Specifically, the new additions to Outreach’s platform include:

• Display product licensing and usage data directly within Outreach (including competitive and complementary products) to help monitor customer health metrics;

• Sequence blueprints for account management designed to streamline workflows related to onboarding, customer training, NPS detractor management and expansion;

• Time-based triggers based on specific dates such as an upcoming renewal, account check-in, key milestones or in relation to marketing communications and events;

• Custom objects that bring custom data into Outreach to reportedly unlock unique selling workflows; and

• Smart Kaia Coach for Conversation Intelligence, which includes the ability to select a meeting recording for review and apply the appropriate card, as well as understand what topics are trending in conversations.

“Retaining and expanding current customers has never been more important,” said Abhijit Mitra, President of Product and Technology at Outreach, in a statement. “At the same time, customer expectations are rising, and organizations face tighter capacities and resource constraints on their customer teams. As a result, each team member must understand customer interactions, opportunity history and product adoption to effectively execute coordinated workflows that land, retain and expand accounts. Our latest release delivers full lifecycle visibility, while enabling teams to take relevant and timely action that leads to account growth.”

The post Outreach Introduces New Features Designed To Boost Customer Retention & Expansion appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

In an exclusive interview with Demand Gen Report, Tiga’s CEO Andre Ye revealed that the platform came to fruition based on a series of discussions he had with GTM professionals in his network. Throughout those conversations, he realized that about 80% of his peers were rethinking their GTM motions due to the need for change in traditional outbound marketing tactics.

“There was a time when uploading a list of 5,000 names and blasting them with a templated email worked, but we’re past that,” Ye explained. “The move away from cold outbounding caused people to rethink traditional GTM motions and the role of the SDR. A lot of people are saying, ‘I’ve done the SDR thing, the ROI isn’t there; I’m going with full-cycle account executives (AEs).’ And then even the ones still using SDRs are rethinking those roles, whether it’s using fewer of them or reserving them for enterprise accounts. Whether they decide to use full cycle AEs or SDRs, one thing is clear: Cold outbounding with these mass-market methods isn’t working anymore, and businesses need to prospect a different way.”

With that in mind, Ye and his co-founders built Tiga to serve as an AI co-pilot purpose-built for signal-based selling, which focuses on finding the signals that matter, identifying in-market accounts and generating relevant messaging. He continued that Tiga can be trained each user’s unique business content to serve as a custom generative pre-trained transformer (GPT).

“The future of selling is about 1:1 signal-based selling rather than cold, mass market outbounding,” said Ye. “Whether you’re an account executive or a strategic SDR, you need to prospect in this new way and Tiga.ai was designed to help you do so, at scale. Our proprietary AI platform makes it possible for you to discover custom buyer signals that matter to your business and autonomously execute the optimal sales play for that signal.”

The post Former Eloqua Executives Launch Tiga.ai, An AI Platform For GTM Teams appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

However, this emerging generation of sales professionals may not find allure in group vacations with colleagues as a reward. Consequently, savvy sales leaders must reevaluate their incentivization structure, shifting away from prioritizing work-related events and instead focusing on motivating reps with incentives aligned with their individual preferences and priorities.

Understand Gen Z Behaviors To Tailor Incentive Compensation

In today’s world, incentivizing sales professionals effectively requires a mix of financial rewards, recognition, non-monetary incentives and a supportive work environment. Some modern and effective incentivization strategies include:

Performance-Based Bonuses & Commissions

A tiered commission structure can be set to ensure sales teams continually create new sales goals as they achieve current ones. When they exceed these goals, sales leaders can grant quarterly or annual bonuses based on these benchmarks. These objectives can be on an individual or a team basis, where they work on surpassing a collective target together, which can foster collaboration.

Non-Monetary Incentives

Outside of the President’s Club model, non-monetary rewards can be effective on their own. Experienced-based rewards, such as travel opportunities and event tickets, would be well-received if rewarded individually. Additionally, sales leaders should publicly recognize their most successful salespeople through programs such as “Employee of the Month” during town hall meetings or through company-wide email blasts.

Health & Wellness

A recent study found that 56% of Gen Z consumers in the U.S. say fitness is a “very high priority,” compared with 40% of US consumers. Wellness program incentives, like gifting gym memberships or health coaching, would resonate well with the next generation of salespeople. With 20% of Gen Z more willing to talk about mental health than their older counterparts, mental health counseling services and stress management programs are also great incentives to offer.

Analyze Data To Implement Effective Incentive Programs

These strategies help create a motivating and fulfilling environment for sales professionals, driving individual and organizational success. Regarding this compensation, sales leaders and professionals can ensure success by overseeing these rewards through incentive compensation management (ICM) software.

