Top MarTech News From the Week of October 6th: Updates from Zendesk, LinkedIn, SugarCRM, and More

The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy MarTech news from the week of October 6th. This round-up covers announcements and updates from Zendesk, LinkedIn, SugarCRM, and more.

Keeping tabs on the most relevant CRM and MarTech news can be time-consuming. As a result, our editorial team aims to summarize the week’s top headlines in the marketing technology landscape. The Solutions Review editors will compile a weekly round-up of vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy MarTech news. With that in mind, here is some of the top MarTech news from October 6th.

Top MarTech News From the Week of October 6th, 2023

Aampe Raises $7.5 Million in a Pre-Series A Funding Round

Aampe, an AI-native user engagement platform, raised $7.5 million in a Pre-Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India and Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA). The company will use the funding to support product development, fuel growth, and continue to invest in its global expansion efforts. Aakash Kumar, the Managing Director of Matrix Partners India, said, “We’re delighted to lead this round to support a team that is best placed to build the next generation of an AI-native customer engagement stack for businesses and keenly look forward to collaborating with them as they scale up.”

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Act-On Software Launches a Suite of AI-Powered Analytics Features

Act-On Software, an enterprise marketing automation solution provider, has launched Act-On Advanced Analytics, a new AI-powered analytics and custom reporting suite. The suite expands on Act-On’s out-of-the-box performance reporting toolkit to include additional dashboards, custom reports from data sets, and filtering and visualization features. Other additions include updated revenue impact reports, funnel performance tracking, natural language querying (NLP), generative email content tool, predictive lead scoring, and other AI-driven functionalities.

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Contentstack Details a New Integration with Amazon Bedrock

Contentstack, a Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provider, has announced the integration of the Amazon Bedrock solution into Contentstack’s Automation Hub and AI Assistant. The integration will give customers access to Amazon’s latest AI capabilities, enabling them to select the AI provider that best suits their needs. It will also provide users with more options for AI products, better security, streamlined procurement, AI-powered automation, and content creation tools like text summarization and keyword extraction.

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Drift Expands its Solution Suite with New Products

Drift—a buyer experience and Conversational AI solution provider—has expanded its buyer engagement suite with three new products—Drift Engage, Site Concierge, and Bionic Chatbots. With these tools, companies can create unique digital experiences for each site visitor, provide visitors with more accurate chatbot interactions to drive better business results and score the visitors’ intent in real-time. These features empower companies to curate personalized experiences based on customer data, even if their visitors are anonymous.

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Intuit Mailchimp Announces New Integrations and Features

Intuit Mailchimp, an email marketing solution provider, has announced its strategic partnership with Wix.com, a global SaaS platform that helps brands create, manage, and grow their online presence. Intuit Mailchimp also revealed a new integration with Buy with Prime alongside updated generative AI and SMS features to help marketers improve how they target, personalize, and automate their marketing efforts during the upcoming holiday season. These announcements were all made at Mailchimp’s annual Marketing Success Season, a three-day virtual conference event.

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Gainsight and HubSpot Release a New Bi-Directional Integration

Gainsight, a Customer Success Platform provider, has revealed a new out-of-the-box, bi-directional integration with HubSpot’s CRM solution. The integration will provide users with a unified view of customer health, sentiment, and success, alongside additional account engagement and touchpoint data. For example, customers using the bi-directional integration can improve their data hygiene, sync customer touchpoints, execute contact outreach sequences, plan renewal strategies to improve revenue retention, maximize productivity, and drive company growth.

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Gartner Releases its 2023 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2023 version of its Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, identifying thirteen leading providers of sales force automation platforms. The analysts on the report—Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, and Guy Wood—also evaluated each listed vendor’s strengths and weaknesses and ranked them on the signature “Magic Quadrant” graph.

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GoTo Appoints a New Chief Product Officer and VP of User Experience

GoTo—an IT management, support, and business communications solution provider—has promoted Damon Covey to chief product officer (CPO) and hired Ruth Frank as its vice president of user experience (UX). Covey originally joined GoTo in 2021 as senior vice president and head of product. As CPO, Covey will lead GoTo’s product teams and UX for the company’s product portfolio. Meanwhile, as the head of UX in the Product team, Ruth Frank will spearhead the company’s ideation, user research, and design functions for product development.

