Hard to keep up with all new Sales Enablement MarTech features using OpenAI ChatGPT and alike

screen-shot-2023-04-19-at-9.35.14-am

This Sales Enablement MarTech list specifically for ChatGPT & alike [Large language models (LLMs) programs for natural language processing (NLP) that use deep learning & neural networks, like GPT-4] has been my fastest-growing ever & has seen daily edits since I started it. My entire list of 782 is here.

Last edit 3-Jun-2023

Accent Technologies accent-technologies.com @accent_tech Now integrating with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI Engine! AI AT YOUR FINGERTIPS: CHATGPT CUSTOMIZED For Your Team. Put the latest AI technology to work with your own ChatGPT knowledgebase that answers detailed questions about your products, services, accounts, opportunities, pipeline—even with detailed recommendations for next steps & improvement. Customized to know your business: All the knowledge & power of ChatGPT plus the knowledge of your business. It knows your company, products, services, competitors, industry… & anything else you need it to know.

Screen Shot 2023-04-14 at 11.36.44 am

Everything You Need to Know About Your Business:

Ask a question about your business, you get the answer. It’s that simple. No implementation needed, minimal if any training for the team, no big rollout. Just an incredibly smart assistant that can help with about anything. Want to Know About Sales? Your Sales Assistant will tell you anything you want to know about your deals. Just ask & get the answer. The Sales Assistant is loaded with all the information from our Synthesis Analytics Engine—purpose-built Sales Engine! Helps You Write Emails & Create Personalized Content Your Chat Assistant is not as smarter as ChatGPT—it’s smarter! It knows you & your buyers; & can help you write on-target emails & create personalized content that directly fit your buyer’s needs.

Ask Details About Your Product & Services

Your Sales Assistant: Know everything you need to know about your products & services—& how they stack up against competitors. It can even help you differentiate & win. Just ask & get the answers you need. FL, USA. Accent Technologies, Inc.


Adobe: Adobe Experience Cloud / Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) / Marketo / ToutApp / Workfront workfront.com @workfront @AdobeWorkfront / Figma / Sensei / AI Art Generator – Adobe Firefly: Adobe’s new Firefly generative tool (generate extraordinary new content)

Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 10.20.33 am


Alphabet Inc.: Google Bard (AI) / Google / Google Cloud Platform (G Suite / Drive / Docs / Sheets / Slides / Keep / Forms / Sites / Currents/Spaces / programmablesearchengine.google.com)

Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 10.23.16 am

GPT for Sheets™ and Docs™ is an AI writer for Google Sheets™ and Google Docs™. It enables you to use ChatGPT directly in Google Sheets™ and Docs™. It is built on top OpenAI ChatGPT, GPT-3 and GPT-4 models. You can use it for all sorts of tasks on text: writing, editing, extracting, cleaning, translating, summarizing, outlining, explaining, etc. If ChatGPT was GPT for Chat, you can think of GPT for Sheets™ as SheetGPT.

Screen Shot 2023-04-26 at 9.53.45 pm

This add-on is completely free to use. You only need to pay OpenAI's API cost. You will need to insert your OpenAI api key. This is unrelated to ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscriptions.
All the details are on the website: https://gptforwork.com

Amazon / AWS / Amazon Bedrock. AI service Amazon Bedrock offers companies tools to build & grow their own artificial intelligence applications designed for their business needs, according to an announcement from Amazon Web Services.

Screen Shot 2023-04-15 at 6.46.07 am

include two Amazon-designed large language models: Titan Text, which is a chatbot similar to ChatGPT that can create text for things like blog posts and emails, and Titan Embeddings, which helps with search personalization.

Bedrock will also include models from startups AI21, Google-backed Anthropic and Stability AI, which turns text into images, Amazon said.

Software firm Pegasystems and enterprise tech company Salesforce, which owns the corporate messaging app Slack, are among the companies looking to use Bedrock


Screen Shot 2023-04-15 at 6.36.19 amAmplemarket AI copywriter amplemarket.com @Amplemarket & ChatGPT. AI Copywriter now powered by GPT-4. Create hyper-personalized cold copy in seconds! A new tool that helps you write impactful & engaging copy in seconds. RELEVANT COPY AT SCALE: High-impact outreach copy at your fingertips. Improve the effectiveness of your sales & cold outreach efforts in-house. Empower your reps to create & send high-impact copy in as little as 20 seconds! A single click is all it takes to generate a hyper-personalized first-touch message or cold email for your chosen prospect according to their LinkedIn profile or activity. Experiment with different iterations: Customize your tone of voice, tailor your copy length, & use the AI Copywriter generate different messages until you find your favorite. Send your AI-optimized message directly to your prospect’s LinkedIn or sync into a new email sequence to scale your outbound with ease! The AI Copywriter gathers all the information you need to take the right approach. Early users of the AI Copywriter have been able to generate messages & send messages to leads 10x faster than manually. Unblock creativity roadblocks & provide you with a hyper-personalized & high-impact copy for your outreach. Salespeople can make sure that their messages stand out & capture the attention of their target audience by leveraging the power of OpenAI’s cutting-edge GPT learning models. At the forefront of Sales Intelligence: Amplemarket’s AI Copywriter is customizable for B2B outreach, enabling sales professionals to make more meaningful connections & close more deals.

Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 10.37.57 am


ASAPP asapp.com @asapp making knowledge workers radically more productive. Powering effective & efficient customer experiences. AI customer service software that helps call center agents work more efficiently. Provides customer care & sales agents with a platform to know the right thing to say & the right action to take, in real-time. Its machine learning models are continuously learning & predicting from every customer interaction, effectively turning every agent into the best agent without the need for manual programming or extensive training. Generative AI for Contact Centers: Multiply agent productivity, operationalize real-time intelligence, & delight every customer. Trained only on your data, for your complex reality. Offices in Silicon Valley, Raleigh, London & Buenos Aires. Manhattan, NY


Atlassian Corporation Plc Australian business software company Atlassian will introduce new artificial intelligence features such as meeting summarization notes & a chatbot trained in delving into a company’s knowledge base. Because companies use its software to track & document projects, Atlassian is in a unique position to use AI to help knowledge workers dramatically increase their productivity. (Confluence Cloud, Trello, etc) atlassian.com/software/confluence @confluence team workspace where collaboration & knowledge meet. Create, collaborate, & organize all your work in one place. Many organizations use Confluence as an intranet & some even as the Sales Enablement portal. Confluence Cloud: Get your files together: With the new Microsoft OneDrive for Business integration, embed Microsoft Word, Excel & PowerPoint files in your Confluence pages so it can always be your single source of truth! By typing “/trello” on a Confluence page, you can embed a complete Trello board for easy access. Work together from anywhere with Confluence Mobile: Stay on top of the latest with your team & move work forward – straight from your device. Screen Shot 2022-01-28 at 10.22.04 amPercept.AI percept.ai (previous name Buddy AI?) AI company from Y Combinator’s summer 2017 batch. Used to offer an automated virtual agent support solution — a chatbot, basically — based on a proprietary AI engine for natural language understanding. Sunnyvale CA, USA. 28-Jan-2022, Atlassian announced it acquired Percept.AI & plans to integrate this virtual agent technology into Jira Service Management, its tool for helping IT teams provide better service to employees & customers. Sydney, NSW, Australia


Screen Shot 2023-04-14 at 8.25.17 pmAviso aviso.com @avisoinc end-to-end AI revenue operating system. Combines generative AI with its Conversational, Deal & Revenue Intelligence Capabilities to power B2B Content Creation: Announced new AI-Assisted, Rep-Triggered Customer Engagement capabilities. Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) & Small Language Models (SLMs), Aviso has added GPT’s functionality to its platform, enabling Generative AI to access insights from recorded meetings, revenue & deal lifecycles and GTM datasets to dynamically generate contextualized prompts & more accurate, personalized email suggestions. Aviso’s AI-Assisted, Rep-Triggered email extends the platform’s sales engagement capabilities while collecting email & interaction data to close the loop & make the system smarter. Seller-buyer interactions have changed dramatically over the past decade. As a direct result, conversational AI & revenue intelligence blossomed to become two of the fastest-growing software categories.

