As buyer behavior evolves, businesses are evaluating their revenue and customer technology to ensure it keeps pace with those changes.
In this year’s revenue technology “products to watch,” we focus on essential categories supported by products that business and technology leaders should consider. The categories and products were chosen based on the need to address three market realities:
- Customers expect personalized, non-intrusive experiences when interacting with your company and people across diverse channels
- There is a need to address the growing complexity of purchasing technology – risk aversion creates longer evaluation cycles and involves more buyers in the decision
- Marketing, sales, and customer success teams operate in silos hindering their ability to serve customers on their terms
This categories and products highlighted represent the capabilities needed for business-to-business revenue and customer generation. It is not a complete list of what is required to build high-performing revenue generation ability within a company. To reflect a real-world revenue technology portfolio, I have showcased a mix of large providers and upstart tech companies.
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Customer Data: Salesforce Data Cloud
Revenue Generation Requirement: Quality, actionable data through your customer data platform or warehouse
To represent this category, we feature Salesforce’s Data Cloud as it underlines the scalability challenge of managing data required to generate customer revenue and relationships.
Companies have hundreds of customer data sources and applications. While customer data is not in short supply, the ability to activate customer data is. Salesforce Data Cloud acts as both a data management system and a customer data platform to unify and clean customer data, build a single customer profile, and then activate the data across Salesforce applications. The activation challenge is real, as front-line sales and marketing teams require relevant and actionable data to engage customers at the right time with relevant and contextual insights.
Salesforce added more than 1,000 new data cloud customers last quarter, according to their Q3 2023 earnings release. Salesforce customers tout two benefits: the single customer profile providing one source of truth and using artificial intelligence (AI) via Data Cloud’s integration with Salesforce’s Einstein, producing customer insights and recommending specific messaging that’s essential for sales and marketing outreach.
Data Cloud customers report sales productivity gains and the ability to target relevant prospect and customer communications more precisely to win more business faster.
Account-Based Revenue: 6Sense Revenue AI
Revenue Generation Requirement: Predictive, connected tools to identify, prioritize, and activate accounts.
6Sense is a strong platform to represent this rapidly growing category. Sellers and marketers struggle to shift from sales cold calling and random acts of marketing to a more timely, targeted approach. 6Sense has spent the last decade developing a platform with tools and data to empower teams to drive revenue in new ways, with a primary focus on selling and marketing to specific accounts and buyers when they are showing signals of being in the market for a company’s software.
The core 6Sense offering is Revenue AI, which focuses on uncovering anonymous buyers, capturing and interpreting their behaviors, and directing sellers and marketers on when and how to reach out. As buyers research technology, they leave digital breadcrumbs. 6Sense tools analyze, detect, and signal sellers and marketers when to engage. First-party and third-party data are also used to provide intelligence on the buyer and their business to shape the sellers’ and marketers’ communications strategy.
Used strategically, this precision approach is good for buyers (not subject to endless unwanted emails and cold calls) and sellers (higher engagement, more likely to buy, and better productivity). Customers highlight more robust pipelines, accelerated sales cycles, and improved seller productivity with a more focused revenue generation effort using 6Sense tools.
Web Pipeline Generation, Conversion: Qualified Pipeline Cloud
Revenue Generation Requirement: Identify and serve prospects and customers with helpful information as they engage digitally with your brand.
Your website is one of your most valuable prospect/customer data sources. Qualified is the solution we chose for the website pipeline tools.
Qualified’s AI-powered Pipeline Cloud includes web chat, voice, and video connections to engage web visitors, book and schedule meetings, present marketing offers, and apply and gather intent data. This integrated approach serves prospective customers and feeds sales teams with inbound leads for more timely engagement. Because the website is just one channel used by prospects and customers, integrations with CRM software such as Salesforce and revenue platforms like 6Sense generate essential insights about buyer and account activity used in sales and marketing.
Customers highlight better, more timely conversations with prospective buyers and accounts, the ability to turn website visits into sales conversations, and the value of pipeline creation as key benefits they realize with Qualified tools.
Customer Career Tracking: Champify
Revenue Generation Requirement: Understand stakeholder movement and changes within your priority accounts, sell to professionals you already know.
For this category, we identified Champify. This is a SaaS application to use with your CRM system to determine when an existing customer changes job roles or companies. With significant resources, time, and money spent chasing new customers, a provider’s best opportunity is often when your current customers change companies or roles. Champify monitors job changes to help go-to-market teams turn existing relationships into new business opportunities that close. When a job change happens, the team is alerted to activate a personalized or automated outreach to a previous customer in their new role.
Unlike other data provider applications, Champify focuses on customers who already know the company’s product and brand. The ease of integration with core CRM and customer data systems makes this a seamless plug-in to get up and running; it can be purchased on the Salesforce AppExchange and other marketplaces. This application is suitable for companies that have an established customer base.
Champify customers report closing business faster due to the decision maker’s familiarity with the company and its products, as well as having a champion inside the organization. Increased sales pipeline and productivity are other benefits touted by Champify customers due to an ability to focus on existing relationships versus trying to create new relationships, which can take months or longer.
Data Unification and Governance: Syncari
Revenue Generation Requirement: Unify and orchestrate customer, business, and account data to understand and activate activity.
For this category, we chose Syncari, an up-and-coming company focused on solving a big problem in sales and marketing: data orchestration. Before we can deliver dazzling customer and personal experiences, we need to get control of the billions of customer data points, sources, and systems. Syncari provides a platform for operations and technology pros to deliver actionable data via a data mesh network architecture.
Syncari delivers data unification and automation capabilities with built-in data quality and governance tools. Unifying data from diverse systems and sources with data cleanliness, integrity, and standardization means data can be immediately put to work in sales, marketing, and go-to-market programs.
Syncari’s unique value is its patented data sync technology and a low-code, no-code environment that can be implemented without a degree in engineering. This is important today as more business professionals without data science or technical know-how access and use data daily. Syncari is an enterprise-grade system that works with your current data sources and combines sync technology with data quality tools, custom scripts, extract, transform and load (ETL), as well as reverse ETL, in a single data platform.
Technology and operations pros report outcomes including the ability to automate, sync, and rapidly “activate” data across multiple systems to arm sellers and marketers with customer data and executives with customer insights.
