B2B Connection

Infer’s flagship product is a predictive analytics platform for marketing and sales, which builds predictive models based on a company’s historical pipeline and current customer data. The predictive sales analytics space is heating up, and as vendors become more competitive, they’re developing differentiators. We talked with Jamie Grenney, Vice President of Marketing at Infer, about their new “stealth” product, Prospect Management, which can work with or without a predictive model. Infer Prospect Management is a lightweight app that works with Salesforce, marketing automation, and/or data from a predictive model to produce recommendations about which prospects to target and which content to use. Prospect management helps ops teams, product marketers, demand gen teams, and sales reps get a more intelligent view of segments, personas, and profiles. Grenney also discussed the evolution of predictive technology and weighed in on the possibility of “self-driving cars” (AI-powered marketing and sales ops) in predictive’s future.  Introduction to Infer What’s new at Infer? Over the last year, $242 million in venture funding has flowed into B2B predictive marketing. That is great validation that we’re on the edge of a mega-trend that could be every bit as big as cloud, social, or mobile. At Infer we feel fortunate to have gotten out front and had time to build […]

EverString is part of a relatively new space called Predictive Sales Analytics (aka Predictive Marketing, or predictive analytics for sales and marketing). We’ve found that many people are interested, but not yet ready to buy—honestly, some aren’t quite sure what predictive sales analytics actually is. We talked to J.J. Kardwell, President and Co-Founder of EverString, to better understand their positioning and the evolution of the space. EverString is unique in the space in that it’s architected for Account-based Marketing, designed around the account object rather than the lead object. Kardwell gave us an in-depth view on how buyers new to the space should be evaluating solutions, and how users already familiar with predictive lead scoring can be driving more value with other applications of predictive.  Introduction to Predictive Analytics for Marketing & Sales How would you characterize the space for readers who are early in the buying cycle, perhaps just starting out with their research? A year and a half ago (when we started actively selling), category awareness was still very, very low. My sense is that nationally, awareness was virtually zero, and even in Silicon Valley it was less than 50%. Now, category awareness in Silicon Valley has grown to more than 80%, […]

Donna Ronayne, Vice President of Marketing at Halogen Software, explained Halogen’s focus on the talent management functionality most important to the mid-market, and why they’ve avoided enterprise bells and whistles and complex customizations.  Ronayne said Halogen strives to be the “un-ERP,” prioritizing easy configuration and usability. Ronayne also described the new style of conducting employee performance reviews, which will be increasingly important as the workforce becomes younger and the talent pool becomes more competitive. Rather than functioning as a system of assessment, the next generation of performance review is about employee engagement and development—a shift supported by the Halogen platform. According to user reviews on TrustRadius, Halogen is Top Rated talent management software for mid-sized companies in 2015. Introduction to Halogen Give us a brief introduction to Halogen. We are one of the leading talent management vendors. We focus on mid-market companies as opposed to the Fortune 100 companies, and our philosophy is to be the “un-ERP.” Because we work with the mid-market, which we define as 100 to 10,000 employees, we knew it was necessary for us to make a solution that was very easy to configure and easy to use. We have been around since 2001; we started with […]

TriNet is an HR software and service provider focused on the professional employment organization (PEO) model, meaning TriNet takes on the HR risk for employees at customer companies. We talked to Pravin Kumar, VP of Product Management, about the company’s tri-fold growth, in terms of revenue, geography, and verticals. Kumar also explained how policy changes like the Affordable Care Act make the HR landscape more complex, motivating TriNet’s technology + services approach. TriNet offers three packages—TriNet Ambrose, TriNet Passport, and TriNet SOI—to serve of private firms, office workers in white-collar industries, and “mainstream USA.” Introduction to TriNet Give us an introduction to TriNet. TriNet is an HR service provider, and we leverage state-of-the-art software along with deep domain expertise and services to our clients in easy-to-use formats. We are one of the largest providers in the space, and we’re growing at an incredible pace. We are more on the SMB side; we target companies from five to 500 employees, though we are flexible outside of that. We provide all services from payroll to benefits to risk management along with the traditional HR tools like time off and job change capabilities. Who are TriNet’s competitors? Our largest competitor is a mishmash of services […]