Gartner states that by 2025, 70% of all B2B seller-buyer interactions will be recorded or analyzed to extract insights & that 75% of B2B sales organizations will replace traditional sales playbooks with AI-based guided coaching.

Competes with EverString, Lattice Engines, & Leadspace. Redwood City, CA, USA. Aviso India, Hyderabad, India

Screen Shot 2023-04-14 at 8.20.19 pm


Canva canva.com Canva Launches ‘Magic’ AI Tools for its Design Software. Record & download “talking presentations”. Edit video: Canva Video suite. ‘Docs to Decks’. Canva Visual Worksuite


Screen Shot 2023-05-01 at 9.29.02 pmColibri Colibri.ai @colibri_ai helping sales teams reach their full potential with generative AI & real-time conversation intelligence. A range of sales enablement tools that utilize generative AI – LLM Large Language Models adapted specifically for the enterprise market. Colibri’s real-time speech recognition & conversation intelligence platform lets organizations capture, analyze, & extract valuable data from all types of conversations: phone calls & video meetings, internal & external. Machine learning & Generative AI for transcribing calls in real-time, automatically generating meeting summaries, tracking usage of specific words & phrases, & analyzing key call metrics such as talk ratio & sentiment. Also provides just-in-time assistance & coaching to sales & customer service representatives during a meeting. Colibri for Sales helps sales teams reach their full potential by providing new & better ways to take meeting notes, update CRM, analyze team performance, & continuously coach sales reps. Colibri AI Notetaker for individuals & businesses of all sizes. The app records online meetings, transcribes them in real-time, & generates concise searchable meeting notes that can be easily shared with teammates. Palo Alto, California, USA. Alterra.ai, Inc. (d.b.a. Colibri.ai)


Screen Shot 2021-10-16 at 8.43.57 pmCoveo coveo.com @coveo combines “unified search”, analytics & Machine Learning (ML) to deliver relevant information & recommendations across every business interaction. Transforms businesses by improving customer engagement & up-skilling employees by providing the best information, every time, everywhere. AI-powered Search for every Salesforce community & app. Immediate access to all the content, wherever it resides. Québec, Canada. 15-Oct-2021: Coveo, a Relevance Platform & applied AI company that transforms digital experiences with AI-powered search, recommendations, & personalization, announced the acquisition of Qubit qubit.com @Qubit AI-powered personalization technology for merchandising teams, based in London, UK, further accelerating Coveo’s geographic expansion into the UK & European markets. New Relevance Generative Answering capability, powered by the Coveo AI platform & LLMs, solves the key challenges of applying GPT within the enterprise. MONTREAL & SAN FRANCISCO – 16-Mar-2023, Coveo (TSX:CVO), an AI platform that makes every digital experience relevant, 1:1 personalized & profitable, announced Coveo Relevance Generative Answering. This new Generative AI question answering capability combines Large Language Models (LLMs) on top of the leading secure unified indexing capabilities of Coveo’s AI platform. This makes generative answering using LLMs applicable within enterprises, where security, privacy, real-time sources of truth, relevance & factuality are all key imperatives.

Screen Shot 2023-05-02 at 9.50.03 am


Screen Shot 2023-04-19 at 9.44.46 amCustomer intelligence platform @Dialpad plans to launch generative AI features in the coming months. According to Diapad, the series of generative AI enhancements would transform how companies communicate, collaborate, & sell: Ai Recap to summarize meetings, Ai Scorecards to improve agents’ day-to-day performance, improvements to Coaching Hub, & Ai Playbooks to provide real-time guidance & tracking against predetermined sales processes. Dialpad says its AI capabilities helped its contact center customers with an 18% cost reduction, a 14% increase in customer satisfaction score, & a 35% agent performance improvement. DIALPAD, INC. San Francisco, CA, USA

Screen Shot 2023-04-19 at 9.48.21 am


Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 8.17.58 pmeggheads eggheads.ai @eggheads_ai conversational microlearning (micro-learning) eLearning: Do your employees always know the latest news from your company? Are their skills up-to-date? In these times many businesses struggle to keep employees current & updated. Make it easy & fun for your team to soak up new business knowledge with chat-based learning nuggets. Let your internal news & trainings feel like WhatsApp. Provide an experience like Duolingo with your content. Create short, mobile & interactive chat conversations to train employees & keep them updated. Increase sales by ensuring your sales reps know the latest value propositions & ways to win new customers. Get new ideas for your trainings, internal communications & more. Eggheads GmbH / eggheads AG. Pfäffikon, Switzerland


Screen Shot 2023-01-27 at 12.00.21 pmGTM Buddy gtmbuddy.ai @GTMBuddy Founded 2020. GTM Buddy is a Hyderabad, Telangana-based tech startup. Sellers simply can’t know everything, but with a little boost from GTM Buddy’s contextual AI, they don’t need to. Stop Searching! Start Selling! Say goodbye to sales enablement tools that make you search for content. And say hello to GTM Buddy, the only platform that delivers valuable content without context switching or manual searching. According to GTM Buddy, its AI features ease the task of generating follow-up emails after a sales presentation. Moreover, Ask Buddy is capable of addressing concerns that a potential customer may raise about a product during the buying process. GTM Buddy says that the tool generates emails by analyzing the key details of each deal. Additionally, the underlying language models consult a company’s internal sales materials. Ask Buddy also uses the data it analyzes for other tasks. The tool can analyze an ongoing sales negotiation & recommend the optimal next step. The tool could point out the specific brochure that a salesperson should share with a prospect to increase the chance of a purchase. Ask Buddy can likewise recommend relevant case studies. Furthermore, it’s capable of generating marketing content for situations where a potential buyer is also evaluating a product from a competitor. Another set of new features included is geared towards sales enablement teams to help make their company’s internal sales content more easily accessible for employees. Funding Round 14-Sep-2021, GTM Buddy raised $2M Seed. GTM Buddy, Inc. Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India

Screen Shot 2023-06-01 at 6.58.26 pm


Screen Shot 2023-01-08 at 9.47.06 amHighspot highspot.com As part of their Spring ‘23 Release, they’ll be unveiling innovations & functionality that harness the power of generative AI to drive sales productivity. “Highspot Discover” happens 1-Jun-2023. Acquired Nova AI on 21-Sep-2022. @Highspot acquired Nova AI nova.ai @novadotai for an undisclosed amount. Nova puts the power of AI to work for you, enabling a more continuous & more productive sales process. Nova helps sellers focus their time where it will have the greatest impact, by identifying next best actions across the entire pipeline. No more dropped balls, no funnel leakage. Nova Labs, Inc., San Francisco, California, United States. Also known as Nova Labs, Nova, Nova AI.


