Six Top Innovating CRM Companies for 2019: The CRM Rising Star Awards
What unites our Rising Star award winners is not how old or new they are to the industry, but the number of innovative products and services they’ve introduced during the past year. Whether it’s sales intelligence capabilities that can assess how engaged important personas are in any given deal, an AI-powered “sales rescue” feature that alerts businesses to sales calls gone awry, or a technology that makes it easier than ever to create augmented reality experiences, these vendors are injecting fresh energy into sales and marketing.
San Francisco-based 6sense was a pioneer in account-based marketing, and the six-year-old company continues to define the ABM space with a number of product launches, partnerships, and integrations in the past few months, including sales intelligence enhancements that bring together CRM, marketing automation data, web engagement data, and 6sense’s anonymous intent data to provide comprehensive, centralized visibility into account intent, engagement, and reach activity directly within CRM systems. Read more here.
LiveRamp is not a new company by any stretch of the imagination. The vendor, based in San Francisco and formerly known as Acxiom, has been providing cloud-based identity resolution solutions for decades. It has been particularly busy over the past 12 months, though. The company has expanded its flagship IdentityLink platform to include connected TV (CTV), with an eye on simplifying campaign planning, targeting, and measurement while allowing data providers to monetize audiences across CTV. Read more here.
Seattle-based Marchex has provided call analytics and call tracking technology for both marketing and customer service for years. Over the past year, the company, which was founded in 2003, has also made major forays into the sales space. This started in March 2018 with the company’s addition of an executive overview dashboard to its speech analytics offering, allowing users to view actionable customer insights from calls in a single place. The executive overview dashboard includes a leaderboard that identifies top and bottom sales performers across key performance indicators, including percentage of deals closed, upsell and cross-sell conversions, and lift from sales promotions. Read more here.
Augmented reality (AR) is among the hottest technology innovations to hit the marketing landscape in years, but creating augmented reality experiences has long been a challenge for marketers, requiring large teams of developers to build and support. That has put the technology out of reach for all but the largest companies with seemingly unlimited resources. Movable Ink is changing all that, striving to democratize the creation of augmented reality experiences with technology that allows anyone to create immersive and on-brand digital experiences that can be launched from email, web, and display ads. Read more here.
Customer data quality solutions provider Validity is just a little more than a year old, but the company has already disrupted the CRM industry with four key acquisitions that almost instantly propelled it into a position of prominence. The company, which was formed in early 2018 through a partnership with Silversmith Capital Partners, a Boston-based growth equity firm, scooped up fellow data quality firm AppBuddy in late June and ReturnPath, a provider of email deliverability and optimization, in May. These two deals followed the 2018 acquisitions of CRMfusion, a data quality provider, and BriteVerify, an email verification platform provider. Read more here.
New York-based online brand management software and services provider Yext offers brand updates using its cloud-based network of apps, search engines, and other facilities. That network expanded greatly in the past year through a number of key partnerships and integrations. The company, founded in 2006, in June announced an integration with Hootsuite that will allow businesses to manage reviews and social media from a single dashboard. Other deals included an integration with JRNI (formerly BookingBug) that allows businesses to keep customer information up to date, sync location details, and have a single user experience when it comes to managing their brand and appointment data. Read more here.