CRM Provider Bullhorn Granted Patent for Sales Acceleration Technology
Newly Patented Technology Helps Companies Create Stronger Relationships, Increase Productivity, and Win Deals Faster
BOSTON, December 17, 2015 – Bullhorn®, the human-centric CRM company that helps businesses proactively manage relationships, today announced that it has been granted United States Patent 9,189,770. The newly patented technology is the cornerstone of Bullhorn’s sales acceleration solution, Bullhorn Pulse, which enables companies to radically improve the way sales teams manage their relationships with all key stakeholders, helping them create and engage champions, eliminate deal blind spots, and win business faster.
Bullhorn Pulse, which powers Bullhorn’s CRM platform and is also available as a standalone product that integrates with any sales force automation system, has transformed CRM from something that salespeople struggle to use to a business asset that is universally-adopted, proactive, and intelligent. Every sales leader knows that relationships are the key to winning new business. However, most sales acceleration tools only focus on increasing the volume of leads and speed of lead handoff, when what’s needed is a way to measure and improve relationship strength, empowering salespeople to take control of their deals. Bullhorn’s patent represents a new era in sales acceleration – enabling the automated collection of relationship data by listening to conversations and activity related to customers and prospects. This server-level capability provides engagement insight and relationship strength so that sales leaders can win more business.
Today, buyers are 57 percent through the sales cycle before they engage with a vendor, according to research from CEB, and sales teams are struggling to adapt to this new buying methodology. Relationships are now paramount, yet knowing what’s actually going on at an account—who’s engaged on a deal and how deep a relationship runs—is impossible to glean from standard sales activity reporting. Bullhorn Pulse provides a clear picture of which deals teams are winning and which ones they’re losing.
In fact, based on an analysis of hundreds of B2B sales opportunities at various stages, Bullhorn has found that winning deals have between three and four times as much engagement activity (defined as volume of emails exchanged) with executive sponsors (C-level and higher) than losing deals.
Why Bullhorn Pulse matters:
Brent Leary, managing partner at CRM Essentials and noted CRM industry expert, notes the value of Bullhorn Pulse in a fragmented CRM landscape: “Adoption continues to be a hard sell for many organizations, as CRM systems are still viewed as being more beneficial to management than to sales professionals. In fact many feel using CRM applications have them spending more time acting as data entry clerks with little to show for it, leaving them with less time for working deals and building relationships with prospects and customers. However, by analyzing companywide relationship interactions, Bullhorn Pulse can automatically provide sales professionals with timely, important insights that can directly impact their ability to more efficiently and effectively close deals. These are insights they might not be able to get anywhere else, providing them with the type of incentive needed to increase CRM adoption rates, which should also provide sales management with the kind of information they crave in order to more accurately understand what’s in the pipeline, optimize resource allocation throughout the sales cycle, and increase the likelihood of winning deals.”
“Sales activity reporting is dead,” said Art Papas, co-founder and CEO of Bullhorn and the originator of the sales acceleration technology. “Lots of activity and no engagement equals no results – we’ve learned this from listening to our customers over 16 years. Relationships are everything, and the standard sales process that other CRM systems facilitate doesn’t say anything about relationships. Bullhorn Pulse solves this relationship insight quandary; we’ve created a CRM that listens to every conversation, automatically and unobtrusively, to tell you which deals you’re going to win and which deals you’re going to lose. Bullhorn Pulse has fundamentally shifted the conversation around what CRM should be – effortlessly intelligent, proactive, and up-to-date – versus what it traditionally has been – manually-intensive, robotic, and two-dimensional.”
How Bullhorn Pulse works:
Upon detecting an email message, Bullhorn’s patented data capture technology automatically enters a copy of the message to the activity records of the sender and contact within the Bullhorn CRM system. Attachments such as meeting and event invitations or cancellations are also automatically added to or updated in users’ records. This zero-click capability ensures that all relationship data is logged and analyzed consistently across an entire organization. Existing CRM applications require the user to either manually add email messages to contact records or utilize third-party applications to tag email messages with contact information to link the fields together. With either of these methods, user action is required. As a result, there’s no universal, organization-wide adoption of the solution. No other solution provides automatic, server-side data capture. Bullhorn captured and analyzed 3.4 billion emails for its customers last year.
For more information about Bullhorn, please visit www.bullhorn.com.
About Bullhorn
Bullhorn provides cloud-based CRM solutions for relationship-driven businesses. Its relationship data capture and proactive intelligence gives companies what they need, from insight to action, to win new customers and keep them happy. Today, Bullhorn serves more than 10,000 clients and 350,000 users, and its software solutions are used by some of the world’s most prominent business services enterprises to help increase sales and improve the customer experience. Headquartered in Boston, the company has offices in St. Louis, London, and Sydney, with 525 employees globally. The company is founder-led and backed by Vista Equity Partners. To learn more, visit www.bullhorn.com or follow @Bullhorn on Twitter.
Media Contacts:
Vinda Souza
Director of Marketing Communications, Bullhorn
617-951-4319
Allison Stokes
fama PR for Bullhorn
617.986.5010