Hubspot chatspot.ai ChatSpot combines the power of ChatGPT & HubSpot CRM. It lets you ask questions & provide instructions in natural language through a chat interface. ChatSpot is a conversational CRM bot that sales, marketing, & service professionals can connect to HubSpot to maximize their productivity. With chat-based commands, you can accomplish everything you already do in HubSpot — even faster. Need to create a new contact on the fly? Skip manual data entry & let ChatSpot do it for you. Ask ChatSpot to send follow-up emails, pull reports, create new segments, & more. Use ChatSpot with HubSpot to supercharge your productivity. hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence

Also, on the Hubspot ecosystem / App Marketplace > Sales > Sales enablement > ChatGPT powered by OBO: Unleash the power of ChatGPT within HubSpot

Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 10.36.05 am


Screenshot 2023-03-27 at 12.37.24 pmintercom.com AI chatbot Fin: Built an AI-powered customer service bot that has the benefits of this new technology, & is suitable for business needs. Converse naturally, using GPT technology. Answer questions about your business, using information you control. Reduce hallucinations and inaccurate responses to acceptable levels. Require minimal configuration & setup. Fin is AI, fine-tuned for support. A natural language bot that can hold complete support conversations with your customers in plain English (& more languages soon!). Fin can understand complex queries, ask clarifying questions, & explain complicated subjects clearly. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 & Intercom’s proprietary machine learning.

Screen Shot 2023-04-15 at 6.38.32 am


Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 10.46.50 amSQN Investors hold 13.6% of the AI-powered software provider @Bigtincan: Bigtincan bigtincan.com [Contondo, FatStax, Zunos, Veelo (mobilepaks), Asdeq Labs, XINN, Agnitio, Clearslide (SlideRocket), VoiceVibes, Vidinoti, Brainshark, StorySlab storyslab.com, Task Exchange taskexchange.net, SalesDirector salesdirector.ai @SalesDirectorAI].

Launched GenieAI artificial intelligence technology that enables sales, partners, customer-facing teams & all employees to increase their productivity, improving how humans work & how they sell. The new features are driven by the latest technology known as large language model tools (LLM). Bigtincan customers can take advantage of copywriting, content summarization, Q&A-style search, & a virtual personal assistant to help all users to increase both efficiency & effectiveness using a new approach to learning & content creation. These capabilities are important new underpinnings of Bigtincan’s vision of creating the buying experience of the future. GenieAI offers sales professionals the ability to quickly digest material & gain insights into the content’s meaning. It is also capable of generating email templates that sales professionals can customize & send to their buyers. Built using the latest LLMs, including OpenAPI’s ChatGPT. “Genie AI” will be available across all Bigtincan Hubs, automatically synthesizing information & content into something digestible, incl. auto-generated abstracts & automatically written emails to be used when sharing content. The GenieAI output can be further personalized by user-provided prompts. Users can also ask general questions with “Ask Genie” & answers provided are inclusive of the customer’s scanned content. GenieAI artificial intelligence technology that enables sales, partners, customer-facing teams & all employees to dramatically increase their productivity, improving how humans work & how they sell. The new features are driven by the latest technology known as large language model tools (LLM). Bigtincan users can take advantage of copywriting, content summarization, Q&A-style search, & a virtual personal assistant to help all users to increase both efficiency & effectiveness using a new approach to learning & content creation.


Screen Shot 2023-04-14 at 8.32.17 pmFireflies.ai fireflies.ai @firefliesai Automatically transcribe, summarize, search & analyze your voice conversations. AskFred – ChatGPT for meetings. Introducing AI Super summaries! AI Voice Assistant for Meetings. Record, Transcribe & Search across your voice conversations. Your AI assistant notetaker. Automatically record, search, & collaborate across your meetings. Fireflies for Sales: Sales Reps, Customer Success, Customer Support, Marketing, Sales Leaders. Automate CRM data entry. Clone top performers. Onboard new reps faster. Collect customer feedback & requests. Nail the messaging for marketing. Ensure quality assurance & compliance. San Francisco, CA, USA. Fireflies.ai Corp.

Screen Shot 2023-04-07 at 10.12.14 am


Screen Shot 2023-03-31 at 2.23.52 pm

designer.microsoft.com

Screen Shot 2023-03-31 at 2.22.51 pm

Microsoft: New Bing search / Microsoft Designer / Microsoft Office / Teams / SharePoint / Dynamics / Azure / Delve / Xbox / Mesh / Loop / Yammer / Skype / LinkedIn (PointDrive) LinkedIn Learning / Viva Sales seller’s companion to CRM working in productivity apps like Outlook & Teams w. integrations to Dynamics 365 Sales & Salesforce CRM / investment in OpenAI openai.com Microsoft adds OpenAI technology to Word & Excel. Microsoft said the new A.I. features, called Copilot, will be available in Microsoft’s most popular business apps like Word, PowerPoint, & Excel. Microsoft debuted a new version of its Bing search engine that included a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language technology.

Microsoft Loop is their Notion competitor, launched 22-Mar-2023

Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 3.17.41 pm


Notion notion.so @NotionHQ all-in-one workspace – for notes, tasks, wikis, & databases. Note-taking & collaboration application for your notes, tasks, wikis, & databases. $11M in estimated revenue annually. Competes with Quip, Airtable, & Simplenote. San Francisco, CA, USA. Notion said 8-Sep-2021 it acquired Automate.io, an Indian startup that builds connectivity & integrations with 200+ services, as the workplace productivity startup looks to accelerate its product expansion to become more compelling for tens of millions of individuals & businesses that are increasingly moving to digital collaborative tools. The San Francisco-headquartered startup, last valued at $2Bn in private markets, said the acquisition of the Hyderabad-headquartered Automate will help Notion understand the know-how of — & leverage — the 200 integrations the Indian startup has developed to give users and enterprises alike the ability to bring their workflows into Notion. Notion AI was launched on 23-Feb-2023

Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 3.34.16 pm


Screen Shot 2023-03-25 at 9.22.53 pmOne AI oneai.com @OneAILabs APIs that make your app understand language. Summarize conversations, categorize articles, & more. One AI’s solution empowers CRM companies & their customers to add capabilities seamlessly & quickly like topics & action items extraction, follow-up reminders, summarizing conversations, & detecting customer sentiment & emotion, enhancing both the operational & analytical aspects. One AI Inc., Tel Aviv, IL


OpenAI openai.com ChatGPT plugins such as Slack, Zapier, etc. Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, & help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services.


