With tech stack consolidation top of mind for providers and buyers of sales and revenue operations solutions, we identify the companies that could be ripe for M&A.
A great rebundling is underway in B2B sales tools.
Top players are using M&A to build up their capabilities, taking on everything from sales engagement to forecasting.
Which startups could get acquired next? We used the following CB Insights data to find out:
- Funding and M&A rounds
- Yardstiq transcripts
- Valuation
- Revenue
- Advanced search
- Competitor data
- Execution, Strength, and Positioning (ESP) matrices
Top players in the sales and revenue operations space are finding that customers are eager to streamline their sales efforts and consolidate costs. As a result, they are looking for ways to make their platforms into all-in-one solutions and have inked multiple acquisitions over the past few years to build out B2B software tech stacks.
This cohort includes both public players like Salesforce and ZoomInfo as well as top sales and revenue operations vendors identified through mining Yardstiq interviews with software buyers.
ZoomInfo has made 5 sales and revenue operations-related acquisitions since 2018. Salesforce comes in second with 3, and all other companies (except for Groove) follow with 2:
- ZoomInfo acquired sales data startups Komiko, EverString, and RingLead in 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively, conversation intelligence startup Chorus.ai in 2021, and customer acquisition startup Insent in 2021.
- Salesforce acquired conversation intelligence startup Bonobo.ai in 2019, sales enablement startup LevelJump in 2021, and messaging startup Troops in 2022.
- Gong acquired customer relationship management (CRM) startup ONDiGO in 2018 and sales data analytics startup Vayo.io in 2020.
- Outreach acquired sales training startup Sales Hacker in 2018 and revenue intelligence startup Canopy in 2021.
- Clari acquired deal mapping startup DealPoint in 2021 and conversation intelligence startup Wingman in 2022.
- SalesLoft acquired conversation intelligence startup Noteninja in 2018 and sales lead management startup Costello in 2019.
- Groove has not made any acquisitions.
