers seven and eight, at six days, 21 hours.

Finally, after eight attempts, the median gap hovers at seven days.

Duration

In engaging with leads over time, the study determined that the median period between first and last contacts was just under five days. However, when broken down by industry, significantly disparate medians emerge. Software representatives, for example, have the longest median duration, at 61 days; while the transportation industry’s median was the shortest at 12 days.

Interestingly, on average, UK companies attempted to contact a lead for almost three days longer than their American counterparts. The median in the UK was 7.4 days while the median in the US was only 4.9 days.

Also Read: Demystifying Header Bidding

DemandGen Appoints Three New Key Members to Its Leadership Team

DemandGen

DemandGen, a world-class team of demand generation and marketing technology experts, today announced three key additions to its senior leadership team. They include Rob Bonham, Vice President of Sales; Eric Chebi, Director of Customer Success; and Anita Covelli, Director of Global Alliances.

We’re excited to be adding three incredibly talented and experienced new members to our leadership team. They signify our continued commitment to being the leading company in our ever-emerging marketing technology market,” said David Lewis, founder and CEO of DemandGen. “Having just reached our 10-year milestone, we’re ramping up for another strong decade, and I feel very fortunate that we’ve been able to attract leaders of such high caliber as Rob, Eric and Anita to fill these roles.”

Rob Bonham, Vice President of Sales, brings more than 25 years of experience in both operational and sales and marketing roles, having demonstrated continuous year-over-year growth in both large and small organizations. Prior to DemandGen, he was Executive Vice President of Marketing Solutions for Nimblefish, a marketing automation engine provider. He has served as Managing Partner of The Rockbridge Group, as well as CEO and President of connectME, a video platform company that delivered unique, 2-way video applications for IP network operators. Rob was also Senior Vice President of Operations for @Home Network Solutions, where he was responsible for all strategic planning, engineering, sales, marketing and operations, and successfully led the deployment of Broadband Internet in over 55 small and mid-sized cable markets throughout the United States. In his new role, Rob will be responsible for the leadership of DemandGen’s sales team, developing new business opportunities in current markets and global market expansion.

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Eric Chebi, Director & Customer Success at DemandGen

Eric Chebi, Director of Customer Success brings more than 15 years of customer success experience to DemandGen, having served as Director of Customer Experience for Oracle’s Marketing Cloud in APAC. While at Oracle, he led a team of Customer Success Managers across the Asia Pacific region to help companies execute highly effective marketing campaigns across key interactive channels, including email, mobile, social, display advertising and the web. Prior to Oracle, Eric held senior marketing position at Listrack, Interush and ExactTarget. Eric will head up DemandGen’s Customer Success efforts, providing leadership in scaling methodologies to ensure DemandGen clients get the most from their marketing investments and exemplary service along the way.

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Anita Covelli, Director of Alliances at DemandGen

Anita Covelli, Director of Alliances, has more than 20 years of experience in B2B software and services, including leadership roles in partnerships, product and marketing. Prior to joining DemandGen, Anita was Partner Development Director for Oracle’s AppCloud, where she focused on technology partner development as well as managing Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Content Marketing. During her tenure at Oracle, Anita managed more than 50 integrated AppCloud partners and grew her team from four to 20 people in just two years. She was instrumental in maturing offerings and processes to help scale AppCloud into the leading ecosystem of integrated marketing technologies. Prior to Oracle, Anita was Director of Strategic Partnerships for ReadyTalk. In her new role, Anita will manage and expand DemandGen’s strategic alliances and work with new and existing MarTech vendors to develop and bring to market service offerings to DemandGen’s clients.

In the 10 years since its inception in 2007 as the very first marketing technology agency, DemandGen has received numerous awards for growth and achievement. DemandGen’s clients include some of the top marketing teams around the world, and the company has received more 75 awards for marketing technology and operations excellence in large part due to the implementation of DemandGen’s methods for aligning sales and marketing departments and systems. DemandGen has been recognized twice by Inc. Magazine for sustained double-digit growth, and last year, the company was recognized by Fortune Magazine as a “Best Place to Work.”

MindTickle Appoints Veteran Sales Leader from AppDynamics and Catchpoint Systems as VP of Sales

Sales readiness company brings on sales leader to support skyrocketing growth; opens San Francisco office in SoMa

MindTickle, the leading sales readiness platform, announced the appointment of Cameron Essalat as VP of Sales for the fast-growing organization. Essalat, who discovered MindTickle as a sales leader at AppDynamics, joins the company with a first-hand understanding of how its sales readiness platform can increase the effectiveness of sales reps. In addition, MindTickle opened its second Bay Area office in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMA) district to support its growing customer base of fast-scaling technology companies.

