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10 B2B Sales Closing Techniques for 2026
10 B2B Sales Closing Techniques for 2026 Sales 11 min Updated: July 21, 2026 “How hard can you push a client to close a deal?” It’s still the wrong question, and it’s gotten more wrong since we first wrote this guide. Gartner’s 2026 buyer research found that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, and buyers now weigh an average of seven different information sources that includes AI tools. All this happens before a rep is meaningfully involved at all. A tactic designed to manufacture agreement doesn’t land well on a buyer who’s already done most of the homework and has little patience for anything that feels like a script. That doesn’t mean closing techniques stopped mattering. It means what “closing well” looks like has changed. 69% of buyers still turn to sales reps specifically to validate AI-generated insights. The seller’s role has shifted from primary source of information to source of validation and confidence at the specific moments a buyer actually needs it. Buyers who combine self-directed research with the right rep interaction at the right moment are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal than buyers who go fully independent. Marty OvermanEVP of Americas Sales, Darktrace You don’t necessarily need a salesperson anymore. You need a sense maker who can help buyers make sense of all the data and information available to them. This guide keeps the techniques that hold up under that shift and replaces the ones that don’t. Get our latest insights into your inbox Why Old-School Closing Tactics Backfire Buying committees have gotten bigger and more skeptical. Gartner puts the average B2B deal at 6 to 10 stakeholders, with enterprise deals reaching 17 or more. The average B2B win rates have fallen to roughly 20%, with sales cycles running 38% longer than in 2021. There are more people in the room, more independent research happening before you’re in it, and less tolerance for anything that feels like pressure rather than partnership. The techniques below are built around that reality: buyers who are already informed, skeptical of scripts, and looking for a rep who reduces their risk rather than one who’s trying to manufacture urgency. The 10 B2B Sales Closing Techniques 1. Lead with their goals, not your script For senior buyers, the decision is close to binary: your product either meets a specific goal or it doesn’t. Consultative selling i.e. diagnosing the real problem before proposing anything remains the technique most aligned with what buyers actually want; multiple 2026 studies cite a strong majority of B2B buyers wanting sales reps to act primarily as advisors rather than pitchers. To do this well: Look past the sales script and ICP data. Ask what the actual person in front of you is trying to accomplish this year. Use the language they use to describe the problem, not your own terminology. Ask specifically, and early: “What does success on this initiative actually look like for you?” 2. Don’t lead with a discount Asking about goals is also how you qualify a deal. A buyer with a clear, time-bound initiative and no objective evaluation criteria yet is a very different conversation than one already comparing vendors on price. If a buyer pushes for a discount before you’ve established value, start from a position of value, not concession. And never offer a discount before it’s asked for. Buyers in 2026 are broadly more cautious with spend than in prior years. A rep who leads with price signals that price is the only thing worth discussing. 3. Use competitor comparisons as an opening, not a threat Buyers increasingly already know a competitor’s weaknesses before they talk to you. Independent research (reviews, analyst coverage, peer communities) surfaces vendor gaps that used to only come out in a sales conversation. Assume that, rather than trying to extract it. Ask directly: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how well is [current tool] actually working for you?” Listen for where the gap is, then ask what would need to be true for it to be a 10. Use their own words to describe the gap, and confirm understanding before moving on. The goal is accuracy, not a gotcha. 4. Lead with a mutual action plan, sized to the real buying committee A mutual action plan maps out who needs to do what to close the deal, with dates attached. This matters more now than it did a few years ago, since the buying committee it needs to account for has grown. A MAP built for a single buyer doesn’t hold up against a committee that size. Cover three things explicitly: the realistic timeframe to close, what it costs both sides (due diligence, procurement, compliance), and who’s actually involved on each side. Send a written summary after the conversation and ask them to confirm it. That alone tells you a lot about how seriously the deal is being treated internally. 5. Use “we,” not “you,” when the stakes are shared A small technique, but a real one: replacing “you” with “we” when describing a shared goal (“we’re both trying to hit this timeline”) does more to build genuine partnership than most rapport scripts. It only works if it’s true. Use it when you’re actually aligned on an outcome, not as a rhetorical trick layered on top of a pitch. 6. Run a premortem before you ask for the close Before pushing a deal to the next stage, assume it’s six months from now and it falls apart. Work backward from there. Why did it fail? Did the champion lose internal support? Did budget get reallocated in Q3? Did a new stakeholder join and froze the decision? This technique, borrowed from research psychology and increasingly cited in latest sales research, surfaces risks of a straightforward “any concerns?” question often misses, because it forces specificity instead of a polite “no, we’re good.” 7. Make the close easy, but only once the signals say it’s earned An assumptive close (“Would you prefer to start
12 Best Revenue Intelligence Platforms for 2026
12 Best Revenue Intelligence Tools for 2026 RevOps 15 min Updated: July 21, 2026 Revenue intelligence uses AI to capture and analyze customer interaction data like emails, calls, and meetings across sales, marketing, and customer success. It turns raw activity into insight you can act on, throws light on which deals are actually healthy, which reps need coaching, and where the pipeline is quietly leaking. For most of this category’s history, revenue intelligence fed a human decision-maker who applied judgment before acting on what the data said. Increasingly, that same data now feeds AI agents that directly update CRM fields, flag risks, and trigger workflows with a lot less human judgment sitting between the insight and the action. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026. That raises what “good revenue intelligence” needs to mean: not just insight a person can use, but data clean enough for an agent to act on without making things worse. Get our latest insights into your inbox What Is Revenue Intelligence? Revenue intelligence is a data-backed, AI-driven approach to understanding and forecasting revenue. It pulls raw interaction data from across your revenue functions like sales, marketing, customer success, and turns it into insight: which deals are trending toward close, which are stalling, and what a rep should actually do next. How Revenue Intelligence Platforms Create Impact 1. It integrates siloed data Most organizations have sales, marketing, and customer success data trapped in separate systems. Revenue intelligence pulls it into a single, continuously updated source of truth rather than treating data cleanup as a one-time project. Rosalyn Santa ElenaFounder, The RevOps Collective I have seen a lot of companies try to clean up their data through third parties as a one-time event. But you can’t approach your data as a one-time action. It’s an ongoing and iterative process. 2. It closes the gap between what’s logged and what actually happened A large share of buyer-seller activity never makes it into the CRM at all. Meetings go unlogged, or nobody adds key stakeholders as a contact. Revenue intelligence automates that capture instead of relying on reps to remember. 3. It surfaces deal risk before it’s a lost deal Multithreading gaps, stalled engagement, missing buying-committee coverage are all visible in interaction data well before they show up as a lost opportunity in the pipeline report. 4. It improves rep coaching Instead of an interrogation-style deal review, revenue intelligence gives managers specific, data-backed coaching moments like this deal has gone quiet, or this rep hasn’t engaged the economic buyer, rather than generic advice. 5. It drives more predictable revenue As much as 80% of sales organizations miss the mark on revenue forecasting by 25% or more. The primary underlying reason is dirty data. Without an accurate forecast, your teams won’t have any direction for revenue strategies. Using revenue intelligence, you can create quality forecasts to help your team budget, strategize business growth, set long-term goals, and secure funding. Also, given their use of AI, your forecasts are void of bias resulting from less manual intervention. Asia CorbettSenior RevOps Manager, GTM, Bread Financial If you don’t have good data, you can’t forecast. If you can’t forecast, you can’t build a scalable and repeatable sales motion. You don’t know what your pipeline is going to be, or what money is going to come in. 12 Best Revenue Intelligence Tools for 2026 Nektar: GTM data foundation and AI signal layer Salesforce CRM Analytics: native Salesforce analytics and predictive insights HubSpot Sales Hub: CRM and sales engagement for HubSpot-native teams ZoomInfo Chorus: conversation intelligence backed by B2B data Xactly: revenue intelligence tied to incentive compensation Mediafly Intelligence360 (formerly InsightSquared): revenue analytics and forecasting Revenue.io (formerly ringDNA): sales engagement and conversation guidance Kluster: forecasting and pipeline process standardization Salesloft: sales engagement, now part of Clari + Salesloft Akoonu (RevWorks): native Salesforce forecasting and pipeline intelligence Cien: AI-driven sales performance analytics Aviso AI: agentic forecasting and revenue execution Overview of the 12 Best Revenue Intelligence Tools 1. Nektar Nektar is the GTM telemetry platform that automatically captures every customer interaction and delivers clean data to your CRM, data warehouse, and AI applications, all with zero manual entry or adoption friction. It makes Salesforce safe for AI execution. As more of your GTM stack, be it Agentforce, Clari, your own AI agents, starts acting on CRM data autonomously, the CRM has to be complete and correct, continuously, or every agent built on top of it inherits the error. Nektar flows this valuable data directly into core business systems like Salesforce, Snowflake, Claude and your entire stack, ensuring customer insights are accessible across all GTM teams & downstream AI initiatives. Pankaj GHead of GTM Systems, Nektar Nektar solved our biggest CRM data problem: incomplete and inconsistent activity data in Salesforce. Contacts were missing from opportunities, engagement history was spotty, and any report built on activity data was unreliable. Now activities flow into Salesforce automatically and land on the right accounts and opportunities, with contacts created and linked as opportunity contact roles without anyone touching a keyboard. Notable features: zero-rep-effort capture, buying-group intelligence, Time Travel™ retroactive correction, Daisy AI signal library (39 signals across 8 categories), vendor-neutral integration alongside your existing sales stack. Pricing: Custom, based on team size and scope. A free CRM scan will show how much of your own pipeline activity is currently missing. 2. Salesforce CRM Analytics Salesforce CRM Analytics (formerly Einstein Analytics, then Tableau CRM) remains Salesforce’s native analytics layer: predictive insights and next-best-action recommendations embedded directly in the flow of Salesforce work. It’s evolved to connect with Data Cloud and Tableau Next, positioning it as part of Salesforce’s broader agentic analytics push rather than a standalone BI tool. Notable features: predictive analytics natively embedded in Salesforce, Slack integration for surfaced insights, inherited Salesforce security and governance, connection to Data Cloud for agentic use cases. Pricing: Tiered by edition; the Revenue Intelligence-focused package has historically run around $200/user/month confirm current pricing directly with
Backstory (formerly People.ai) Alternatives: 10 Options for 2026
Backstory (formerly People.ai) Alternatives: 10 Options for 2026 Product 11 min Updated: July 20, 2026 People.ai rebranded to Backstory in April 2026, repositioning itself from an activity-capture platform into what it now calls a “Revenue Answers Platform” which is a conversational AI layer that reasons over captured activity data to answer natural-language questions about deal and account health. Same underlying company, same core capture technology, a meaningfully different pitch. That rebrand is also a useful marker for something bigger that’s happened across this entire category since the original version of this list. Every tool built in the last decade for “capture activity, show a dashboard” is now being measured against a different bar: can it feed an AI agent that acts on that data directly, not just a human reading a report. That’s the lens this update applies to all ten entries below. Get our latest insights into your inbox What Is Backstory (formerly People.ai)? Backstory automatically captures sales activity like emails, meetings, and calls, and structures it against CRM records. What’s new since the April 2026 rebrand is a conversational interface layered on top: instead of navigating dashboards, users can ask natural-language questions about deal or account health and get an AI-generated answer reasoning over the captured activity. Worth knowing before you evaluate it: a conversational layer is only as reliable as the data it’s reasoning over. Read detailed feature comparison Comparing Nektar & Backstory (People.ai)? Top Backstory / People.ai Alternatives for 2026 1. Nektar Nektar GTM telemetry platform that automatically captures every customer interaction and delivers clean data to your CRM, data warehouse, and AI applications, with zero manual entry or adoption friction. Unlike tools that lock your data in proprietary interfaces, Nektar acts as revenue signals infrastructure: capturing emails, meetings, calls, and Slack, then piping structured intelligence into Salesforce, Snowflake, Claude, and your entire stack. Data Foundation automatically captures every email, meeting, call, and calendar event and writes it natively into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Dynamics — zero rep effort, live in under two weeks. Time Travel retroactively corrects historical records as new context arrives, closing a gap no point-in-time capture tool (including Backstory) can touch. Daisy AI then surfaces 39 signals across categories like buyer visibility, deal risk, and rep performance directly on the Salesforce Opportunity tab. Key features: Zero-rep-effort capture across email, calendar, meetings, and calls Time Travel retroactive correction: up to 12 months of historical backfill Daisy AI signal library across buyer visibility, deal risk, and forecast-relevant flags Vendor-neutral as it sits alongside your existing sales stack rather than replacing it Best for: Salesforce-first enterprise teams that need CRM data reliable enough for AI agents to act on directly, not just a cleaner dashboard. 2. SetSail (now part of ZoomInfo) SetSail was acquired by ZoomInfo in 2024 and now operates within ZoomInfo’s broader platform rather than as an independent company. It still functions as an AI-powered sales data layer capturing activity across email, calendar, and call transcripts and surfacing the specific rep behaviors that correlate with winning deals, plus incentive mechanics to reinforce them. Key features: automated activity capture across email, calendar, and calls; behavioral pattern analysis tied to deal outcomes; MEDDPICC-style meeting-prep summaries; incentive and gamification layer for reinforcing winning behaviors. Best for: Teams already invested in the ZoomInfo ecosystem wanting behavioral analytics layered on top of activity capture. 3. Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) EAC remains Salesforce’s native tool for syncing email and calendar activity into Salesforce records. It’s a reasonable baseline for teams that want activity visibility without adding a third-party vendor, though it lacks the AI-driven signal layer — deal risk scoring, buyer engagement analysis — that dedicated revenue intelligence tools build on top of similar capture data. Key features: captures email and calendar events from Microsoft or Google accounts, logs activity to the Salesforce timeline, native to Salesforce with no separate vendor relationship required. Best for: Teams wanting basic activity capture natively inside Salesforce without additional AI features or vendor cost. 4. MatchMyEmail MatchMyEmail automates email and calendar logging into Salesforce, working with any email client or host rather than requiring a specific inbox provider. It’s a narrower, lighter-weight tool than most others on this list — no AI signal layer, just reliable, automated capture. Key features: automatic email and calendar capture, permanent storage of historical communication data, compatible with any email client. Best for: Teams wanting straightforward, dependable activity logging without a broader intelligence platform attached. 5. Revenue Grid Revenue Grid combines activity capture with guided-selling and forecasting features — 360-degree pipeline visibility, forecast-to-actual comparison, and revenue signals aimed at improving process consistency across a sales team. Key features: 360-degree pipeline visibility, forecast accuracy tracking, guided-selling signals embedded in Salesforce. Best for: Teams wanting activity capture bundled with broader guided-selling and forecasting tools in one product. 6. Aviso AI Aviso’s forecasting engine is now paired with MIKI, a conversational orchestrator that can query pipeline data and trigger CRM updates directly, alongside a library of 50+ pre-built revenue agents and a no-code studio for building custom agentic workflows. Key features: MIKI conversational AI orchestrator, predictive forecasting, 50+ pre-built revenue agents, no-code agent workflow builder. Best for: Teams wanting AI agents built directly into forecasting and pipeline execution, not just activity capture with a chat interface layered on top. 7. Collective[i] Collective[i] has repositioned itself around what it now calls “applications and agents” for sales forecasting and CRM optimization, explicitly framing its mission around helping organizations “operate with the speed and precision required to compete in an AI-first world.” Underneath the updated positioning, its core capability remains automated activity capture combined with AI-driven forecasting and opportunity scoring. Key features: AI-driven forecasting and opportunity-win probability, automated activity and contact capture into CRM, professional-network intelligence for surfacing warm relationship paths. Best for: Teams wanting forecasting and relationship-network intelligence combined in one platform. 8. LinkPoint360 LinkPoint360 focuses specifically on email integration for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics — one-click email logging, custom object and field detection, and client-side deployment for teams with stricter data-residency requirements.
