Buzzworthy B2B: The Latest News & Trends From October 2021

Movers & Shakers

The B2B eagles have landed — let’s look at the latest cohort of industry leaders striving to create better customer experiences (CX) and buying journeys, and improve existing technologies, software and solutions.

SmartBug Media Promotes Jen Spencer To President

Inbound marketing agency SmartBug Media elevated Jen Spencer to its newly created role of President, where she will report to the CEO. Spencer will oversee all operations and help execute SmartBug’s growth and market expansion strategy.

ON24 Appoints Leo Ryan As VP, Customer Success In EMEA

ON24, a digital experience platform, welcomed Leo Ryan as its VP of Customer Success in EMEA to help local EMEA customers leverage the full power of the ON24 platform.

RollWorks Welcomes Mihir Nanavati As President

ABM platform RollWorkspromoted Mihir Nanavati to President following his long history with the company, which includes leading RollWorksfrom inception to launch and paving the way for enhanced service offerings, such as Journey Events and the expansion of Journey Stages.

Chili Piper Introduces First Chief Customer Officer

Chili Piper, an inbound conversion platform, promoted its VP of Customer Success, Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, to its first Chief Customer Officer (CCO) to help accelerate itspositioning as a customer-first company. 

Money Makers

The World Series wasn’t the only series we were focused on this month —check out the companies that knocked it out of the fundraising park.No stealing (bases) here!

Openprise Raises $16M In Series A Funding

The RevOps automation platform plans to use the $16 million to help capitalize on growth in the RevOps automation space, accelerate development and scale its team.

Influ2 Generates $8M In Series A Funding

The person-based advertising platform will invest the $8 million into product development and continue its U.S. and team expansion, with specific plans to build an end-to-end buying group marketing solution to help businesses monitor engagement and sentiment across buying groups. 

Rock Content Secures $30M In Series B Funding

With the new capital, the content marketing solutions provider plans to continue investing in marketing, sales and product innovation and evolving its content marketing solutions to empower brands to scale through content.

Apollo.io Receives $32M In Series B Funding

The go-to-market (GTM) acceleration platform will use the $32 million to expand its product and engineering teams, refine its technology and expand its client base of mid-market and enterprise clients with further investments in sales, marketing and operational resources, including new leadership hires.

Head’s Up

What do videos, customers and payments have in common? 

…

Okay, we actually don’t have a clever punchline for that. 

BUT they are all major factors in helping marketers meet the growing demands of digital-first buyers who prefer self-service, personalized buying experiences.

HubSpot Releases B2B Payments Solution

CRM platform HubSpot launched the open beta for HubSpot Payments, an end-to-end payment solution designed to help marketers create a better, more connected buyer experience. In an interview with DGR, Andrew Pitre, VP of Product at HubSpot, explained, “We realized that instead of the common practice of salespeople embedding a payment link into a quote they send a customer, they can just send somebody a webpage with a list of their services to allow people to buy directly,” which helps meet buyers’ increasing preference for self-service, accelerated buying journeys.

On-Demand Video & Streaming Services Get Hotter

Vidyard, a video platform for businesses, launched Sales Feed, a digital media network designed to serve modern sellers with tips, news and entertainment. Sales Feed will feature original online shows, podcasts, video series and more — all created specifically with B2B sales professionals in mind.

Brightcove, an online video platform, released Brightcove CorpTV, a solution designed to help companies create personalized content streaming channels for their target audiences. Housed in the PLAY TV app, it will stream a variety of branded stories, shows, case studies, demos, training content and more across connected devices. 

These two innovations fall in line with the on-demand content streaming services emergence in the industry, as companies such as Salesforce, Demandbase and Terminus recently released their own entertainment hubs.

Organizations Focused On Creating Better Customer Experiences 

Corporate Visions, a success training consultancy, enhanced two skill development programs in its Customer Conversations Systems: Create Value and Expand Value. The courses will be updated with “High-Velocity Selling,” which explores new tactics sales reps can use to build and expand on customer relationships.

Experience management software Momentive, formerly known as SurveyMonkey, revealed new integrations between its CX data insights platform GetFeedback, Salesforce and Slack to help CX teams capture and leverage customer insights in various systems to enhance the effectiveness of their CX programs.

ON24, a digital experience platform, highlighted new ways to turn customer engagement into first-person insights, releasing an advanced AI engine designed to enable organizations to turn engagement into actionable insights that unlock personalization and surface real-time buying intent signals.

New Tools Fueling Event Marketing 

Folloze, a buyer experience platform, revealed Folloze Live Events, an intuitive event experience designer built to help frontline marketers create engaging virtual events for audiences of any size without the need for technical support or expertise.

Event software platform Bizzabo unveiled a new Event Experience category and operating system (OS) to help marketers create more personalized and impactful experiences for individual event attendees. Additionally, the company acquired TeeVid, an interactive virtual event platform, to create its Ultimate Video Production Suite, a custom-built video event solution that seeks to create an immersive event experience that blends content and video in a seamless, TV-like experience.

Stand-Out Stats