Salesforce acquisition of Momentum to boost sales functions

Salesforce entered a definitive agreement to acquire Momentum, an AI startup with several tools for sales and revenue operations.

Among Momentum's numerous AI sales agents are Deal Execution Agent, which auto-fills data across CRM systems for sales reps; Coaching Agent, which analyzes every sales call for key moments such as product positioning and objection handling; and AI CRO (chief revenue officer) Agent, which creates briefs and derives pipeline insights from plain-language queries for revenue operations (RevOps) leaders.

Momentum's agents already have tight integrations with Slack and Salesforce, as well as with competing CRMs, including Zoom, and Salesforce-adjacent tools such as Gong, Google Meet and Webex. It also integrates with numerous large language models, including Google Gemini, OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude and Cohere.

In a press release, Salesforce said that Momentum's integrations with video meeting tools, including Zoom and Google Meet, will help Salesforce users ingest more conversational sales data into Agentforce 360 and Slackbot's agentic workflows.

Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed.

While sales and RevOps have had advanced AI analytics and pipeline prediction tools for a few years, it's still difficult for executives to get to the truth of what is really going on in their pipelines, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm. It comes with the territory because salespeople are optimists at heart.

Having AI tools that can analyze every conversation and provide unbiased feedback will help managers cut through the noise and paint more realistic forecasts.

AI has had its own issues of hallucinations, be they optimistic or just wrong. Momentum's -- or any other company's -- AI tools will have to beat back those tendencies to succeed in the world of sales. Having reliable AI tools could also help companies more efficiently manage and streamline top-of-funnel business development representative outreach processes.

"If I am doing this with AI, it's going to come down to whether I can trust it or not," Wettemann said.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.