Screen Shot 2023-01-25 at 3.08.56 pmPod workwithpod.com @PodWorkspace Launching Pod AI copilot in 2023. AI copilot: Close More Deals. Faster. Account executives shouldn’t waste their time on admin work. Manage your pipeline crazy easily with a GPT-powered workspace built for B2B sellers. Supercharge your enterprise sales team with Pod’s intelligent hub. Less time wasted on guessing, more on doing. The Smart Workspace for Sales Teams. Remove the noise. Close more deals. You shouldn’t waste time digging through all your sales tools. Focus on what matters & hit your quota every month with the only all-in-one productivity workspace, built for you. Pod is the all-in-one workspace for B2B sales teams. Work 10x faster every day. Seamlessly collaborate on deals, quickly update your CRM, and intuitively track your task, notes, & more. Chrome Extension: You probably jump between 15 different tools daily, wasting time updating your Salesforce or looking for information your need. You shouldn’t have to work in Excel, OneNote, or Trello. It’s time for a productivity tool built for sellers. Productivity workspace for account executives. It’s your new command center. Pod Technologies, Inc. San Francisco, CA, USA

Screen Shot 2023-04-07 at 7.31.59 am


Screen Shot 2023-05-08 at 5.24.29 pmPragma Pragma.ai @PragmaAI harnessing knowledge for exceptional sales & support. Your company’s knowledge, accessible from anywhere: Access your organization’s knowledge sources, find information in Slack, instantly & right when you need it. Pragma reveals, & structures needed organizational knowledge otherwise hidden or scattered across multiple platforms & provides easy access to it, whenever you really need it. Immediate access from anywhere. Chrome Extension: Access information faster & right when you need it. Make the most of your sales content! Now you can easily access the information you need & generate customized emails quickly. Get instant answers: Effortlessly ask questions & receive answers from your own data sources, enabling you to quickly & accurately respond to customer inquiries & improve productivity. Available in Slack: Slack Bot saves you time & effort by instantly surfacing answers directly within Slack. Pragmatica Ltd. Tel Aviv, Israel. Also Known As Pragmatica LTD, Pragma.ai, Pragmatica Inc


Screen Shot 2022-09-30 at 5.00.11 pmRegie AI regie.ai @regieai AI Content Platform for Modern GTM (Go to Market) Teams. All-in-one content creation & management system. All your content. In one place. Create. Integrate. Analyze. Optimize. Store. Share. Blogs, Social Posts & more. Content creation is slow, manual & expensive. Use Regie to write original, SEO-optimized content in 80% less time with the only AI copywriter designed for marketers & sellers. Sales Sequences: The days of manually writing sequences are over. GTM teams can easily create custom sales sequences in minutes using AI & best practices. That’s sequence writing made simple. Content Management System (CMS): Resources you need, at the moment you need them. Use the content you already know to maximize impact & execute consistently throughout your revenue team. “No need for expensive software like Seismic, Showpad or Highspot”. Generate original, optimized-for-search-engines content or create custom sales sequences. The platform also offers blog- & social-media-post-authoring tools for personalizing messages, & Chrome extension that analyzes the quality of emails & optionally rewrites the text. A way for companies to communicate with their customers via channels like email, social media, text, podcasts, online advertising & more. Because companies have so many platforms & mediums at their disposal to speak with customers, it can be a challenge for content marketers to produce continuously compelling content to reach their customers. The way content is getting generated has fundamentally changed. Marketers & copywriters working in the enterprise increasingly need to produce &d manage content & content workflows at scale. Uses GPT-3 to power its service. Custom language systems built by Regie reflect brands & their messaging, designed to be integrated with existing sale platforms like Outreach, HubSpot, & Salesloft. Competes with Jasper, Phrasee, Copysmith & Copy.ai — all of which tap AI to generate bespoke marketing copy. Regie caters to go-to-market teams in the enterprise while combining text, images & workflows.


Screen Shot 2021-07-21 at 6.33.02 pmReply Reply.io @ReplyAppTeam a sales engagement platform which automates email search, LinkedIn outreach, personal emails, SMS & WhatsApp messages, calls, & tasks. Supercharge your sales team with Reply – a sales engagement platform that helps you automate & scale multichannel outreach, so you can generate more leads, acquire new customers & grow revenue faster. Scale your multichannel outreach faster. Engage across multiple channels: Combine emails, calls, LinkedIn, SMS & WhatsApp messages into a multichannel sequence, generate & complete tasks to reach your prospects wherever they are. Sell better with the power of AI: Improve your emails with AI-backed text quality scoring & keep an eye on your ‘Interested’ folder for the hottest leads sorted out by an intelligent algorithm. Drive your revenue growth with AI: Reply is your AI-powered sales engagement platform to create new opportunities at scale – automatically. We’ve built AI ChatGPT capabilities into our core platform to power up your sales engagement efforts, from email writing & sequence setup to replies handling & booking calls. With the direct API ChatGPT integration, Reply allows for seamless use of all of the available capabilities of this model. It is reliable & easy to use without switching between the apps. Reply acts like AI-powered SDR, handling every aspect of the process to free up your time & improve your outcomes. Also known as Reply App. Reply App Inc., Toronto, ON, Canada

Screen Shot 2023-05-02 at 8.51.15 pm


Screen Shot 2023-04-24 at 4.41.07 pmSalesforce working on a generative AI-driven workflow system. The Salesforce system brings together different domains, such as Data Cloud, Einstein GPT, & Flow. One of the new tools that Salesforce is working on is “Einstein GPT” for Flow, which combines generative AI textual interaction to create a workflow. “Data Cloud for Flow” is another tool that uses data-driven event triggers to drive actions in Flow. Salesforce SFDC: Salesforce CRM / CMS / Sites / Content / Chatter / Quip / Einstein / AppExchange / Trailhead / Slack ChatGPT plugins / Slack / LevelJump formerly Lurniture / Salesforce Genie / Genie for Tableau / MuleSoft / Slack Genie / Einstein AI & Flow automation. ChatGPT App for Slack: combines knowledge found in Slack with the intelligence of ChatGPT, empowering customers with the information they need to move work forward faster.


Screen Shot 2023-05-26 at 10.51.51 amScreenApp screenapp.ai unlock the power of corporate video content. Unify your videos in one comprehensive knowledge workspace. Get answers from your videos. Fast & efficient way to capture your screen & extract insights. Record your screen, transcribe it & transform your content into valuable knowledge. Say goodbye to note-taking. Need to record, store & extract knowledge from high-value videos? By using AI to extract insights & present them in a user-friendly format, ScreenApp can help users access the information they need without having to manually watch through all of their videos. Import all your videos into the platform & ask questions in natural language, just like talking to a person who had watched all of the videos. The AI-powered system provides relevant answers to the user’s queries, making it easy to find the information they need. Sydney, New South Wales, Australia


Spinify spinify.com @SpinifyApp Sales Gamification Software used by both Small Business & Enterprises to motivate & drive sales teams. Leveraging Spinify’s Sales Leaderboard & Sales Screens, results in growth, an increase in sales, KPIs exceeded, high levels of employee motivation, & customer satisfaction. Empowers sales management & sales leaders with a secret weapon that integrates with all major platforms such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Google Sheets, Excel, Slack, SQL, Zapier & more. HELP SALES TEAMS CRUSH THEIR TARGETS: Motivate & drive your sales team with the gamification software. Gamified competitions: Competitions are easy to set up & maintain. Drive engagement with fun competitions that boost performance. Collaborate & compete: Work together on team-based goals & measure progress in real-time. Giving real visibility of the task. Coaching tools: Understand teams strengths & weaknesses to create smarter KPIs. Integrate your data: Automation competitions with taking data from almost anywhere. Canada, Toronto. 20-Apr-2023: Sales gamification platform Spinify launched Sidekick, a GPT-enhanced sales gamification & employee engagement platform. The Toronto-based company claims a 27% increase in gamification competitions created since the launch. Sidekick leverages GPT-4, providing sales managers with smarter goals, better insights, & a more personalized experience. It provides customers with 33 recommendations per day to easily design gamification competitions & free up time to focus on other essential tasks. To ensure sales teams are motivated & informed, Sidekick provides customized metrics with real, engaging, & visible data that can be shared on desktops, TVs, Microsoft Teams, etc.