ICM software consolidates sales and employee data, streamlining the calculation of commissions. Effective incentive compensation programs help sales representatives focus on their performance, encouraging them to manage leads and close deals. Accurate and transparent ICM software motivates sales personnel, retains vital staff and enhances sales performance. Interactive dashboards where individuals can create plans, rate tables, quotas and highlight sales opportunities help sales leaders inspire and drive their teams to meet and exceed targets.

Additionally, ICM software allows organizations to efficiently and accurately compensate top performers while enabling sales representatives to manage and monitor their individual sales goals in real-time. The software can show sales reps exactly how their commissions break down with unrestricted clarity. This transparency builds trust so sales teams can focus on selling, not double-checking commissions.

Ensure Incentives Meet Modern Workforce Needs

As the workforce evolves with a growing presence of Gen Z, companies must rethink traditional incentivization methods to stay relevant and practical. This shift is especially critical for sales leaders who have historically relied on models that will no longer be effective. Modern strategies that blend financial rewards, personalized non-monetary incentives and wellness-focused benefits are essential to appeal to the values and preferences of younger sales professionals.

Implementing ICM software can enhance these efforts by providing a transparent, efficient and motivating platform for managing commissions and performance metrics. By embracing these contemporary approaches, organizations can foster a motivated, high-performing sales force that drives individual and collective success.

Bayley Fesler is the Director of Revenue Operations at Xactly, a provider of sales performance management solutions.

The post Not Your Grandparent’s President’s Club: The Next Generation Of Incentivization   appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The AI assistant seeks to blend conversational and behavioral AI to automate the manual tasks involved in B2B sales. Key capabilities include:

• Writing call summaries;
• Cloning a seller’s voice to draft relevant follow-ups;
• Summarizing information surrounding buyer intent; and
• Sharing information with go-to-market and product teams for more visibility and forecasting.

“When a salesperson is spending most of their time in their CRM rather than talking to customers, you know that something needs to change,” said Sybill CEO and Co-founder, Gorish Aggarwal, in a statement. “The benefits of AI have not fully percolated to B2B sales yet, and we are changing that. In 2024, AI isn’t just for programmers and marketers — it’s empowering sellers to focus on prospects, close deals faster, and achieve higher win rates.”

The post Sybill Secures $11M In Series A Funding To Expand AI Assistant appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Convert Assist works to bring together action plans, call coaching and smart follow up — all features from the company’s innovation program, CallRail Labs — to:

• Auto-generate next steps for leads based on prior calls;
• Automatically draft email messages or call back content to enable customized re-engagement; and
• Provide real-time call coaching sales agents.

“As a marketer myself, I understand the value of each and every lead, and how important it is to provide a personalized response to each one, quickly,” said Laura Beussman, SVP of Marketing at CallRail, in a statement. “Most customers expect a response from a business within hours and are most likely to go with whoever responds first. Convert Assist is a game changer for the industry that will help SMBs capture more leads and turn them into paying customers. I’m excited we’re able to take the innovations coming out of CallRail Labs and launch a new, AI-driven product that will make an immediate impact for our customers.”

The post CallRail Launches AI-Powered Convert Assist appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Flex Search leverages Lusha’s intelligent data engine to help enhance contact and company data accuracy and expand coverage. Powered by machine learning models, specific features include:

• Search features that allow users to leverage free text, natural language queries;
• Automatically identifying and applying key filters to refine search results to the most relevant prospects; and
• A new smart search engine designed to deliver a greater volume of relevant prospects.

“Transitioning from everyday search engines like Google to sales prospecting is often like a trip back in time with rigid filters and options that limit effectiveness,” said Yoni Tzerruya, CEO and Co-Founder of Lusha, in a statement. “Our new Flex Search brings the most powerful search method to the world’s most accurate and effective prospecting platform. That means more leads with the right intent and far more ease, and it’s a game changer for the sales and business development professionals that rely on us.”

The post Lusha Unveils New Prospecting Feature appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Digital Labor Live features a dynamic Live Feed on Starboard, designed to showcase real-time Sailebot activities through animated avatars. This function includes indicators highlighting actionable opportunities and detailed metrics such as AI qualified leads, emails and referrals as they occur. The platform also tracks the active Sailebot count to help enable better resource management and efficiency measurements.

For its part, ROI Live reportedly empowers sales teams to track pipeline growth, savings on manual tasks executed by Sailebot and the value of new prospect data. The solution also provides access into the tasks Sailebots are completing and their subsequent impact to cost savings.

“By leveraging Sailebot capabilities, enterprises can dramatically reduce ramp time for new account executives, enabling them to become revenue positive much faster,” said Nick Smith, CEO and Founder of Sailes, in a statement. “This strategic deployment of Sailebots for every account executive shortens ramp time and significantly enhances productivity, creating a compelling ROI story from the first deployment.”

