I’m continuing to watch the impact of COVID on the Sales Enablement market. Here are the virtual selling skills challenges rainsalestraining.com found in a survey:
AccessBell accessbell.com @access_bell Founded in March 2020 you could call Access Bell inspired by COVID. Customized video conferencing for enterprise workflows. Customized, self-serve, fully-managed video conferencing for your workflows & apps. Expand your Zoom experience with features incl. real-time collaboration, personal notes, & agendas that sync with tools you already know & love. Take personal & collaborative notes & assign action items during the meeting. Organize your meetings with an agenda to indicate the progress of the meeting. Integrate seamlessly with Slack, Drive, Email, & other productivity tools. Track user engagement & better understand your meeting participation. Palo Alto, CA, USA. 7-Jun-2021, “AccessBell, a VC-backed silicon valley startup founded by Stanford MBAs, sold its video conferencing software solution to Tata Medical & Diagnostics for an undisclosed amount. What started as a trial converged into a solution which is being used to provide teleconferencing services to deliver healthcare services.”
A recent spike in Google search traffic for the term Sales Enablement seems to be a trend worldwide.
Bigtincan bigtincan.com @bigtincan helps sales & service teams increase win rates & customer satisfaction. The mobile AI-powered sales enablement automation platform’s user experience empowers reps to more effectively engage with customers & prospects & encourages team-wide adoption. Global sales & marketing headquartered in Boston + offices across EMEA, Australia & Asia. Waltham, Massachusetts, USA but listed on the Australian ASX. Early October 2020, Bigtincan Holdings Limited entered into a binding purchase of Agnitio A/S agnitio.com @agnitiomcm a Danish company that provides a leading solution for remote selling for life sciences customers creating Digital Sales Rooms for customer engagements. Copenhagen, Denmark
Emarsys emarsys.com @emarsys 1-Oct-2020: SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) acquired retail marketing automation & personalisation platform, Emarsys, for an undisclosed sum, a deal designed to build out its customer experience offering. Emarsys provides a cloud-based omnichannel customer engagement platform with functionality for personalising customer interactions across email, mobile, social, SMS & the Web at scale. Austria.
Scrimmage wescrimmage.com @wescrimmage mobile learning platforms & sales enablement software to help reinforce training, improve speed to competency, & enhance sales productivity. Minneapolis, MN, USA based mobile learning company Scrimmage has been acquired by Canadian software company ACTO actoapp.com @acto the companies announced 11-SEP-2020. “Disrupting Education & Enablement For The Life Sciences” / Omni-channel Education ecosystem for education in healthcare & life sciences. ACTO Technologies Inc. Toronto, ON, Canada
The fourth most recent acquisition that I’m aware of was announced 10-Sep-2020:
VERB verb.tech @VerbTech_Co (NASDAQ: VERB) business-focused interactive video Webinar, CRM, marketing, & sales enablement software applications. Verb CRM: Sales Enablement Platform. Send Product Samples from an App. Increase retention & revenue with a custom mobile app. Newport Beach, CA, USA. VERB Technology Company, Inc. the maker of interactive video-based sales enablement applications, including interactive 
livestream eCommerce, webinar, CRM & marketing applications for entrepreneurs & enterprises, completed the acquisition of SoloFire solofire.com (dba for Ascend Certification, LLC), provider of a sales enablement platform for the healthcare industry.
Tellwise tellwise.com engage.zoominfo.com @tellwise Sep-2020, acquired by ZoomInfo (ZoomInfo Technologies Inc NASDAQ: ZI) to join its family of go-to-market solutions, as “Engage” engage.zoominfo.com TellWise (formerly Discuzz) customer communication focused on seller productivity, pipeline insights, & a greater customer experience. All in one integrated solution. Combines phone, text, email, & presentations into a single platform accessible from your CRM. Live activity feed which watches what customers do with your content.
These acquisitions caused my latest updates to my market overview chart (where the first market players aren’t in order of revenue):
My complete overview with 762 line items has dates to sort by latest edits.
The latest addition to my lists is the following vendor, which sounds a bit like a @Qwilr or @Pitch competitor when it comes to Sales Enablement, but allows @Salesforce users to create a website directly from an Account / Opportunity record.
Brandcast brandcast.com @brandcastapp code-free web content system. Create branded websites & content in a connected, design-driven system. Customizable. Engaging. Trackable. Discover the power of interactive sales collateral. Your prospects will love it & you can track their interactions from cold call to closing. Pitch decks, Sales proposals, Case studies, & Web brochures. Replacing static, slow-loading PDFs with interactive content is a new idea. Adding videos, demos, or showrooms to presentations livens up the pitch like nothing else.
Going forward, you may have fewer live meetings where you can develop personal bonds with customers. That makes lively, engaging presentations more important than ever.
Brandcast Salesforce Studio is an integration that allows a Salesforce user to automatically create a personalized website directly from a Salesforce Account or Opportunity record. The personalized website will pull content & data from Salesforce to create a personalized experience. All websites created from Salesforce can be updated in real-time & are automatically equipped with tracking metrics that allow a Salesforce user to see engagement activity directly from Salesforce. San Francisco, CA, USA.
30-Aug-2022: BRANDCAST IS NOW TIME SITES timesites.com We’ve joined iconic media brand TIME to deliver a more expansive platform for storytelling. The global media company TIME announced the acquisition of Brandcast, the leading no-code platform for creating and managing enterprise-grade websites.
The latest addition to my list of AI powered Sales Enablement software is this one:
BirdzAI p360.com @P360_Solutions Optiks Solutions, Inc D\B\A P360 Solutions. Sales solution: 360 degree full-lifecycle suite for sales performance, from data management & lead resolution to data compliance. Updated the sales enablement platform, BirdzAI, with AI that provides insights for sales forecasting, churn prediction, brand propensity analysis, next best action recommendations, & more. By adding artificial intelligence capabilities it helps life sciences companies eliminate the guesswork often associated with sales operations. Piscataway Township, New Jersey, USA. Cockburn Central WA, Australia. Eksar, Borivali, Maharashtra, India
At minute 21 on a ThisWeekInStartups podcast with the founder of Loom mentioned that video views for them were up 10x in the first three weeks of COVID hitting in the US.
Loom loom.com @loom work communication tool that helps you get your message across through instantly shareable video. Say it with video! Get your message across, no matter where you work. Sending a Loom is more efficient than typing long emails or spending your day in meetings having conversations that don’t need to happen in real-time. You talk up to 6x faster than you type. Capture you screen, record their front-facing camera, & narrate video all at once with no switching apps or upload required. Whether it’s training new teammates or replying to a customer inquiry, Loom enhances the way people communicate at work by allowing them to send the next best thing to being there. San Francisco, CA, USA. Legal name Opentest, Inc.
For the question of COVID’s impact on software this @zapier report is also very interesting:
zapier.com/blog/fastest-growing-apps-2020/
Besides giants such as Zoom and HubSpot the other company from that report that I also cover on my blog/lists is…
PandaDoc pandadoc.com @pandadoc a document automation software as a service with built-in electronic signatures, workflow management & document builder. Estimated annual revenue $10M USD. San Francisco, California, United States
B2B Sales Enablement and Sales Tech SaaS 