Cameron Essalat MindTickle
Cameron Essalat

Most recently, Essalat served as Vice President of Sales of North America (West) for Catchpoint Systems. Prior to Catchpoint, he was director of sales for the commercial team at AppDynamics, where he consistently exceeded revenue targets by up to 233 percent. He used MindTickle’s platform at both companies to onboard new sales reps quickly, monitor the readiness of his teams and provide coaching to advance them individually.

“Cameron brings a strong track record of scaling sales organizations and building revenue in highly competitive environments,” said Krishna Depura, co-founder and CEO at MindTickle. “No one knows better how MindTickle can contribute to sales organizations than someone who relied on the platform to help train, coach and mentor his sales reps to consistent 125-percent-plus achievement quarter-over-quarter.”

“MindTickle is a strategic partner to sales leaders who need to onboard, upskill and improve the effectiveness of their sales reps with quantifiable results,” said Essalat. “I’ve been typically limited to Salesforce as a tool to manage my teams. It wasn’t until I found MindTickle that I found a meaningful way to impact the KPIs and metrics we were tracking – pipeline, closed deals, etc. With MindTickle in my right hand and Salesforce in my left hand, I can collapse the sales rep bell curve to ensure each rep is functioning at the highest level possible. MindTickle’s platform allows sales leaders the ability to slice and dice data to ensure the rep is receiving training that is specific to him or her versus generic training.”

Also Read: “Using deterministic data means marketers do not need to rely on probabilistic guesses

Node.io nabs $ 10.8 Million Series A to Accelerate Falon Fatemi’s Sales Intelligence Serendipity at Scale

Node.io is the brainchild of a brilliant 19 year old who starts her career spending 6 years at Google focused on go-to-market strategy, global expansion, and building strategic partnerships. And the next 6 years in the startup world as a  strategy consultant  for startups and VCs and advising companies on everything from infrastructure to drones.

Node emerges from stealth today and announces $16.3 million in financing to revolutionize how people and businesses discover new opportunities on the web. Through proprietary artificial intelligence technology, Node automatically delivers valuable, relevant and timely information about people and companies to help its customers understand who they should engage with and why.

Ninety percent of the information on the web was created in just the last two years and that pace is only increasing. Search is great when you know what you’re looking for, but what about the people and companies on the web you don’t know you should be looking for,” said Node Founder & CEO Falon Fatemi. “With Node, we’re creating a new paradigm in how people and businesses build connections and realize new opportunities. Helping companies discover their next best customers is just the start.”

Node is currently focused on enabling more effective customer discovery for sales and marketing teams, and has been in stealth mode for the past 18 months. During that time, Node has been working with select enterprise customers and is now making its patent-pending discovery engine available to businesses worldwide. Node’s relationship graph includes over half a billion rich profiles of people and companies, each loaded with valuable insights that can be leveraged to engage the right people, at the right time, and with the right message, enabling discovery of the next markets of opportunity.

Mark CubanData by itself is not valuable. Leveraging data to create actionable recommendations and deliver them at the right time, however, can be transformational. By applying a people-centric methodology and using the latest AI technology, Node has created a prescriptive recommendation engine that will transform how business gets done,” said investor Mark Cuban.

 

While in stealth, Node has grown quickly, doubling revenue in the last six months alone and is already helping thousands of salespeople and marketers optimize more than $4 billion in revenue at companies like BlueJeans Network, Periscope Data, Pagerduty, Outreach.io, and others. Node has a native integration with Salesforce, where it helps sales and marketing teams discover new potential customers without needing to modify existing workflows. As a result, Node customers recoup the cost of their investment in as little as eight weeks and have generated nearly $103 million in total revenue from Node recommendations.

Node uncovered more than $1 billion in new market opportunity,” said Node customer Jerry Clarno, Vice President of Sales at Periscope Data. “Node’s data intelligence has allowed our sales team to execute on that opportunity at scale and has paid for itself multiple times over.”

Node’s funding includes a new $10.8 million Series A funding round led by Avalon Ventures with participation from existing investors Mark Cuban, NEA, and Canaan Partners. New investors in the Series A include GREE Inc, Industry Ventures and Michael Stark – the co-founder of Crosslink Ventures. Other prominent Node investors include Gartner-owned CEB Ventures, Bee Partners and Sway Ventures.