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LinkedIn Announces an Automated B2B Marketing Campaign Creation Tool

LinkedIn has announced Accelerate, a new, automated B2B marketing campaign creation experience powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The tool is designed to recommend an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimizations to help users reach their intended B2B audience with engaging content they can adjust and fine-tune before launching. The Accelerate tool is available as a pilot to a limited amount of North American customers. It builds on LinkedIn’s existing AI features, including its automated placement and predictive audiences tool.

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Outreach Debuts New AI-Powered Features

Outreach, an AI sales platform for revenue organizations, has unveiled new AI Assist capabilities to help provide users with deeper visibility into the status of meetings, deals, and sequences, enabling them to improve how they accelerate deals and drive revenue. The new AI-powered capabilities available on Outreach’s AI Sales Platform include Smart Meeting Assist, which automatically summarizes sales meetings; Smart Deal Assist, designed to help sales reps identify when deals hit roadblocks; and Smart Sequence Assist, a solution for generating tailored sequence content for target personas.

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Solutions Review Launches New Insight Jam Community for Enterprise Technology Professionals

The team at Solutions Review is excited to bring an entirely new distribution channel to Insight Jam, providing our readers with guidance, best practices, and advice on top-of-mind topics in enterprise technology, delivering a community of experts a loudspeaker from which to share their insights, and giving our PR and vendor partners the ability to measure their impact on the community.

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SugarCRM Introduces Several New AI Solutions to its Midmarket CRM

SugarCRM, an AI-driven CRM solution, has announced several new AI-driven capabilities to provide midmarket companies worldwide with out-of-the-box value and productivity gains. The new offerings include embedded generative AI capabilities for sales, marketing, and customer service teams and are currently available to customers enrolled in a closed pilot program. With these tools, SugarCRM users can leverage the benefits of generative AI while maintaining responsible usage and providing admins with the tools they need to audit, control, and filter the flow of data passed down to large language models (LLMs).

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Teradata and ActionIQ Detail Their New Partnership

Teradata—a multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics—and ActionIQ, a composable customer data platform for enterprise brands, have announced a joint offering for marketing and customer experience (CX) activations available for Teradata VantageCloud customers. The new offering includes integration with VantageCloud and ActionIQ and will combine the data and analytics tools of Teradata VantageCloud with the capabilities of ActionIQ’s customer experience apps. This will give users 360-degree customer views, helping them develop better customer engagements and experiences.

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Vivun Releases an AI-Powered Solution for PreSales Teams

Vivun, a PreSales software solution provider, has officially launched VivunOne. This AI-powered platform provides PreSales teams with the tools and insights to engage customers and promote growth. The VivunOne solution is designed to help teams execute, measure, and scale workflows, tie feature requests to revenue impact, win over stakeholders with interactive, customizable demos, and provide insights into growth by drawing from a new set of go-to-market data. The announcement was made at the company’s UNXPCTD event.

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Zendesk Launches New Generative AI Tools

Zendesk, a customer experience software provider, has announced several new generative AI advancements that will help companies improve satisfaction, reduce costs, increase customer loyalty, and realize business value. The new features will expand Zendesk’s AI solution by allowing users to deploy generative AI-powered bots that supply answers to customer questions. Additional enhancements will equip teams with AI-generated conversation summaries and transcripts of customer calls alongside advanced data privacy and protection functionalities to ensure that generative AI is used safely.

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Zoku Reveals Its Advanced Omni-Commerce Platform for Retail

Zoku, a B2B software company, has released its Advanced Omni-Commerce platform for retail. With this cloud-based integrated system, Zoku’s NetSuite Certified systems can work alongside Oracle NetSuite and Shopify solutions to provide better retail and customer experiences. The Advanced Omni-Commerce platform provides users real-time inventory data, unified customer loyalty modules, gift card management, order management automation tools, multi-channel marketing automation, real-time reporting, and improved customer management functionalities.

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Expert Insights Section

Watch this space each week as our editors will share the best written and video resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community for business software pros. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, trends and predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

Consumers Want Better Brand Experiences, And They’re Willing to Pay With Their Data, by Jeremy Swift of Cordial

As part of Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series, Jeremy Swift, the CEO and co-founder of Cordial, explains why customers are willing to share their data to get better brand experiences. In his article, Swift identifies how companies can develop tailored experiences, use data to guide their marketing personalization strategies and earn customer data with better, smarter technologies.

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For consideration in future news round-ups, send your announcements to wjepma@solutionsreview.com.