Screen Shot 2021-03-25 at 8.56.04 pmUpland Software uplandsoftware.com @UplandSoftware (cloud-based enterprise work management software) announced 17-Nov-2017 it acquired Qvidian Corporation (provider of cloud-based RFP & Sales Proposal automation software) Sant & Kadient had merged into Qvidian qvidian.com. 10-Jan-2022, Upland Software @UplandSoftware announced it acquired Objectif Lune Inc. objectiflune.com @objlune enterprise software for document composition & business communication automation. Screen Shot 2022-03-24 at 9.13.44 am24-Feb-2022, acquired Boston-based search company BAInsight / BA Insight / BA-Insight Inc. bainsight.com @BAinsight for $33.4M in cash.

With Upland’s new AI Knowledge Assistant, which utilizes OpenAI’s ChatGPT API, knowledge workers can streamline the creation of knowledge by simply requesting content related to their topic at hand & receiving a real-time response with full article content, summarization, & identification of key words. BA Insight was recognized by KMWorld’s 2023 list of 100 companies that matter in knowledge management.


Screen Shot 2023-05-01 at 9.47.35 pm

Leverage all your internal knowledge

More than a search tool. Workbounce AI aggregates information across multiple sources of internal knowledge—before generating the most accurate and informed response.

Workbounce workbounce.com @GetWorkbounce sales teams, meet your co-pilot! Looking for information, chasing prospects, & doing admin work is slowing your deals down. Try a better way. Close those browser tabs! We integrate with your most used platforms (Salesforce coming soon). Every team struggles with knowledge silos! Knowledge shouldn’t have to be hard-won & reps shouldn’t have to lose business to get better. Content & answers could be anywhere… Loom, Gong, Marketo, DocuSign, Dropbox, GDrive, Slack—answers live everywhere, incl. inside people’s heads. So much valuable information is available but hidden—unless you know exactly what to look for & where to find it, or exactly who to ask. To solve this, you bring in a content management system as a single source of truth which inevitably becomes an outdated silo & creates a maintenance burden. Workbounce is designed to be an insightful co-pilot for all customer-facing teams. We connect the siloed tools you use every day—like Google Drive, Notion, & Slack—with a layer of intelligent search & analytics. Spend less time digging through multiple platforms looking for answers, & more time building deal-winning relationships with your customers. Workbounce Ltd, Covent Garden, London, UK


Vidyard @vidyard create, host, & share videos so you can keep connecting with customers & colleagues when everything else feels remote. Vidyard AI Script Generator vidyard.com/ai-script-generator/ Using Vidyard Video Messages in your sales cycle helps get more responses & close more deals…but knowing exactly what to say in a video can be tricky. Let Vidyard’s AI Script Generator write your sales video scripts for you! Just enter a prompt describing the topics you want to cover, & our new OpenAI-powered feature will automatically populate your speaker notes inside Vidyard’s video creation tool. Not quite happy with your script? Adjust your prompt to get a whole new one for your sales video. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Screenshot 2023-04-06 at 12.10.42 pm

Sales Enablement MarTech tools using ChatGPT and alike

AI for selling b2b: Tools that help B2B sales teams include CRMs & sales chatbots. CRMs like Hubspot & Salesforce use AI-powered analytics & ML (machine learning) to help understand customer behaviour, predict sales trends, track customer engagement & manage sales data etc… Sales chatbots, like Hubspot Chatbot Builder & chatspot.ai, Salesforce Einstein, & Drift, can help B2B sales teams qualify leads, book meetings, & close deals.

In January 2018, I started a list of Sales Enablement tools powered by AI/ML, but here is the early start of a list specifically for ChatGPT and alike [Large language models (LLMs) are computer programs for natural language processing (NLP) that use deep learning and neural networks, like GPT-4].

Last edit 3-Jun-2023

Accent Technologies accent-technologies.com @accent_tech Now integrating with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI Engine! AI AT YOUR FINGERTIPS: CHATGPT CUSTOMIZED For Your Team. Put the latest AI technology to work with your own ChatGPT knowledgebase that answers detailed questions about your products, services, accounts, opportunities, pipeline—even with detailed recommendations for next steps & improvement. Customized to know your business: All the knowledge & power of ChatGPT plus the knowledge of your business. It knows your company, products, services, competitors, industry… & anything else you need it to know.

Screen Shot 2023-04-14 at 11.36.44 am

Everything You Need to Know About Your Business:

Ask a question about your business, you get the answer. It’s that simple. No implementation needed, minimal if any training for the team, no big rollout. Just an incredibly smart assistant that can help with about anything. Want to Know About Sales? Your Sales Assistant will tell you anything you want to know about your deals. Just ask & get the answer. The Sales Assistant is loaded with all the information from our Synthesis Analytics Engine—purpose-built Sales Engine! Helps You Write Emails and Create Personalized Content Your Chat Assistant is not as smarter as ChatGPT—it’s smarter! It knows you & your buyers; & can help you write on-target emails & create personalized content that directly fit your buyer’s needs.

Ask Details About Your Product & Services

Your Sales Assistant: Know everything you need to know about your products & services—& how they stack up against competitors. It can even help you differentiate & win. Just ask & get the answers you need. FL, USA. Accent Technologies, Inc.

Continue reading “Sales Enablement MarTech tools using ChatGPT and alike”

Sales Enablement MarTech market dynamics you missed in 2022

For 2023, I’m thinking about adding the following to my list of qualifying questions for shortlisting Sales Enablement SaaS vendors:

  • Large number of bolt-on acquisitions or clean codebase of features built with a single product vision?
  • Organic growth as a vendor as opposed to many acquisitions of failed competitors? (Less likely to go out of business in 2023 as vendors without growth.)