Node’s impressive leadership and advisory team is comprised of experienced data engineers and technology entrepreneurs, including PhDs from Google, Facebook and Microsoft, the former CTO of Euclid Analytics, the former head of engineering for LinkedIn and Facebook Search, the founder of Alta Vista, and the former product lead for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, among others.

AI will change the way we discover information and Node is at the forefront of driving the paradigm shift from search to discovery – its demonstrable impact on sales and marketing is just the beginning. In the future Node’s technology can be applied to facilitate discovery for businesses and consumers across use cases ranging from recruiting to uncovering your next job opportunity,” said General Partner, Rich Levandov from Avalon Ventures. “You can think of it as technology that accelerates serendipity.”

Cision Unveils Exclusive Influencer Identification, Monitoring and Measurement Capabilities

Cision, the leading PR and social software company, has introduced new features and product enhancements to the Cision Communications Cloud™. The new features are designed to enable communicators to identify influencers, craft and manage campaigns, and attribute value across relevant communications channels.

Cision Now Offers a Comprehensive Platform with Meaningful Analytics and Data

The latest enhancement of the Cision Communications Cloud introduces capabilities to holistically manage and measure multi-channel PR campaigns and results. Updates include integration with Google Analytics and Adobe Omniture to track the impact of influencer programs on business objectives.

Cision MUlti channel PR dashboard
Enable users to direct PR campaigns across channels, influencers, press releases, email pitching and social media in one interactive dashboard. (PRNewsfoto/Cision)

Read Also: Dovetale Unveils First AI-Based Platform to Match Brand with Social Media Influencers

Additional features include the all-new “You Might Also Like” and “Trending Influencers” Cision Influencer Graphs, and expanded social media monitoring.

Kevin Akeroyd, CEO at Cision, said, “The latest release of the Cision Comms Cloud addresses two of the industry’s biggest challenges: navigating communications through thousands of influencers and dozens of channels; and attributing real, bottom-line business impact to these efforts. Today’s product enhancements enable marketing communications professionals to tackle these challenges head on, equipped with one comprehensive platform and meaningful analytics and data.”

Read More: Snips Launches Social Insights to Measure Audience Demographics for Influencers

  • Cision Social Media Dashboarc
    The Cloud now includes Facebook, Instagram and YouTube content in the same platform as print, online and broadcast material, in addition to the already included Twitter content, allowing users to monitor the complete story across all important channels. (PRNewsfoto/Cision)

    Multi-channel PR campaign management features enable users to direct PR campaigns across channels, influencers, press releases, email pitching and social media in one interactive dashboard.

    Integration with Google Analytics and Adobe Omniture enables communicators to connect influencer outreach and the resulting news coverage to activity on their company’s web and e-commerce experiences. By viewing the success of PR campaigns through the lens of web analytics tools, communicators can demonstrate how earned media campaigns drive e-commerce revenue or sales leads on their owned properties.
    The Cision Influencer Graph’s”You Might Also Like” feature provides data-driven recommendations based on audience geography, demographics and interests to help identify influencers on Twitter who can reach the targeted end consumer. “Trending Influencers” allows users to find influencers as they are rising in prominence on a particular topic, in order to reach them before they have peaked in popularity.

    The Cision Comms Cloud now includes Facebook, Instagram and YouTube content in the same platform as print, online and broadcast material, in addition to the already included Twitter content, allowing users to monitor the complete story across all important channels. Comments, mentions and trends can now easily be segmented by company, message, executives or products.

The new announcements mark the second major product update to the Cision Comms Cloud since the platform’s launch in October 2016. The latest update closely follows the company’s recent listing on the New York Stock Exchange 

Xignite Announces Channel Partner Program Focused on Making Market Data Easy

Initial Partners Nasdaq, ChartIQ and Streamdata.io Are Addressing Capital Markets Cloud Initiatives

Xignite, Inc. the leading provider of market data cloud solutions, today announced the Xignite Channel Partner Program. The new program provides partners with unique and integrated cloud-based market data solutions that empower clients undergoing digital and cloud transformation. Xignite also announced the program’s first three channel partners: NasdaqChartIQ and Streamdata.io.

Xignite is partnering with market data providers, technology firms, independent software vendors, and professional service providers that offer complementary products and solutions. Xignite offers channel partners a wide range of benefits, including marketing, sales readiness, training, and technical support to ensure mutual success.