RevOps Starter Guide – Building a Successful RevOps Roadmap
RevOps Starter Guide – Building a Successful RevOps Roadmap RevOps 15 min Updated: July 20, 2026 Consider a soccer game. We know the key parts of a team are the players and the coach. If we’re to draw a comparison, “sales” is the striker, while “RevOps” is the coach that analyzes, strategizes, and develops the game plan to win more games. In the real world, RevOps helps your organization run an interconnected business. It streamlines the end-to-end revenue process and GTM functions. It, consequently, breaks down operational silos and improves efficiency and predictability. Businesses today understand what RevOps is better than ever, and adoption has followed. A 2026 survey of over 1,200 B2B companies found 78% now have a dedicated RevOps function, up from 48% in 2023 and 30% in 2021. RevOps has gone from an emerging bet to close to the default operating model for B2B companies with real growth ambitions. With data’s growing significance and an increasingly complex tech stack, organizations are relying on RevOps to maximize revenue generation by strategically removing sales roadblocks. And align the entire organization towards a single goal – revenue generation. That’s where a RevOps roadmap comes in. If you don’t know how a RevOps roadmap helps, let the expert rein you in. We spoke to Briana Yarborough on The Revenue Lounge podcast to find out what is a RevOps framework and how businesses can create one. Briana is a seasoned RevOps leader and co-founder of a RevOps solution in development. She serves as an advisor and executive leader for several high-growth startups. She’s also an active thought leader of RevOps in multiple communities and was recognized as one of the Top 25 trailblazers in the space. Look at the full discussion below and keep reading to know more about building a revenue operations roadmap. What is a RevOps Roadmap? A RevOps roadmap, in its simplest form, is a strategic visualization of your team’s upcoming projects. For leaders, it’s a goal-oriented tool communicating the clear scope of activities and outlining how these activities tie back to revenue. It enables managers to align the team and focus on activities that maximize the value of converting prospects to buyers. For reps, it is a source of truth to highlight “what” work is being done and “why.” Briana YarboroughVP, RevOps at Pontoon Solutions Revenue operations is about aligning the entire organization across the customer’s life cycle. A RevOps roadmap can be followed seamlessly when everyone on the team understands it. Therefore, it’s important to get these 5 attributes right when creating an effective roadmap: Strategic: Focus areas and strategies Simple: Short, crisp, and visual Goal-oriented: Key deliverables and activities Easy to communicate: No jargon, straightforward Collaborative: Cross-functional cooperation Get our latest insights into your inbox A RevOps Roadmap Clears The Path To Revenue Success Adding a strategic layer of RevOps to your Go-to-market functions connects all activities which otherwise exist separately in a vacuum. Here are some key reasons why you need a RevOps framework: 1. Prioritization One of the primary benefits of having a RevOps roadmap is giving teams the necessary visibility. They can prioritize high-impact projects and focus on those that positively affect revenue. Teams can avoid off-plan requests that distract them from hitting predictable targets. Additionally, it doesn’t let your weekly meetings run in divergent directions based on unhinged queries from Sales or Marketing teams. 2. Alignment A GTM alignment is possible when teams improve buying experience by breaking down cross-functional silos. Through sales and marketing alignment, the RevOps roadmap serves as a single source of truth to unify people, processes, and platforms. This alignment drives full-funnel accountability and helps you grasp inconsistencies and develop a baseline for improvement. Mark HudsonPrincipal Consultant, RevOps Consulting LLC Without a roadmap, your path to success is fraught with dangers, and you do not have a clear sense of direction and can make a wrong turn or fail to reach your destination. 3. Understanding A roadmap helps you dive deeply into the “why” behind revenue generation activities, including business goals and supporting resources. Start as early as you possible can, even if you have a one-person team. You can understand what your priorities are and then begin to earmark things to accomplish in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Briana YarboroughVP, RevOps at Pontoon Solutions It provides clear definitions for and sets up the priority of each project, timeline, and initiative to measure progress effectively. Simultaneously, a RevOps roadmap restricts confusion among different departments. Also, a roadmap empowers leaders to develop a vision for the business and ensure a solid system is in place to make this reality. Now that you know what a RevOps roadmap is, are you inspired to build one for your business yet? Let us help. Creating a Successful RevOps Roadmap You can strategically and tactically achieve the roadmap to a successful RevOps plan with several key steps and considerations in place. For beginners, it’s best to start with the 4 primary phases. But remember – a RevOps roadmap will differ for each organization based on its maturity stage and resources. You can’t truly start to just come in and do what worked at another company. Every business model is different; every organization is different. If you don’t have the context, you can’t implement (the RevOps roadmap). Briana YarboroughVP, RevOps at Pontoon Solutions For this blog, we’ll dive into a summarized version of a beginner’s RevOps framework. Phase 1: Discover Research is pivotal in understanding the problems in relevant operational areas before solving them. The initial analysis, aka discovery, seeks to lay down the “state of play” before designing the roadmap. Discovery presents a comprehensive awareness of stakeholder expectations and gaps in the customer journey, starting with a thorough audit. Use these questions to set the direction of your roadmap for stakeholders: Does each team clearly understand what they’re working on? How does the team determine the next best steps? Can each operational initiative be mapped back to a gap felt by customers? Is
5 Ways Siloed Data is Burning Your Revenue
5 Ways Siloed Data is Burning Your Revenue RevOps 12 min Updated: July 20, 2026 There are plenty of visible reasons revenue underperforms. A slow quarter, a competitive loss, a stalled deal. Most of those show up somewhere in a QBR deck. Siloed data rarely does, and it’s usually a bigger problem than any of them. In MuleSoft’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark, surveying 1,050 IT leaders, 90% respondents said data silos are creating business challenges for their organization. This has risen to 94% among companies actively using AI agents. Gartner has long pegged the average cost of poor data quality at $12.9 million a year per organization; more recent Gartner research adds a sharper, more current number on top of it: 60% of AI projects are expected to be abandoned through 2026 due to data that isn’t ready for AI to use. Siloed data isn’t a new problem. What’s new is what it’s now blocking. Get our latest insights into your inbox What Is Siloed Data? Siloed data is information from revenue-generating activity in sales, marketing, customer success departments that’s trapped in disconnected systems. These activities are visible to the team that owns it and effectively invisible to everyone else. Marketing builds strategy on data sales never sees. Sales logs activity customer success has no visibility into. Each team optimizes its own numbers because that’s the only complete picture available to it. This is exactly the gap revenue operations exists to close. But RevOps as a function can only align teams around data that’s actually complete and shared in the first place. How Data Silos Form Three forces reliably create them: Siloed incentives – When sales, marketing, and customer success are measured on separate goals, they optimize for those goals rather than the shared outcome. Misalignment between sales and marketing specifically has been estimated to cost businesses over $1 trillion annually, a figure that’s been widely cited since a 2021 HBR analysis and, if anything, undersells the problem now that buying committees and tech stacks have both grown since then. Cultural resistance – Legacy systems persist because switching feels riskier than staying, even when staying is quietly more expensive. Teams that don’t have a shared data culture struggle to turn the data they do have into anything actionable. Tech stack sprawl – MuleSoft’s 2026 research found the average organization now runs 957 applications, up from 897 the year before. And only 27% of them are actually integrated. Organizations already using AI agents run even more: 1,103 applications on average, 45% more than organizations without agents. More tools, adopted faster than they’re connected, is the direct mechanical cause of most data silos. 5 Ways Siloed Data Is Damaging Your Revenue 1. Missed business opportunities When teams default to protecting their own data rather than sharing it, prospecting and pipeline nurturing both suffer. A lead handed from marketing to sales without the context behind it is a colder lead than the data actually supports. Internal competition for credit compounds the problem: teams optimize for defending their own numbers rather than looking for revenue opportunities that fall between them. 2. A worse customer experience Disconnected touch points mean sales often can’t see where a prospect actually is in their journey, leading to repetitive conversations, generic follow-ups, and a buyer who has to re-explain their situation to every new person they talk to. It also distorts cost measurement: when a deal that closed on a call gets attributed to an email instead because the systems don’t talk to each other, marketing’s cost-per-acquisition numbers become unreliable. And decisions get made on top of that unreliable number. 3. Inaccurate revenue forecasts Siloed data means no single leader has the complete picture, and different departments’ partial views rarely reconcile cleanly. The result is a forecast built by stitching together incomplete team-level reports rather than one grounded in what’s actually happening across the full customer journey. This is a large part of why forecast accuracy remains a persistent, well-documented problem across B2B sales organizations. 4. Lower productivity and weaker cross-functional trust Sales and marketing misalignment isn’t just a data problem. It’s a trust problem that compounds over time. When teams can’t see each other’s data, blame-shifting becomes the default response to missed targets, and each function starts optimizing for its own win rather than the business’s. Employees also notice when leadership doesn’t seem to understand how data actually gets used day to day, which corrodes morale in a way that’s hard to trace back to a specific number, but real all the same. 5. Compliance and security exposure Each isolated system typically runs its own security posture, multiplying the number of places a breach or leak can originate. Manually re-entering the same data across disconnected systems. A rep logging the same lead in a spreadsheet and a CRM, for instance, also introduces the kind of error that erodes trust in the numbers even before any compliance issue arises. On the privacy side, the landscape has shifted since this post first published: Google reversed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome in 2024, moving to a user-choice model rather than a full deprecation. Safari and Firefox still block third-party cookies by default, so the underlying trend that first-party data is becoming the more durable, more compliant asset hasn’t changed. Organizations with siloed data are still worse-positioned for this shift than ones with a unified, first-party data strategy, regardless of exactly which browser does what on which timeline. Data Silos in the Agentic AI Era For most of the last decade, a data silo was primarily a coordination cost. Teams making worse decisions because they couldn’t see each other’s information. That’s still true. But MuleSoft’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark surfaces a sharper problem: 50% of AI agents currently operate in isolated silos, disconnected from any cohesive multi-agent system, and 86% of IT leaders agree that without proper integration, AI agents introduce more complexity than value rather than less. Only 54% of organizations have a centralized governance framework for the
7 Elements of a Successful Deal Review
7 Elements of a Successful Deal Review RevOps 13 min July 20, 2026 Knowing the ins and outs of your deals is what makes revenue predictable. A good deal review tells you what’s actually happening in your pipeline, where to pivot, and which risks to get ahead of before they cost you the quarter. It’s also one of the most commonly botched rituals in sales. Most deal reviews are unplanned, ad-hoc sessions that interrogate a rep instead of helping them win. The result is the same as it’s always been: inaccurate forecasts, missed targets, and reps who dread the meeting instead of using it. The first question to ask is what’s riding on getting deal reviews right. Before the advent of AI, the data a deal review runs on used to be interpreted by a human. Probably a manager reading a stage field, applying judgment, and catching the obvious gaps. Cut to present times, that same data now feeds AI agents that update opportunity stages, flag deal risk, or trigger next steps directly inside Salesforce, with a lot less human judgment sitting between the data and the action. A deal review built on incomplete data used to produce a bad meeting. Today it can produce a bad decision made by software, at a speed no manager can catch in time. This guide presents a seven-element framework for what a deal review actually needs to look like now. Get our latest insights into your inbox What Is a Deal Review? A deal review is a meeting between a sales manager and a rep about the deals in that rep’s pipeline. It assesses the probability of closing, and agreeing on next-best actions for anything that’s stuck. Done well, it’s a coaching tool. Done badly, it’s an interrogation that produces a status update nobody trusts. What’s Actually Changed The mechanics of a deal review haven’t changed. What has changed is the environment it runs in: Buying committees are bigger, and reps see less of them. Gartner puts the average B2B buying group at 6 to 10 stakeholders, most of whom your rep will never speak to directly, and none of whom show up in Salesforce unless someone manually adds them as a contact. AI agents are now acting on the data a deal review used to just discuss. Salesforce’s April 2026 Headless 360 release made every core Salesforce capability available as an API or MCP tool specifically so agents can read, write, and execute workflows without a human in the loop. When a stage field, a close date, or a forecast category is wrong, it’s no longer just misleading a manager in a Friday pipeline review. It’s potentially misleading an agent that acts on it before anyone notices. The data gap deal reviews have always fought is now measurable at scale. Most CRMs are missing a large share of what actually happens in a deal: meetings that never got logged, stakeholders who were never added, activity that lives in someone’s inbox instead of the opportunity record. That gap used to just make forecasts optimistic. Now it’s the input layer for automated decisions. None of this changes what a good deal review is for. It changes what “good data going into the review” needs to mean. Why You Still Need Deal Reviews Selling has only gotten harder to do by “feel” alone. Longer cycles, bigger buying committees, and more channels for a deal to quietly go sideways all mean a manager’s instinct is a weaker substitute for actual pipeline data than it used to be. Here’s what a deal review still gives you that nothing else does: 1. Identify risks and opportunities early A good deal review surfaces deal risk before it’s a lost deal. It answers questions like which stakeholders have gone quiet, which deals haven’t had a meeting in weeks, or which “commit” deals don’t actually have the engagement to back that up. Sales teams that catch this early can act on it; teams that find out at quarter-close can’t. 2. Align with cross-functional teams Deal reviews often surface why a deal is stuck for reasons the rep alone can’t fix. Maybe it needs a solutions engineer in the next call, a piece of marketing collateral, or executive air cover. A good review turns that into an action item instead of a shrug. 3. Increase rep accountability Every deal review should end with a clear next step for the rep, and a regular cadence to follow up on it. That consistency, not the interrogation, is what actually makes reps more accountable over time. 4. Gain executive support Executive deal reviews are where a rep can borrow leverage they don’t have alone. An exec-to-exec relationship, a strategic sponsorship, a connection nobody on the account team knew existed are few examples. That only works if the review actually surfaces who’s in the room on the buyer’s side, which depends on the buying committee being visible in the first place. 5. Develop sales reps through targeted coaching A deal review tells a manager exactly where a rep needs help, not in the abstract, but on this specific deal, this specific gap. A rep who hasn’t followed up in 30 days needs different coaching than one who’s engaged the wrong stakeholder. Specific coaching, from specific data, is what actually moves a rep’s win rate. Why Most Deal Reviews Still Fail 1. Poor data to begin with This is still the root cause behind most failed deal reviews, and it matters more now than ever. Most organizations’ deal data lives in silos across sales, marketing, and customer success, and a large share of what actually happens in a deal never makes it into the CRM at all. That used to mean a deal review ran on an incomplete picture. Now, with AI agents reading and acting on that same CRM data, an incomplete picture doesn’t just produce a bad meeting. It produces bad automated decisions with nobody checking the work first. 2. No consistent process Deal
5 Revenue Operations Tools to Consider in 2026
5 Revenue Operations Tools to Consider in 2026 RevOps 10 min July 20, 2026 Revenue operations exists to make sales, marketing, and customer success run as one connected system instead of three teams working off different numbers. The software behind that job has to do two things well: give the team accurate, complete data, and turn that data into action without adding more manual work. A growing share of RevOps tooling now includes AI agents that don’t just surface an insight for a person to act on, but they act directly, updating fields, flagging risk, or triggering workflows inside the CRM. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026. That raises the bar for what “revenue operations software” needs to guarantee: not just visibility, but data clean enough for both a human and an agent to trust. Get our latest insights into your inbox What is Revenue Operations? Revenue operations, or RevOps, is the function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success around shared data, shared process, and a shared revenue goal, instead of each team optimizing its own metrics in isolation. Done well, it removes the guesswork from forecasting, shortens the gap between a problem showing up in the data and someone acting on it, and gives leadership one trustworthy view of the business instead of three conflicting ones. 5 Revenue Operations Tools to Consider in 2026 Nektar: GTM data foundation and AI signal layer Backstory (formerly People.ai): AI-driven activity capture and revenue answers SalesDirector.ai (a Bigtincan company): Automated activity capture and revenue insights HubSpot Data Hub (formerly Operations Hub): Data sync and hygiene automation Aviso AI: Agentic forecasting and revenue execution Overview: 5 Tools to Consider for Revenue Operations 1. Nektar Nektar is a GTM telemetry platform that automatically captures every customer interaction like emails, meetings, calls, and Slack, and delivers structured, clean data to your CRM, data warehouse, and AI applications. This requires zero manual entry from sales reps. Nektar ensures that what actually happens across your deals gets recorded. Most CRMs reflect only what reps remember to log. Nektar captures the rest, mapping interactions to the right accounts, contacts, and opportunities, then writing that data natively into Salesforce and Snowflake without any behavior change from the team. For revenue organizations adopting AI, this matters more than ever. AI agents act on CRM data. When that data is incomplete or stale, agents make wrong decisions at machine speed with no human in the loop. Nektar acts as the data foundation that makes AI-driven forecasting, deal intelligence, and agent workflows trustworthy. The platform also surfaces complete buying committees by identifying every stakeholder involved in a deal across email and calendar signals, not just the contacts a rep manually added. This gives RevOps and sales leaders a full picture of deal engagement, not fragments. Pricing: Nektar is priced based on team size and scope rather than a flat per-seat rate. A free, no-obligation CRM scan will show you how much of your own pipeline data is currently missing before you commit to anything. 2. Backstory (formerly People.ai) People.ai rebranded to Backstory in April 2026, repositioning itself as a “Revenue Answers Platform” — reasoning over activity data captured from email, meetings, and calls to answer natural-language questions about deal and account health. The rebrand adds a more conversational interface on top of the same underlying activity-capture approach of the product. Pricing: Not publicly listed as a simple rate card; contact the vendor for a quote. 3. SalesDirector.ai (a Bigtincan company) SalesDirector.ai automates capture of email and calendar activity between reps and buyers, layering on account-health scoring and stakeholder analysis. It’s operated as part of Bigtincan’s sales-enablement suite since a 2023 acquisition, and remains a reasonable fit for teams that want activity capture bundled with broader sales-enablement content and coaching tools. Pricing: Historically started around $29/month per user for the base activity-capture tier; confirm current pricing directly with Bigtincan, since packaging has shifted since the 2023 acquisition 4. HubSpot Data Hub (formerly Operations Hub) HubSpot renamed Operations Hub to Data Hub in 2026 as part of a broader push into data quality and AI-readiness — syncing, cleaning, and standardizing customer data across connected systems for teams running on HubSpot. It remains a strong fit for HubSpot-native RevOps teams and a weaker fit for anyone on Salesforce or a multi-CRM stack, since it’s built to serve HubSpot as the system of record. Pricing: HubSpot’s pricing structure changes often enough that a static table goes stale within months — current tiers run from a free entry point through Professional and Enterprise plans priced in the hundreds to low thousands per month, plus mandatory onboarding fees at the higher tiers. Check HubSpot’s official pricing page for current numbers before budgeting. 5. Aviso ai Aviso has repositioned from a pure forecasting tool into an agentic RevOps platform built around MIKI, a conversational orchestrator that can query pipeline data and trigger CRM updates directly, alongside a library of 50+ pre-built revenue agents and a no-code studio for building custom agent workflows. Pricing: Quote-based; contact Aviso directly. RevOps Tools Compared Why Use Revenue Operations Software The case for RevOps tooling hasn’t changed much in substance, even as the tools themselves have: More revenue. Companies with a dedicated RevOps function report meaningful revenue gains, largely from removing the friction between what sales, marketing, and CS each know about an account. Less manual work. Automating data capture and hygiene frees reps and RevOps analysts from reconciling spreadsheets and chasing missing CRM fields. Real visibility. Centralized, complete data lets teams spot problems — a declining conversion rate, a stalling deal, a churn risk — before they show up in a quarterly report. Better cross-functional alignment. Shared data removes the arguments about whose numbers are right, which is usually the real blocker to sales and marketing working well together. Frequently Asked Questions Q. What’s the difference between RevOps software and a CRM? A CRM stores contact and deal records that a rep
