Upland Software extends its portfolio with CRO tool Altify

Upland Software Inc. last week introduced a new customer revenue optimization tool, Altify, to its Enterprise Sales Enablement suite, offering analytics with Salesforce Einstein and Tableau, relationship map visualizations and integrations with applications in the CRO tool ecosystem.

The move follows Upland Software's recent acquisition of Altify, a customer revenue optimization (CRO) cloud platform for sales and extended revenue teams.

With the addition of the Altify CRO tool, Upland's Enterprise Sales Enablement suite now provides opportunity and account management, sales process automation, customer reference management, request for proposal and sales proposal automation, as well as content operations.

Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to help their sales team manage processes and deliver a better experience for buyers. By 2021, 15% of all sales technology spending will be on sales enablement technology, up from 7.2% in 2017, according to Gartner's 2018 Market Guide for Digital Content Management for Sales.

"CRO represents the next step in augmenting and automating the selling process, and can deliver competitive advantage, help to increase win rates and deal sizes, improve forecast accuracy and achieve a higher level of sales consistency," said Jim Lundy, chief executive officer and lead analyst at Aragon Research.

"In recent years, the industry has continued to see a clear need for CRO as digital transformation of sales has evolved," Lundy said. With Altify included in its enterprise sales suite, Upland Software adds a new category called Guided Selling to its product portfolio, which will help the company offer a more complete offering to sales organizations, he added.

Altify CRO tool, built on the Salesforce platform, is aimed at helping teams involved in the sales process view key information such as past interactions, third-party influencers and existing opportunities. This data can help automate sales processes and provide insight into areas for revenue growth, according to the company.

When choosing a product like this, Lundy said customers should look at their organizations' existing sales methodology and look to digitize it. "This is a new category, but sales methodology is the biggest gap in an enterprise. Making it digital and integrated with CRM is all about the digital transformation of sales," Lundy said.

Features offered by Altify CRO tool include:

• Updated insight and relationship maps: Creates relationship maps between existing deals, new opportunities and key points of contact or visualize customer goals, pressures and initiatives.
• Analytics: Provides insight for the extended revenue team with Salesforce Einstein or Tableau's data visualization platform.
• Team sharing: Connects the different departments that are parts of the extended revenue team by sharing account and opportunity insights and relationship maps across the entire application.
• Integrations: Synchronizes existing data with other applications such as Anaplan, Gainsight, Xactly and other CRO partners.
• Onboarding support: Provides new users introduction wizards and in-app assistance providing step-by-step overviews of new features and operability.

The pricing of the product starts from $75 per user per month, depending on the number of capabilities and the number of users.

Other vendors in the work management platform market include Workfront, Clarizen and Plainview. The Workfront platform offers features including demand and resource management, workflow automation and Gantt charts, which let teams create "what if" scenarios within projects before committing to changes, according to the company. Clarizen project management software features tools to help project teams keep on track with scalable project plans, team scheduling and resource management, according to the company. Planview's Enterprise One enables organizations to build roadmaps connecting investments, outcomes, technology and financials of a project and provides impact analysis for managers to understand how potential changes will affect the organization, according to the company.