Oliver Albers NASDAQ
Oliver Albers

“Partners and providers play a vital role in Nasdaq’s focus on delivering high-quality, high-value data for everyone in the market including financial technology startups and established firms,” said Oliver Albers, Vice President of Global Information Services at Nasdaq. “Through our partnership with Xignite, clients can seamlessly access Nasdaq Basic, Nasdaq Last Sale, Nasdaq Global Indexes and Mutual Fund data from Xignite’s Cloud APIs and integrate with innovative mobile apps, web portals and wealth management systems.”

Read More: Onvia Agrees To Be Acquired By Deltek

Xignite makes market data easy for financial institutions of all types. Xignite’s Cloud APIs and Market Data Cloud solutions, hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), allow partners to unlock capacity and enable simplicity and interoperability for their clients with a high-availability, industry-wide mutualized infrastructure. Cloud APIs easily and seamlessly integrate multiple data types originating from more than 150 best-of-breed sources including direct from exchanges. APIs free clients from the constraints of hardware and software so that they may create, deliver and scale applications globally touching millions of users and devices. Xignite’s Market Data Cloud centralizes client entitlement, allocation, and distribution of first-level real-time and reference data licensed from vendors or contributed internally.

“Xignite and our channel partners are committed to improving the client experience,” said Marla Sofer, Head of Business Development at Xignite. “Together, we will empower and inspire the future of finance by solving client business problems and reducing costly and redundant infrastructure.”

Read More: SBS Group to Launch SalesConnect 365, a New Solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales

Redbrick Launches Cloud-Based Application for Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Team Offers Free Trial To Streamline Influencer Management And Help Marketers Focus On Scale

RedbrickCanada’s second-fastest growing software company, announced the release of their latest product, Assembly, a cloud-based application that allows brands and marketing agencies to manage all of their influencer marketing campaigns in one centralized location.

Redbrick officially launched Assembly on Product Hunt on July 18th, and the team is now offering influencer marketing professionals a free 15-day trial to help manage and scale their campaign ROI with ease.

Marco Pimentel Redbrick
Marco Pimentel

“Whether it’s at the brand or agency level, managing one influencer campaign is tedious and time-consuming enough, let alone managing dozens or even hundreds of them simultaneously,” said Redbrick CMO Marco Pimentel. “Our goal with Assembly was to streamline influencer management by bringing all the moving parts together in one neat package to prove that it doesn’t have to be hard to demonstrate ROI.”

Influencer marketing is seeing an explosion in popularity, with 84% of marketers saying they planned on launching at least one influencer campaign during the next 12 months.

“Brands across virtually every market are allocating major resources into leveraging the power of peer influence on social media by having their products promoted by celebrities and niche thought leaders alike while gaining organic, targeted exposure to their loyal social followers — followers who already happen to be paying attention to what they have to say,” said Assembly CEO Neil Henderson.

Also Read:  Developing Customer References for Technology Marketing: Some Things Have Changed While Others Remain the Same

An attractive proposition indeed for those trying to reach audiences in an age where they’re blinded by conventional ads and 47% of consumers are deploying ad blockers. Even more so considering it’s been noted that consumers trust authentic content 92% more than traditional marketing tactics.

Assembly is perfectly aligned with these trends, and the Redbrick team emphasizes their product’s ability to prove ROI thanks to an intuitive interface and comprehensive features.

Assembly is the technology that provides marketing teams with all the resources they might need across the entire campaign lifecycle. The influencer marketing platform has been referred to as the influencer CRM for marketers in search of a smarter way to manage their campaigns. Key features include influencer onboarding, campaign management, real-time analytics reporting and tracking, in-app payments, and more.

Oracle Named a Leader in 2017 Analyst Evaluation for Digital Process Automation Software

Oracle Positioned As A Leader And Selected For Evaluation Based On Proven Customer Adoption, Strong Go-To-Market Strategy, And Breadth Of Capabilities

Oracle announced that it has been named a leader in the Forrester Wave™ Digital Process Automation (DPA) Software report. This placement confirms leadership of the Oracle Process Cloud, which is a part of the Oracle Cloud Platform.

“By delivering comprehensive process automation capabilities such as no- and low-code process design, case management and simplified connections to SaaS, Social, Cloud and on-premise systems, Oracle provides customers with a powerful option to continuously deliver engaging customer, employee, and partner experiences at every stage in their business transformation journey,” said Vikas Anand, vice president, product management, Oracle. “Today business process automation augmented with intelligent machine learning is helping organizations drive best next actions and provide them with better, timely decision making capabilities.”

