Sugar CRM’s latest acquisition, Node, will enable marketers to design better CX
Sugar CRM acquired the AI predictive intelligence platform, Node Inc. yesterday to enable marketers to deliver better digital experiences. The acquisition powers Sugar’s time-aware CX platform by automatically forecasting expected outcomes and highlighting previously unforeseen challenges and opportunities.
The acquisition is the latest in a series of innovations supporting Sugar’s vision for the next frontier of high-definition customer experience (HD-CX) which began last year with the launch of Sugar’s time-based, no touch CX solutions for sales, marketing and service teams.
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“Obtaining a high definition view of your business and customers, from pipeline to forecasting, is all about replacing a fragmented, dated, and distorted picture with one that is sharply focused and rich in breadth and depth,†said Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM. “Sugar is democratizing AI, ushering in a new frontier in CX with its powerful combination of AI, time-aware and data enrichment, to drive business performance and enable predictability for companies of all sizes.â€
The combined capabilities of Node and Sugar CRM will offer wide-ranging capabilities for sales, marketing and service teams and include:
- Identifying customers most likely to churn, giving precious runway to remediate and engage with customers in the most strategic way possible
- Predicting likelihood to convert from lead scoring models
- Insight-driven forecasting and prescriptive guidance for higher quota attainment and sale close monitoring
- Seamless recommendations for add-on products during the right phase of the customer journey increasing average sale size
- Ascertaining marketing attribution and contribution to closed business
- Improving customer engagement models through predictive case routing and contextual data in real time to empower customer service professionals
Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, says the two companies match up well, and Node represents a valuable addition for Sugar.  “Adding Node has the potential to bring impressive predictive accuracy to Sugar’s platform and products. And now more than ever it is critical to leverage all available data and signals to work towards better outcomes for both customers and the business alike,†he said.
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Node’s 30 employees will be joining the company, but the CEO, Falon Fatemi will not be going with them. Instead, she is moving on to start something new.
What Does this Mean for Marketers?
Making sense of data is a perennial issue for companies. Deep learning models are limited by the quality and quantity of input data, which historically has been inaccurate or incomplete in real-life CRM implementations. Node’s deep learning models identify signals with up to 81% greater accuracy than heuristic-based approaches to deliver the tangible benefits of heightened performance and true predictability.
Sugar was founded in 2004 and has raised over $123 million along the way. Accel-KKR bought the company in 2018, and began a process of evaluating and overhauling it, as private equity firms tend to do.
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It brought in the Charlton as the CEO to steer the ship last year and the company has since aggressively turned to acquisitions to fill in its product voids. Node marks Sugar’s fourth acquisition since last year. The AI platform has raised over $40 million since its inception in 2014.