GROOVED, WHICH PROVIDES CUSTOMER SERVICE SOFTWARE PROGRAM FOR SMBS, BOOSTS A $45M COLLECTION B LED SIMPLY BY VIKING GLOBAL, GETTING ITS TOTAL ELEVATED TO $57M (KYLE WIGGERS/VENTUREBEAT)

groove smbs viking global Groove , an automation-driven sales engagement platform, today announced that it closed a $45 million series B round led by Viking Global Investors with participation from Capital One Ventures, Level Equity, Quest Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital. The funds bring the company’s total raised to over $57 million to date, which cofounder and CEO Chris Rothstein says will undoubtedly be put toward product development and international workforce growth.

It’s Groove’s assertion that the pandemic-fueled shift to digital selling is driving the convergence of sales engagement and revenue operations. But digital trying to sell has also exposed a weakness in some companies’ customer relationship management (CRM) software: too little adoption. In a recently available survey, Forrester discovered that 57% of salespeople struggled to maintain good customer experiences because their CRM systems aren’t well-integrated or accessible.

Founded in 2014 by Rothstein, Alexander Kerschhofer, and Austin Wang, the San francisco bay area, California-based company offers tools to capture sales activities and support collaboration within enterprise environments. The platform syncs events with existing CRM computer software, logging emails, and calendars to ensure accounts remain up to date and collecting data just like the amount of time spent on support calls versus how often questions about pricing are answered.

Groove’s dashboard allows users to create multistep, multichannel campaigns that can be personalized using fields, variables, and attributes. It lets teams use workspaces to interact on accounts and share top-performing strategies, campaigns, and content, so that leads could be imported into flows while analytics identify which flows, will work.

CRM systems present challenges to many organizations. A third of users spend between three and five hours weekly using CRM tools, according to LinkedIn. And the failure rate of CRM projects is estimated to be between 18% and 69%.

“Our enterprise clients want to enable the present day seller while ensuring the highest levels of enterprise security and compliance, ” Rothstein wrote in a statement. “We’re capturing a substantial amount of enterprise market share from our competition because our platform was built for the needs of large, complex businesses 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 excessively high user adoption rates, even with technology averse sellers in non-tech industries. ”

Driving sales engagement

Groove has an overview with insights into sales and account management activities as they’re completed, including calls, emails, and tasks. It could 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 right down to the response date.

Within the last year, Groove has launched new features including auto-contact capture, real-time opportunity, Seismic and Sendoso integration, and more. The auto-contact capture feature identifies missing Salesforce contacts cc’d on emails or meeting invitations, while pipeline management and enhanced profits on return reporting runs live pipeline reviews and instantly pushes updates back to CRMs.

Groove competes with Outreach, an AI-driven sales automation platform vendor, in addition to Salesloft and People. ai.   But Rothstein claims that annual recurring revenue grew 114% in the past 12 months with clients including teams at Activision, iHeartMedia, New Relic, Uber, Google, Atlassian, and Capital One.

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