The Drift to Salesloft Deal
The purchase of a leading marketing chatbot platform by a sales technology vendor highlights the increasing overlap between martech and sales tech.
The exact boundary between marketing nurture and sales follow-up has long been a source of conflict, particularly since the likes of Outreach or Salesloft became a mandatory part of the enterprise tech stack. Both sales and marketing now have tools to send multi-channel outbound communication sequences. As such, there has been plenty of talk in recent years about the overlap between marketing technology and sales technology.
Web chat is one area where marketing and sales often clash about technology ownership. The primary internal users of web chat applications are often business development teams, yet the technology itself is owned by marketing as part of the website stack. Marketing control of chatbots is often used to justify this split, but bots are generally a secondary use case for web chat. Investment in web chat applications is driven by the live chat capabilities, providing either BDRs or SDRs the ability to engage directly with prospects online.