Groove, the sales engagement platform for enterprises using Salesforce, has raised a USD45 million Series B round of funding, led by Viking Global Investors.
Existing investors Capital One Ventures, Level Equity, Quest Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital also participated in the round. Groove plans to use the funding to expand its international operations and accelerate its momentum in the enterprise segment of the market, having grown enterprise ARR 114 per cent in the past twelve months with new customers that include Activision, iHeartMedia, LexisNexis, New Relic, TIBCO, Veeva, and Wintrust.
The global shift to digital selling as a result of the pandemic is driving convergence in two of the fastest-growing sales technology categories: sales engagement and revenue operations. As enterprises look to manage large and distributed revenue teams, they are seeking platforms that integrate the productivity benefits of workflow automation with the insights gleaned through revenue operations software.
Digital selling has also exposed a key weakness in most companies’ Salesforce deployments – lack of adoption. An August 2021 Forrester Consulting “State of CRM” study, commissioned by Salesforce, found that 57 per cent of respondents struggled to maintain good customer experiences because their CRM systems were not well-integrated or accessible. Groove solves this accessibility problem by meeting sellers where they already work, increasing rep productivity while ensuring over 90 per cent Salesforce adoption.
“This notion of the sales engagement platform as a cockpit for sellers is likely to continue to drive further integrations between other sales tech categories and these platforms as the advantages of bringing everything to the seller where they sell (the original vision for CRM technology) become more widely recognized,” said Anthony McPartlin, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research in a recent blog post.
Groove is the only sales engagement platform that integrates seamlessly into existing seller workflows, driving up usage and Salesforce adoption as a result. Groove’s seller adoption rates enable enterprises to leverage complete and comprehensive data to run a more accurate, predicative, and effective GTM process.
“Our enterprise customers want to enable the modern seller while ensuring the highest levels of enterprise security and compliance,” says Chris Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of Groove. “We’re capturing a significant amount of enterprise market share from our competition, because our platform was built for the needs of large, complex organisations that rely on Salesforce as their system of record. We bring automation to the seller instead of requiring that they work out of a separate system. This flexibility ensures extremely high user adoption rates, even with technology averse sellers in non-tech industries.”
Over the last year, Groove has expanded its revenue intelligence capabilities with auto-contact capture, real-time opportunity and pipeline management and enhanced ROI reporting. Through this expanded capability set, Groove enables revenue leaders to make real-time, data-driven business decisions based on sales engagement outcomes across a wide variety of roles, teams, and divisions.
“Our sales operations have been transformed because of Groove,” says Matthew Mullin, Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations and Technology at Tenable. “Our sellers are armed with productivity tools and workflow automation that makes them more effective at their jobs, and we can now rely on accurate, real-time data in Salesforce to make informed decisions.”
