Automation-driven sales engagement platform Groove nabs $45M

Groove, an automation-driven sales enablement 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 Capita. The funds bring the company’s total raised to over $57 million to date, which cofounder and CEO Chris Rothstein says will 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 selling has also exposed a weakness in some companies’ customer relationship management (CRM) software: a lack of adoption. In a recent survey, Forrester found 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, San Francisco, California-based Groove offers tools to capture sales activities and support collaboration within enterprise environments. The platform syncs events with existing CRM software, logging emails and calendars to ensure accounts remain up to date and collecting data like the amount of time spent on support calls versus how often questions about pricing are answered.

Groove’s dashboard lets users create multi-step, multi-channel campaigns that can be personalized using fields, variables, and attributes. It lets teams use workspaces to work together on accounts and share top-performing strategies, campaigns, and content so that leads can be imported into flows while analytics identify which flows are working.

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 customers want to enable the modern seller while ensuring the highest levels of enterprise security and compliance,” Rothstein wrote in a statement. “We’re capturing a significant amount of enterprise market share from our competition because our platform was built for the needs of large, complex organizations 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.”

Driving sales enablement

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.

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

Groove competes with Gong, an AI-driven sales enablement platform vendor, as well as Highspot, Showpad, Clari, and sales process automation giant Outreach. But Rothstein claims that annual recurring revenue grew 114% in the past 12 months with new customers including teams at Activision, iHeartMedia, New Relic, Uber, Google, Atlassian, and Capital One.