We talked to George Brady, VP of Sales and Business Development at Personnel Data Systems (PDS) Software, about his perspective on safe data transmission, the development benefits of having an active user community, and why PDS customers call their bundled solution “the best-kept secret in HR.” Brady explained that PDS Software caters to HR departments at mid-sized companies, and is unique in that it continues to focus on on-premise deployments—although they do also have a licensed-hosting plan and a SaaS offering, which requires a 3-year commitment. Brady also said that PDS handles complex use cases well, by offering features like tips processing, grandfathered benefits plans, and mid-period pay increases, and by allowing companies to personalize the system to their own individual use case. Vista HRMS, the Core HR solution from PDS, was Top Rated by users on TrustRadius in 2015. Introduction to PDS Give us a brief introduction about your company and your product. PDS has been around since 1974, and we are only focused on HR solutions: payroll, benefits, recruiting, and time and attendance. We’re a small, privately owned company in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Our target market is the 500- to 10,000-employee range. This is in part because of our […]

11/12/2015 We talked to Lara Shackelford, CMO at The TAS Group, about the Dealmaker platform and The TAS Group’s new product release: Dealmaker Sales Performance Manager. Dealmaker helps sales reps and sales managers better visualize their pipeline, assess sales velocity, and understand risk and trends. Because The TAS Group focuses on strategic sales pipeline management, account targeted selling best practices are built into the software in the form of guided insights and coaching. Dealmaker is built natively on the Salesforce1 platform, which Shackelford explained maximizes accessibility, usability, and security. This is also a differentiator within the marketplace, since pipeline analytics competitors aren’t native to Salesforce. Introduction to The TAS Group Give us a brief introduction to The TAS Group. The TAS Group is focused on helping sales professionals and sales managers get the best sales performance and guidance every day through our built-in sales expertise. We do that in real-time, built natively on the Salesforce1 platform. We help sales professionals crush their quarter with insights and total visibility into their pipeline and performance—no analytics needed. Companies don’t need to hire a business analyst or a data analyst to try and figure out what’s happening with your sales pipeline. We help them […]

We talked to Malcom Fox, VP of Product Marketing at Epicor, about the benefits of deep integration between HR and ERP technologies. Fox explained that with this approach, Epicor can help the mid-market improve knowledge retention and transfer across the company. Epicor uses a social collaboration network, embedded in their legacy ERP product, to build a knowledge library. Constructing such a repository for skills and processes enables a company to more efficiently train new employees. According to Fox, as younger generations (who are less likely to remain with the same company longterm) become the majority in the workforce, it is important to institutionalize company knowledge on an ongoing basis. This can also help HR get recognized as a core department, with technology and capabilities that impact the entire company and remain relevant even after the onboarding stage. Introduction to Epicor Give us some background on Epicor, including your entrance into the HR space. Our legacy is ERP. We focus on the global midmarket manufacturing, distribution and retail space. We have found that our customers have employees, of course, and more and more of them need a solution to manage that. In 2010, we acquired Spectrum, an HR solution marketed as “an HR solution […]

Matt Singer, VP of Marketing at Jobvite, discusses the company’s focus on best-of-breed recruiting software, including how they handle social and trends toward mobile and predictive analytics. Singer also talks about the “recruiting funnel,” methods for building the talent pipeline, and the increasing importance of recruitment marketing to build interest in a company’s brand. According to user ratings on TrustRadius, Jobvite was a Top Rated recruiting product for mid-sized companies in 2015. Introduction to Jobvite Give us a brief overview of Jobvite, who you are and what you offer. Jobvite is a top-to-bottom recruiting platform; recruiting is all we have ever done and all we ever plan to do. We view recruiting as a funnel with passive candidates at the top and onboarding at the bottom, with reporting and analytics to optimize every step of the recruiting lifecycle over time. We have products for each step of the funnel. Deep Focus on Recruiting Why has Jobvite chosen to be a recruitment-only platform instead of adding functionalities for different aspects of HR? It starts with our CEO, Dan Finnigan, who is a big believer in the idea that there are two parts to HR: the personnel department, which is focused on existing employees and […]