A 30-60-90 Day Guide for First-Time Directors of RevOps
A 30-60-90 Day Guide for First-Time Directors of Revenue Operations RevOps 10 min Updated: July 17, 2026 Starting a new job as a Director of Revenue Operations is an exciting opportunity to make a significant impact on a company’s revenue growth. To ensure success in this role, it’s essential to have a strategic plan that guides your actions during the crucial first three months. Here’s a 30-60-90 day plan that will help you strategically manage revenue operations and drive sustainable growth. We recently spoke to Hassan Irshad, Director of RevOps at FEVTutor. He shared his approach to this powerful framework, demonstrating how each phase (30, 60, and 90 days) builds strategically upon the last to deliver alignment, trust, and sustained improvement. By breaking down complex goals into achievable milestones, the 30-60-90 day approach empowers RevOps leaders to initiate meaningful change without overwhelming teams. For all the RevOps leaders, it’s a way to approach change with purpose, driving measurable impact and laying the groundwork for long-term success. The 30-60–90 day framework must be an indispensable tool and here is how you can implement progressive, sustainable growth strategies from day one. Get our latest insights into your inbox First 30 days for a Director of Revenue Operations The purpose should be to gather insights and understand the organization, especially the needs and challenges of different teams. 1. Goals for first 30 days: Meet Key Stakeholders Meet with cross departmental teams like Finance, HR, and Sales to understand their goals, challenges, and priorities. Document Everything Create a “lay of the land” document summarizing findings on different team goals, challenges, and processes. Hassan IrshadHead of Revenue Operations, Unify Whoever you work with, like finance, HR, not only your standard stakeholders, you want to understand where they are, what drives them, what their priorities are. What are they looking for as short-term and long-term goals? Understand their pain points, which is going to dictate how your next 60 to 90 days’ work will be. So a lot of the discovery work happens then. Create a document, something I call “lay off the land” document. Understand the Product Take product demos, listen to sales calls, and use tools that show how the product is sold. This helps in understanding the customer needs better. Dive into Your CRM Understand your CRM (whether Salesforce or HubSpot) to assess how the data is organized. This is to check whether it’s easy to use, and identify immediate improvements. The CRM should be the central source of truth, with other tools supporting it. The data should be unified with easier adoption for the teams. Build Trust Internally Establish trust within your teams by listening carefully, asking questions about how RevOps can help, and addressing quick fixes to show you’re there to help. Having this trust shows them that you’re here to support their success. Quick wins, such as small fixes that make people’s jobs easier, helps in establishing credibility early. 2. Establish Clear KPIs: Understanding Team KPIs It is important to ask you stakeholders about the KPIs that matter to understand their goals and what their expectations are. Aligning KPIs Across Teams Different departments oftentimes work in silos. RevOps should strive to align these departments and check if these KPIs match the overall business objectives. Gaps must be closed if their KPIs don’t align. Setting RevOps KPIs As you approach the end of the first 30 days, start establishing RevOps-specific KPIs that match company goals, which may involve metrics like revenue increase, conversion rates, or improvements in overall efficiency. 3. Tech Stack Audit Deep dive into the existing tools that your company is using. Identify all redundancies, and find opportunities to streamline the entire tech stack. Map Out Tools Compile a list of all tools used by teams, noting their purpose and how they work with the CRM. Evaluate Use and Cost Determine if tools are actively used or if there are duplicates. Look for cost-saving opportunities by consolidating tools when possible. Next 30 days – Alignment and Control The next 30 days marks a shift from discovery to alignment. The goals should be to create cohesion between departments (e.g., Sales, Marketing) and laying down effective controls. The improvements need to be implemented without overwhelming the teams. This phase combines further exploration with actionable improvements with the primary task being bringing the teams into sync. Hassan IrshadHead of Revenue Operations, Unify One of the core things that I feel like revenue operations need is that trust between the go-to-market teams and saying, yes, you are here and you’re going to help us achieve our goals. That requires trust. No one’s going to come in and say, yeah, all of your system is bad; let me just remove it, create something new. That doesn’t really create the trust building part. So what I try to do is listen. 1. Ways to bring your teams together Encouraging cross-team collaboration by addressing silos and ensuring all teams work toward shared quarterly or company-wide goals. By creating alignment, you help teams see RevOps as a support system rather than an enforcer. This keeps communication channels open and creates buy-in. Based on your findings, introduce controls wherever needed to improve workflow. Example: If close dates aren’t being recorded properly, this could skew reports. Meet with sales, identify the root cause (e.g., manual data entry that is taking too much of a reps’ time), and provide solutions or tools to make their tasks easier. Ensure that controls are practical and developed with the trust built in the first 30 days. Foster internal consensus within teams so that these improvements are adopted seamlessly. 2. Navigate Organizational Politics Barrier Removal Larger organizations may have internal politics or ingrained processes that resist change. Find an internal “sponsor” who trusts and supports RevOps initiatives and can authorize actions to navigate any resistance. Trust and Consistency As you implement changes, make sure your efforts consistently demonstrate how RevOps can make work easier and more efficient for everyone. 3. Evolving the Tech
13 Best Revenue Forecast Tools for 2026
13 Best Revenue Forecast Tools for 2026 RevOps 11 min July 17, 2026 Forecast accuracy has been a stubborn problem for as long as there’s been a quota to hit. Most RevOps teams have lived through the gap between the number in the forecast deck and the number that actually closes, and the tools in this category all exist to shrink that gap. This list keeps to forecasting platforms genuinely built around pipeline prediction, deal-risk scoring, and forecast accuracy. Get our latest insights into your inbox What Is Revenue Forecasting? Revenue forecasting is the process of predicting future revenue based on historical data, current pipeline, and market conditions. It’s how a business turns “how much did we sell last quarter” into “how much should we plan to sell next quarter.” It helps RevOps and finance teams decide where to allocate budget, headcount, and resources with some confidence in the number. The mechanics haven’t changed much: gather historical data, identify the factors that actually drive revenue (leading indicators like pipeline conversion rate and engagement), build a model, and continuously validate it against what actually closes. What’s changed is what “the data” means. A forecast model built on CRM data with incomplete contact and activity records is still just a confident guess. No algorithm fixes an input problem, however good the model on top of it is. Why Forecasting Accuracy Is Still Hard Forecasting has always been difficult, but the reasons have shifted since the last version of this list: Data completeness, not just data volume. Most CRMs are missing a large share of the activity that actually happened in a deal. Examples include meetings that never got logged, or stakeholders who were never added as contacts. A forecast model can only be as accurate as the pipeline data it’s built on. AI agents are now acting on forecast data, not just displaying it. Where a forecasting dashboard used to be something a RevOps leader read and interpreted, more of that data now feeds directly into agents that flag risk, reprioritize pipeline, or trigger workflows. There is less human judgment sitting between the data and the action. Market and buying-committee volatility. Longer sales cycles and larger buying committees mean more stakeholders whose engagement (or disengagement) can shift a deal’s trajectory without ever showing up as a stage change in the CRM. 13 Best Revenue Forecast Tools for 2026 Nektar: CRM data foundation that forecasting tools depend on Aviso AI: agentic forecasting and revenue execution Anaplan: enterprise financial and revenue planning Cien: AI-driven sales performance analytics Kluster: forecasting process standardization ZoomInfo Chorus: conversation intelligence backed by B2B data MadKudu: predictive lead and account scoring Celonis: process mining for sales-cycle bottlenecks Fullcast: territory, quota, and capacity planning Gryphon.ai: compliant call analytics and activity tracking SalesDirector.ai (Bigtincan): activity capture and revenue insights Upland Altify: account planning and opportunity management Vortini: forecasting and revenue-planning dashboards Overview of the 13 Best Revenue Forecast Tools 1. Nektar Every tool on this list predicts from the same underlying source: your CRM’s pipeline and activity data. If that data is incomplete with missing stakeholders, unlogged meetings, or contacts attached to the wrong opportunity, the forecast built on top of it is a confident guess dressed up as a number, no matter how sophisticated the model. Nektar addresses the layer underneath the forecast rather than the forecast itself. Data Foundation automatically captures every email, meeting, call, and calendar event across your team and writes it natively into Salesforce with zero rep effort and go-live in under two weeks. Time Travel retroactively corrects historical records as new context arrives, closing the gap that static, point-in-time capture tools can’t touch. Daisy AI surfaces revenue signals across categories including deal velocity, buyer engagement, and churn risk, giving forecasting and pipeline-inspection tools (including several others on this list) a materially more complete dataset to predict from. Nektar doesn’t compete with the forecasting and orchestration platforms on this list on prediction math. It’s vendor-neutral by design, sitting alongside those tools and making sure the data feeding their models is actually there. In production: Mimecast identified $80M in pipeline and $2M in incremental expansion revenue within 80 days of deploying Nektar. Brex built Nektar’s engagement data into daily CRO pipeline reviews. Key features: Zero-rep-effort capture across email, calendar, meetings, and calls Up to 12 months of historical backfill Revenue signals feeding downstream forecasting and pipeline tools Improves the data underneath other forecasting platforms rather than replacing them Best for: Teams whose forecast accuracy problem traces back to incomplete CRM data rather than a weak prediction model. 2. Aviso AI Aviso has moved from a pure forecasting tool to an agentic platform built around MIKI, a conversational orchestrator that can query pipeline data and trigger CRM updates directly, alongside 50+ pre-built revenue agents. The forecasting engine underneath is trained on historical deal and engagement data which remains the platform’s anchor. Key features: MIKI conversational orchestrator, predictive forecasting, real-time AI-driven deal coaching, no-code agent workflows. 3. Anaplan Anaplan is a connected-planning platform used well beyond sales for supply chain, workforce, and financial modeling, with revenue forecasting as one major use case. It’s been privately held under Thoma Bravo since 2022; the platform is worth knowing if procurement or vendor-stability questions come up in an evaluation. Key features: Hyperblock modeling engine, scenario and what-if planning, cross-functional connected planning, enterprise-scale collaboration. 4. Cien Cien uses AI to analyze historical sales data and benchmark rep performance against forecast outcomes, aiming to separate the deals that are genuinely likely to close from the ones that look healthy on paper but aren’t. Key features: AI-driven performance benchmarking, forecast accuracy analytics, sales coaching recommendations. 5. Kluster Kluster standardizes the forecasting and pipeline-review process itself: consistent cadences, repeatable reporting, and pipeline-funnel tracking so forecast calls run the same way every cycle rather than being rebuilt from scratch each time. Key features: standardized forecasting workflows, pipeline funnel tracking, automated reporting cadence. 6. Zoominfo Chorus Chorus has been part of ZoomInfo since 2021 and now runs on
What Is Revenue Operations and Why Is It So Important?
What Is Revenue Operations and Why Is It So Important? RevOps 9 min July 16, 2026 Revenue operations (RevOps) is an operating model that runs sales, marketing, and customer success as one connected system with shared data, shared goals, and shared accountability. Its job is to make revenue predictable by closing the gaps where deals, data, and context get lost between teams. RevOps has gone from an emerging idea to something close to the default operating model in B2B. A 2026 survey of over 1,200 B2B companies found 78% now have a dedicated RevOps function, up from 48% in 2023 and just 30% in 2021. The remaining companies without one are disproportionately early-stage (sub-$5M ARR), where operations responsibilities are still distributed across individual department heads rather than unified. The trajectory is clear even if the exact endpoint isn’t. RevOps has moved from a bet growth-stage companies made to a baseline expectation. Get our latest insights into your inbox What is Revenue Operations? RevOps is an end-to-end operating model that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success around a shared view of the customer and shared accountability for revenue, instead of three departments each running their own tech stack, their own metrics, and their own version of what’s actually happening with a given account. Historically, these functions operated in silos: marketing generated leads and handed them to sales with little context, sales closed deals and handed customers to CS with even less, and each team was measured on its own slice of the funnel rather than the outcome as a whole. That structure made sense when the buyer’s journey was simpler and more linear. It doesn’t hold up against a B2B buying process where the average committee runs 6 to 10 stakeholders, deals loop rather than progress in a straight line, and most of the buyer’s research happens before a rep is even in the room. RevOps exists because no single function can own an outcome that complex alone anymore. Read the Blog Are you a first-time RevOps Leader? If you’re building a RevOps function from scratch, this 30-60-90 day playbook will guide you The Four Pillars of Revenue Operations Most current RevOps frameworks converge on the same four pillars, each acting as a load-bearing part of a predictable revenue engine: 1. Process The workflows, handoffs, and stage definitions that move a prospect from first touch to closed revenue and beyond: lead routing, opportunity stage criteria, renewal and expansion motions. These need to be consistent and documented, not reinvented by each rep or team lead, or the process itself becomes a source of variance rather than a source of predictability. 2. platforms The technology stack: CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, customer success tooling, that runs the process above. RevOps owns the decisions about which tools to add, and just as importantly, which to consolidate: 67% of RevOps leaders name tech stack consolidation their top priority for 2026, a sharp reversal from the “add a tool for every new problem” instinct that defined the last several years of GTM tech buying. 3. Data Clean, complete, and connected data across every customer-facing system is the foundation the other three pillars run on. And it’s the pillar that’s changed the most since this post was first written. It used to be enough to say “data quality matters.” In 2026, the more specific and more useful framing is data completeness as a measurable RevOps metric in its own right: teams that actively track and manage CRM data completeness see 23% higher win rates than teams that don’t, because reps work from better information, automation runs on a foundation that’s actually accurate, and forecasts reflect what’s really in the pipeline rather than what got manually logged. 4. People The team responsible for running all of the above is the fourth pillar. Sizing varies by company, but a common current benchmark is roughly one RevOps professional per 25-30 revenue team members, with top-performing organizations investing closer to 1-in-15-20. Regardless of team size, RevOps only works if the rest of the organization trusts the data and processes it produces, which is a change-management problem as much as a technical one. Why Revenue Operations Matters More in 2026 The basic case for RevOps hasn’t changed: aligned teams outperform siloed ones. What’s changed is the stakes attached to getting the “Data” pillar specifically right. AI adoption inside RevOps functions hit 61% in 2026, concentrated in forecasting, data enrichment, and lead scoring. That number is a floor, not a ceiling, given how fast agentic tooling is being layered into CRMs generally. That shift changes what “clean data” needs to mean. For most of RevOps’ history, a data gap was a coordination problem: a manager working from an incomplete pipeline view made a slightly worse decision, and a person further up the chain usually caught the obvious error before it compounded. Increasingly, that same data feeds AI agents that act on it directly by updating fields, flagging risk, or triggering workflows. There is no person checking the work first. A wrong stage or a missing stakeholder used to produce a misleading report. Now it can produce a wrong automated decision at a speed no manager can catch in time. This is why CRM data completeness earning its own place as a top-tier RevOps metric in 2026 isn’t a cosmetic shift. It reflects the actual change in what’s riding on the data being right. The Business Case for RevOps The performance gap between companies with mature RevOps functions and those without has stayed wide and, across most current research, gotten wider: Companies with mature RevOps functions report 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher win rates than peers without one. Forrester research on aligning people, process, and technology across the revenue engine has linked that alignment to 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability. Public companies with dedicated RevOps functions have shown meaningfully stronger stock performance than peers without one. Frequently Asked Questions Q. What is the difference between RevOps
10 Best Account Based Marketing Tools for 2026