In Forrester’s 30-criteria evaluation of DPA vendors, they evaluated 12 significant software providers. Oracle was cited as a leader with the highest possible scores in the low-code/no-code, smart forms and user experience, process flow and design, mobile engagement, API support, data virtualization, deployment options, and ease of implementation criteria.

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

Oracle Process Cloud Service was built from the ground up for the cloud to provide enterprises of all sizes with the low-code app dev platform that they need to build business agility and control their digital destiny. With full lifecycle support for end-to-end process automation spanning departments, SaaS apps, and on-premises systems of record, Oracle Process Cloud Service empowers business analysts and process designers with the tools they need to rapidly deliver differentiating experiences in a collaborative manner. Oracle Process Cloud Service comes with Quick Start App templates and pre-built integrations to companion platform services including, Content Management, Integration, Mobile, Intelligent Bots, and IoT Apps, to enable rapid delivery of engaging experiences across channels and devices.

Customer Momentum
“Process automation is central to our integration strategy,” said Ravi Gade, senior director of apps IT and digital transformation, Calix. “Calix leverages Oracle Process Cloud to reduce IT backlog, ensure compliance, and simplify connections across our rapidly evolving SaaS and on-premises business systems.”

Ryan Klose
Ryan Klose

“Using a combination of Oracle Process Cloud Service and Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service along with the cloud-native best practices introduced by our partner, Rubicon Red, we have a comprehensive, integrated cloud platform that enables us to deliver innovative, modern solutions,” said Ryan Klose, general manager, corporate, National Pharmacies. “The Oracle Cloud Platform gives us flexibility to connect to all our core systems, and easily deliver to a range of user interfaces, whether they be online, mobile/tablet, devices/IoT, or emerging chatbot technology.”

“Oracle Process Cloud Service has allowed us to dramatically shorten our time-to-market by up to 40 percent,” said Matt Wright, chief technology officer, Rubicon Red. “Oracle provides developers with immediate access to a full lifecycle process management environment—including development, test, and production—and enterprise-quality tooling, without needing to build and maintain an IT infrastructure.”

Zeta Global Acquires Boomtrain to Accelerate Roll-out of Its Machine Learning-Driven Marketing Cloud

Fast-Growing Enterprise SaaS Company Shaping the Next Wave of Marketing Technology

Zeta Global, the data-driven marketing technology innovator whose SaaS-based marketing cloud helps leading brands acquire, retain and grow customer relationships, announced that it has acquired Boomtrain, a machine learning driven marketing technology platform that uses artificial intelligence to drive personalized messaging across all digital touchpoints.

Boomtrain developed the first marketing technology platform with machine intelligence at its core, enabling brands to better understand and communicate with their customers. Launched in March 2014, the Boomtrain platform has gained significant traction, attracting more than 120 clients including leading media companies such as CBS and Dow Jones. Boomtrain’s technology will become the personalization engine within ZetaHub, the Gartner Magic Quadrant-rated digital marketing hub. Following the acquisition, Zeta will hold one of the largest machine learning patent portfolios in marketing technology.

David Steinberg Zeta Global
David Steinberg

“We are delighted to announce the addition of Boomtrain’s world-class team and technology to Zeta Global,” said David A. Steinberg, Zeta’s Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO. “My co-founder John Sculley and I believe machine learning will fuel next-generation marketing technology. This acquisition accelerates Zeta’s already significant investments and achievements in machine learning to enable the world’s leading brands to deliver 1:1 marketing at scale.”

“We’re thrilled to be joining Zeta’s growing team,” said Chris Monberg, Boomtrain’s Co-Founder and CTO, who will become CTO at Zeta Global. “Our team was impressed by Zeta’s vision and commitment to becoming a leader in the nexus of machine learning and omni-channel messaging. Combining our innovative tech stack with Zeta’s scale will enable brands to achieve more than first generation marketing clouds.”

The integration of Boomtrain’s engineering and data science teams brings Zeta’s global headcount to more than 1,300 employees. Boomtrain’s San Francisco headquarters will become part of Zeta’s Silicon Valley Center of Excellence. Boomtrain’s Bangalore office will be Zeta’s third engineering hub in India and a center for investment in advanced R&D and machine learning.

The deal marks the 10th acquisition in 10 years for Zeta Global, and follows the closing of a $140 million Series F financing round in April of this year.