Lots of real news today. Start with a $2.4 billion acquisition by SAP of Callidus Software, which offers cloud-based sales performance management and configure-price-quote systems. Readers of a certain age will recall that Callidus bought early B2B marketing automation vendor LeadFormix back in 2012. The deal beefs up SAP’s sales automation products.
Customer Data Platform and personalization vendor Evergage has purchased the MyBuys retail offer targeting business from online advertising company Magnetic. MyBuys merged with Magnetic in 2015. Evergage plans to move MyBuys customers onto the Evergage platform. It’s unusual to see one personalization company buy another. Sign of an overcrowded market, perhaps?
In fact, companies struggle to measure a lot of things. This survey from Qlik suggests one reason is a lack of basic data literacy skills. Just one-quarter of junior- and mid-level employees classified themselves as data literate while 74% felt their company would value them more if they improved their data literacy level. Encouragingly, 82% said they’d be willing to invest more time and energy in improvement. Click here to rate your own data literacy skills.
Salesforce has agreed to buy Troops.ai, which helps sales teams use CRM data without actually opening their CRM system. Modules include tools to update CRM records, send Slack notifications of changes in CRM data, and collaborate on deals using a hub within Slack. Troops.ai will be part of Salesforce’s Slack division when the deal closes some time this summer.