Performance Metrics Feed Visibility and Engagement: Hoopla is a visual communication platform that specializes in intra-company engagement through shareable content broadcast across mobile, web and TV , including company updates and sales competitions. The company is a Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2010. They take a unique, complex approach to visibility and gamification, which Mike Smalls, Founder and CEO, says can help engage the millenial workforce and create a small company feel at large companies. Hoopla recently launched a new release to open up the platform to other data sources, improving customization options and the ability for more employees and departments to contribute content (such as selfies when they’ve achieved a goal). Hoopla is highly rated by users on TrustRadius. Introduction to Hoopla Who are you as a company, and what is the grand vision behind Hoopla? I founded Hoopla in 2010, and we’ve seen some pretty impressive growth since then. At the time, we were trying to solve a key problem: the challenge of motivating, engaging and driving the right behaviors from salespeople. We were focused on the metrics and dynamics that drive performance. Our team built a platform to bring visibility to key metrics and progress, and create […]

  During October’s HR Tech Conference, we spoke to David Hurwitz, CMO, about how the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition platform works to maximize efficiency in the recruiting process. SmartRecruiters is built around three core components: recruitment marketing, collaboration, and management.  With an emphasis on deep, bidirectional integrations to major HRIS systems, SmartRecruiters has helped clients triple their recruiting productivity along with building collaboration across a company’s recruiting infrastructure. Introduction to SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition What is the SmartRecruiters vision around recruitment and hiring? Our vision is set by Jerome Ternynck, our founder and CEO, who is a longtime veteran of the recruiting industry. He founded a very successful recruitment agency in Europe in the ‘90s before becoming a software entrepreneur. Jerome came to realize that talent acquisition is about so much more than just applicant tracking. ATS is more about compliance and internal “check-the-box” than about finding, sourcing, marketing to, and recruiting the best candidates. Additionally, it did not stimulate the collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters. ATS systems needed to be supplanted by a new generation of technology that would support the holistic, full-lifecycle approach to talent acquisition. He founded SmartRecruiters in 2010 as a next-generation talent acquisition platform that includes ATS […]

At Dreamforce, we talked to Rip Gerber, Vlocity CMO, about how Vlocity can help companies become more efficient and increase customer satisfaction by delivering an industry-specific CRM layer that eliminates the phantom costs of developing on Salesforce. Vlocity has four solutions: government, telecommunications, insurance, and healthcare. Each cloud-based app is native to Salesforce, and extends the CRM platform with very specific business process applications for those verticals. These apps replace custom-built solutions, which Gerber explained are increasingly costly to maintain over time. Vlocity was founded in 2014 by experts on industry customized CRM software, who earned their stripes implementing on-premise Siebel systems. The company is backed not by venture capital, but by strategic investments from Salesforce and Accenture. Give us an introduction to Vlocity—who are you as a company, and what do you do? Vlocity is an Industry Cloud company. We deliver cloud and mobile software that embeds industry-specific functionality and processes, built in partnership with Salesforce. We enable companies to deliver an omnichannel experience, achieve greater sales and service agility, and capture faster value from the cloud. Vlocity is industry cloud apps built on the Salesforce platform. Our verticals are communications, public sector, insurance, and health insurance. We’re 100% native […]

Evan James, Head of Americas Marketing, gave us a view on the Socialbakers approach to social media marketing: cross-channel visibility into a brand’s own social profiles paired with comparisons to competitor performance, including in newer areas like social video. According to James, Socialbakers has the largest social pages database, allowing them to create customized benchmarks for specific industries, geographic markets, and sets of competitors. Beyond their core analytics product, Socialbakers also has solutions to help with publishing and content management (Builder) and ads strategy (Promoted Post Detection). James explained that because Socialbakers has an intrinsically analytic perspective on social media marketing, analytics are built deep into all of these other products. Give us an introduction to Socialbakers—who are you, and what is your value proposition? We started in 2008. Over the years we have developed into a social media marketing company with an emphasis on analytics. Our core product, Socialbakers, gives marketers visibility across their social profiles—across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Sina Weibo, and vKontakte—to understand what’s working and not working. The main piece involves being able to see how they’re performing in context of competitors. Our customers can see how they stack up one-to-one versus their most important competitors, […]

