Announcing Our New Release and Slack Investment

SaaS vendors are touting their use of AI and machine learning. But, how do you understand what’s real and the true value AI can bring your sales team in 2017?
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Today we are excited to announce our upcoming release featuring Collections and our new investment from Slack. As we look back at our progress and learnings in 2016, we are very excited with the growth we have seen and what is in store for 2017!

A few highlights from last year

  • We have seen companies both big and small adopt Guru. We were thrilled to welcome many of the fastest growing companies like AirBnB, Square, Optimizely, Shopify, Greenhouse, InVision, Bitly, and many more to the Guru family. We have learned a lot from our customers, and we are excited to continue working hard for them.
  • We are not just solving a Sales problem, we are solving a Customer Experience problem. While many sales teams have and continue to adopt Guru for Sales Enablement, we were excited to see departments across the enterprise adopt Guru as well, from sales and marketing, to support to success to professional services. That’s when we realized that what we are really solving for our customers is ensuring that every interaction they have with their customers is a great one, across the entire customer relationship. With Guru, all of these departments are on the same page. Information is always one click away, and it never goes stale.
  • The way companies work is going through a big change, and we are excited to be part of it. It was only 13 months ago that Slack announced their platform allowing anyone to develop bots on top of it. As we see customers adopt Slack and Guru, we are amazed at how transformative it is to their work day. Company communication is vastly improved, from internal collaboration to customer engagement. Instead of opening a sea of tabs, applications, and siloed experiences, the knowledge and communication they rely on to do their job is brought to them when they need it, right in their current workflow.

These milestones and learnings have helped to set the stage for 2017 for Guru, our product, our market, and where we should focus as a company.

We have joined the Slack Fund!

After releasing our Slack bot last January, we have welcomed many mutual customers. Given how much time someone spends in Slack each day, it is clear they have become a destination, just like your web browser. Our bot ensures that you can easily find information you create in Guru without leaving Slack, as well as turn useful conversations in Slack into FAQ’s in Guru for ongoing recall. Based on how well our products work together, we both felt that we could strengthen our partnership and we are excited to be part of Slack’s portfolio.

Slack’s focus on their partner ecosystem is something that has been proven to work. When combined with Slack, products like Guru create compelling solutions for customer facing teams by ensuring there is a highly streamlined way to capture knowledge from internal subject matter experts.

“We are huge users of Slack on the Greenhouse sales team. Internal sales conversations happen here all day long” says Tori Moss, Director of Sales Operations at Greenhouse. “Having Guru + Slack ensures our sales knowledge lives right where sales conversations are taking place!”

We are excited to be part of this community, and look forward to working with Slack to build great things for our customers.

Why Guru?

As we have shared, the way companies collaborate internally and engage with customers is fundamentally changing thanks to the rise of bots and artificial intelligence. The sea of apps on our phones and countless browser tabs open on our desktop is getting turned inside out. Bots let us have one location to interact with our apps and services with a conversational experience, and AI proactively brings us the information and services we need to do our jobs.

But there’s a problem. The way companies capture and share knowledge in this new world is broken. We spend more than one day of each week just looking for answers to questions, fact checking, and shoulder tapping experts in order to educate, sell and support our customers. One day every week. This is because the systems we rely on today like wikis, intranets, portals, have failed. They are siloed systems that are hard to find, with outdated search, and no way to understand if the knowledge they hold is accurate.

These systems aren't designed to solve business problems. They were conceived when people wanted basic ways to store and retrieve content. At the time it made sense. People were trying to use shared file servers, or worse, and these systems came along and improved the status quo. But that was long ago...companies now need solutions that help their businesses run more efficiently and fit into this new way of working.

Guru brings this content and knowledge to you when you need it, where you are already working, and makes sure it never goes stale. Guru was built for this new world.

Introducing Collections

Continuing towards this vision, we are very excited to announce our latest release, featuring Collections. As we saw our customers adopt Guru and roll it out across their companies, we realized we needed to ensure they had control over how their content was organized and separated. Equally important, for the person using Guru to get answers, Guru should spread across the organization without becoming noisy or complex to use as the volume of information grows.

Collections introduces a unique way of solving these problems. Teams can now set up separate Collections for Sales, Support, etc. and control access and permissions to each Collection, as well as search priority. This simple approach to organization gives a highly curated experience for search. Results that are most important to your job will always appear at the top of the list. Leaving lower priority items below. Collections, combined with Categories, Tags, and Popularity Score, delivers a unique and purpose built search capability for knowledge and content in an enterprise.

As Brenna Stanton, Revenue Team Project Manager for Bit.ly, states: "While we started using Guru to help organize and relay information between our sales and engineering teams, it has since been rolled out ot the entire company, encompassing 7 departments and over 80 employees."

We will be rolling out Collections to our customers over the next few weeks.