New on my list of Israel-based Sales Enablement / B2B Sales Engagement MarTech companies:

Screen Shot 2022-12-23 at 9.49.43 amsubstrata substrata.me @SubstrataHQ Social Signal Processing Technology (SSP) to fuel the b2b world. Leverages SSP technology to assess the dynamics that occur in negotiations & dealmaking and provide actionable insights. Performs in-depth analysis of non-verbal social cues incl. body language & voice, covering deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), social science, psychology, linguistics, & cognitive science: Outperforming Transcript-Dependent Conversation Intelligence Models! Fill the void of transcript-dependent conversation intelligence models. Reads between the lines. Often, the most critical information necessary to close a deal is left unsaid. Due to past one-dimensional practices, sales teams are bound to conduct tedious follow-ups, ask further questions, get down to the nitty-gritty details, & analyze manually collected data to perform appropriate solutions. This is time-consuming, counterproductive, & often yields poor outputs. With substrata’s capacity to combine computer science, social science, & behavioral psychology, it digs deep & deciphers human nonverbal communication tendencies. Tel Aviv, Israel

Screen Shot 2022-12-16 at 3.28.12 pmSweep sweep.io @sweep_io fast way to build a CRM. No-code editor to manage GTM (go to market) motions on SFDC salesforce.com. Customize & scale any Salesforce configuration, without the dev time. CRM should be a source of efficiency, not frustration. Sweep helps you design the CRM that revenue teams really need. No more workarounds or compromises; build a responsive RevOps system to match the speed of your business. Push your CRM process to Salesforce; it automatically configures with just one click. Templates enable you to quickly add best-practice CRM funnels to your system. They’re simple to customize to your needs. Or, if you know exactly what you want, easily build funnels yourself. Sweep turns Salesforce configurations into real-time visuals of your business process. Pipeline information becomes more accessible & more intuitive. Sweep.io Ltd. Tel Aviv, New York, Madrid & Lisbon


[Edit] 28-Dec-2022, Bigtincan bigtincan.com acquires Sales Director salesdirector.ai @SalesDirectorAI Revenue Intelligence and Data Platform for B2B Sales Irvine, CA, USA. Acquisition consideration of US$1.2m with US$800k cash component funded from cash reserves raised through the institutional placement conducted in December 2022. SalesDirector.ai revenue in FY23 is not expected to be material.


Screen Shot 2022-12-19 at 9.03.26 amWorkRamp workramp.com @workramp Enablement Cloud: Bridge the gap between strategy & execution. Onboard, train & develop employees. Training software built for sales & support teams. From driving revenue to increasing customer satisfaction, WorkRamp provides training software to help you build teams. Sales: Decrease ramp time & get your sales reps closing deals faster. Customer Success: Enable your success team to provide the best customer experience. PARTNERS: Empower your partners to better understand & sell your product. $1M in estimated revenue annually & competes with Mindflash, BambooHR, & Easygenerator. San Francisco, CA, USA. 18-May-2022, WorkRamp acquired The Enablement Squad for an undisclosed amount.


Screen Shot 2022-12-17 at 5.17.25 pmConnectLeader connectleader.com @ConnectLeader 20-Apr-2021, ConnectLeader Rebrands to Koncert koncert.com @koncert_com Koncert’s Sales Engagement Platform delivers revenue & increases B2B sales productivity by up to 800%. Intelligent Sales Engagement Platform / Sales Acceleration Platform: Revenue growth & sales productivity. $20.3M in estimated revenue annually & competes with Outreach, Nexsales Corp., & aMarketForce. Salem, NH, USA


Screen Shot 2022-12-22 at 2.26.23 pmExecVision ExecVision.io @ExecVision_io conversation intelligence software built for coaching. Washington, DC, USA. 27-Apr-2022, Mediafly @Mediafly acquired ExecVision. Mediafly, a sales enablement & revenue intelligence platform provider, has acquired ExecVision, a conversation intelligence (CI) provider. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

 

Private Equity ($43M) from Invictus Growth Partners Invictus Growth Management LLC (26-Jul-2022): Allbound allbound.com @allbound
EQT (EQT Partners AB): Sitecore sitecore.com (Boxever, STYLELABS, Moosend)
FLEX Capital acquired a majority stake in ComX ComX.io “ComX.io AI for Sales”
Adobe: Adobe Experience Cloud / AEM / Marketo / ToutApp / Workfront workfront.com @workfront @AdobeWorkfront / Figma / Adobe Firefly
Cincom Systems cincom.com TeamSync CPQ Sync
Canva canva.com record & download “talking presentations”. Edit video: Canva Video suite. ‘Docs to Decks’. Canva Visual Worksuite
Dura Software (Revegy)
SAP (Callidus, iCentera, Litmos LMS, Emarsys, Signavio) CRM, CPQ, CLM
Alphabet Inc.: Google / Google Cloud Platform (G Suite / Drive / Docs / Sheets / Slides / Keep / Forms / Sites / programmablesearchengine.google.com)
Meta (Metaverse, Oculus / Reality Labs / Project Cambria / Meta Quest Pro! / Workplace by Facebook, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, etc)
Sprinklr Inc. also known as Demand Media, Inc. Sprinklr Modern Marketing; CMS
Asana for Marketing, Asana Operations & Asana for Sales & Account Management
Permira permira.com: Nu:Pitch became Seismic: Seismic (SAVO / SAVO Group, KnowledgeTree, Zensight, Percolate, Grapevine6, Lessonly [Obie acquired by Lessonly 29-Jul-2021])
LegalZoom.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: LZ) [Revv revv.so @Revv_so previously known as RevvSales]
ZoomInfo Technologies (Predecessor DiscoverOrg) TellWise, Clickagy AI, Komiko, Chorus.ai, EverString everstring.com @EverString
ServiceNow, Inc. (Attivio, Loom Systems, Passage AI, Sweagle, Montrêal-based Element AI)
Dropbox building a metaverse. Dropbox Paper, Dropbox for Business (HelloSign, DocSend docsend.com)
Salesforce CRM CMS / Sites / Content / Chatter / Quip / Einstein / AppExchange / Trailhead / Slack / LevelJump formerly Lurniture / Salesforce Genie / Genie for Tableau / MuleSoft / Slack Genie / Einstein AI & Flow automation
Microsoft: Microsoft Designer / Microsoft Office / Teams / SharePoint / Dynamics / Azure / Delve / Xbox / Mesh / Loop / Yammer / Skype / LinkedIn (PointDrive) LinkedIn Learning / Viva Sales seller’s companion to CRM working in productivity apps like Outlook & Teams w. integrations to Dynamics 365 Sales & Salesforce CRM
Atlassian Corporation Plc: Confluence Cloud, Trello, etc (doctape.com tape.io @doctapers / Percept.AI former Buddy AI)
NICE nice.com @NICELtd NICE Ltd / NICE Systems Ltd. (ContentEngine / MindTouch @MindTouch)
Axway axway.com (Atos [Unify unify.com Circuit by Unify will be sunset Dec-2022] bluekiwi.io bluekiwi-software.com acquired by Atos)
Private Equity Firm HGGC, LLC invested in Upland uplandsoftware.com: Altify, Kapost, RO|innovation, Qvidian (Sant & Kadient), BlueVenn, Objectif Lune Inc. objectiflune.com, BA-Insight Inc. bainsight.com
Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. [Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. (EdCast)]
Zoom zoom.us @Zoom acquisition of Solvvy solvvy.com @solvvyinc to strengthen conversational AI capabilities & launched Zoom IQ for sales
Ziff Davis, Inc was J2 Global, Inc (Landslide Technologies Inc / CampaignerCRM / Campaigner campaigner.com @CampaignerEmail)
ESW Capital Group: Aurea, Inc. (Jive Software / XANT, Inc. XANT.ai [now once again insidesales.com] PLAYBOOKS)
Insight Partners: Optimizely rebranded Episerver Inc [Insite Software acquired Storyworks Ondemand/Storyworks1 optimizely.com acquired Insite])
TA Associates: Revalize revalizesoftware.com @revalize acquired Sofon Solutions sofon.com @SofonSoftware @SofonDE Sofon Guided Solutions
Thoma Bravo private equity firm: Bridge @GetBridge getbridge.com by instructure.com @Instructure / Conga conga.com (Octiv [formerly TinderBox]) acquired by Apttus apttus.com
Vista Equity Partners: ACQUIA INC acquia.com (Widen Enterprises, Inc. widen.com), SalesLoft (Costello, Noteninja), Drift drift.com (@GiantOtterTech AI), Pipedrive pipedrive.com (Mailigen) Sales Docs, Khoros (Lithium Technologies, LLC / Lithium Technologies [Jive Software])
TPG private investment firm: Nintex (Drawloop Technologies / K2)
opentext.com acquired Documentum / Dell EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. The product originally called Livelink became an OpenText flagship product
Showpad (LearnCore, LIA, Voicefox, Hickup, Taptera)
Oracle CPQ Cloud former BigMachines Inc + InQuira / Oracle Netsuite configure, price, & quote (CPQ) = Netsuite CPQ for sales teams
Dialpad dialpad.com @Dialpad acquired TalkIQ @Talk_iq
Gong.io (Vayo, ONDiGO)
6sense.com @6senseInc 6sense Insights, Inc. acquired Slintel slintel.com @Slintel_Inc as well as Granite Media, Saleswhale, Fortella, ZenIQ.io
Demand Science: PureB2B, Klarity, Internal Results, Leadiro [B2B sales enablement, sales intelligence & data enrichment platform], Tidings, BIOMES, airborne app airborneapp.io
Coveo coveo.com (Qubit. qubit.com)
Sumeru Equity Partners: Former SocialChorus socialchorus.com SocialChorus & Dynamic Signal combined to create Firstup firstup.io @Firstup_io
mediafly (Alinean / iPresent / Presentify presentify.co.uk / InsightSquared [acquired Olono Olono.ai] / Aptology aptology.com @APTOLOGY1 / ExecVision ExecVision.io)
SQN Investors hold 13.6% of the AI-powered software provider @Bigtincan: Bigtincan bigtincan.com [Contondo, FatStax, Zunos, Veelo (mobilepaks), Asdeq Labs, XINN, Agnitio, Clearslide (SlideRocket), VoiceVibes, Vidinoti, Brainshark, StorySlab storyslab.com, Task Exchange taskexchange.net, SalesDirector salesdirector.ai @SalesDirectorAI], not buying LiveTiles Ltd livetilesglobal.com @LiveTiles]

