Most complex B2B deals take months or years to close. Along with every point in that pathway, there are human beings interacting. There are literally hundreds of thousands of micro-conversions happening within one large-scale B2B sales engagement. Once the bastion of in-person interactions, B2B engagements must now occur almost exclusively as virtual exchanges even though they're still primarily 1-to-1 communications between buyers and sellers. They may be using technology to connect, and share information digitally via that technology -- but it's still the transference of information (issues and solutions, questions and answers, plans, and revised plans) back and forth between humans that make up the logistics of the path.

Outreach, the number one sales engagement platform, announced new Outreach Amplify machine learning capabilities that redefine the next generation of artificial intelligence for sales. These capabilities put machine learning to work and make sales reps more productive and their engagement with customers more impactful. By leveraging nearly one billion previous sales actions, Outreach Amplify machine learning capabilities allow sales organizations to optimize their playbooks, ramp new team members faster, and coach sales reps in real-time, increasing overall performance. These new Outreaches Amplify capabilities add to a growing list of features Outreach has developed and shipped this year, including Microsoft Outlook support for Enterprise customers and Out-of-Office Data Extraction, which identifies new contacts and drives timely email follow-up. "Customers believe Outreach is the'reference platform' for customer engagement and rely on us to advance the category," said Manny Medina, chief executive officer of Outreach.

Ready to learn Marketing & Customer Analytics Training? Browse courses like Increase Cross Selling and Upselling of Products and Services developed by industry thought leaders and Experfy in Harvard Innovation Lab. A lot has happened in the sales tech space since I introduced my first sales tech landscape last summer. The 38 categories illustrate the extreme fragmentation of the market. Both sales and sales operations are sharing an increased frustration with the number of applications they have in their stack.