Marchex was recently included in Forrester’s February 2021 blog post titled, “Sales Tech Convergence and Confusion,” which outlines the need for clarity and defined categories within an expanding sales tech industry. The article describes the overlap between three sales tech categories beginning to merge – Sales Engagement, Revenue Intelligence, and Revenue Operations.
According to Forrester, these three tech categories are moving closer together and now share significant overlap, particularly around the capture and analysis of buyer engagement data. As spending on tech continues to rise and technology choices expand, the need to define and differentiate between sales tech categories is becoming more prevalent. This trend is only expected to grow and accelerate further in 2021 as companies and sales teams work to adapt.
Included in Forrester’s blog post is a helpful infographic titled “Convergence In Sales Tech” that provides a visual map of how these categories relate and overlap. Marchex is included among the vendors within the Sales Engagement category, and overlaps with the Revenue Intelligence category as a conversation analytics tool.
Here’s how Forrester defines Sales Engagement, Revenue Intelligence, and Revenue Operations in their recent blog post:
- Revenue intelligence: Revenue intelligence solutions capture human engagement activity between buyers and sellers and automatically upload that data to CRM platforms. The AI engine analyses data to deliver insights, provide dynamic guidance, and supply inputs on deal management, forecasting, and other revenue-generating activities.
- Revenue operations: Revenue operations platforms allow companies to optimize the performance of the revenue engine by centralizing data and analytics across opportunities, accounts, and pipelines for sales teams. These insights enable robust management of forecasting and revenue performance, while also providing greater transparency and accountability.
- Sales engagement: Sales engagement platforms help early-to-mid, mid-to-late, full cycle, and post-sale reps manage their omnichannel touchpoints. By automating manual repetitive tasks such as outbound dialing, leaving voicemails, calendaring, and tracking emails, sales engagement platforms deliver significant productivity gains. Embedded AI helps users pick the best messaging, understand preferred engagement channels, and surface missing contacts.
Forrester also included Marchex in their The Forrester Tech Tide™: Sales Technologies, Q1 2021 and among top sales engagement that matter most in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Engagement, Q3 2020.
Marchex Sales Engagement Solutions
Marchex Sales Edge
Marchex Sales Edge is a suite of sales engagement solutions that use conversation intelligence (CI) to support the buying process from beginning to end. Sales organizations can gain efficiencies from automations, get better outcomes by accessing the right data and signals at the right time, and provide frictionless buying experiences for their customers. For example, Marchex Sales Edge Rescue, the solution evaluated by Forrester for this report, uses AI and human validation to evaluate sales calls as they happen, identifies calls where an opportunity is missed and sends an action alert to a designated sales specialist to take next steps. The alert provides high-level call context, a link to the call recording if more detail is desired, and a link to the prospect’s callback number so the seller can take immediate action to save the sale.
Marchex Sonar
Marchex Sonar is an intelligent mobile messaging solution that augments a business’ sales funnel with a two-way text channel. For multiple reasons with increasing importance, text response and engagement rates are often as much as five times higher than that of email. With intelligent automation, chat, workflows and CRM integration, Sonar streamlines inbound sales conversations early in the sales cycle and routes high-intent conversations to your sales team when a consumer decision is imminent. This automation can accelerate the sales cycle and allows sales staff to spend their time taking higher-value calls and closing deals.
To learn more about Marchex sales engagement solutions, contact us.