10 Best Account Based Marketing Tools for 2026 Marketing 10 min Updated: July 16, 2026 Account-based marketing tools have gotten better at execution but are not easier to run at scale. Multi-channel ABM campaigns still require real coordination between sales and marketing, and the tools in this category exist to make that coordination less painful, whether that means better targeting, better personalization, or better reporting on what’s actually working. Two things are worth knowing before you evaluate anything on this list. First, this category has consolidated meaningfully in the last few years, several tools that used to be independent are now part of larger platforms, and it’s worth knowing which is which before you sign a contract expecting the standalone product. Second, ABM’s underlying data problem has gotten a new dimension: as more marketing and sales tools add AI features on top of account and contact data, that data has to be genuinely accurate, not just directionally useful, or the AI layer amplifies whatever gaps are already there. Get our latest insights into your inbox What is ABM? Account-based marketing flips the traditional funnel. Instead of casting a wide net and qualifying leads down to a smaller set, marketing and sales work together from the start to: Identify high-value accounts that fit ICP criteria Engage them with personalized content Find and map the actual decision-makers involved Move them toward closure together Stay engaged post-sale to capture expansion opportunities ABM isn’t one-and-done selling. It’s built around customer lifetime value, which is also why the data behind it has to stay accurate well past the initial close. Marketing Attribution Usecase Uncover hidden first-party contacts to drive your ABM efforts with Nektar Map buyer group intelligence hidden in sales conversations Create personalized ABM Campaigns Discover hidden pipeline from first-arty contacts 10 ABM Tools for 2026 6sense Revenue AI, predictive account intelligence and journey orchestration HubSpot Marketing Hub, omnichannel personalization for HubSpot-native teams Demandbase, account-based experience across three integrated modules Terminus (now part of DemandScience), multi-channel ABM with native email-signature marketing RollWorks, ABM built around paid ad execution Foundry Intent (formerly Triblio), intent data and web personalization bundled with Foundry media Vainu, sales intelligence and account data for list building Apollo.io, prospecting, engagement, and ABM in one platform Uberflip, content personalization and distribution for ABM Alyce by Sendoso, AI-personalized corporate gifting for account engagement Overview of the 10 Best ABM Tools 1. 6sense revenue AI 6sense helps marketing teams identify high-value accounts, predict where they are in the buyer journey based on account activity, and engage them with the right message at the right touchpoint. Features: automatically updates contact lists with additional firmographic information, segments accounts into behavioral cohorts, tracks activity across channels and attributes it back to the account. Pricing: Custom, based on users and use case. 2. HubSpot Marketing Hub HubSpot Marketing Hub is an omnichannel marketing solution with particularly powerful personalization tools. You can use them to set up and automate hyper-targeted messaging across multiple touchpoints to reach and engage with specific prospects. Features: automatically segments contact lists based on customer criteria, spots prospects who mirror your top customers through lookalike lists, personalizes messaging across landing pages, emails, socials, and more. Pricing: Marketing Hub Starter: $7/user/month Marketing Hub Professional: $800/month Marketing Hub Enterprise: $3,600/month Free marketing tools with limited features are also available 3. Demandbase Demandbase runs on the Account-Based Experience concept across three connected modules: ABX Cloud for ABM strategy, Advertising Cloud for campaign management, and Data Cloud for integration support. Features: account-level insights for campaign execution, support for multiple ad formats across global markets, straightforward integration with existing stacks. Pricing: Custom, based on use case and team size. 4. Terminus (now part of DemandScience) Terminus merged into DemandScience in November 2024. The product continues to operate under the Terminus name, now backed by DemandScience’s broader B2B data and demand-generation assets, and still includes the native email-signature marketing (via its earlier Sigstr acquisition) that differentiates it from most other platforms on this list, turning every outbound employee email into an addressable ABM surface. Features: in-depth segmentation including buyer intent, multi-channel campaign support (ads, chat, email signatures, web personalization), a built-in B2B CDP. Pricing: Quote-based; third-party buyer data puts mid-market packages around $40,000 to $80,000 annually, with enterprise tiers higher. 5. AdRoll ABM (formerly RollWorks) RollWorks was fully rebranded to AdRoll ABM in August 2025, when parent company NextRoll unified its AdRoll and RollWorks brands into one platform. It’s the same product, team, data, and pricing as before, just operating under the AdRoll name, and remains a good fit for marketers who rely primarily on paid ads for account-based lead generation. Features: targeting recommendations based on historical campaign performance, account-to-decision-maker mapping with contact information, contextual account signals like org changes, mergers, and acquisitions. Pricing: Starter plan around $975/month; contact sales for other tiers. 6. Foundry Intent (formerly Triblio) Triblio was acquired by IDG, now Foundry, back in 2020, and the product has been sold as Foundry Intent for several years. If you’re evaluating this expecting the independent Triblio product, know upfront that pricing and packaging now tie more closely to Foundry media-spend commitments than the standalone product used to. It’s a strong fit specifically for enterprise tech and IT vendors already buying Foundry/IDG content syndication, since its intent data draws from IDG’s own editorial coverage areas (security, cloud, enterprise software) and is noticeably weaker outside them. Features: visual, drag-and-drop campaign builder, intent- and activity-based conversion probability scoring, web personalization bundled with Foundry’s media inventory. Pricing: Tied to media-spend commitments; contact Foundry directly. 7. Vainu Vainu is a sales intelligence tool for finding high-value accounts from its global company database, speeding up list-building with contextual account information. Features: targeted contact lists built from ICP filters, automatic updates as new contacts are found, a single consolidated view of contacts stored across other tools. Pricing: Free trial available. Team plan around €4,200/year, Business around €9,900/year, Global around €12,000/year, custom Enterprise pricing. 8. Apollo.io Apollo.io combines prospecting, campaign orchestration, and sales engagement, letting you
5 Reasons for Low AI Sales Tools Adoption (And How to Fix It)
5 Reasons for Low AI Sales Tool Adoption (And How to Fix It) RevOps 11 min Updated: July 16, 2026 AI sales tools are everywhere in the stack now. AI SDRs for outbound, conversational assistants that summarize calls, AI-powered forecasting layers, AI note-takers, AI enrichment tools bolted onto the CRM. Adoption of the category has grown fast: 43% of sales reps now actively use AI tools in their daily work, up from 24% in 2023, a real jump in two years. It still hasn’t grown as deep as the buying pattern suggests. 42% of sales and marketing professionals report real dissatisfaction with the AI tools they’ve used, mostly citing data quality and hallucination issues. Gartner projects more than 40% of current AI sales pilots will be cancelled outright due to unclear value or runaway costs. Teams are buying AI sales tools faster than they’re getting reliable value out of them. That gap, bought fast, adopted slowly, is the story of this post. It maps onto five specific, well-documented reasons, each with a fix that doesn’t require waiting for a better model. Get our latest insights into your inbox The AI Sales Tool Adoption Gap, in Numbers 70% of sales organizations say data quality is the single biggest obstacle to getting real value from AI sales tools, ahead of cost, integration difficulty, or which vendor they picked. 42% of sales and marketing professionals report dissatisfaction with the AI tools they’ve used, citing data quality, security, and generative AI “hallucinations” as the main drivers, per ZoomInfo’s State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025 report. 56% of sales professionals use AI daily, and those who do are roughly twice as likely to exceed their targets than reps who don’t, so the upside is real for the teams that get past the adoption barrier. 24% of sales organizations report low user adoption specifically, with 41% of reps actively resisting the AI tools they’ve been given, a rep-level resistance rate well above what most other sales tech categories see. None of these are model-quality problems. They’re data, trust, and rollout problems that happen to be wearing an AI label. 5 Reasons for Low AI Sales Tool Adoption (and How to Fix Them) 1. The Problem: The AI Tool Is Only as Good as the CRM Data Feeding It This is the most consistently cited barrier specifically for AI sales tools, and it’s the least visible until something visibly breaks. An AI forecasting tool, AI deal-risk flag, or AI-generated account summary built on stale contacts, missing stakeholders, and unlogged activity doesn’t produce a cautious, hedged answer. It produces a confident, wrong one, since the AI tool amplifies whatever data it’s given rather than correcting for what’s missing from it. This is also where an old, familiar problem gets new stakes. Dirty CRM data used to just slow a rep down doing a manual lookup. Fed into an AI sales tool that surfaces a recommendation or, increasingly, acts on the data directly, the same dirty record can now produce a wrong output at machine speed, before anyone reviews it. The Fix: Fix the Data Foundation Before You Add an AI Layer on Top Don’t bolt an AI sales tool onto a stack you already know has gaps in contact and activity data. Fix your data foundation as a first step. Nektar’s Data Foundation automatically captures every email, meeting, call, and calendar event across a team and writes it natively into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Dynamics, with zero rep effort required. Whatever AI sales tool sits on top of that data, Nektar’s or anyone else’s, only gets more reliable once the foundation underneath it is complete. 2. The Problem: Multiple AI Sales Tools Lead to Mixed Priorities Selling doesn’t get easier just because more of the stack is now labeled “AI.” MuleSoft’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark found the average organization now runs 957 applications, and only 27% of them are actually integrated. And organizations already using AI agents run even more on average, 1,103 apps versus 957. Adding an AI SDR, an AI note-taker, and an AI forecasting layer on top of a stack that already doesn’t talk to itself just gives a rep three more disconnected tools to check, each with its own partial view of the deal. The same research found this is now a governance problem specifically, not just a sprawl one: 50% of AI agents currently operate in isolated silos, disconnected from any cohesive system, and 86% of IT leaders agree that without proper integration, AI agents introduce more complexity than value rather than less. If the head of sales asks which AI tool actually flagged a deal as at-risk, a rep might have to check three separate AI features across three separate tools to find out, which defeats most of the point of automating it in the first place. The Fix: A Unified Data Layer the AI Tools Actually Share An AI sales tool is only as useful as the data it’s working from, and that data has to be the same data every other tool in the stack sees, not a fourth silo with a chatbot interface on top. A unified data layer automatically captures contact, activity, and intent data, the same underlying record every AI tool in the stack should be reasoning over, instead of each one working from its own fragment. Platforms like HubSpot’s Dashboard and Reporting Software show what this looks like when it’s done well: sales, marketing, service, and revenue data centralized under one dashboard, so an AI-generated forecast or attribution report is drawing from the same complete picture a rep sees, not a narrower slice of it. That consistency is what determines whether an AI tool layered on top of the stack actually reduces the number of places a rep has to check, or just adds one more. 3. The Problem: Reps Who Get Burned Once Stop Trusting the Tool at All Trust, not raw capability, is the actual bottleneck for most AI sales tools, and
Top 10 Relationship Intelligence Tools for 2026
Top Relationship Intelligence Tools for 2026 RevOps 12 min Updated: July 14, 2026 Gartner puts the average B2B buying group at 6 to 10 stakeholders, most of whom a rep will never speak to directly. Forrester’s research on self-serve buying shows a growing share of that group would rather research on their own than sit through a sales conversation. These new realities mean that reps get less face time with more people who all have a vote. CRMs were supposed to solve this. In practice, they’ve solved storage, not visibility. Salesforce only sees what a rep manually logs, and reps log a fraction of what actually happens in a deal. Most estimates put manually-captured activity at 20-30% of the real picture. The other 70-80% (the champion who went quiet, the executive who joined one call and never came back, the procurement contact nobody added to the opportunity) stays invisible until it costs you the deal. Relationship intelligence closes that gap. It automatically captures every meeting, email, and call tied to an account, structures it, and turns it into a map of who’s actually involved and how engaged they are, instead of asking reps to remember to write it down. Get our latest insights into your inbox The AI Shift: Why Relationship Intelligence Is No Longer Optional For most of CRM history, bad data was a hygiene problem. A rep mis-logged a meeting, a manager caught it in a pipeline review, someone fixed it. Humans sat between bad data and bad decisions. That buffer is disappearing. Salesforce and every major CRM vendor spent 2025 and early 2026 shipping AI agents that read CRM data and act on it directly. Tasks like updating opportunity stages, drafting follow-ups, reprioritizing pipeline,or flagging churn risk, without a person checking the work first. Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% just a year earlier. That’s a real shift in what “clean data” is for. When a human interprets a messy CRM, they apply judgment and usually catch the obvious errors. When an agent acts on that same CRM autonomously, it doesn’t pause to sanity-check. It executes. A wrong contact role, a missing stakeholder, an activity logged against the wrong opportunity: these used to produce a bad report. Now they can produce a wrong decision, at machine speed, with nobody in the loop to catch it. The industry’s own numbers show how far the data foundation lags the AI ambition. 76% of organizations report that less than half their CRM data is accurate and complete, and 45% say their CRM data isn’t prepared for AI use at all. This is happening despite 92% of leaders calling data strategy critical to AI success. That’s the gap relationship intelligence tools now have to close: not just “give reps better visibility,” but “make the CRM trustworthy enough for an agent to act on unsupervised.” It also changed what these tools need to do. Three years ago, “relationship intelligence” mostly meant a dashboard: here’s who’s engaged, here’s who’s gone quiet. In 2026, the category is splitting between tools that still stop at surfacing insight and tools that structure data well enough to feed the agents now running on top of it like Agentforce, Copilot, a custom LLM pipeline, whatever your stack runs. The tools built only for human dashboards are starting to look thin next to the ones built to be a trustworthy data layer underneath autonomous execution. What Is a Relationship Intelligence Tool? A relationship intelligence tool automatically captures interaction data like emails, calendar invites, meetings, and calls across every stakeholder tied to an account. It then structures it into a usable picture: who’s involved, how engaged they are, and where the relationship is trending. It replaces the manual, incomplete version of this that lives in a rep’s memory (or doesn’t) with a system that captures it whether or not anyone remembers to log it. The best platforms do three things reasonably well: Capture passively. No rep has to open a new tab or fill in a field for the data to exist. Structure it against the CRM. Raw activity is useless until it’s mapped to the right contact, opportunity, and role. Surface it as a decision, not just data. A list of emails isn’t insightful. “Your economic buyer hasn’t been on a call in 34 days” is. In 2026, add a fourth: hold up as a source an AI agent can act on. If the data underneath your relationship map is wrong, every downstream agent, be it CRM-native or third-party inherits that error. Why a relationship intelligence tool matters 1. It shows you the whole buying committee, not the one or two contacts a rep happened to add Most opportunities in Salesforce list one or two contacts. The real buying group is usually 6 to 10. That gap is where deals quietly stall. A champion changes roles, a new VP joins a call and never gets a follow-up, and nobody notices until the deal is already cold. Relationship intelligence tools auto-detect new stakeholders from actual email and calendar activity and map them to the opportunity, so multithreading stops depending on a rep’s memory. 2. It tells you which relationships are actually strong, not which ones look strong on paper Meeting count isn’t engagement. A relationship intelligence platform weighs recency, frequency, and who’s actually responding, so you can tell the difference between a champion who’s still driving the deal and one who’s gone quiet. 3. It recovers deals you already wrote off Not every lead converts, and pipeline math means most won’t. But “lost” and “dead” aren’t the same thing. Relationship intelligence tools retain historical engagement data even for closed-lost opportunities, so when a prospect’s priorities shift six months later, you can see who was engaged and pick the relationship back up instead of starting cold. 4. It’s the data layer your AI initiatives are quietly depending on This is the part that’s new. If
Best Revenue Operations Software for 2026
Best Revenue Operations Software for 2026 RevOps 12 min Updated: July 15, 2026 Revenue operations exists to make sales, marketing, and customer success run as one connected system instead of three departments passing spreadsheets back and forth. The software behind that job has consolidated hard over the past two years. Several of the platforms on the 2025 version of this list don’t exist anymore in the form it described them, and the ones that remain independent are increasingly competing against combined entities with a lot more scale. That consolidation is worth understanding before you evaluate anything on this list, because it changes the buying question. It used to be “which point solution fits my stack.” Increasingly it’s “which of these platforms actually get maintained and improved after their acquisition, and which of them are the foundation the others depend on.” Get our latest insights into your inbox What is Revenue Operations? Revenue operations, or RevOps, is the operating model that runs sales, marketing, and customer success as one interconnected system instead of three functions working in silos. Done well, it drives visibility, accountability, and predictable revenue across the entire funnel. RevOps has always cared about data quality. What’s new is that AI agents inside Salesforce, your sales engagement platform, or whatever custom tooling your team builds, are now reading that same CRM data and acting on it directly, without a human checking the work first. When a human RevOps analyst worked from messy data, they applied judgment and caught the obvious errors. An agent doesn’t pause to sanity-check; it executes. That turned “Is our CRM data clean?” from a hygiene question into a governance question. And it’s reshaping what RevOps software actually needs to do. 10 Best Revenue Operations Software for 2026 Nektar – GTM data foundation and AI signal layer Gong – conversation intelligence and deal risk Groove, now part of Clari + Salesloft – sales engagement and revenue orchestration HubSpot Operations Hub – data sync and hygiene automation for HubSpot-native teams Aviso AI – agentic forecasting and revenue execution Kluster – forecasting and pipeline process automation Fullcast – territory, quota, and capacity planning Mediafly Intelligence360, formerly InsightSquared – revenue analytics and guided selling Breadcrumbs, now part of MadKudu – predictive lead scoring ZoomInfo Chorus – conversation intelligence backed by ZoomInfo’s B2B data Overview of the 10 Best Revenue Operations Software 1. Nektar Nektar the GTM telemetry platform that automatically captures every customer interaction and delivers clean data to your CRM, data warehouse, and AI applications. It does so with zero manual entry or adoption friction. As more of your GTM stack starts executing autonomously (Agentforce, your own AI agents, a forecasting model, anything reading CRM data and acting on it), the CRM has to be complete and correct continuously, or every agent built on top of it inherits the error. Nektar does this in two layers. Data Foundation captures every email, meeting, call, and calendar event across your team automatically and writes it natively into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Dynamics. Daisy AI sits on top of that foundation, surfacing revenue signals across multiple categories (buyer visibility, deal velocity, churn risk, marketing impact, and more) and putting a live engagement canvas directly on the Salesforce Opportunity tab. Nektar is vendor-neutral by design. It sits alongside Gong, Outreach, or Salesloft rather than replacing them, making sure the CRM data those tools depend on is actually complete. Unlike tools that lock your data in proprietary interfaces, Nektar acts as revenue signals infrastructure: capturing emails, meetings, calls, and Slack, then piping structured intelligence into Salesforce, Snowflake, Claude, and your entire stack. Enterprises & AI focused companies rely on Nektar to see complete buying committees (not the incomplete fragments in most CRMs), power AI systems with trustworthy data, and preserve institutional knowledge when people leave. In production: Mimecast identified $80M in pipeline and $2M in incremental expansion revenue within 80 days using Nektar’s telemetry. Chainguard’s CRO credits Nektar with the data foundation behind a 5x team scale-up. Brex built Nektar data into daily CRO reviews across sales, CS, and presales. Key features: Zero-rep-effort activity capture across email, calendar, meetings, and calls Time Travel retroactive data correction up to 12 months of historical backfill Daisy AI: 39 revenue signals across buyer visibility, deal risk, churn, and rep performance Vendor-neutral: works alongside Gong, Outreach, Salesloft, and Clari rather than replacing them Best for: Salesforce-first revenue teams, typically 800–5,000 employees, running a multi-threaded enterprise motion who need CRM data reliable enough for both reps and AI agents to act on. 2. Gong Gong built its category on conversation intelligence: recording, transcribing, and analyzing sales calls, and has extended into deal-risk scoring and forecasting. It gives RevOps teams a strong view of what happened on recorded calls, though its visibility stops at the edge of what Gong itself records; email and calendar activity outside a call require a separate capture layer. In 2026, Gong has pushed further into AI-native forecasting and coaching. Key features: call recording and transcription, deal risk warnings, closed-lost analysis, AI-assisted coaching. Evaluating Nektar against other platforms? Explore our in-depth comparisons with leading alternatives across features, data quality, AI readiness, and implementation. Nektar vs Gong Nektar vs Clari Nektar vs People.ai 3. HubSpot Operations Hub HubSpot Operations Hub keeps customer data synced and clean across connected systems for teams running on HubSpot. Its data-quality automation and sync tooling remain a strong fit for HubSpot-native RevOps teams; it’s not built to serve as a data layer for teams on Salesforce or a multi-CRM stack. Key features: Bi-directional data sync, automated data-quality rules, programmable automation. 4. Aviso AI Aviso has repositioned itself as an agentic AI platform for GTM teams, built around an orchestrator called MIKI that accepts natural-language queries and executes CRM updates directly, alongside a library of 50+ task-based revenue agents and a no-code GTM Agent Studio for teams to build their own agent workflows. Its forecasting engine still anchors the platform, now paired with real-time AI avatars for role-specific coaching and deal guidance.
