Former software rivals create Kuvana sales acceleration solution

A pair of former rivals in the marketing automation software space have joined together to launch Kuvana, a new software company focused on capturing engagement data and providing intelligent recommendations for sales people through email and mobile tools.

Tracking engagement is something that Kuvana founders Rhett Thompson and Chad Ruff know well. Thompson co-founded marketing automation firm CoreMotives, which was acquired by Silverpop and then by IBM, where he worked until last summer. And Ruff founded the marketing automation firm Salesfusion and Sage Software years before.

With Kuvana, Ruff and Thompson have shifted their focus from the tracking of large scale, structured communications like email blasts and other pre-built content to understanding the individual engagement of each prospect by a sales person and the behaviors relevant to those specific interactions.

"As a sales person, you are underserved by traditional marketing automation tools," says Thompson. "Switching to another tool to search for a prospect's activity is inefficient."

Kuvana's software works within Outlook or Gmail without an intermediary to track data on how people engage with the material sent by a sales person. Based on that data, it also provides intelligent recommendations to sales people to help optimize their efforts.

For example, when a prospect views a PDF or a YouTube video, Kuvana measures the time spent or pages viewed and gives a real-time alert within an Outlook signal panel. It ...