Sales engagement solutions provider Groove today announced that it has raised $ 12 million, which CEO Chris Rothstein says will be used to expand awareness and accelerate adoption. The round comes as companies shift their selling strategies in response to the pandemic, whose economic effects are anticipated to be both long-lasting and severe.
Products like Groove could facilitate those shifts with automation. Already, 87% of enterprise AI adopters say they’re using (or at least considering using) machine learning for sales forecasts and email marketing. And according to real-time data warehouse company MemSQL, 61% of marketers believe AI is the most important element of their overall data strategy.
Groove’s features are tailored to account executives, focusing on granular activity capture and cross-team collaboration within enterprise environments. The platform syncs all events with Salesforce, logging emails and calendars to ensure accounts remain up to date. And it collects data — like the amount of time spent on support calls versus how often (and how quickly) questions about pricing are answered.
Groove’s Flow dashboard lets users create multi-step, multi-channel campaigns that can be personalized using any field, variable, or attribute. Moreover, it lets teams use workspaces to collaborate on accounts and share top-performing strategies, campaigns, and content. Leads can be automatically imported into flows, while analytics identify which flows are working by revealing engagement at the account and individual levels.
Above: The Groove dashboard.
Groove offers a dialer application boasting click-to-call functionality across Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, flows, and other services. With local presence calling, sales reps can have calls come from numbers within any area code and can send and receive SMS messages directly from a PC in nearly real time. The dialer automatically syncs data directly into Salesforce’s contact history, and it optionally drops recorded messages into voicemail inboxes when voicemail is detected.
Groove provides an overview with insights into sales and account management activities as they’re completed, including calls, emails, and tasks. It can track the performance of email and call script templates and identify which days of the week and times of the day have the highest call connect rates, and it spotlights account-based engagement stats that can be drilled down to the response date.
Groove has plenty in the way of competition, not the least of which is MindTickle, an AI-driven sales enablement platform vendor that raised $ 60 million in June 2019. There’s also Showpad, which nabbed $ 70 million in June 2019, as well as Seismic, Clari, and sales process automation giant Outreach.
But Groove appears to be doing well for itself, with over 50,000 account executive customers at more than 450 organizations — including Google, Uber, Capital One, Veolia, Elastic, Atlassian, and Workfront — driving growth 103% year-over-year, on average. Groove is one of the Inc. 5,000’s fastest-growing privately held companies in the U.S. and was ranked number 14 on the San Francisco Business Times‘ list of fastest-growing private companies in the Bay Area last year.
Level Equity led the series A round, with participation from Capital One Ventures and existing investors Uncork Capital and Quest Venture Partners. The round brings San Francisco-based Groove’s total raised to $ 16 million.