The post Sailes Releases Two New AI-Powered Sales Solutions appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Uphoff stopped by the B2B Marketing Exchange Podcast booth at the B2B Marketing Exchange event in February to discuss the new world of digital marketing, the role of data will play and the evolving shifts between sales and marketing. As part of his conversation with myself and my co-host, Klaudia Tirico, Uphoff noted that there are four key things marketers need to keep in mind as they navigate the digital landscape:

1. High-quality demand generation at scale;
2. Ensuring 100% compliance with data governance standards;
3. Analytics that allow “in-flight” campaign optimization; and
4. Demonstrable impact on pipeline.

Throughout the conversation, Uphoff expanded on those insights and shared more expertise into the digital landscape, as well as the idealized union between sales and marketing. While you’ll have to head over to your podcast player of choice (or our handy-dandy website!) to hear the full episode, here’s a quick snippet of what we covered:

Kelly Lindenau & Klaudia Tirico: Can you expand on some of the factors contributing to the self-service buying journey, share some steps marketers can take to personalize outreach and assets?

Tony Uphoff: All the demography we use in modern marketing was lifted from the Baby Boomer generation, but now we have Millennials in the same workforce at the same time — it’s the broadest demographic stretch we’ve ever seen in the history of North American businesses. As digital natives meet analog natives, it presents an interesting cultural dynamic. A lot of the self-service stuff was initially driven by the younger generation, but now it’s become an industry standard.

To create content tailored to independent buyers, the answer is around data. It’s going to sound cliché, but if you look carefully and have good data science, you’ll see people’s digital footprints. That doesn’t mean the persona will always be 100% correct, but business still need to embrace the idea of letting data lead their understanding of prospect and customer needs.

Lindenau & Tirico: What are some of the biggest impacts that this new, independent digital landscape has on demand generation marketers?

Uphoff: If you think of demand generation in a series of phases that we’ve gone through, we’ve gone through the “just give me a lead, just give me a name,” phase, which we’re starting to move past as we clean up our leads. We realized that unbranded leads aren’t valuable; if I get your name from an asset download but you don’t know anything about me, my company or our offerings, it’s tough to make an impact. But if I can take advanced display and surround you, and perhaps your colleague has heard of my company and familiar with brand, we’ll be able to have that connection to you.

We’re also struggling with how to sell in a digital-first world. And while I don’t know if I’d lay that at the feet of the marketing department, at the end of the day, marketers have to figure out, “if 70% of my prospects’ purchase processes are done before they engage, how does that impact the average sales cycle?” And from there, marketers need to figure out when the best time to bring in sales would be.

Lindenau & Tirico: While we’re on the topic, can you expand on how the sales role is also evolving in this age of the independent buyer?

Uphoff: We’ve seen glimpses of the sales rep of the future, but I don’t think we’ve met them yet. I think it’s entirely possible that we’re going to see an era shift, where sales is in more of a support and nurturing role, which was typically thought of as marketing’s jurisdiction. And then marketing would shift over to engaging customers and catering to their needs.

Lindenau & Tirico: Naturally, this brings up the topic of sales and marketing alignment, which many people are still trying to figure out — especially amidst shifting responsibilities. With all the newness, what advice would you have to help internal teams become more closely aligned?

Uphoff: It comes down to figuring out what’s the right internal structure, and then determining the relationships within those structures across customer success, BDR functions, sales and marketing. But it’s not easy to coordinate workflows across existing siloes; there’s no simple path. The secret is interdependence.

To unlock more from Tony’s conversation and dive deeper into the work he’s doing over at Pipeline360, check out the full episode here!

The post How The Self-Service Buying Journey Is Causing A Role Reversal Between Marketing & Sales  appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

To aid with those efforts, there are various tools and strategies marketers can deploy to get ahead of their competition, and we’ll reveal them all the 2024 Buyer Insights & Intelligence Series! Throughout the three-day event, we’ll magnify:

• Advanced analytics tools that help uncover hidden patterns in buyer behavior to enable hyper-personalized marketing messages and content at scale;
• How to identify businesses actively researching solutions related to a company’s offerings;
• The shift away from individual leads to a more holistic understanding of accounts, which involves gathering insights on different decision-makers within a target company and tailoring message accordingly;
• The power of their first-party data — such as website analytics, CRM data and customer surveys — in providing a unique understanding of existing customer needs and preferences; and
• The importance of mapping out touch points along the buyer’s journey to create targeted content and interventions to guide buyers toward a purchase

We’re just about three weeks away from the (free) webinar series, and we wanted to give you a little glimpse into what you can expect!

Where Are The B2B Buyers? And How Do We Find Them?