We couldn’t be more excited for 2017 and to deliver on our next set of product innovations. We look forward to continued success with our customers!

Today we are excited to announce our upcoming release featuring Collections and our new investment from Slack. As we look back at our progress and learnings in 2016, we are very excited with the growth we have seen and what is in store for 2017!

A few highlights from last year

  • We have seen companies both big and small adopt Guru. We were thrilled to welcome many of the fastest growing companies like AirBnB, Square, Optimizely, Shopify, Greenhouse, InVision, Bitly, and many more to the Guru family. We have learned a lot from our customers, and we are excited to continue working hard for them.
  • We are not just solving a Sales problem, we are solving a Customer Experience problem. While many sales teams have and continue to adopt Guru for Sales Enablement, we were excited to see departments across the enterprise adopt Guru as well, from sales and marketing, to support to success to professional services. That’s when we realized that what we are really solving for our customers is ensuring that every interaction they have with their customers is a great one, across the entire customer relationship. With Guru, all of these departments are on the same page. Information is always one click away, and it never goes stale.
  • The way companies work is going through a big change, and we are excited to be part of it. It was only 13 months ago that Slack announced their platform allowing anyone to develop bots on top of it. As we see customers adopt Slack and Guru, we are amazed at how transformative it is to their work day. Company communication is vastly improved, from internal collaboration to customer engagement. Instead of opening a sea of tabs, applications, and siloed experiences, the knowledge and communication they rely on to do their job is brought to them when they need it, right in their current workflow.

These milestones and learnings have helped to set the stage for 2017 for Guru, our product, our market, and where we should focus as a company.

We have joined the Slack Fund!

After releasing our Slack bot last January, we have welcomed many mutual customers. Given how much time someone spends in Slack each day, it is clear they have become a destination, just like your web browser. Our bot ensures that you can easily find information you create in Guru without leaving Slack, as well as turn useful conversations in Slack into FAQ’s in Guru for ongoing recall. Based on how well our products work together, we both felt that we could strengthen our partnership and we are excited to be part of Slack’s portfolio.

Slack’s focus on their partner ecosystem is something that has been proven to work. When combined with Slack, products like Guru create compelling solutions for customer facing teams by ensuring there is a highly streamlined way to capture knowledge from internal subject matter experts.

“We are huge users of Slack on the Greenhouse sales team. Internal sales conversations happen here all day long” says Tori Moss, Director of Sales Operations at Greenhouse. “Having Guru + Slack ensures our sales knowledge lives right where sales conversations are taking place!”

We are excited to be part of this community, and look forward to working with Slack to build great things for our customers.

Why Guru?

As we have shared, the way companies collaborate internally and engage with customers is fundamentally changing thanks to the rise of bots and artificial intelligence. The sea of apps on our phones and countless browser tabs open on our desktop is getting turned inside out. Bots let us have one location to interact with our apps and services with a conversational experience, and AI proactively brings us the information and services we need to do our jobs.

But there’s a problem. The way companies capture and share knowledge in this new world is broken. We spend more than one day of each week just looking for answers to questions, fact checking, and shoulder tapping experts in order to educate, sell and support our customers. One day every week. This is because the systems we rely on today like wikis, intranets, portals, have failed. They are siloed systems that are hard to find, with outdated search, and no way to understand if the knowledge they hold is accurate.

These systems aren't designed to solve business problems. They were conceived when people wanted basic ways to store and retrieve content. At the time it made sense. People were trying to use shared file servers, or worse, and these systems came along and improved the status quo. But that was long ago...companies now need solutions that help their businesses run more efficiently and fit into this new way of working.

Guru brings this content and knowledge to you when you need it, where you are already working, and makes sure it never goes stale. Guru was built for this new world.

Introducing Collections

Continuing towards this vision, we are very excited to announce our latest release, featuring Collections. As we saw our customers adopt Guru and roll it out across their companies, we realized we needed to ensure they had control over how their content was organized and separated. Equally important, for the person using Guru to get answers, Guru should spread across the organization without becoming noisy or complex to use as the volume of information grows.

Collections introduces a unique way of solving these problems. Teams can now set up separate Collections for Sales, Support, etc. and control access and permissions to each Collection, as well as search priority. This simple approach to organization gives a highly curated experience for search. Results that are most important to your job will always appear at the top of the list. Leaving lower priority items below. Collections, combined with Categories, Tags, and Popularity Score, delivers a unique and purpose built search capability for knowledge and content in an enterprise.

As Brenna Stanton, Revenue Team Project Manager for Bit.ly, states: "While we started using Guru to help organize and relay information between our sales and engineering teams, it has since been rolled out ot the entire company, encompassing 7 departments and over 80 employees."

We will be rolling out Collections to our customers over the next few weeks.

We couldn’t be more excited for 2017 and to deliver on our next set of product innovations. We look forward to continued success with our customers!

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