by Jim Lundy
Summary: Bigtincan announced that it was buying ClearSlide from Corel for an undisclosed price. Separately it announced it acquired VoiceVibes to add Conversational Intelligence to the Bigtincan platform.
Event: Bigtincan announced these two acquisitions within 30 days of each other, on December 23rd, 2020 and January 15th, 2021, respectively. Both acquisitions were announced via press release and deal terms were not disclosed.
Analysis: Bigtincan is complementing its organic growth with acquisition strategy. By acquiring ClearSlide, Bigtincan gets both a great technology platform and a significant customer base. The VoiceVibes deal complements its growing focus on AI and eliminates the need to buy standalone conversational intelligence offerings.
Bigtincan Acquisition Strategy Payoff
In the past, Bigtincan has made acquisitions that complement its existing technology investments. While the same is true for these two deals, what is significant is the large install base that ClearSlide has. This makes Bigtincan one of the larger sales enablement providers on the market.
VoiceVibes and Sales Coaching
With VoiceVibes, Bigtincan bolsters its focus on making its overall platform intelligent. VoiceVibes provides real-time coaching to salespeople on how to communicate effectively through practice and constant feedback from the platform.
Bigtincan enhances its sales coaching capabilities with a proven platform that helps reps practice and present more effectively. VoiceVibes will complement Bigtincan’s existing sales coaching and learning offerings.
Sales Enablement Market Consolidation
For the last several years, leading providers of sales enablement have been acquiring other large competitors in their quest to own more customer relationships. Bigtincan’s acquisition of ClearSlide follows other recent moves such as Seismic’s acquisition of Savo in 2018.
Prediction: By year end 2024, 40% of the sales enablement providers will merge or be acquired (80% probability).
While most of the consolidation has occurred in the sales content management part of sales enablement, we expect that the next wave of consolidation will be the acquisition of sales communication vendors who often refer to themselves as sales engagement. Providers who we think are candidates to be acquired include
- DialSource
- Outreach
- ringDNA
- SalesLoft
- vablet
- VanillaSoft
Sales Enablement Market Continues to Grow
Sales enablement platforms are a form of digital work hub. There are still many sales organizations that have not adopted sales enablement platforms. So, in reality, this market is still relatively young and poised for strong growth.
Enterprises who are still using traditional, horizontal office productivity tools should evaluate the shift to a sales enablement platform. With continued innovation, Aragon also expects that most of the leading offerings in this category will become more intelligent and more automated. This all will lead to increased sales rep productivity.
Aragon Advisory
- Enterprises should evaluate shifting from office productivity suites to a sales enablement platform for their direct and indirect sales teams.
- Enterprises should evaluate sales coaching and learning offerings for dedicated sales training in lieu of their existing learning management system (LMS).
- Enterprises should evaluate Bigtincan and others to see how their needs can be met.
Bottom Line
Bigtincan has proven that it can grow organically and via acquisition. The combination of these two strategies has made it one of the largest players in the overall sales enablement market. While the overall SEP market continues to grow, there are still many enterprises that are yet to reap the benefits of deploying sales enablement platforms.
Additional Resources:
The Aragon Research Technology Arc™ for Sales and Marketing, 2020
The Aragon Research Globe ™ for Sales Enablement Platforms, 2020
The Aragon Research Technology Arc for Artificial Intelligence, 2020
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