sales_enablement_martech_market_2024

How to create & deliver a presentation that wins the sale

Photo by the author Paul Krajewski

Communispond, along with their CEO Bill Rosenthal, have an interesting point of view on how to create a winning sales presentation. (Communispond provides communications skills training for interpersonal communications, management and sales.)

1. Put away your trusty old dog and-pony show and start learning everything you can about the prospects critical needs. […]

2. Create a unique solution to the customer’s critical needs. […]

3. Build the team, and organize the presentation. […]

4. Sharpen your team’s presentation skills. […]

5. Start selling before you begin.
Get to the presentation room early. Stand at the door and greet the audience members as they enter. Introduce your co-presenters and get into a dialogue with the prospect’s people. Make a mental note of some personal information, and cite this in your presentation.

6. Watch for booby traps in the Q&A.
Prepare for the Q&A in advance by anticipating the questions you’ll be asked, particularly the tough ones. Be sure the entire team agrees on how they should be answered. Plan replies that are concise, persuasive, and tie back to one of your major points. For example, if someone asks: “How can you justify such exorbitant prices?” you answer: “Our pricing includes all of the following services.” Then you tie back to the part of your presentation that described your cost-effectiveness. Address the group as you answer questions, but look back to the questioner occasionally to show courtesy.

7. Finish with a flourish. Explain how the information from the previous presenter relates to what’s coming up. Make sure the presentation isn’t dragging on too long. Pre-plan a visual clue that lets a speaker know when to stop. Go out on a strong finish. Look at the audience intently. Smile and express your feelings: “We’d love to work with you.” Pause and drop your hands to your side to signal that you’re finished. Lead your group out of the room smoothly to show that you’re a well-organized team. The final impression you’ll leave with the customer is one of confidence and conviction. You’ll also feel this way because you’ve out-performed the competition.

Where does Sales Enablement live within an organization?

An updated version of the following post can be found here, (February 5, 2017)

On September 7, 2010, Eric Nitschke (Launch International) asked the following questions on the LinkedIn Group Sales Enablement Content. Please see my response below:

“Sales Enablement: Where does it live?
Several clients have asked us for best practices in sales enablement – specifically who owns it?

I’d support our marketing colleagues who are trying to align selling messages with product positioning and messaging documents. Others on the training side would say that their training materials are the baseline for sales enablement. Finally, the “sales enablement automation” crowd would claim ownership of the process and fulfillment of sales enablement materials on their web-based or internally-hosted portals.

So I ask YOU – learned Sales Enablement Content Group members: Where does Sales Enablement live?”

Coming from the point of view of someone providing web-based or internally-hosted portals for Sales Enablement, I would not claim ownership. All stakeholders like product marketing, training, CI/MI, the teams for pricing and ROI / business case calculations, the customer reference database, corporate branding, MarComs, etc… should be invited… invited to house their content and – just as important – their contact details in that one joint portal.

A portal… not for the sake of the technology or to have yet another portal… but… a portal to let all these stakeholders see which of their content works and which doesn’t (also which content is missing and which gets insightful comments as a feedback loop from the field or the channel back to corporate).

When there is this one interface that cuts across all team sites and the silos the many regional or functional groups might have built with SharePoint or LiveLink or any of these solutions, your sales people and channel partners can – for the first time – see what is available for the given sales situation they are in. None of the stakeholders “owns” this more than the others and the portal just helps to filter by sales step, region, industry vertical, content type, etc… to make visible whether the sale is being enabled or specific content and contacts are missing.

matrixed organization

The single biggest complaint about Sales Enablement, I hear from sales people is missing content… content that is more specific than the generic pitch. A portal, that comes along with all stakeholders agreeing on content governance, a life-cycle duration for the content and responsibilities to respond to feedback & requests, will first of all make these gaps painfully visible and then guide the content planning to invest marketing’s dollars as effective as possible.

To come back to your question, in some organizations it might be the CMO and in others the sales leader or portfolio manager – who is the executive sponsor, who aligns all the stakeholders to feed the new portal and shut down the old ones.

define a taxonomy of customer pain points and map your products and solutions against them

One of my posts on the question “where Sales Enablement lives within an organization” got a comment requesting further clarification of the following graphic:

The comment was asking where to find sales people in the graphic and what the role of sales playbooks is. I have to admit that it is difficult to read, but the sales people are actually represented within the green area as indicated by the words Sales Force. (This is not a reference to salesforceDOTcom.)