Top RevOps Agenices
Top 9 B2B SaaS RevOps Agencies RevOps 10 min Updated: July 14, 2026 RevOps is the backbone for driving sustainable growth and maximizing revenue. By breaking down silos between sales, marketing, and customer success teams, RevOps fosters seamless collaboration and alignment, ensuring a unified approach towards revenue generation. Even though the importance of RevOps has been largely understood by organizations, one bone of contention remains: RevOps agencies. RevOps agencies promise to align sales, marketing, and customer success around shared data and process usually faster than building that muscle in-house from scratch. Whether that promise holds up depends entirely on which agency you hire, and this category has no shortage of firms making similar claims with very different track records behind them. But first – What is a RevOps agency, and what do they do? When should you consider hiring a Revenue Operations agency, and what are the top agencies in the market? We answer all this and a lot more in this blog. Get our latest insights into your inbox What Is a RevOps Agency? A RevOps agency is an external team that designs and implements the systems, data architecture, and cross-functional processes connecting sales, marketing, and customer success. This typically includes CRM architecture, tech-stack integration, forecasting methodology, and the handoffs between teams that most commonly break as a company scales. Most operate on a retainer or fractional model rather than a one-off project, since RevOps is an ongoing function, not something you fix once and leave alone. Top RevOps Agencies in the US (2026) 1. RevPartners RevPartners, headquartered in Miami, FL, holds a 5.0 rating across 450+ reviews on the HubSpot Solutions Directory. It is the only agency to simultaneously hold HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner and Clay Elite Studio Partner status. Its work spans CRM architecture, HubSpot implementations and migrations (including from Salesforce and Marketo), embedded fractional RevOps, and a Clay-driven outbound layer they call “allbound.” Best for: HubSpot-centric B2B SaaS teams wanting the deepest pure-RevOps bench in the category. 2. New Breed New Breed, headquartered in Vermont, carries a 5.0 rating across 580 reviews on the HubSpot Solutions Directory. Their work combines demand generation with RevOps implementation, and they built Distributely, a lead-distribution app purpose-built for HubSpot users. Best for: HubSpot-native B2B SaaS teams that want RevOps and demand generation handled by the same partner. 3. Aptitude 8 Aptitude 8, headquartered in New York, NY, holds a 5.0 rating across roughly 250 HubSpot Solutions Directory reviews and was named the #2 Global HubSpot Solutions Partner in 2024. They position themselves specifically as a technical consulting firm rather than a marketing agency. They do no campaign or content work, and have an in-house US-based delivery team. They are focused on complex HubSpot architecture and systems design. Best for: Companies that have outgrown standard HubSpot onboarding and need deep technical/architectural work, not marketing services. 4. Winning by Design Winning by Design, headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, created the widely-referenced Revenue Architecture framework and the “bowtie funnel” model now taught across much of the B2B SaaS GTM world. Their client list includes Adobe, Uber Eats, Calendly, among others, which signals the scale of engagement they typically handle. Best for: Series B+ SaaS companies wanting the full customer lifecycle re-architected as one engineered system, not just a CRM cleanup. 5. Go Nimbly Go Nimbly, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, provides fractional RevOps teams of analysts, Salesforce admins, and marketing automation specialists, with a particular strength in product-led growth motions. They’ve worked with brands like Intercom, Watershed, and Superhuman. Best for: PLG or hybrid PLG/sales-led SaaS companies needing flexible, subscription-style access to a full RevOps bench. 6. Carabiner Group Carabiner Group, headquartered in Los Gatos, CA (acquired by growth advisory SBI in 2024), bills itself as the only fully platform-agnostic RevOps-as-a-Service agency, supporting 150+ tools across the revenue tech stack rather than specializing in one CRM. Best for: Teams with a genuinely fragmented, multi-tool stack where no single platform is the core problem. Best for: PLG or hybrid PLG/sales-led SaaS companies needing flexible, subscription-style access to a full RevOps bench. 7. RevPal RevPal, headquartered in Bend, OR, was ranked the #1 RevOps agency on Reply.io’s 2026 list and placed in the top three by Revenue.io. Their proprietary diagnostic tool, OpsPal, connects to a prospect’s CRM and produces a scored health report before any engagement begins. Best for: B2B SaaS teams wanting a diagnostic-first engagement or proof of what’s broken before committing to a scope of work. 8. Remotish Remotish, headquartered in Cincinnati, OH, runs a Monthly RevOps Program purpose-built for HubSpot portals, alongside onboarding, consulting, and WebOps support. Best for: HubSpot-native teams wanting an ongoing, monthly-cadence RevOps partner rather than a large upfront implementation project. 9. Domestique Domestique is a fractional RevOps firm that, unlike many agencies in this category, does hands-on implementation work directly rather than handing over an audit deck. They build targeted tech stacks and go-to-market alignment for early-stage through Series B companies. Best for: Early-stage to Series B SaaS companies wanting foundational RevOps systems built, not just advised on. RevOps Agencies Compared When to Hire In-House vs. an Agency Strengthen your in-house team when your processes are genuinely company-specific, when data security or compliance requirements make outside access impractical, or when tight day-to-day collaboration with other departments matters more than outside expertise. Consider an agency when you need specialized knowledge you don’t have in-house, when you need results faster than a from-scratch hire-and-train cycle allows, or when your needs will flex significantly over the next year. An agency can scale engagement up or down in a way a full-time hire can’t. Most companies land somewhere in between: an agency to build the initial system and train the team, with an in-house hire eventually taking over day-to-day ownership once the foundation is in place. Frequently Asked Questions Q. How much does a RevOps agency cost? Retainers typically run $3,000–$30,000+ per month depending on scope, with project-based engagements (a full CRM migration, for instance) often priced between $40,000–$200,000. Diagnostic-first engagements
Why Your Salesforce Data Isn’t Ready for AI Agents
Why Your Salesforce Data Isn’t Ready for AI Agents AI 8 min July 3, 2026 You’ve started evaluating Agentforce, or Copilot, or one of the dozen AI tools now plugged into your GTM stack. The demo looked great. The pilot got greenlit. And somewhere in week three, things started going sideways. Wrong recommendations, missed context, an agent confidently citing a contact who left the company eight months ago. Before you conclude the AI isn’t ready, it’s worth asking a different question: Is your data ready for AI? Get our latest insights into your inbox The Problem isn’t the Model Across the Salesforce ecosystem right now, a consistent pattern is emerging in post-mortems on stalled AI deployments. It is rarely the algorithm. A widely cited industry estimate puts the figure starkly: 88% of enterprise AI agent pilots fail to reach production, not because the agents are weak, but because the CRM data underneath produces confidently wrong outputs at scale. That’s a different failure mode than what most teams plan for. Bad data has always been a CRM annoyance. Duplicate records, an outdated phone number, a stale job title. Humans navigate around these problems instinctively. A sales rep glancing at an incomplete contact record fills in the blanks from memory. A sales manager catches an obviously wrong forecast before it reaches the board deck. AI agents don’t do that. As one analysis of Salesforce data quality puts it, garbage in, garbage out was the old principle. The 2026 version is sharper: garbage in, confidently wrong out. Agents do not pause to verify a stale record the way a human would. They act on it, then propagate the action across thousands of records before anyone notices. Salesforce’s own product marketing has converged on the same message. As the company’s Tableau product marketing director put it, an AI strategy without a data framework is just a wish list. Attempting to deploy AI agents without one leads to inconsistent results, security risks, and a lack of user trust. What “data readiness” actually means It’s tempting to treat data readiness as a vague hygiene goal. “Clean up the CRM” without a concrete definition. Salesforce’s own guidance on the topic is more precise, and worth using as a working checklist before evaluating any agent deployment: Is your data unified and harmonized? If your data is fragmented across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, spreadsheets, and a dozen point tools, the agent will deliver fragmented and inconsistent experiences. Unification isn’t optional. It’s the precondition. Have you resolved identities and is the information current? The same contact often exists as three different records: full name, abbreviated name, email-only. And each one tells the agent something slightly different. Old, incorrect data leads to frustrating experiences for customers and unreliable outcomes, including outright hallucination. Do you have governance and security in place? An agent should only access the data it needs to do its job, and that access needs to be auditable. Can you activate the data in real time? Data sitting in a warehouse, updated weekly, doesn’t power an agent that needs to act now. Is there a feedback loop? Agents need humans in the loop checking whether they’re acting on the right information, not a “set and forget” deployment. Separately, a widely referenced breakdown of what “good” CRM data looks like for AI purposes narrows it to three properties: data needs to be complete (the full picture, not partial context), structured, and effective for the specific task the agent is meant to perform. Without completeness, AI models miss vital context: what stage a contact is at, what previous interactions occurred, who else is involved in the decision. The numbers behind the problem are larger than most teams expect This isn’t an edge-case concern. Recent industry data paints a fairly stark picture of how unprepared most enterprise data actually is for agentic AI. Fewer than one in five companies has a high level of data readiness, and only 9% are fully prepared for the data integration and interoperability that AI requires, according to a 2025 Capgemini report on AI agents. A separate analysis found that 81% of companies say fragmented data is preventing them from unlocking AI’s potential. Service agents miss complete customer histories, sales agents miss signals because marketing interactions aren’t visible, and analytics agents produce unreliable insights that undermine decision-making. The trust problem compounds this. Industry surveys cited by Salesforce found that nearly six in ten AI users say it’s difficult to get what they want out of AI right now, with over half saying they don’t trust the data used to train the systems they’re working with. Separately, a survey found that 90% of high-level data professionals believe company leadership isn’t paying enough attention to bad or inadequate data, even as AI initiatives accelerate. Only 9% of organizations report fully trusting their data which directly affects their confidence in CRM reporting. The forecasting impact is direct and measurable. Inaccurate forecasting tied to poor data quality affects a meaningful share of sales organizations, and several industry analyses tie data quality directly to financial loss. Duplicate or incomplete customer records cause missed opportunities, double-booked engagements, and wasted marketing spend when AI-driven outreach unknowingly targets the wrong contacts or duplicates effort. Why this is structurally different from past CRM problems Traditional CRM issues included duplicate records, missing fields, outdated contact info. A salesperson could work around a few mistakes in a report. A direct mail piece sent to an old address was a minor, contained error. When an AI agent built on top of that same data starts making autonomous decisions, the stakes change entirely. The agent doesn’t know it’s working from a flawed record. It acts with full confidence on whatever it’s given. The moment AI starts acting on it, a small inaccuracy in CRM data gets magnified, not corrected. This is also why simply buying a better AI agent product doesn’t solve the underlying issue. As one technical breakdown of Salesforce AI failures put it plainly: it’s not the
How Nektar helps AI Hypergrowth companies move even faster
How Nektar Helps AI Hypergrowth Companies Move Even Faster Artificial Intelligence 10 min Fast-moving AI companies are having a moment. Every week a new AI-native startup crosses $100M ARR in what feels like record time. Accel’s 2025 Globalscape report shows a “new breed of AI-native applications” hitting scale much faster than previous generations of SaaS, with some reaching $100M ARR in just a few years. That velocity is backed by unprecedented capital. Prominent AI companies like Cursor, Writer, Groq and Fireworks are raising huge rounds, hiring at triple-digit growth rates, and building products that spread virally from individual builders into the world’s largest enterprises. AI application categories like developer tools, finance, cybersecurity and vertical AI each attracted multiple billions of dollars in 2025 funding alone. Nektar sits right in the middle of this wave. Over the past year, we’ve partnered with some of the fastest-growing AI companies in the US – including Writer, Cursor, Groq, Chainguard and Fireworks to help them turn raw go-to-market activity into clean, structured, AI-ready data they can actually execute on. This blog looks at why AI companies grow differently, what that does to their GTM data, and how Nektar helps them grow even faster. The new AI growth curve: Speed, Efficiency and Youth Funding and company maturity Accel’s data makes one thing clear: AI is no longer a niche category. It’s the new centre of gravity for software investing. Total EU/US/IL cloud & AI funding (excluding models) has climbed into the ~$180B+ range annually, with 2025 setting fresh records. AI model funding is heavily concentrated in the US, but on the application side, EU/IL funding now represents roughly two-thirds of US levels, showing how global this wave has become. The winners look very different from the last SaaS cycle: over 65% of the Accel US & Europe AI 100 are 0–3 years old, and US winners skew especially young at 2.4 years on average. Put simply: AI companies are raising big, hiring fast, and still figuring out their GTM motion on the fly. Bottom-up adoption and insane efficiency AI-native tools are spreading from the bottom up: Developers using AI coding assistants jumped from 36% in 2023 to 90% in 2025 – in just two years. Tools like AI IDEs, agents and copilots are hitting milestones such as “$100M ARR in 8 months” and “10x YoY growth,” according to Accel’s case studies of leading AI-native apps. This isn’t just fast growth – it’s efficient growth. Accel estimates that leading AI applications now generate 3–10x more ARR per employee than prior generations of SaaS companies. But that speed and efficiency create a GTM paradox: You can scale product adoption and revenue incredibly fast. But your GTM data, process and tooling often lag badly behind. The hidden tax of hypergrowth: messy GTM data Most fast-growing AI companies share a few traits: They sell into large, multi-person buying committees (Fortune 500, Global 2000, high-growth tech). They run hybrid motions – PLG bottoms-up adoption plus enterprise sales, often with heavy founder-led or executive-led outbound. Their GTM stack is complex and evolving: Salesforce + Gong + Snowflake + ABM + sequencing tools, changing every few quarters. They are young – which means processes, definitions and data hygiene were rarely “designed,” they just happened. That shows up in four chronic problems: Invisible buying groups Activity sits at the account or activity object level, not tied to which humans are actually influencing a deal. Contact roles are incomplete, incorrect, or simply not used. Multi-threading that’s impossible to measure Leadership wants reps and CSMs to multi-thread. But nobody can answer basic questions like: “How many net new stakeholders did this SDR actually bring in?” “Which deals progressed because we pulled in the economic buyer early?” Broken marketing attribution for enterprise deals First-touch and last-touch models collapse when there are 10–20 stakeholders, dozens of events and campaigns, and long sales cycles. “Marketing sourced” covers only a small fraction of reality. No shared view of the customer journey Pre-pipeline engagement, in-pipeline meetings, onboarding, success reviews, expansion conversations – they live in different systems owned by different teams. This is exactly the gap Nektar is built to fill. Nektar as the data backbone for AI GTM At its core, Nektar is a revenue data platform that: Harvests metadata from communication tools (email, calendar, meetings, sequences). Cleans and transforms that data. Writes it into Salesforce against the right opportunities, accounts, contacts and leads. Automatically creates and updates Opportunity Contact Roles (OCRs) with accurate personas (economic buyer, champion, influencer, etc.). Generates revenue signals that help teams act – from “missing exec sponsor” to “multi-threading risk” to “QBR overdue.” Writer is a great illustration of how fast-moving AI companies use this foundation Writer: building an AI-ready GTM engine on top of Nektar Writer is an enterprise AI platform selling into Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations. Their GTM complexity is huge: multi-persona deals, long cycles, and a mix of PLG, partner, and enterprise motions. One activity capture layer for Sales, CS and Marketing Writer started with Nektar in sales, then expanded to sales engineering, customer success and now marketing. Nektar: Captures emails, meetings and other activities from tools like Gmail and calendar. Associates them correctly with accounts, opportunities and contacts in Salesforce. Backfills historical data by “travelling back in time” across past emails and calendars, so data isn’t limited to post-implementation activity. Creates missing contacts and writes them into Salesforce as OCRs with mapped personas. Compared with their previous setup (Gong plus internal workarounds), Writer’s RevOps leaders called out that Nektar simply does a better job of capturing and correctly associating activities, especially in complex account structures with multiple open opportunities. This gives Writer a single, reliable activity dataset they can push into their warehouse (GCP) and model in Omni for analytics – a critical enabler for AI-driven GTM. Making multi-threading measurable (and compensable) Writer wants SDRs and AEs to multi-thread aggressively – and they want to pay them for doing it. The problem: Nektar was so good
Nektar.ai vs People.ai: A Buyer’s Guide
2026 Guide for Enterprise GTM Teams Seeking People.ai Alternatives Buyer’s Guide 10 min Jan 27, 2026 Introduction: Two Different Approaches to the Same Problem Both People.ai and Nektar.ai operate in the revenue data capture category, helping enterprises automatically capture GTM activity and enrich their CRM using AI. However, they solve fundamentally different problems for different buyers. People.ai is an established revenue intelligence platform with strong analytics capabilities, recent recognition as a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration, and a mature suite of tools including ClosePlan, account planning, and leadership dashboards. Nektar.ai is an advanced data-first GTM telemetry solution focused on delivering clean, accurate, AI-ready CRM data directly into standard Salesforce objects, designed specifically for enterprises that want to power their existing BI stacks rather than adopt another analytics platform. This guide is intended for GTM leaders, RevOps leaders, Sales Operations teams, and Data teams evaluating both solutions. It draws on direct enterprise evaluation feedback, product analysis, and independent research to help you determine which solution fits your specific needs. Get our latest insights into your inbox Who This Guide Is For This comparison is most relevant if your organization: Already operates a mature BI stack (Databricks, Snowflake, Looker, Tableau) Has dedicated RevOps or SalesOps teams building custom analytics Prioritizes CRM data accuracy over out-of-the-box dashboards Needs granular control over what data syncs to Salesforce Requires specific details around internal and external participation or meeting attendance intelligence (not just invitee data) If your priority is comprehensive analytics UI, pre-built dashboards, and account planning tools, People.ai may be the stronger fit for your organization. But if you are looking at solving the data problem at its core without putting the additional enablement effort on a new training, Nektar is a better bet. This guide focuses on scenarios where data infrastructure is the primary buying criterion. The Core Difference: Analytics-First vs Data-First The fundamental difference between these platforms comes down to philosophy: People.ai is built around the premise that revenue teams need better analytics and insights delivered through their platform. Data capture exists to power their dashboards, scorecards, and AI-driven recommendations. Nektar.ai is built around the premise that enterprises already have analytics tools they trust. What they lack is clean, accurate, complete, unified rep activity data in CRM to feed those tools. Nektar focuses on being the best possible data layer. Neither approach is inherently superior; they serve different organizational needs. The question is which approach matches your GTM infrastructure strategy Considering an Alternative to People.ai? See how Nektar delivers 95%+ attribution accuracy directly into your Salesforce, without the People.ai price tag. Check the Comparison Why Enterprises Evaluate People.ai Alternatives Based on conversations with enterprise buyers evaluating both platforms, several consistent themes emerge: Existing Analytics InvestmentMany large enterprises have already invested significantly in Databricks, Snowflake, Looker, or Tableau. Their internal ops teams build custom dashboards tailored to their specific sales motions. For these organizations, adopting another analytics platform creates redundancy rather than value. They want the underlying data, not another UI. Salesforce Integration Model People.ai uses a managed package approach that creates custom objects in Salesforce. While this provides rich functionality within People.ai’s ecosystem, some enterprises report challenges including: Additional automation required to map data into standard Salesforce fields Complexity when using captured data in existing workflows or forecasting Duplicate participant records requiring cleanup Nektar writes directly to standard Salesforce objects (Events, Tasks, Contacts), which can simplify integration with existing processes but may offer less specialized functionality. Meeting Attendance Requirements A significant differentiator for some buyers is meeting attendance intelligence. People.ai’s meeting data typically relies on calendar invites and recorded calls via CI platform integrations. Nektar captures both invitees and actual attendees, along with meeting status (completed, cancelled, no-show, under 10 minutes), without requiring recording. For organizations focused on coaching, churn analysis, or executive involvement tracking, this distinction can be decisive. Data Volume Control Some enterprises express concern about data volume and Salesforce storage costs. Nektar offers granular sync controls that let administrators define which activities to capture, which contacts to create, and what thresholds to apply. People AI’s capture approach may generate higher data volumes, which can be beneficial for analytics but challenging for storage-conscious organizations. Key Differentiators: A Deeper Look Opportunity Matching Accurately attributing activities to the correct opportunity is critical for pipeline analytics and forecasting. The two platforms take different approaches: People.ai uses configurable, rule-based matching logic that can be customized per deployment. This approach offers predictability but may require ongoing maintenance as your sales process evolves. Nektar employs graph-based machine learning that analyzes email content, domain patterns, calendar metadata, and historical matching to attribute activities. Nektar reports accuracy rates above 90% in multi-opportunity environments, with the model improving over time through self-learning. Meeting Intelligence This is one of the most significant differentiators between the platforms: People.ai captures meeting data primarily through calendar integration and conversation intelligence partners (Gong, Zoom IQ, Webex). Insights from recorded calls are available in their analytics but may not be written as structured fields in Salesforce. Nektar captures both invitees and actual attendees directly from Zoom and Teams (without requiring recording), writes meeting status to Salesforce, and distinguishes between internal and external participants. This enables use cases like: Tracking which executives actually joined renewal calls Identifying no-show patterns that predict churn Measuring SE and CSM involvement in deals Coaching based on actual participation, not calendar entries Engagement Scoring People.ai provides engagement scoring as part of its analytics suite, displayed through their dashboards and scorecards. The scoring methodology is largely pre-defined and optimized for their UI. Nektar offers customizable engagement scoring that writes directly to Salesforce fields. Organizations can define their own scoring formulas based on email, meetings, touches, attendance, roles, and recency, making it easier to integrate into existing workflows and BI tools. Multi-User Attribution Modern enterprise sales involve multiple internal stakeholders: AEs, SEs, CSMs, AMs, and leadership. Accurate attribution matters for: Understanding true time allocation Measuring team effectiveness Forecasting with complete engagement data Pod-based and team selling models People.ai primarily attributes activities to
5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Pipeline Visibility
5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Pipeline Visibility RevOps 10 min Driving the sales pipeline in an organization is like driving a vehicle. You have a goal, a rough map of how to reach your destination, and you want to avoid roadblocks and reach the end-point quickly. However, navigating a sales pipeline without proper visibility is like driving a car through the night without headlights. You might have a general idea of where you’re going, but you need help seeing the obstacles or opportunities ahead. Just as headlights illuminate the road and allow you to make informed decisions about your driving, sales pipeline visibility provides insight into the status of your sales opportunities. It enables you to make strategic decisions to move deals forward. 93% of sales organizations are unable to forecast revenue within 5% error, even in the two weeks prior to the end of the quarter. A lack of visibility can result in overestimating the company’s financial performance, leading to missed targets, misaligned resources, and poor decision-making. Without clear visibility into the pipeline, sales teams may not be able to prioritize leads effectively, resulting in missed opportunities and lost revenue. Poor visibility can also make it difficult to identify and address inefficiencies in the sales process, leading to longer sales cycles and decreased customer satisfaction. In this blog, we try to understand what sales pipeline visibility is, the ways to improve it, and the role of clean data in your sales pipeline visibility. What is Sales Pipeline Visibility? Sales pipeline visibility refers to seeing and understanding the various stages of a company’s sales process, from lead generation to closing deals. Information in the form of data should be available to all revenue teams, including sales, marketing, finance, product management, and customer success. The visibility in the sales pipeline allows sales managers and team members to track the progress of sales opportunities, identify potential bottlenecks or issues, and make informed decisions about resource allocation and sales strategy. Typically, a sales pipeline comprises several stages: lead generation, qualification, needs analysis, proposal, negotiation, and closed-won. Stages of a Sales Pipeline: Lead Generation, Qualification, Needs Analysis, Proposal, Negotiation, Closed-Won. 1. Lead generation It’s the first stage of the sales pipeline, and it involves identifying potential customers. This can be done through various means, such as cold-calling, email campaigns, or social media outreach. 2. Qualification Once leads are generated, they need to be qualified to ensure that they are a good fit for the product or service being sold. This process involves gathering more information about the lead, such as their budget, timeline, and decision-making process, to determine whether they are likely to make a purchase. 3. Needs analysis In this stage, the sales team works with the potential customer to understand their specific needs and challenges, and how the product or service being sold can help address them. It helps tailor the sales pitch and personalize the proposal. 4. Proposal Once the customer’s needs have been analyzed, the sales team creates a proposal or quote that outlines the specific solution being offered, along with pricing and other details. 5. Negotiation After the proposal is presented, the sales team may need to negotiate with the customer to address any concerns or objections they may have. This may involve making adjustments to the proposal or offering incentives to help close the deal. 6. Closed-won The final stage of the sales pipeline is when the customer agrees to purchase the product or service, and the deal is closed. This represents the successful conversion of a potential customer into a paying client. Having good sales pipeline visibility means that you can track and analyze the progress of each sales opportunity at every stage of the sales process. It helps you forecast revenue accurately, plan accordingly, and identify areas where you can improve your sales process. Let’s see how organizations can improve their sales pipeline visibility: 5 Ways to Improve Sales Pipeline Visibility 1. Define clear sales stages Clearly defining each stage of the sales process is the first step in improving sales pipeline visibility. Each sales stage should have specific criteria determining when a deal moves to the next one. Sales teams can then accurately track where each value is in the pipeline and prioritize their efforts on deals most likely to close. Analyzing conversion rates between each stage helps generate more accurate sales forecasts. Additionally, clear sales stages promote accountability by identifying who is responsible for moving deals forward and preventing them from falling through the cracks. 2. Implement a CRM system A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is essential for improving sales pipeline visibility. By centralizing Dedicated CRM platforms like HubSpot centralize all customer and prospect data, so sales teams can easily track and manage their deals from a single platform. Sales reps can easily view the status of each deal, as well as any associated tasks, notes, and documents. Implementing a CRM system can increase sales productivity, improve customer relationships, and create a more efficient and effective sales pipeline. 3. Assign ownership and accountability By assigning ownership, sales teams can ensure that each deal has a designated owner responsible for moving it through the pipeline. This helps to prevent deals from falling through the cracks and ensures that there is someone accountable for each stage of the process. In addition to ownership, it’s also important to set accountability. This means that each team member should be responsible for specific tasks and activities within the sales process. For example, one team member may be responsible for scheduling meetings, while another may be responsible for preparing proposals. By assigning ownership and accountability, sales teams can streamline their sales process and improve visibility into the pipeline. This allows for better deal tracking, more accurate forecasting, and more effective decision making. 4. Use data analytics Data analytics can provide valuable insights into the performance of the sales pipeline. Analyzing data such as conversion rates, win/loss ratios, and sales cycle times can help identify areas for improvement
How Activity Tracking Can Help You Get Better Visibility Into Deals
How Activity Tracking Can Help You Get Better Visibility Into Deals RevOps 10 min There hasn’t been a time that demanded sustainable revenue growth more than now. Economic headwinds of the last few months have forced businesses to rethink their revenue growth strategies and focus on efficiency. This means getting away with anything that does not make a positive dent in revenue or causes revenue to leak across the sales funnel. But cutting deep costs is not the only way to increase profits. It’s about doubling down on what’s working. And investing time and resources in strategies that help the whole company march towards the same objective – increased revenue. And there is one sure shot way of achieving this. By knowing exactly what’s happening with your deals. And how can you do that? Activity tracking. Let’s dive deep. What is Activity Tracking? Activity tracking in sales refers to monitoring and recording the various actions and behaviors undertaken by sales professionals as they engage in their sales activities. It involves tracking and measuring the specific activities performed during the sales process, such as the number of calls made, emails sent, meetings scheduled, demos conducted, and deals closed. The purpose of activity tracking in sales is to gain insights into the sales process, assess individual and team performance, and make data-driven decisions to improve sales effectiveness. What is an Activity Tracking Software? An activity tracking software is designed to monitor and record the various activities performed by sales representatives or teams. These activities typically include interactions with leads and prospects, customer communication, follow-ups, and other sales-related tasks. The primary purpose of activity tracking software is to help sales managers and team leaders assess and improve the productivity and effectiveness of their sales teams. Why Do We Need Activity Tracking? Accurately and comprehensively capturing activity data poses a significant challenge. Despite 67% of businesses utilizing 4 to 10 digital tools, they need to track the activity data generated by these tools completely and precisely. Additionally, 79% of opportunity-related data sales representatives collect never enters the CRM. Moreover, the data recorded in systems like CRM could be more reliable, plagued by issues like outdated, missing, or incomplete entries. This lack of data accuracy is a concern for as many as 70% of revenue leaders, leading to substantial financial losses averaging around $15 million per year for organizations. The presence of accurate and complete activity data in systems like CRM creates misalignment among teams in terms of their technological tools and objectives. When sales teams grapple with questions about updated prospect contact information or the correctness of email IDs in the CRM, their efficiency could improve, positively impacting both businesses and customers. Due to lacking confidence in the data, sales, and marketing teams work in the dark, unable to leverage the full potential of significant investments like CRMs. This situation results in poor returns on investment for such resources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6zZpHUoIg&t=1s How Does Poor Activity Data Affect Revenue? Poor data and a lack of activity data in the CRM can harm gaining accurate insights and lead to revenue leakage throughout the customer journey. Here are some key points to consider: 1. Inaccurate or incomplete data When data quality is compromised, it becomes challenging to extract meaningful insights. Only complete or updated information can lead to correct assumptions and flawed decision-making. 2. Missed opportunities Important customer interactions and touchpoints may go undocumented without comprehensive activity data. This lack of visibility can result in missed opportunities to engage prospects, address their needs, and nurture relationships, leading to potential revenue leakage. 3. Ineffective sales strategies The absence of activity data hinders the ability to analyze and optimize sales strategies. Without a clear understanding of which activities drive results, aligning sales efforts with customer preferences and needs becomes difficult, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. 4. Inefficient resource allocation With activity data, it’s easier to assess the productivity and effectiveness of sales teams. This can lead to misallocation of resources, including time, effort, and budget, resulting in revenue leakage and diminished returns on investment. Clean data is essential for Activity Tracking Software as it ensures accurate and error-free information, leading to reliable insights into sales team activities and facilitating better decision-making and performance analysis. With clean data, the software can provide a comprehensive view of sales interactions, prospect engagement, and customer behavior, enabling businesses to identify opportunities, optimize processes, and enhance overall sales efficiency. Moreover, clean data minimizes the risk of misinterpretation or skewed reporting, fostering greater trust in the software’s output and empowering sales managers and teams to take data-driven actions to achieve their goals. Benefits of Activity Tracking Software Here’s a look at the various advantages of an activity tracking software: 1. Clear visibility into deals Increased visibility into deals serves as a prerequisite for enhancing productivity. When you have comprehensive activity data, you better understand each deal’s status, identify areas that require improvement, and prioritize values that need immediate attention. Consider the importance of deal reviews in a successful sales process. By utilizing insights derived from unified activity data, deal reviews can evolve from impromptu events to impactful sessions, where sales managers gain clear visibility into the intricacies of every deal. As activities related to each deal are automatically captured and updated, managers no longer need to remind sales representatives to input data into the CRM constantly. Instead, both reps and managers can access a comprehensive view of contacts and deal specifics within the pipeline, allowing them to focus on urgent matters. 2. Identification of winning rep behaviours Activity data enables you to correlate the productivity of your sales representatives with their performance. For instance, you can obtain crucial insights to answer important questions such as: Activity data helps map sales reps’ productivity to their performance It provides answers to critical questions such as time allocation, engagement with high-value customers, decision-maker involvement, adherence to best practices, sales target progress, account engagement, and lead follow-up Insights from activity data serve as leading indicators for real-time coaching and decision-making Managers gain visibility into sales reps’
The Marketing Efficiency & Attribution Playbook: What Today’s CMOs Are Tracking
The Marketing Efficiency & Attribution Playbook: What Today’s CMOs Are Tracking RevOps 10 min Marketing attribution and efficiency metrics are becoming more critical than ever. CEOs want to know how to allocate budgets effectively across marketing, sales, and product. Investors seek clear insights into ROI. And marketers themselves need to track performance by channel and initiative to optimize their efforts. Yet, in B2B marketing, where deal cycles are long and touchpoints span multiple teams, tracking and proving marketing’s true impact is easier said than done. A recent Marketing Budget Benchmark Study by Ray Rike, Jon Miller, and Bill Macitis reveals key insights. sheds light on how top B2B marketers are approaching efficiency and attribution. Let’s explore key takeaways and how you can apply them to your own marketing strategy. What are CMOs Tracking? The Top 3 Metrics When asked about their top three performance metrics, CMOs consistently focused on: Pipeline Generation – Ensuring a steady flow of qualified leads for sales teams. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) – Measuring the long-term revenue impact of marketing efforts. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) – Tracking lead volume and initial qualification. Notably absent from the top three were cost-related efficiency metrics, such as cost per opportunity or customer acquisition cost (CAC). This suggests that many marketing leaders are still primarily focused on volume rather than efficiency—raising the question of whether marketing investment is being optimized for maximum impact. Why Efficiency Metrics Matter While pipeline and ARR are crucial, failing to measure marketing’s efficiency can lead to wasteful spending and missed opportunities. The study revealed that larger companies tend to measure: Cost per Dollar of Pipeline – Connecting marketing spend to potential revenue. Marketing Cost per New Customer (New Logo Revenue) – Assessing acquisition efficiency. Cost of Expansion Revenue – Tracking marketing’s role in upsells and renewals. Interestingly, cost per expansion revenue remains under-tracked in many organizations, despite its importance in retention and growth strategies. In many cases, marketing’s contribution to expansion revenue is undervalued compared to account management teams. Attribution Models: What’s Working and What’s Not Accurately attributing revenue to marketing efforts remains one of the biggest challenges in B2B. The benchmarking data highlighted five primary attribution models: First-Touch Attribution – Identifies the first interaction a prospect had with the brand. While useful for understanding top-of-funnel performance, it overlooks the full buyer journey. Last-Touch Attribution – Credits the final touchpoint before conversion. This model can be misleading, often over-attributing conversions to channels like paid search or SDR outreach. Multi-Touch Attribution – Allocates credit across all touchpoints in the buyer journey. While comprehensive, it often struggles to account for offline influences and brand awareness efforts. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) – Uses statistical analysis to measure the impact of different marketing activities. This approach requires significant data and investment, making it more common among large enterprises. A/B Testing – While not a full attribution model, controlled experiments can help validate the impact of specific marketing strategies. How Attribution Matures with Company Growth As companies scale, their approach to attribution evolves: Early-Stage Startups (<$5M revenue) – Often track deals manually, analyzing each conversion on a case-by-case basis. Pre-Scale Companies – Rely heavily on inbound metrics, focusing on organic sources like referrals and word-of-mouth. Scaling Companies – Experiment with first- and last-touch models but face growing pains in attribution accuracy. Mature Companies – Use multi-touch attribution combined with first- and last-touch insights to inform strategy and budgeting. Despite its potential, Marketing Mix Modeling remains underutilized in B2B tech, with adoption still below 10%. However, as organizations gather more data and refine their analytics capabilities, this approach may gain traction. The Future of Marketing Measurement To build a more efficient marketing function, leaders should move beyond simple volume metrics and embrace a more holistic approach: Adopt Blended Cost and Revenue Metrics – Instead of just tracking cost per pipeline, measure cost per revenue to better justify budget allocation. Use Multiple Attribution Models – No single model provides the full picture. A combination of first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch insights offers better visibility. Prioritize Expansion Revenue Tracking – Marketing plays a key role in customer retention and upselling. Failing to measure its impact means missing a major component of revenue growth. By focusing on both pipeline growth and efficiency, marketing teams can drive stronger results and make a more compelling case for continued investment. Bhaswati Director of Content Marketing at Nektar.ai, an AI-led contact and activity capture solution for revenue teams. With 11+ years of experience, I specialize in crafting engaging content across blogs, podcasts, social media, and premium resources. I also host The Revenue Lounge podcast, sharing insights from revenue leaders. In this blog
Intelligent Sales Automation: How AI is Transforming Sales Processes
Intelligent Sales Automation: How AI is Transforming Sales Processes RevOps 10 min Imagine this. You’re a sales rep juggling emails, follow-ups, and endless data entry. Your coffee is cold, your CRM is a mess, and before you know it, half your day is gone, with barely any actual selling done! Sounds familiar? You’re not alone. Sales studies reveal that professionals only sell 22% of the time. The rest goes to manual tasks. The result? Missed opportunities, slow sales cycles, and lost revenue. What if you had a super-powered assistant? It could handle the dull tasks, study customer behaviour, and forecast future sales trends. Intelligent Sales Automation does just that, using the magic of AI sales tools. By leveraging automation, businesses can streamline operations, boost efficiency, and maximize sales performance. This guide looks at the benefits of smart sales automation. We’ll share real-world examples and show how AI is changing sales strategies for success. What is Intelligent Sales Automation? Intelligent sales automation uses AI, machine learning (ML), and data analytics to automate repetitive sales activities. To optimize decision-making, these technologies analyze customer interactions, CRM systems, and market trends. Integrating AI sales tools lets businesses generate more leads, personalise interactions, and raise conversion rates—all without manual effort. How AI Enhances Sales Automation Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionised the sales landscape. Here’s how AI-driven sales tools are making an impact: Customer Data Analysis: AI analyses sales conversations to identify trends and buying patterns. Predictive Sales Forecasting: Machine learning models provide accurate revenue predictions. Automated Email Sequences: AI personalizes follow-up emails based on customer behavior. Lead Scoring & Prioritization: AI ranks leads based on conversion potential. Chatbots for Instant Support: AI chatbots engage prospects and answer queries in real time. AI in sales is growing at an exponential rate, with adoption expected to surge by 139% between 2020 and 2023. Companies using AI-driven automation are finding a competitive edge. They boost efficiency and make sales cycles faster. 7 Powerful Use Cases of Intelligent Sales Automation 1. CRM Data & Contact Automation The Problem: Sales representatives spend a significant amount of time manually entering and updating customer data in CRM systems. In fact, 71% of sales reps cite manual CRM entry as a major time drain, leading to inefficiencies and lost selling opportunities. The AI Solution: AI-powered CRM automation streamlines data entry by capturing key customer details automatically. These intelligent tools extract information from emails, meeting notes, and other customer interactions to populate CRM fields accurately. This not only reduces manual errors but also ensures that sales reps have the most up-to-date customer insights at their fingertips. As a result, teams can spend more time engaging with prospects and closing deals rather than on administrative tasks. 2. AI-Driven Lead Management The Challenge: Generating leads is only the first step—effectively managing them determines conversion success. Companies that implement high levels of sales automation see a 16% increase in lead generation. However, manual lead qualification and follow-up can result in inefficiencies and lost opportunities. The AI Solution: AI-powered lead management takes the guesswork out of lead prioritization. Advanced algorithms assess lead behavior, engagement patterns, and historical data to score leads based on their likelihood to convert. Automated nurturing sequences then ensure timely and personalized follow-ups, keeping prospects engaged throughout the sales funnel. With AI handling lead segmentation and prioritization, sales teams can focus on high-value opportunities, boosting conversion rates. 3. Intelligent Sales Forecasting Why It Matters: Accurate sales forecasting is critical for business planning, resource allocation, and revenue growth. Yet, many sales teams struggle with imprecise forecasts due to reliance on outdated methods or incomplete data. The AI Solution: AI-driven forecasting analyzes historical sales data, market trends, and customer behaviors to generate highly accurate sales predictions. These insights allow sales leaders to make informed decisions regarding inventory, staffing, and revenue goals. AI also continuously refines its predictions by learning from new data, ensuring forecasts remain relevant and reliable over time. 4. AI Chatbots for Customer Support The Trend: AI-powered chatbots have experienced a 92% growth since 2019, highlighting their increasing role in customer interactions. The AI Solution: AI chatbots provide 24/7 support, instantly answering queries, assisting with product recommendations, and resolving customer concerns. These bots use natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer intent and deliver personalized responses. By handling routine inquiries, chatbots free up human sales agents to focus on complex, high-value conversations, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and efficiency. 5. Personalized Email Campaigns The Challenge: Generic email campaigns often fail to capture customer interest, leading to low engagement and poor conversion rates. The AI Solution: AI-driven email automation creates hyper-personalized content based on customer preferences, purchase history, and behavioral data. These intelligent systems craft subject lines, body text, and call-to-actions tailored to each recipient, significantly increasing open rates and conversions. By optimizing send times and content relevance, AI ensures that prospects receive the right message at the right time. 6. AI-Powered Sales Analytics The Insight: Understanding customer behavior and sales performance is key to refining strategies and boosting revenue. The AI Solution: AI sales analytics tools track sales trends, customer interactions, and conversion rates in real-time. These insights enable sales teams to identify successful tactics, pinpoint weaknesses, and adjust their strategies accordingly. AI also provides predictive analytics, helping businesses anticipate customer needs and proactively address market changes. 7. Sales Gamification for Performance Boost The Stat: A whopping 90% of employees say gamification improves their productivity, making it a valuable tool for sales motivation. The AI Solution: AI-powered gamification systems track sales performance, rewarding top performers with incentives, leaderboards, and performance-based challenges. These systems create a competitive yet engaging environment that motivates sales teams to achieve their targets. By integrating AI insights, gamification strategies can be customized to match individual and team goals, fostering a culture of continuous improvement. How Intelligent Sales Automation Benefits Businesses Let’s look at how sales automation actually benefits businesses: 1. Automates Repetitive Tasks The Impact: Businesses can automate over 30% of sales activities, significantly freeing up time for strategic selling. The
Top 7 Data Cleansing Tools Blog
Top 7 Data Cleansing Tools Blog Ensure your business decisions are based on accurate data. Discover what data cleansing is, its importance, and how it can transform your messy data into a valuable asset. Learn about top data cleansing software to keep your CRM clean and efficient. Dive into our comprehensive guide to make your data work for you, not against you. 10 min What is data cleansing? Data. It’s the lifeblood of modern business, fuelling insights, driving decisions, and ultimately, shaping success in the larger picture. But raw data is often messy, riddled with inconsistencies, errors, and duplicates. This “dirty data” can lead to inaccurate analysis, flawed decision-making, and eventually wasted resources. The amount of data around us has increased and so is the need of validating its quality. As this data surge has made room for inevitable errors, companies are dabbling with the subsequent data quality checks. Did you know only 3% of data meets basic quality standards? As per Gartner, Poor data is responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses. This is why the need for Data Cleansing is at all time high! Data cleansing, also known as data scrubbing, is the process of identifying and correcting or removing corrupt, inaccurate, or irrelevant data from your datasets. It’s essential for maintaining data integrity and ensuring your company can make accurate, informed decisions. Why Does Your Company need it? Just picture your best salesperson enthusiastically pursuing a lead only to get stuck. The phone number is wrong and the email has bounced back. Yes, it’s frustrating. This “dirty data” is battled against by reps every now and then. Inaccurate, missing or duplicated information that are in your CRM system can constitute unnecessary barriers for your reps. It’s like being lost and taking the wrong turns while traversing through a town; you may eventually arrive at your destination but after several hours of wasted efforts. Therefore, dirty data is a silent killer waiting to feast on potential opportunities in your CRM with a possible domino impact such as: Wasted Time & Resources: Data-detective mode takes over for your reps who spend hours following up cold leads, fixing mistakes or verifying details. This means that they lose significant selling time that could have been used to close deals. Missed Opportunities: Inaccurate data can be likened to a blind spot. You cannot reach existing customers via targeted advertising nor find new ones using it more effectively. What if you miss out on a big client simply because their mail account was returning an error message? Poor Decision Making: Dirty data also takes the crown when it comes to generating skewed reports and metrics. This can lead to distorted representation of things, poor business decisions and finally missed opportunities. Strained Customer Relationships: There is hardly any doubt that sending irrelevant emails or reaching out wrong individuals will yield a negative experience for customers. Your company name can be tarnished by bad data while at the same time clients can be left annoyed and made feel like digits. Doing proper data cleansing will make sense out of your chaotic data transforming it into one clean reliable source of truth. Top 7 Data Cleansing Softwares Luckily, you can tame the dirty data with several data cleansing software in the market today. A good data cleansing software can transform your messy CRM into a well-organized filing system, ready to empower your sales team. We have curated a list of top 7 data cleansing softwares for your company to choose their perfect fit. Nektar.ai Salesforce data could end up being a mess of information that can hinder the reliability of your reports. This is where Nektar.ai can help you navigate out of the clutter by putting your data hygiene on auto pilot using AI. Here’s how Nektar.ai solves the problems with data cleansing: Unmatched Sync Accuracy: Nektar.ai does not only import data at basic level, it also analyzes your records using AI algorithms for establishing links between accounts and opportunities and provides confidence scores for correct synchronization. This helps in cutting out redundant entries more importantly by enabling you to view all needed details.Time Travel for Data Retrieval: What if I told you that you can unearth the actuals of an old conversation that happened with a particular client? Nektar helps in identifying interactions like contacts, emails and meetings linked to a given domain which are then added into newly created opportunities. Its “time travel” functionality facilitates knowledge transfer among sales people and adds context to live conversations during ongoing engagement.Easy Report Creation: High-quality reporting is dependent on clean data. Nektar.ai makes it simpler to generate reports by automatically syncing contacts, emails, and meetings directly into standard Salesforce objects.Self-Healing Energy: Nektar.ai is ever learning and adjusting. It updates CRM records in response to new information by appending manual changes made by users into the system automatically.Smart Contact Automation: Nektar.ai can automatically create a contact point as well as eliminate some repetitive tasks. They are created with matching domains such that they connect with previous accounts as appropriate.Contrary to traditional data cleansing that may necessitate manual work or third party tools, Nektar.ai is an AI-powered solution that integrates well with Salesforce and does many tasks automatically. It is self-learning and ensures data always remains clean and accurate. With Nektar.ai, you can liberate your sales team from the grind of data entry and enable them to concentrate on their core function; closing deals. Openrefine Google Refine, which is now known as OpenRefine, is already a well-known open source tool. It’s an open-source software like python script that can be freely used and modified by anyone. It also helps to maintain your data in a consistent format and sorts it according to your company requirements. Apart from this, you can import data from the web sources and apply its clustering algorithms for solving complex data cleaning jobs. Where all does OpenRefine stands out? Free and Open Source: Cheap to install and allows
9 Sales Commission Software for 2025
9 Sales Commission Software for 2025 RevOps 10 min Your sales reps are on top of their game. Deals are closing, quotas are being met, and the revenue charts are off the roof. The team is motivated. But what keeps them so? What is driving them to work so hard and close deals? Is it for the growth of the company? Maybe. Is it for the pure passion of closing deals? Possible. Is it to become the best sales rep in the company? Sure. Is it for the commissions they receive for meeting and exceeding their quota? That’s a resounding YES! One of the oldest and most attractive parts of working in sales is the commissions or the incentives a sales rep is eligible to receive for the hard work they put in to meet quotas. This leads to the company having effective sales commission criteria in place. It’s important that companies keep a tab on the rep’s performance, determine the commission they are eligible for and ensure they get fairly compensated. Hence it’s vital that companies employ sales commission software. And if your company still thinks that its commission model is too simple/complex, these 9 sales commission softwares are designed keeping exactly that in mind. Let’s explore them in more detail. Top 9 Sales Commission Software for 2025 Spiff Qobra Everstage Anaplan QuotaPath Xactly Performio SalesCookie OpenComp What is Sales Commission Software? Sales Commission Software is a type of tool that helps businesses manage their sales commission calculations and payments to their sales representatives. Basically, it helps companies keep track of how well their sales are doing, figure out how much commission their salespeople should be earning based on different factors like sales targets, and even automate the whole commission payment process. Think of it as your reliable companion in the sales world. It takes the guesswork out of the equation and provides a streamlined process for businesses to accurately determine the commissions owed to their sales team. 1. Spiff Spiff dominates the market with its AI-powered “Commission Cortex,” which predicts quota attainment and recommends incentive adjustments. Trusted by high-growth SaaS and fintech companies, it’s ideal for scaling teams needing dynamic, data-driven plans. Key Features: Predictive Analytics: Forecast earnings using historical data and market trends. Dynamic Quota Management: Auto-adjust quotas based on rep performance. Integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Netsuite. Rep Experience: Mobile-first dashboards with gamified progress tracking. 2. Qobra Qobra leads the next generation of sales compensation management, empowering revenue teams to design, automate, and optimize commission plans with total transparency and precision. Purpose-built for modern go-to-market teams, Qobra eliminates spreadsheet chaos, ensures payout accuracy, and delivers a best-in-class experience for sales reps and managers alike. Trusted by leading SaaS and scale-ups across USA and Europe, Qobra helps organizations align incentives with performance, accelerate revenue, and foster a culture of trust and motivation. Key Features: End-to-End Compensation Automation From plan design to payout, Qobra automates every step of commission management. Finance and RevOps teams can configure complex plans (accelerators, tiers, bonuses, or clawbacks) without code or spreadsheets. Real-Time Commission Visibility Sales reps get instant access to their performance metrics, earnings forecasts, and payout breakdowns in intuitive dashboards. No more monthly surprises, Qobra ensures clarity and motivation throughout the quarter. Scenario Modeling & Forecasting Finance leaders can simulate the impact of comp plan changes, new hires, or revenue targets. Qobra’s forecasting tools help anticipate costs, optimize incentive structures, and support strategic decision-making. Data Accuracy & Compliance Qobra ensures every payout is traceable, auditable, and compliant with financial regulations. Its data model centralizes inputs from all systems to eliminate manual errors and guarantee payout integrity. Analytics & Insights Gain actionable insights into sales performance, quota attainment, and incentive efficiency. Qobra helps leadership optimize comp strategies using driven analytics and customizable reports. Engagement & Motivation Gamify performance tracking with leaderboards and recognition dashboards. Empower reps to simulate “what-if” scenarios to understand how closing one more deal impacts their commission. Integrations CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho Data Warehouses & Databases: Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift File Storage Systems: SFTP, Amazon S3 HR & Payroll: Factorial, Workday, Sage HR, HiBob, BambooHR, and 100+ software 3. Everstage Everstage’s no-code platform now includes AI-driven “Incentive Co-Pilot,” which designs comp plans tailored to rep behavior. Popular among mid-market agencies and consultancies. Key Features: Drag-and-Drop Rules: Build SPIFFs, bonuses, and clawbacks without IT help. Rep Retention Analytics: Identify at-risk reps using engagement metrics. Collaboration Tools: Comment threads and @mentions for plan feedback. Integrations: ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Stripe. 4. Anaplan Anaplan’s enterprise-grade platform now offers a “Compensation Workbench” for modeling M&A scenarios and harmonizing plans post-acquisition. Key Features: Territory Optimization: Balance workloads using AI-driven territory mapping. Scenario Modeling: Simulate comp plan changes on revenue and margins. Security: FedRAMP-certified for government contracts. Integrations: Snowflake, Tableau, Salesforce CPQ. 5. QuotaPath QuotaPath remains a top choice for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and remote sales teams in 2025, thanks to its intuitive design, affordability, and focus on transparency. Designed to simplify commission management, it empowers reps to track earnings in real time while giving managers tools to align incentives with business goals. Below is a comprehensive breakdown of its 2025 features, pricing, and use cases: Key Features AI-Powered CoachBot ChatGPT-4 Integration: Reps receive real-time coaching via an in-app chatbot. For example, asking, “How can I hit 120% quota this quarter?” triggers personalized tips based on historical performance and team benchmarks. Skill Gap Analysis: The AI identifies weak spots (e.g., low conversion rates) and recommends training modules or playbooks. Gamification & Motivation Tools Live Leaderboards: Reps compete for badges like “Closer of the Month” or “SPIFF King.” Milestone Celebrations: Auto-generated shoutouts in Slack/Teams when reps hit targets. Free Tier for Startups Unlimited Plans: Manage up to 10 users at no cost, with access to core features like commission tracking, basic reporting, and QuickBooks/Xero sync. Ideal for Bootstrapped Teams: Perfect for early-stage startups testing comp structures. Self-Service Rep Portals Earnings Simulator: Reps model “what-if” scenarios (e.g., closing
How Nektar Automates Buying Committee Engagement
How Nektar Automates Buying Committee Engagement RevOps 10 min In today’s complex B2B sales environment, understanding and engaging with buying groups is crucial for driving revenue. Modern B2B buying decisions are made by groups, not individuals so traditional methods, like tracking Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), are no longer sufficient. This shift necessitates a new approach to tracking engagement, one that leverages advanced technology to automate and streamline the process. Nektar offers a powerful solution for sales teams looking to stay ahead. By automating the tracking of Buying Group Engagement, Nektar’s features ensure that every interaction is captured and analyzed, providing deep insights into the buying process. Features such as Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation, Conditional OCR, Intelligent Meeting Tagging, and Contact Participation (Meeting Intelligence) work together to create a comprehensive and automated engagement tracking system. In this blog, we will explore how Nektar’s advanced capabilities can transform your sales process, making it more efficient and effective by automating the tracking of Buying Group Engagement. We’ll delve into each feature, highlighting its benefits and real-world applications, to show you how Nektar can help your team achieve greater success in today’s competitive market. Understanding Buying Group Engagement Buying Group Engagement refers to the interactions and activities involving multiple stakeholders within an organization who collectively make purchasing decisions. Unlike the traditional focus on individual leads, Buying Group Engagement acknowledges the collaborative nature of B2B purchases, where various roles such as decision-makers, influencers, and end-users all contribute to the final decision. In modern B2B sales, it’s essential to track and manage these engagements effectively. Understanding who is involved in the buying process, their roles, and their level of participation helps sales teams tailor their strategies and communication. This approach not only enhances the relevance of sales efforts but also increases the likelihood of closing deals by addressing the needs and concerns of all key stakeholders. By automating the tracking of these engagements, sales teams can gain comprehensive insights into the buying dynamics, enabling them to engage more effectively and drive better outcomes. How Nektar Automates Buying Group Engagement Choosing From 5 Types of Sales Territory Mapping Nektar’s innovative approach to automating Buying Group Engagement leverages several key features that streamline and enhance the process of managing interactions with multiple stakeholders. Here’s a detailed look at how each feature contributes to a more efficient and effective sales strategy: 1. Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation Nektar’s Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation feature automatically identifies and assigns contact roles to opportunities within your CRM. This automation ensures that all relevant stakeholders are accurately documented and associated with each opportunity, reducing the manual effort typically required. Benefits: Time-Saving: Eliminates the need for sales reps to manually input and update contact roles, freeing up their time to focus on selling activities.Accuracy: Ensures that all contact roles are correctly and consistently assigned, reducing errors and improving data integrity.Visibility: Provides a clear view of all individuals involved in the buying process, helping sales teams better understand and manage their interactions. 2. Conditional OCR (Opportunity Contact Role) Conditional OCR allows for the creation of contact roles based on specific, predefined conditions. This feature enables sales teams to customize how and when contact roles are created, based on criteria that are most relevant to their sales processes. Benefits: Customization: Tailors the contact role creation process to fit the unique needs of different sales teams or business units.Efficiency: Automatically applies the right conditions for contact role creation, ensuring that only the most relevant contacts are included.Scalability: Supports the management of complex sales environments with numerous stakeholders and varying engagement scenarios. 3. Intelligent Meeting Tagging Nektar’s Intelligent Meeting Tagging feature automatically tags meetings with relevant information, making it easier to track and analyze interactions with buying group members. This feature leverages AI to identify key details from meetings and associates them with the appropriate contacts and opportunities. Benefits: Enhanced Insights: Provides detailed insights into the content and outcomes of meetings, helping sales teams understand engagement levels and follow up effectively.Consistency: Ensures that all relevant meeting information is captured and tagged correctly, enhancing the quality of data in the CRM.Productivity: Reduces the manual effort required to document meetings, allowing sales reps to focus more on strategic activities. 4. Contact Participation (Meeting Intelligence) The Contact Participation feature tracks and analyzes the participation of contacts in meetings. By monitoring who attends and actively participates in meetings, sales teams can gain valuable insights into the engagement levels of different stakeholders within the buying group. Benefits: Engagement Tracking: Identifies key influencers and decision-makers based on their participation and engagement in meetings. Actionable Insights: Helps sales teams tailor their follow-up strategies based on the involvement and interest levels of different contacts. Data-Driven Decisions: Provides a data-driven approach to understanding and managing buying group dynamics, leading to more informed sales strategies. How GuideCX got Visibility into $1.7Mn Inactive Pipe Every company wants to squeeze out every drop of revenue from its active pipeline. Missing out on achievable quotas and letting potential revenue slip away due to inactivity and poor engagement have become the biggest sins in Sales. But what if there was a way to bring these dormant deals back into the spotlight for the sales teams? This is the scenario we explore—a practical challenge met with a pragmatic question, setting the stage for the journey ahead. This is the story of GuideCX and how they transformed deal prioritization using process automation, powered by customized rules that considered the engagement data that Nektar captured in their CRM. This helped GuideCX gain instant visibility into $1.7M worth of inactive deals, which otherwise would have been lost forever. Ready to revolutionize your sales process with automated Buying Group Engagement? Discover how Nektar’s advanced features can help your team capture every interaction, gain deep insights, and drive better outcomes. In this blog
Configure Contact Roles on Salesforce to Unlock Immediate Efficiency Gains
Configure Contact Roles on Salesforce to Unlock Immediate Efficiency Gains Discover how defining OCRs can enhance visibility into your buying committee, improve sales execution, and boost win rates. RevOps 10 min Let’s begin by simply defining what is an opportunity contact role (OCR). An OCR is a standard object on Salesforce within the Opportunity object that links Contacts to Opportunities, specifying the Contact’s role in that Opportunity. Having great OCR hygiene means sales leadership teams gain better visibility into the buying committee for each opportunity. Better visibility helps monitor if reps have at least identified the necessary people needed to win the deal. If the necessary people are involved, then sales leaders can guide their teams on the right engagement playbook to navigate the deal toward success. While sales teams know the importance of identifying and engaging the entire buying committee, not many follow this through to execution. This becomes worse when we consider the OCR data available in a CRM. Open any CRM today, and you will notice that a majority would have an average of 3 contact roles. Of those 3, one is usually a required field made mandatory by the revenue/sales operations or CRM admin. In companies that practice MEDDIC (and its variations), the ‘Economic Buyer’ and ‘Champion’ are identified and added to the CRM, but the remaining buyer roles are either identified but not added to the CRM or not identified at all. So why should OCRs matter? The answer to this question lies in whether or not you’re working on improving sales execution, rep efficiency, win rates, and forecasting. You’d be surprised if we told you how often we hear prospects say “We have no idea who our sellers are talking to” or “We don’t know how often we’re engaging buyers in open deals”. ‘Who’ you are talking to and ‘how often’ are you talking to buyers are the fundamental units of generating revenue. The ‘process’ of generating revenue can only be improved by tracking and measuring such fundamental units. You may be doing a great job with creating contact lists from third-party data tools like Zoominfo or Lusha or by auto-creating contacts in accounts with tools like Clari or Gong, but if such contacts are not being linked to opportunities, you are losing out on critical data. Technically, in CRM terms, opportunities are won, not accounts. And so having contact data is not good enough. You must aim to have granular and comprehensive contact role data. Introducing Configurable OCRs Using AI, automation, and graph inference, Nektar automatically creates contacts in the relevant accounts present in Salesforce. Until recently, Nektar would automatically associate these contacts as OCRs within the relevant open opportunities. There was no configuration needed. However, through customer feedback and research, Nektar is excited to announce ‘Configurable OCR’. An OCR record is only useful if it is: associated because it is actually involved in the deal a buying role was identified and assigned to it With configurable OCR, you can define rules using buyer-seller engagement data that Nektar has already added to the (open) opportunity and account. For example, a rule can be: “If engagement with contacts in an account is more than 5 times in the last 10 days, and if there is an open opportunity in those accounts, then associate such contacts as opportunity contact roles.” This example considers the recency and frequency of buyer engagement. So, only those contacts that are frequently engaged by the seller will get added to opportunities as OCRs. As a result, sales leaders gain instant visibility into who is actually involved in deals. This is just a simple, straightforward example of a rule. You can define your own rules. Additionally, you can customize the rule for the different segments you may have. For example, have a rule specifically for strategic accounts, expansion accounts, new business accounts, vertical-specific accounts, or any other segmentation you may have. Next, you can configure the second component – the buying role. If you’ve used Nektar, you would know that it extracts job titles from email signatures. A default capability we’ve always offered is to map out job titles to the respective buying roles. With this one-time configuration, as and when Nektar links OCRs, it also assigns a buying role to the OCR based on the corresponding job title. Now, using genAI automation you can define rules to assign an appropriate buying role. You can consider a combination of job titles and engagement trends, job titles and seniority, job titles and engagement and segment – whichever factors address your requirements. After all, the process of generating revenue is unique to a company. The best part is that all this is done using the standard Salesforce records, so they are easily reportable on Salesforce. This can also be achieved for your historical opportunities by backfilling them. Benefits of configurable OCRs Nektar customers use this OCR data for deal inspections, win-loss analyses, playbook optimization, and enhancing their multithreading strategy. Every opportunity has only those contact roles that are involved in the deal while the remaining stakeholders such as legal remain in the account as contacts. So sales leaders are able to monitor which job titles and buying roles are being engaged. Since historical data is also plugged in, you can study buying committee engagement for won and lost deals to analyze what worked and did not work. Some of our customers identified new personas in their closed deals, and have now started prospecting this persona actively to generate new pipeline. By studying won deals, you can also track the engagement pattern and work towards improving your multithreading strategy. Lastly, playbooks can be transformed. For example, one of our customers now has made it mandatory to have a specific number of contact roles if the deal is in stage 3 of the sales process. Similarly, answers to who, how often, and when should different people of the buying committee be engaged can be detailed out. Outside of the sales team, a clean and
6 AI for Customer Success Use Cases
Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025 RevOps 10 min Sales operations has become one of the fastest growing functions over the last few years. According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Operations 2021 Report, the number of sales operations professionals increased by 38% around the world between 2018 and 2020. What’s the reason behind this growth? Bradley Gray, Director of Business Development at Enterprise Holdings attributes two reasons for the growth in this role. There has been a significant increase in the amount of data that gets generated within organizations. The proliferation of data is creating a need for sales operations to generate contextualised insights for sales teams to succeed. RELATED RESOURCE : SALES OPERATIONS TRENDS FOR 2025 A well run sales operations function enables businesses to operate efficiently with data-driven decisions, and also identify gaps that exist in the sales process, and help fill them up through analytical insights. In short, a great sales operations function can help an organization unlock massive productivity gains. To make the most out of your sales operations function, it is important to be aware of the trends that will shape in 2025 (and beyond). Let’s take a look. 1. Multithreading Will Be a Key Sales Tactic The world is in the midst of a great reshuffle for talent. The turnover among corporate director-level-and above, that constitutes the majority of B2B buyers, increased by 31% in 2021. With key people in the B2B buying committee quitting jobs so often, many deals fall apart because reps fail to develop strong relationships with more than one buyer. And with an average of 6.8 decision makers in every B2B purchase, not having strong relationships with all of the key players within the buying committee can be a big risk. When a key stakeholder leaves the organization, reps are forced to start from scratch, causing 80% of them to lose deals. Having just one primary contact for an account, or single-threading, thus increases the chances of missing out on deals. This is where adopting multithreading as a sales practice becomes extremely crucial. Multithreading is when reps form relationships with multiple stakeholders on the buying committee of an account. This way, even if the primary stakeholder quits the organization, reps can capitalize on the relationships they have with the rest of the stakeholders within that account. Multithreading increases the chances of closing a deal by 16%. Successful sales teams in 2025 will master multithreading by gathering champions, influencers and decision-makers, and engaging with them on a regular basis. 2. An Increase in Regulations Will Impact Tech Stack Decisions There has been an increase in the number of regulations across the globe around protection of consumer information and data privacy. Non-compliance of these regulations can be a huge cost. Organizations lose an average of $4 million in revenue due to a single non-compliance event. To prevent such events from taking place, sales and revenue leaders must narrow down on their tech investments from a compliance-first lens. With the world increasingly moving towards a cookie-less world, highly compliant first-party data will become key in helping sales teams make data-driven decisions. First-party data is the information that is handed off with consent from a user to a company. This can be from sources like email, calendar, Zoom or other tools that buyers use. For example, organizations can use their own first-party data to drive contextual insights that can help them make their sales operations function more efficient, while staying compliant with GDPR regulations. Forward thinking leaders will realize this and take control of their first-party data in 2025, and use it to make powerful data-driven decisions. Technologies like artificial intelligence can help enrich CRM with first-party buyer and seller interaction data. Nektar has built an advanced data capture solution that intelligently connects first-party data to the CRM and enriches it for sales teams. 3. AI Based Guided Selling Will Help Sellers Win More Deals B2B sales is getting increasingly complex, with buyers getting bombarded with information across channels, and sellers tackling multiple tasks and responsibilities while chasing their quota. AI based guided selling is helping sellers navigate this complex selling environment by helping them improve their sales execution through a data-driven approach. Along with increasing productivity, AI based guided selling helps identify patterns that lead to more intelligent business decision making, ultimately helping in revenue generation. The pandemic exposed cracks in many organization’s sales processes. Knowing that sales process discipline must be improved to increase the chances of closing new deals, sales leaders are investigating new data-driven, AI-based guided selling functions for improving sales execution. Tad Travis, VP, Gartner AI-based guided selling offers prescriptive as well as predictive insights to sellers to close more deals. From a prescriptive lens, it recommends the next best actions for sales reps and managers to undertake within the sales process. As an example, organizations can use AI to improve their playbook compliance within teams for consistent selling. From a predictive lens, it offers insights that help identify lead indicators to make the sales process more efficient. For example, by having insights on the activity data of sales reps, sales managers can define which deals are real and which need to be eliminated from the pipeline. With such functionalities, sales teams can decide on what to do next to move a relationship, deal or quote forward on the basis of analytics (rather than relying on instinct to make decisions). 2025 will see organizations add AI based guided selling solutions to their tech stack. 4. Training in Consultative Sales Will Take Priority Today’s B2B buyers prefer to conduct their own research before they speak with sales reps. According to research, most buyers engage with more than 13 pieces of content before connecting with a seller. Forrester’s research found that buyers went to all forums for information in 2021 – from webinars and online events to learn about the category and competitors, to speaking with peers and industry experts to have their questions answered. These changes in buyer preferences have raised the bar for sales. Understanding the buyer’s intent and offering them personalized solutions
Revenue Leader Caroline Holt on Putting Together the Best Sales Tech Stack
Revenue Leader Caroline Holt on Putting Together the Best Sales Tech Stack RevOps Sales Techstack 10 min Extracting value from a sales tech stack continues to be a frustrating challenge for revenue leaders. Budget freezes across the board have forced revenue leaders to be more mindful of the tools they add to their tech stack. But it can be a daunting project to undertake with the market being so crowded with tools across multiple categories.How can revenue leaders select the best tools for their tech stack? How can they derive value from this steep investment? And how can they make their sales teams more productive? We sat down with Caroline Holt, VP Revenue Training & Enablement at Bonterra, to unpack some of these nuances around creating the best sales tech stack. Caroline shares some brilliant insights on how revenue leaders can create the best sales tech stack. And make the process more efficient and effective. If you’re short on time, here is a quick summary of the conversation. If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode. The Sales Tech Landscape Has Exploded & Disrupted Sales Abhijeet: Caroline, thanks for coming on the show. Caroline: Thank you so much for having me. Abhijeet: You’ve been in the sales tech industry for quite some time. How have you seen it change over the last few years? Caroline: Well, it has not only transformed. But it has exploded, right? Technology has disrupted sales. I think the buying process in some cases has not changed over the last 20 years, but the way we sell and the way that the buyer wants to purchase has changed. So when I think about my role as a BDR early on, I was calling, I was faxing, I was emailing. But I could get to someone typically. And I think in some cases the proliferation of things like cadence tools that allow people to drop somebody into a constant flow of information has actually hindered our ability to get to people that we want, who might actually need what we need to do. So to the overarching question of how technology has changed, I think in some ways it’s changed in a really incredible way. Because I am an efficiency geek. I like removing friction from the sales process. But I think that sometimes we actually get in our own way because of how we purchase technology. I think of the tech stack in terms of where your business is and what you need to be successful. And I think that’s actually the biggest challenge right now. The first thing that I would say is that when you think about technology, it’s a great solution if you have a really good process to start with. And people to manage the automation, ongoing configuration, updates, maintenance, and so on. CarolineHolt VP, Revenue Training and Enablement Technology is going to be great at a foundational level. So the first thing you need is a way to engage with people, whether that is your regular old telephone and email, or whether that is some sort of a dialer tool where you’re capturing that information. And then you need some place for that information to live. So you need some sort of CRM to be able to capture that information, figure out who you’ve been talking to, what that’s been like, if you’re opening opportunities, what that opportunity looks like. Then you need to figure out what’s actually happening in those calls. And then that you can analyze a lot of that data over time in terms of what people are saying in aggregate. So our whole roadmap should be focused on it. It provides just a really powerful level of insight. But I think for a lot of organizations, they don’t ever optimize those parts of the tech stack, and then they start adding new stuff. They either haven’t gotten it right the first time, or they think that that’s table stakes. That foundational piece, particularly the architecture around the CRM, if that stuff isn’t right, none of the other tech is really that helpful because you wind up buying stuff and building stuff that doesn’t really help that whole flow from who are we talking to, what are we talking to them about, what’s happening with those deals to closing those deals. Caroline Holt VP, Revenue Training and Enablement So that’s a really simplistic way of thinking about sales technology. But I would say that most organizations need to start with those fundamental pieces and then start thinking about, okay, once we know, now we need to figure out who those prospects are. So what sort of technology is gonna help us identify who those folks are. So how you build that stuff over time becomes really powerful. And then what you do with that data and analytics becomes really powerful over time. But sometimes people invest really quickly in a lot of technologies, but they never really optimize them for performance. So the other part is just thinking about having what you can actually bite off in terms of tech investments in any given year to be able to do the right thing for your business. Where is Sales Tech Heading Towards? Abhijeet: If you don the hat of a sales leader who’s going to spend a hundred dollars this year across the technology stack, how should they go about their investment approach? Where should those a hundred dollars be allocated? Caroline: So I would say that like everything in enablement or any of the back office operations, it’s where are your problems? So if the business should be investing based on what technology is going to actually help them be more effective, where they’re less effective than they could be today. So
Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025
Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025 RevOps 10 min The sales operations function went through dynamic changes this past year. Economic uncertainties in 2023 killed the “growth at all costs” model. In 2025, budgets will be tighter, talent scarce and selling more challenging. All these challenges make one thing clear – Delighting customers at every turn is what matters. If we walk backwards from this larger goal, it requires a maniacal focus on the customer. What do customers really need? How can they be assisted? How can they be helped with making confident purchase decisions without seeming pushy? To achieve this, sales teams have to meet customers where they are, at the right time. And act as their trusted advisors. Having complete visibility into the customer journey from lead to cash (to renewal and expansion) is critical to survive what lies ahead. The new mantra for sales operations in 2025 will be to “build a seamless customer journey.” This article will cover the top sales operations trends that 2025 can expect. It’s vastly different from the trends we saw last year. Which is a testament to the fact how fast things are changing in the B2B sales world. What is Sales Operations or SalesOps? Sales Operations refers to the function, role, activities or processes within a sales organization that help sales reps sell faster and better. This department is responsible for reducing frictions within the sales process. It enables reps to achieve higher win rates in a predictable and repeatable manner. The sales operations function strategizes on ways that can help sales reps focus on tasks that contribute to revenue. This includes implementing sales training, investing in tools and technology that eliminate roadblocks in selling, or creating processes that optimize the sales process for all reps. The ultimate goal of a sales operations function is to create a sales engine that runs smoothly. The sales operations function has a direct impact on business revenue. This department continues to be a strategic component of an organization’s structure. Top Trends To Expect in Sales Operations in 2025 B2B sales has been evolving at a rapidly fast pace, making traditional processes of operations obsolete. Some of the biggest challenges facing sales operations today include: 72% of B2B buyers demand a rep-free experience. 47% sellers say their sales tech stack does not boost their productivity or improves results. Close to half of operations professionals say that processes within their companies are only moderately data-driven or not data-driven at all. The confidence of operations professionals dipped over the last two years. As companies hold back on investments because of the downturn, sales leaders will have to devise new ways to survive and sustain in 2024. This puts sales operations in a unique position to help organizations navigate these new challenges. By embracing innovation and pivoting at the right time, sales operations leaders can provide some much needed relief in the tough months that await. They can do this by staying on top of these trends that demand attention: 1. Reduce Technology Overwhelm Among Sellers 2023 was the year of AI. The space of sales technology was already an exhausted field, and artificial intelligence tools just got added to the mix in 2023. But too many tools also cause overwhelm among salespeople. As high as 49% of sellers feel overwhelmed by the tech they are required to use for their jobs. This reduces the likelihood to attain quota by 43%. More tools in the tech stack add the burden of deployment, management and adoption. The goal for sales leaders is to evaluate what they have, consolidate wherever they can and optimize their tech stacks to improve productivity and execution across every role. Bloated tech stacks can also create many problems in disguise and add to a lot of hidden costs such as cost of integrating, tool fatigue, cost of siloed data and much more. Which is why 2025 will be the year of tech stack consolidation. Tech stack consolidation is the process of reducing the number of tools in a company’s tech stack by merging functionalities into lesser and more exhaustive platforms. The goal of consolidation is not to knock down all of the investments in point solutions that already exist. It demands a structured approach in analyzing which tools offer real value for sales teams. And eliminate tools that don’t add any merit to their day to day workflows. Sales leaders will have to do a cross-functional exercise to identify what their top use cases are for sales operations. And lay down a complete technology roadmap against these use cases. Teams that use tech stack that enable the full sales motion, from creating pipeline to closing deals are more likely to meet their revenue goals. A lean and fully capable sales tech stack is a reality as companies look to consolidate vendors while retaining the features and capability of their previous array of point solutions. If you are also looking to consolidate your sales tech stack in 2025, here’s an evaluation framework to get started on. 2. Strategic Multithreading Will Become a Competitive Differentiator B2B buying has changed drastically over the last few years. Relying on decade old strategies to close deals do not appeal to the modern buyer. Especially when buying is no longer a linear process or a one person event. From an average of 6.8 decision makers in every B2B purchase, the number has now gone up to 14. And most of these contacts never make it to the CRM. As they can be from other departments within the company calling the shots in the background. This is where strategic multithreading comes into the picture. Knowing exactly how many people are involved in a deal and having complete visibility into their needs, aspirations and expectations are vital for sales people to know. This kind of relationship intelligence enables reps to form relationships with multiple stakeholders on the buying committee of an account. And they have to do it in a strategic manner. Having access to the list of contacts that might be influencing a deal will be a saviour for sales
Welcome Efficiency Gains in 2025 with a Suite of Meeting Insights Built for Revenue Teams
Welcome Efficiency Gains in 2025 with a Suite of Meeting Insights Built for Revenue Teams Product 10 min Imagine you’re preparing for a 42 km marathon. You’ve set a weekly running plan across terrains and weather conditions. You’ve brought the best equipment – wind-resistant clothing, a sleek water pouch, well-fitted goggles, perfectly cushioned shoes with the right grip, and a pace calculator. There were days when you completed 42 km, there were days you only did 5 km, and there were days you did 25 km, and so on. But, throughout your preparation, the pace calculator unfortunately missed capturing your pacing and the time taken to run the distance. Oops! Now, you have no idea what is the average time you take to complete 42 km or what is your average pace. So you’re going in blind and decide to pace yourself by winging it. Yes, this blog is not about preparing for a marathon. But this example is an analogy to sales. The runner is the revenue leader. The equipment refers to the sales team and tools. Each run refers to a meeting with a buyer. The pace calculator refers to a tool that is meant to provide key insights – what are you doing well, and what you should improve. So, with the analogy and this context, let me challenge you with some questions: How many meetings does it take your SMB and your enterprise teams to win a deal, respectively? How many meetings get completed out of all the scheduled meetings? How often are meetings happening in each of your accounts? How often are the different members of the buying group invited to these meetings? How often are these buying group members attending these meetings? What is the nature of the meeting? What is being discussed exactly? How much time is being spent or wasted in meetings by your sellers and deal support team like solution engineering, executives, etc.? Sure, conversation intelligence tools may help answer a couple of these questions. But, not all. Moreover, most conversation intelligence tools only capture data if they’re set to record that meeting. If it’s not set to record, then the data does not get captured. And before you jump to a conclusion, no, this is not a blog on conversation intelligence. Rather it’s about zooming into your buyer-seller data with a specific focus on meeting insights. Meeting Insights Missing from Your Engagement Data Over the last two quarters, Nektar introduced several useful features that surface insights into buyer-seller engagement. Some of them are specific to meeting data. These insights are 100% accurate because they stem from data picked up at the source of action – your calendar invites, be it Google or Outlook. What’s more? All the data is provided to you in your standard Salesforce objects – account, opportunity, contact, and lead. So you can leverage Salesforce’s powerful reporting capabilities to surface these meeting insights. Let’s dive into some insights that Nektar.ai unlocks through these recently launched features. 1. Meeting Status Every week revenue leaders conduct 1:1 deal reviews where the rep shares with them all the meetings that are scheduled, that took place, and that got canceled or rescheduled. Additionally, the rep also has to share who is invited to the meeting and who attended. The revenue leader then suggests adding a key stakeholder, and the dialogue continues. With Nektar, this ‘zero value information exchange’ can be eliminated. Instead, revenue leaders can access such data in their Salesforce. Nektar automatically marks the status of a meeting across the meeting lifecycle – scheduled, completed, aborted, canceled, missed – to give deep visibility into how meetings are impacting sales cycles, win rates, and revenue generation. The most important question this helps answer is: How many meetings do I need to complete to win an enterprise deal and an SMB deal, respectively? This can be further segmented at an industry or region level for further granularity. Layer Meeting Status with additional factors to unlock clear visibility into deal activities and understand what’s working and not working. 2. Meeting Type Let’s assume an enterprise deal had 55 meetings from creation to close. With Meeting Status you will easily know how many were completed. You may also choose to use native Salesforce reporting to slice this data across deal stages. The only insights you have are that 55 meetings were scheduled, 40 were completed, and each deal stage had a specific count of meetings. But, you’re still not sure what each meeting was about. Was it a demo meeting, a discovery meeting, a use case mapping meeting, a mutual success plan meeting, a proof of concept discussion meeting, or something else? And how many such meetings took place? This is where Activity Tagging becomes beneficial. Nektar automatically assigns tags to meetings based on the context of the meeting using certain keywords. This tag is then automatically added to a custom field on Salesforce within standard objects, making it completely reportable. Equipped with this data point, revenue leaders can easily spot what types of meetings are taking place and how many meetings of the same type are taking place. Most importantly, you can define these tags yourself. For you, you may define one of the tags as ‘use case mapping’, while another company may not. Or, you may have defined only 4 tags while another company may have defined 12 tags. It’s easily customizable to suit your revenue process. Going back to the example we started with, you’ll have the following insights – 55 meetings were scheduled, 40 were completed, 3 discovery meetings, 5 demo meetings, 3 use case mapping meetings, and so on. This insight helps you gather which types of meetings are critical to winning a deal. For example, if deals over $100,000 had more use case mapping meetings and deals less than $50,000 had more negotiation meetings, you can now optimize your plays to replicate this more often to improve your chances of winning deals. Activity tags are customizable. Based on your sales process,
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