Waltham, MA – December 4, 2019 – Brainshark, Inc., the industry’s only data-driven sales readiness platform, today announced that it has acquired Rekener, a leading sales scorecard provider. The acquisition extends Brainshark’s position as an innovative force and leader in the sales readiness and enablement software market, with the most effective and comprehensive solutions for preparing client-facing teams to perform at the highest level.
With Rekener, Brainshark will provide cutting-edge visibility into sales team activities, behaviors and productivity, helping customers make real connections from improved readiness to increased revenue. These insights will give organizations a powerful new way to identify sales performance challenges and skills development needs early, and address those issues more effectively via Brainshark’s best-of-breed training and coaching solutions.
Founded in 2016, Rekener was developed to provide a simpler way for sales and marketing professionals to use data to drive growth. The platform automatically creates a 360-degree view of sales rep and customer account activities using data from a variety of critical systems, including customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation and other sources. Rekener captures this data to deliver powerful sales scorecards that enable key performance indicators (KPIs), pipeline metrics and benchmark data to be analyzed easily. Sales leaders use this analysis to identify performance issues and optimize coaching efforts.
Alex Laats, co-founder and CEO at Rekener, said: “Rekener puts the power of data directly into the hands of sales managers in their regular one-on-ones. We’re joining forces with Brainshark so sales managers can use data to diagnose what’s working and what’s not working, and then motivate sales reps to improve with training and coaching from Brainshark’s world-class readiness platform. The end result is better quota achievement and increased revenue production. That’s the promise of data-driven sales readiness, and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”
The Rekener technology will add to Brainshark’s award-winning solutions for sales onboarding, training and skills development; sales coaching and practice; content authoring and more, plus dashboards and analytics that easily track training progress and overall readiness across the entire sales force. The newly combined platform will launch a new era of data-driven sales readiness that now serves more than 1,100 companies worldwide.
Greg Flynn, co-founder and CEO at Brainshark, said: “For years, we’ve said that true readiness is not just about the training a team member completes, but also understanding how effectively they put those skills and knowledge into action. We believe the right readiness platform should provide these insights, and that’s what this announcement is all about. The combined platforms of Brainshark and Rekener will give CEOs, sales leaders and managers a new, impactful way to directly correlate learning activities to sales performance – and use that data to prescribe customized, data-driven training and coaching.”
The acquisition is the latest example of Brainshark’s innovative approach to addressing sales productivity challenges, which includes the 2018 release of Machine Analysis, the company’s acclaimed artificial intelligence (AI)-powered feedback and scoring engine for video coaching.
Earlier this year, Brainshark was recognized as a Leader in four G2 Grid® Reports for the categories of “Sales Training and Onboarding,” “Sales Coaching,” “Sales Enablement” and “Course Authoring.” In addition, Brainshark has been a winner in the Golden Bridge Awards® (“Best Training Solution”), Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service (“Best Sales Enablement Solution”), International Business Awards® (“Best Corporate Learning/Workforce Development Solution”) and other programs this year alone.
“Rekener marks a significant milestone in our continued efforts to deliver the most valued readiness solutions on the market, and to help organizations make meaningful connections between readiness and revenue,” said Flynn. “We couldn’t be more excited about what this means for the future of our platform, and the increased value we’ll be able to provide Brainshark customers in the coming year.”
For more information on Brainshark’s acquisition of Rekener and the future of data-driven sales readiness, view this blog post from both companies’ founders: https://www.brainshark.com/ideas-blog/2019/december/brainshark-acquires-rekener.
To learn additional details on how companies use Brainshark to power their sales readiness strategies, visit https://www.brainshark.com/success.
About Brainshark
Brainshark’s sales readiness platform gives you the tools to prepare all your client-facing teams with the knowledge and skills they need to perform at the highest level. With best-of-breed solutions for training, coaching, content and more, you can ensure reps are always ready to make the most of any selling situation. With Brainshark, companies can: enable sales teams with on-demand training that accelerates onboarding and keeps reps up-to-speed; validate readiness with sales coaching and practice that ensures reps master your message; and empower sales organizations with rich, dynamic content that can be created quickly, updated easily and accessed anywhere. Thousands of customers – including more than half of the Fortune 100 – rely on Brainshark to get better results from their sales enablement initiatives. Learn more at www.brainshark.com.
