News

SAVO Group announced it has received $35 million in its latest venture funding round, bringing the total funding to $84 million to-date.

The round of funding, led by Goldman Sachs & Co., will be used to expand SAVO’s global operations and further develop its suite of sales and marketing applications. Two new board members were also announced alongside the funding results: Michael McGinn and Holger Staude from Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing group.

Private equity firm GTCR completed its $447 million purchase of Vocus, Inc., a cloud-based public relations and marketing software provider. GTCR also announced plans to merge Vocus with Cision, a Swedish-based Vocus rival that the private equity firm also recently acquired.

The combined company will bring new software tools, content and services that help organizations of all sizes to enhance their performance in acquiring and retaining customers. When the combination is complete, Cision and Vocus customers will benefit from sharing access to a comprehensive influencer database, news distribution service and media monitoring and analytics services, as well as Vocus’ new marketing automation platform.

SAVO announced that availability of Sales Onboarding Pro, a new application for its Sales Accelerator Series designed to support recently hired sales reps so that they can begin contributing early to the company’s bottom line.

The offering creates a learning environment that maintains records of task completion and performance. This helps sales leadership to keep reps on track by providing timely and appropriate guidance when needed. New hires establish relationships across the organization — and obtain information about the company and responsibilities — by finding answers and soliciting real-time feedback from product experts and peers.

Next generation personalization and leveraging social data were among the topics at Marketo’s recent virtual conference, titled: The Road To Success Virtual Summit.

In the opening keynote session, Kiip co-Founder and CEO Brian Wong discussed the need for an always-on mentality, even in the B2B world. “In this model of living, we are super obsessed with connectivity and serendipity,” said Wong. “We want things now. We live in moments, and we consume in moments.”

Invoca, a provider of cloud-based inbound call marketing technology, announced the capability for enterprise brands using Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) telephony applications to integrate with Invoca's platform.

The integration layers Invoca’s cloud-based call marketing technology onto existing SIP communications protocol to deliver call tracking, call marketing automation and voice intelligence. SIP is becoming a more popular choice for large enterprises with high call volumes looking to improve the reliability and lower the cost of their telecommunications.