Organizations are quickly realizing that running AI with poor data can create unintended mysteries. To successfully use AI to find elusive buyers, practitioners need to go beyond messy CRM data and run their AI with clean, accurate data to pull everyone together into a crack detective team that works with accurate, real-time buyer intent signals.

In this session, ZoomInfo sales and marketing leaders will share practical ways to combine AI with high-quality data for better sleuthing and results, as well as actionable use cases.

Mastering Intent Signals: From Noise To Revenue

B2B revenue professionals are constantly bombarded with data, insights and metrics in a bid to provide context around their buyers and drive revenue growth. But amidst all that noise, how can teams find the valuable signals?

This webinar — featuring Lihi Chizik, Product Marketing Manager at Salesloft — will discuss strategies for cutting through the noise to gain valuable buyer insights and intelligence, with a focus on how marketers can take the first step toward mastering the art of signal detection in the B2B landscape.

B2B Buyers Want A Better Purchasing Experience — Get The ABM Framework That Delivers It

B2B buyers are more informed and more demanding than ever before — and as a result, they expect a personalized and seamless experience from start to finish. In this session, we’ll revisit a B2B Marketing Exchange keynote led by Steve Armenti, who previously ran global demand gen for Chrome Enterprise at Google. With several demand and growth leadership positions under his belt, Armenti focused on how to build demand and growth teams that drive revenue with a focus on ABM.

Uncovering The Blind Spots In The B2B Tech Buying Journey

With most of the buying process conducted independently, tech vendors are tasked with building silent influence that shapes pre-contact purchase requirements with buyers. And, once contact is initiated, they then have to fast-track the decision-making process and displace competitors.

Ross Howard, Director of Product Marketing for Inbox Insight, will walk attendees through new research that uncovers the crucial touchpoints in the buying process that have traditionally been unknown to vendors. His webinar will focus on how marketers can scaffold out effective tactics around the buyer’s journey and leverage intent to enhance accuracy and precision.

Turning Data Into Dollars: Unleashing DTC Insights For B2B Growth

The B2B Marketing Exchange was chock full of B2B buying insights, so it’s only natural we’re bringing you another replay! Tara Clever, SVP of Marketing & Partnerships at MarginEdge, explored the dynamic world of DTC marketing and unveiled its hidden potential for supercharging B2B growth. Throughout her discussion, she’ll share a new lens on metrics and attribution to help you learn how to choose metrics that more closely align sales and marketing priorities and make marketing a powerful profit center.

Creating An Engagement Loop Via Interactive Experiences, Targeted Content & Engagement Data

To make marketing content more effective, impactful and fun while gathering a wealth of engagement data, practitioners need to create an engagement loop. The key is interactive experiences via the Ceros platform, which deliver longer time on page, increased conversions and higher project win rates — all while tracking the numbers needed to better understand an audience.

In this session, the Emerald Studio team will discuss best practices for creating interactive assets that can fuel demand gen, connect with multiple personas in one asset and capture insights for refining messaging and content development.

Orchestrating Human-Centric B2B Marketing: A Practical Blueprint For AI-Powered Team Success

In today’s AI-driven landscape, the true competitive advantage lies not in the technology itself but in how it’s leveraged to enhance the human experience. Join Daniel Englebretson, AI Strategist and creator of the “Rule of 100” framework, as he unveils a practical blueprint for empowering B2B marketing teams to orchestrate highly relevant, authentic and contextual campaigns that put the human experience at the center.

Throughout this discussion, Englebretson will touch on how to foster a mindset shift across organizations to foster a better understanding of the AI’s potential in enhancing human-centric marketing, as well as adapt marketing strategies that best leverage AI capabilities.

It’s all going down from July 15-17 — make sure to register now so you don’t miss a session!

The post #BII24 Preview: Your Guide To Engaging Elusive, Anonymous B2B Buyers appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Powered by Luster’s proprietary generative AI discourse engine, the technology seeks to revolutionize sales practice, skill mastery and performance by offering features such as:

• Personalized, AI-simulated practice environments;
• Drills to help sales reps practice skills such objection handling, value proposition delivery and discovery with specific personas; and
• Rep and team level insights to surface skill proficiencies and deficiencies in real-time.

“With Luster, sales teams can finally stop practicing on their customers,” said Christina Brady, CEO and Co-Founder of Luster, in a statement. “Until now, practice was only possible through person-to-person role-play or live prospect and customer calls, which meant sales teams had to practice on their customers or with others who couldn’t provide impactful feedback. Our proprietary predictive enablement technology is uniquely positioned to solve this problem. Luster not only predicts and closes individual skill gaps, enabling sales teams to sell better and faster, but it also provides quantifiable ROI for sales leaders to measure the impact of their training.”

The post Luster Debuts With AI-Powered Predictive Enablement Technology appeared first on Demand Gen Report.