Seismic Buys Savo Group, Sales Engagement Enters a Consolidation Phase

by Jim Lundy

Seismic, one of the leaders in our Aragon Research Globe™ for Sales Engagement Platforms, announced this week that it is buying rival Savo Group for an undisclosed price. Seismic made the announcement via a press release. No details on the deal were disclosed.

Validating the Sales Engagement Platform Market

Aragon feels that this Seismic/Savo deal helps to validate the sales engagement platform (SEP) market. In 2016, Aragon Research declared the sales engagement market to be a U.S. $5 billion market by 2021. We defined what a sales engagement platform is and explained why we chose that term versus the vanilla sales enablement, a catch-all phrase where all non-CRM tools get tossed.

While the ink is still drying on the deal, we feel that based on this deal, it will drive further consolidation in the market.

The Race to Consolidate

For those who follow the sales engagement market, rumors of a deal to buy Savo were out there. We know some of the vendors who competed to buy Savo and in the end, Seismic won out.

That said, all markets go through a consolidation phase and where we are now is in phase two of this market. The first phase of consolidation was really driven by ShowPad, which has made a number of acquisitions over the years.

Savo Group was also making deals—it had acquired KnowledgeTree in June 2017. Also, more recently, Clearslide was acquired and is now part of Corel Software. Bigtincan acquired Israeli-based Condonto in 2017. Part of the reason consolidation occurs is to gain efficiencies in distribution.

The firms that might be on the acquisition list as part of this round of consolidation include:

• Pitcher, a mobile-focused SEP provider
• Conversica, conversational AI for sales
• Lattice Engines, an AI platform for account-based marketing
• DocSend, for robust content management and content analytics
• vablet, a mobile-focused SEP provider

The Race to Innovate

Early consolidation plays are about grabbing marketshare. However, smaller acquisitions are about adding technology such as artificial intelligence into applications. Making part of sales engagement real by adding AI-based guided selling is what is badly needed in overall sales engagement. New start-ups are emerging that are tackling that part of the equation.

Regarding new emerging players, look for our analysis of some of the emerging SEP providers in our 2018 Hot Vendor™ research.