Gong.io and Outreach.io Raise All The Money! | This Week In Sales

On this week in sales we’ll be looking at:  * Gong and Outreach raising a crap ton of money and what that means for the sales industry* If you should swear at work And much more! News: AI-powered sales enablement platform Gong raises $250M Enterprise sales enablement platform Gong.io today raised $250 million in a series E funding round valuing the company at $7.25 billion, more than triple its previous valuation ($2.2 billion). CEO and cofounder Amit Bendov says the new capital, which brings Gong’s total raised to $584 million, will be put toward product development, hiring, and customer acquisition. Forty-six percent of business-to-business (B2B) sales reps list lead quantity and quality as their top challenge. That’s perhaps why Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, merging their sales process, sales applications, sales data, and sales analytics into a single operational practice. The stakes are high, given that suboptimal and delayed leads can have catastrophic effects. Harvard Business Review found that there’s a 10 times drop in lead qualification when reps wait longer than 5 minutes to respond and a 400% decrease when they respond within 10 minutes versus 5 minutes. https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/03/ai-powered-sales-enablement-platform-gong-raises-250m/ Vidyard integrates with LinkedIn Messaging  Vidyard is unveiling a new product offering – integration with LinkedIn Messaging – and launching a new sales trainer partner program to expand its partner ecosystem Today, the company is broadly releasing its new Vidyard LinkedIn integration. As an update to its popular Vidyard Google Chrome extension, the Vidyard LinkedIn integration is a free solution that extends Vidyard’s capabilities wherever users work. Vidyard now makes it easy for salespeople to record and send a video right within the LinkedIn message composer. With one click, record with a webcam and/or screen share, or insert an already recorded video, then send it off to a LinkedIn contact and get notified when viewed. Premium partners such as The RAIN Group, Sales Gravy, Corporate Visions, and Sandler Training are all a part of the launch of the new program, which includes other leading sales trainers such as #SamSales, On The Ball Ventures, In The Funnel Sales, Skaled, RevShoppe, SalesIQ, Sales Labs, Harris Consulting Group, Scott Leese Consulting, Sales For Life, CTS Solutions, and Blissful Prospecting. Vidyard.com Outreach Closes $200M Funding Round Outreach, a sales engagement and intelligence platform, closed a $200 million funding round. Specializing in optimizing the customer journey across the entire lifecycle, Outreach promotes collaboration at-scale by driving efficiency and effectiveness for marketing, sales development, closing and success teams.  With the added funding, Outreach plans to scale its sales and marketing organizations and invest in building, acquiring and delivering new technologies. The company also intends to expand and invest in new markets. This new funding round follows two years of remarkable growth for the...