HOT TAKE: M&A Continues to Heat Up Around Growth Optimization Technologies
HOT TAKE: M&A Continues to Heat Up Around Growth Optimization Technologies
Martin Schneider has had a unique career that has spanned both analyst and marketing practitioner roles, focused on high technology and related industries. The unifying factor has always been both a keen analysis of go-to-market trends, while also having achieved success as a marketing leader. Schneider started his career as a journalist covering B2B technologies, and quickly transitioned into a leading analyst covering application software for the 451 Group in NYC, where he specialized in CRM, marketing automation, and business intelligence/analytics technologies. After analyzing various go-to-market strategies of dozens of technology vendors, Schneider made the move to the vendor side, where he led successful go-to-market teams for several startups and established tech providers,…...
Read moreThe pace of M&A seems to be increasing as we move through the summer. One area where we are seeing an interesting flurry of deals is around companies that help foster growth in one form or another. This might be around promotions optimization for B2C, or around further empowering the strategic power of RevOps teams.
RevOps teams are slowly becoming more and more strategic members of the team, in terms of leveraging the data in their operations wheelhouse to analyze and predict how revenue activities might play out for the quarter, year, etc. A slew of startups have formed to aid this transition - aiming to leverage Gen AI and other new technologies to provide low/no code tools for RevOps teams to build and manage sophisticated analytical and predictive models aimed at various system data sets (lead management, CRM, ERP, etc.). Similar in how we saw CMOs become more like CIOs in the past decade plus...RevOps leaders are now required to have even more technical acumen in the age of AI and the expectation of predictive analytics inside the RevOps tech stack.
So, it is not surprising that we are starting to see a wave of M&A to support this shift. We are seeing larger established players add this functionality via tuck-in acquisitions. And a few smaller firms are joining forces to build out a more data rich, predictive platform for RevOps to leverage every day.
The latest of such moves is by startup Forwrd.ai scooping up LoudnClear.ai. Forwrd has been building up its business as an analytics dashboard of sorts that guides RevOps leaders. The addition of LoudnClear brings more conversational AI, allowing users to harness and act on revenue opportunity signals that may stem from multi-channel, synchronous or asynchronous interactions from both inside and outside the usual real of sales interactions.
For example, RevOps teams can use the combined entity to model alerts and workflows based on upsell opportunity signals arising inside a contact center conversation. Since many customer support agents are either not trained nor permitted to act on potential revenue opportunities, uncovering these signals and routing them to the right sales or success team member can make the most of every potential revenue opportunity if configured properly. Again, this is important, as RevOps teams need to be more data-driven, predictive and strategic, but have not traditionally come from technical backgrounds, so the addition of low/no code tools and conversational intelligence is a big evolution for the market.
A few weeks prior we saw RevOps analytics provider Setsail get acquired by Zoominfo. SetSail provides a number of interesting analytics and dashboard tools for RevOps teams to better analyze sales interactions, pipeline and deal flow etc., leveraging data from various social media and other internal systems to better understand how deals track. With Zoominfo being a data provider for pre-sales teams, you can see how the strategic combination empowers both RevOps teams and sellers with more data, recommendations around prioritization of daily actions, outreach cadence and identification of buyer committee members, etc.
The recent M&A in the growth operations area isn't limited to a RevOps focus. Infor recently closed its acquisition of Acumen which fleshes out its growth optimization offerings for CPG companies. (More on Infor's recent industry-focused M&A activities here.) As CPG companies need to be closer to both their distributors, retail partners and downstream customers, Acumen helps gather and analyze the right sets of data to best optimize promotions and other offers to drive the highest profitability for all players in the CPG value chain. As Infor continues to flesh out its vertical offerings, Acumen will fit nicely inside the Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage and CloudSuite Fashion offerings, providing more trade promotion and other capabilities inside those existing industry focused cloud products.
As the M&A activity heats up in this sector, we are slowly seeing the RevOps management, data enrichment providers and others come together to become what is looking like a true full journey growth operations platform. As more and more enterprises create offices of the Chief Growth officer, these platforms and tools will equip these new C-suite members with the right data, insights and workflows to better drive strategic growth plans and empower their downstream supporting cast.
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