This speaks to the point that sales people and the legacy sales portals, that are supposed to enable them, sit in between a highly matrixed organization on the one side and just as complex an organization on the client’s side. These legacy sales portals are one-dimensional (they fail to show content & contact details of subject experts in the context of the highly matrixed organization and in context to which pain point on the client side is addressed) and there are often several portals as there are so many silos of information.

Each sales playbook is a great tool for a small subset of the sales force (as shown in the graphic), but comes out of one of the silos, fed by only some of the Product/Portfolio Marketing teams or one regional team. When all content (e.g. customer references from different regions or specific value propositions per industry vertical…) lives in a multi-dimensional business context like it is made possible in BizSphere (which is was a Sales Enablement Solution Suite that was designed to cut across all silos. Full disclosure: I used to work with them.), a completely customized sales playbook for any given sales situation can be auto-generated.

In contrast to legacy sales portals, BizSphere takes at least three dimensions into account. These could be:

  • Where is the seller going to a meeting? (Sales regions, countries, language,…)
  • What does the seller want to sell (Portfolio of products, services and solutions.)
  • What does the seller need in order to be successful in the meeting? (Content types like white paper, case study, ROI-Calculator, contact details of a subject matter expert, etc…)

You might also want to define a taxonomy of customer pain points and map your products against them or add other dimensions that your company thinks in. BizSphere then lets you filter down by media type, the language of the content, and/or the sales step you are in with the opportunity you are working.

The dimensions of Sales Enablement

  • Imagine the 1st orange arrow in the graphic above to be a customer reference from a Canadian client for a specific security solution.
  • Imagine the 2nd orange arrow to be the contact details of the sales engineer in South Africa who is the expert for a given service.
  • The 3rd orange arrow could be an ROI-calculator for the same service but it is really specific to the mining industry and therefore relevant in Western Australia.
Can you already see how here the regional teams can have as much of say in “which content is relevant for specific sales situations?” as the product marketing team?

Can you get lost in BizSphere? No way, because nothing is easier than answering:

What do I want to sell, where do I want to sell it and what would help me to close the deal?

Once you set your context in these three dimensions you will have filtered down from thousands of marketing assets / pieces of collateral to only the relevant ones.

semantic web or web 3.0 and sales enablement

recent numbers to show the return on sales enablement software

On August 22, 2011, Forrester’s TJ Keitt pointed out…

“…some key differences between Enterprise 2.0 users and the rest of the workforce:

  • They’re your highest paid employees. Over half of this group earns more than $60k a year, compared to just 36% of non-users.
  • They’re the most educated members of the workforce. Sixty-five percent of this group has completed at least a 4 year college degree compared to 55% of the rest of the workforce.
  • They’re the leaders in your office. It’s not surprising to see 49% of this group are managers are executives given management’s enthusiasm about social technologies. Just 31% of non-users are in similar positions.

On August 17, 2011, BDSolutions tweeted that its VP of Sales Enablement, Bill Golder, said:

“Alignment of sales and marketing impacts revenue growth up to 3x.”

In a post by Amanda F. Batista from August 16, 2011, IDC is quoted with the statement that…

“B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue per year, or $100 million for a billion-dollar company.”

inability to get sales and marketing teams aligned around the right processes and technologies costs upwards of 10 percent of revenue per year

On July 21, 2011, IDC hosted a webinar entitled “Setting Your Sales Enablement Strategy”. In the invite for the webinar IDC revealed a very interesting number that really helps to put the financial impact a proper Sales Enablement strategy can make into perspective:

“Is Sales Enablement a new concept? Certainly not. Marketing and some sales organizations have been attempting for decades to equip their direct and indirect sales channels with the right information, at the right time, in the right format, to assist in moving specific opportunities forward. However, companies’ inability to get their sales and marketing teams aligned around the right processes and technologies (or at least consistent ones) has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue per year; or $100 M for a $1B company. […]”

The following chart (source IDG Connect) was also shared during the webinar:

too_much_content_that_is_not_useful

The Importance of Context

On September 7, 2010, Matthias Roebel from BizSphere wrote “The Importance of Context for the Enterprise 2.0”:

Just a few days ago Joe Galvin from Sirius Decisions wrote about how important Social Media – as an approach for better internal collaboration – is as part of a Sales Enablement strategy. I think he is absolutely right. What used to be the informal coffee corner chat before nowadays is mimicked in Social Media platforms. Over time, people will learn that even within an enterprise the sharing of information is beneficial for everyone in the end. Yes, there may be a lot of sceptics around, especially in sales teams, but with the right programs and incentives offered, they will make the jump to the new social collaboration paradigm.

However, the flip side of extensive social collaboration might be the appearance of new information silos as well as growing information overload. Without the social collaboration being moderated to a certain extend, it might lose some of its potential impact on the overall performance of the sales teams. Aaron Roe Fulkerson discussed this in a recent blog post: “The importance of context: why Enterprise 2.0 still fails to deliver value”.

web 3.0 with BizSphere

 

A company might use a lot of different types of social collaboration platforms – the challenges is: How can they be orchestrated in a way, that actual knowledge exchange is taking place across existing team and functional structures? And how can the content generated be aligned to some generally agreed upon enterprise structures? What companies, that are serious about implementing a Social Media strategy for sales, should think about, is to create and maintain an enterprise context.

Enterprise 2.0 from a Sales Enablement point of view

Then collaboration can take place within this context and will add greater value to a broader audience. Ideally, the enterprise context should constantly evolve based on feedback gathered during the ongoing social collaboration.

Reading List – Beginning of September 2010

“Engage early with Senior Execs, or Lose the Deal” (Tom Pisello: The ROI Guy; May 13, 2010)

“[…] Many salespeople are not armed today to adequately engage executives in the consultative strategy phase. That can be changed with Executive Assessment tools, providing a structured way to connect and engage with executives in this crucial early buying phase. […]”

“In Sales Productivity, Coroners’ Inquests Won’t Improve Life Expectancies” (John Cousineau, CEO, innovativeinfo; AUGUST 27, 2010)

“[…] Today, one of the productivity-improving therapies often recommended in sales operations is Loss Analysis. When a deal’s lost, do a post mortem to determine what happened + what should be done to prevent future deal deaths. In my view, it’s a bit like holding a coroner’s inquest. It accepts that fatalities are unavoidable other than by learning from them after the fact. It’s a strange way to stretch life expectancies. […]”

“Meet the Chief Listening Officer” (Neville Hobson; August 30, 2010):

“[…] So I wonder how a Chief Listening Officer will do.

In my view, such a role implied by the title is surely and exactly what organizations need today, especially large organizations. It’s not enough just to listen to conversations, analyze what’s going on and interpret the metrics: you need to know exactly, with precision, what the huge amount of interpreted data means to your organization specifically and what the people in their different roles can and must do as a result of the knowledge and insight you’ve gleaned from that listening, from that interpretation of the data.

Above all, you must know who in your organization needs what information, and be able to get that info to those people, on demand, when they need it. […]”

%d bloggers like this: