Sales Tech Deep Dive: Sales Engagement Consolidating With Kyle Man

With overly saturated vendors warring for a slice of the market, M&A are gradually gaining ground as viable companies attempt to grow and become full-fledged sales acceleration solution providers.

The Marketo-Adobe deal was not so big compared to the SalesLoft and Outreach merger that is one of the biggest deals as both are heavyweights in sales engagement. This highlights the fact that the intent data and conversational intelligence have now become essential capabilities for sales teams to be able break through clutter in order to collect customized insights of prospective buyers.

It Has a Competitive Market.

According to Kyle’s calculations, there are upwards of 120 companies on the market that offer some subtype of sales engagement software. It is an immensely disjoint market that is full of legacy and next-gen solutions. This leads to erroneous industry noise that incorrectly informs buyers, but which provides a lot of opportunities for consolidation.

As Kyle notes, “There is no clear vendor that does everything right; customers are connecting solutions between vendors and this introduces data and workflow issues”. The perceived need to reach scale by M&A in response to this reality is leading many companies down the acquisition path.

Consolidation is Accelerating

Consolidation has taken place already and its impact is evident. Taking a look at the biggest example so far from Kyle, there was one that involved Outreach and SalesLoft where they merged. However, there are other major transactions- Drift acquiring Properties and Chili Piper fusing with PathFactory.

This aggregation has a snowballing effect that continues to see more consolidation. As Kyle puts it, this begins the sort of arms race where vendors feel they need to match the end-to-end functionalities offered by their main market competitors. This leads to more deals that target completing holes in portfolio offerings.

The Rise of “Full-Funnel” Sales Acceleration

There are several driving points and with the consolidation there emerges end-to-end “full-funnel”sales acceleration platforms as a result. Customers require tools to align with the total customer/sales process. This translates to, orchestrating the transfer from marketing to sales, allowing man/ AI assisted selling, and stringently joining revenue operation ( RevOps).

As Kyle defines, “The goal is to eliminate data and workflow barriers, so that revenue flow can be accelerated. This implies the creation of a mesh across sales, market and customer success systems.” Others like 'Salesforce', ‘HubSpot’ and ‘SugarCRM’ are also running towards this vision.

Artificial Intelligence and Intent Data are Two Valuable Differentiating Capabilities

The vendors are focusing on embedded AI and intent data integration that have become the main points of ensuring distinction in a consolidating market. The new edge is a capacity to bring insights up and offer the suggestion that lays importantly forward thinking about what may follow.

As per Kyle’s platform AI-driven innovations such as artificial intelligence for conversation analysis, email efficiency and lead scores are exactly what constitutes sales engagement systems in the current setup.

Also, using intent data is equally important to track the marketing and sales that could easily incur unnecessary expenses. The buyer signals and the behaviour are essential in providing sales reps the needed insight to help them recommend priorities for outreach and also ensure personalized communication.

Market Segmentation is Shifting

Why the emerging market segmentation in terms of company size and level of complexity by Kyle mostly signals a significant evolutionary shift within the wider sales engagement meaning. CMS integration with other software continues to be the core objective of SMBs, in particular integrations with CRM systems which include Salesforce and HubSpot. At the midmarket, something comprehensively led by sales of acceleration is certainly required. Due to this, in the enterprise, specialized solutions (conversational intelligence, sales coaching tools) go as their own or are put into larger platforms.

Therefore in the case of coalescence, it is relevant to note that although consolidation is taking place across markets regardless as to which products are being flagged for life, shades in such areas require close attention product depth versus width wise owing to the factor of sophistication among clientele base and also their specific needs.

Vertical Specialization is Coming

Another prediction of value is vertical specialization. However, as of the core horizontal sales engagement embraced will ultimately give in to more solution-oriented options. As Kyle affirms, “The different kinds of industries have specific sales motion and workflows. Look forward to note tailor-made solutions for business services, healthcare, fintech etc such as that also took place in the CRM space.

Data Management and Operations Is the New Slogan.

Even with the success and fading of AI or consolidations in headlines, data management and RevOps certainly became a challenge for sales organizations. A source of truth is difficult to be created because random data and incoherent systems do not favor even operations leaders as much as they try.

As explained by Kyle, there is a huge advantage for sales engagement vendors to move on the operations side through connection of data sources, uniformity of preclusions and supply of endowment strata. This turns out well for those who are focused on operations and minds at Salesforce with their new Revenue Cloud offering.

The Bottom Line

It is a moment that is thrilling and exploding in sales engagement. The consolidation will continue to grow and evolve as more demand is there for end-to-end sales acceleration platforms based on AI technology powered by the intent data. Although this is happening, it is also evident that new frontiers battlegrounds related to data management, and sales operations are coming.

For Kyle, “The vendors have to ensure they strike the right balance between large-scale platform ambitions and core value proposition; we cannot be everything to everyone.” Specialization of verticalization embed capabilities also equate major opportunities worth pursuing in this consolidating market.

Whichever strategies sales engagement providers opt for, the bottom line is that they will make it or break based on the workflow automation and efficiency that they manage to create for those using their services. What customers value most is the ability to transparency, and to deliver the intelligence that can enhance the selling experiences and have a positive revenue impact.