Marc Aubin, CEO and co-founder at AppBuddy, explained that while Salesforce’s complex data structures are well suited for storing data properly, they can be difficult for end-users to navigate effectively, which hinders adoption among salespeople. GridBuddy fills this gap in Salesforce by improving data visibility, context, and actionability. Aubin characterizes its single-screen interface, where related data can be sorted, filtered, and edited, as the marriage between transactional reporting and data management capabilities. Give us overall background on AppBuddy—how long have you been around, and what is your product focus? AppBuddy started about 6 years ago, in 2009. We were first listed our flagship product GridBuddy on the Salesforce AppExchange in 2010. GridBuddy fills a usability and adoption gap in Salesforce. Working with a relational data management system is confusing for end-users. The data structures translate into a lot of complexity, yet this complexity is necessary to store data properly, insuring data integrity so that it can be reported on. It’s a necessary evil. Unfortunately, for a lot of people that user experience is not something they can dive into easily and use effectively. We see problems with sales people not entering their data in a timely fashion. Down the line, these user adoption […]

During Dreamforce we spoke to Lumesse CMO Stephan Schmitt about how Lumesse is partnering with Salesforce to re-think the talent management user experience. Their new TalentObjects portfolio, available on the app cloud, anticipates the growing importance of talent to business strategy, and the need to develop better relationships with a skilled workforce. Schmitt explained that Lumesse is shifting the “workforce management” paradigm toward “workforce engagement,” with an emphasis on convenience and consumer-grad usability. The new platform is totally mobile, intuitively modulized, and designed to foster continuous engagement with talent communities. Give us some background on Lumesse—who are you as a company, and what is your grand vision? Lumesse is a talent management company. Our solution includes talent acquisition and talent management—performance, succession planning and development, learning, and onboarding. Our four-product suite covers the entire talent management space. We’ve been on the market for about 15 years, primarily in Europe. We have customers in the U.S. and in Asia Pacific, but about 80% of our customer base is made up of European companies. We believe that the talent management space will radically change in the next 5-10 years, and we want to lead the market in preparing customers for those changing business […]

We talked with Hannon Hill’s CEO, Kat Liendgens, and VP of Engineering, Bradley Wagner, about their approach to content management and content marketing. They explained the inner workings of Cascade Server and Spectate, including the advantage of storing content in small, flexible chunks, and shared their vision for smarter personalization based on customer journey data. Though originally designed for higher education, the company has been gaining traction in new verticals. According to Liendgens and Wagner, the CMS is a good fit for any organization that values self-sufficiency and needs to manage multiple, decentralized sites. Based on reviews and ratings contributed by end-users to TrustRadius, Cascade Server is a Top Rated CMS product for mid-size companies and enterprises. Cascade Server was also featured in our recent CMS Feature Report, which compares user feedback and company and customer demographics across eight leading CMS products. Could you give me an introduction into Hannon Hill’s overall vision and positioning? Kat: Hannon Hill was founded in 2001 by David Cummings, CEO of Atlanta Ventures. Our core product offerings are Cascade Server, a content management system, and Spectate, a content marketing tool. David started developing Cascade Server while he was student at Duke University. He designed the CMS with higher education […]

We heard from Igor Polevoy, President of ExpressPigeon, about ExpressPigeon’s custom integrations, deep personalization, and unique combination of email marketing and transactional email features–differentiators from competitors like ExactTarget, SendGrid, and MailChimp. Polevoy explains how ExpressPigeon, as a recent entrant in the space, has learned from the limitations and successes of older email service providers (ESPs). The company’s focus is now on providing boutique email services that meet the complex demands of B2B corporations. Who are you as a company, what’s your mission, and what is your value proposition? On the surface, we are a typical email service provider. We have tools for users to log in, create messages, send, and run reports. If you dig deeper, though, we are more of a boutique ESP; our tools allow users to produce high quality work very fast. We also take care and pride in our responsive, compatible messages. This is something that an ESP should do, but very few other providers are actually capable of producing a message that is compatible with different browsers and responsive across different devices. We also combine marketing email and transactional email capabilities, which very few ESPs do. Think about MailChimp and SendGrid—we’re two mass email communication services under the same roof. The other differentiator is that we are a […]

At Dreamforce we talked with Paul Rudwall, Director of Product Marketing at Invoca, about marketers’ blind spot in the customer journey. According to Rudwall, the rise of mobile has created a surge in phone calls, which are not properly linked to the mobile internet research preceding the calls. Tracking this journey is crucial, if marketers want to understand which touch points are driving conversion.  Rudwall describes how customers are using Invoca to tie online activity to phone calls—intelligence they use to drive high-converting leads for sales.   Give us a little introduction—who are you as a company, and how did you personally come to work with Invoca? Before Invoca, I worked with Responsys, so digital marketing is my forte. But finding Invoca was a light bulb moment. At Responsys, I had worked with huge companies who invest millions of dollars every day to drive demand for their product, and you might be surprised by how many conversions still happens over the phone. Before buyers make a big purchase of a complex product, like a cable or satellite subscription, life insurance or software, they want to talk to a real person. Tools like Responsys, ExactTarget, Kenshoo, and Marin are not focused on how phone calls fit into the […]

The sales software category is red hot right now as companies try to apply best practices and technology to improve prospecting effectiveness and efficiency. The category has attracted a lot of investment capital and competition is intensifying.  I caught up with Nick Hedges, President and CEO of Velocify® at the Dreamforce conference to learn more about their offerings and approach to the market. Velocify is a provider of cloud-based sales software, designed for high-velocity sales environments. It has two core products – Velocify Pulse for companies using Salesforce.com and LeadManager for those that do not use Salesforce.  Its primary focus is on accelerating lead response, optimizing sales practice to boost conversion, and prioritizing sales activities. Velocify is reviewed on TrustRadius by users here What’s the founding story of Velocify and how did you get to this point? The business has changed quite a lot over time. We got our start in the financial services industry. About 11 years ago, many financial services companies, particularly in the mortgage industry, were buying a lot of leads. It was an exploding vertical, growing really fast. Companies were growing really quickly but not building marketing capabilities. They had been buying leads from Lending Tree, for […]

  FinancialForce.com is a cloud applications company built on the Salesforce.com platform. Their apps include accounting and billing, PSA, ERP, HCM, inventory management, and SRP. At the Dreamforce conference, TrustRadius talked with Tom Brennan, SVP of Marketing, about the relationship between accounting and customer success management, the company’s recent funding, and the R&D advantage of working with the Salesforce platform, which Brennan sees as “winning the platform race.” How did FinancialForce.com get started, and where is the company now? The company started in 2009, with an investment from Salesforce and Unit4. Initially, the idea was to break down barriers between what Salesforce does, in the front office, with everything that goes on in the back office like accounting. FinancialForce.com’s main value is that front and back office apps are now on the same platform. For users that means one login, one set of workflow tools, and one set of reporting tools. From a data point of view, there’s only one customer record, so the information they put in Salesforce is the same they bill, invoice, and collect cash against as well. Companies have only one set of data to use for reporting; it greatly simplifies the business as a result. We started in the accounting space and then added professional […]

According to Ian Walsh, CMO, TrackMaven’s approach to marketing analytics is helping content marketers drastically increase engagement. Walsh explained how TrackMaven’s metrics aim to help content marketers focus in on what’s working–both in terms of their own content and their competitors’ content. TrackMaven is a competitive marketing analysis platform, aggregating and presenting competitor marketing activity and content marketing via a feed and offering it for comparison to one’s own campaign.  Tell me about TrackMaven—what do you do and what is your vision? Basically, TrackMaven is a marketing analytics software platform. We call ourselves competitive intelligence for digital marketers. At the highest level, we help companies create better content for their content marketing. We do that by analyzing the impact that our customer’s content is having in the marketplace. Not social listening or the voice of customer but actually looking at the content and messages that our customers are putting in the market across various different digital channels, and looking at what’s working, what’s not? What’s driving the most engagement with channel metrics? We do that for their competitors as well as for the customers themselves. This really helps them benchmark their performance relative to their competition. This means understanding how well they’re performing on different channels and different topics […]