Tag: Personalization

Lavender V3 in Beta

Lavender applies AI to assist sales reps with drafting emails and recommending best practices.

Sales AI Email Coach Lavender rolled its V3 release into beta. The full release, expected later this summer, sports faster writing times through improved personalization tools and insights, and an enhanced coaching system with segmented and custom dynamic models.

By design, Lavender doesn’t want to replace sales reps but make them more effective, a sharp contrast with many SalesTech vendors. Lavender’s AI helps sales orgs understand why emails work and uses this understanding to help reps quickly write effective emails.

“Everything that we do is steeped in this concept of enablement and trying to get the user to think. There’s nothing I hate more than the concept of AI taking thinking away from sellers, because that’s where their growth is going to happen. The friction that we introduce is always intentional.”

COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting

The objective is to educate the sales rep on best practices that raise response rates and move deals forward. Blackboxing these practices doesn’t educate the rep and it ignores the wisdom of the rep.

While Lavender speeds up the composition process (efficiency), its true benefit comes in improving message quality through personalization and email best practices (as determined by AI analysis of client email data). Simply pushing out more quasi-personalized emails provides limited lift.

“If you actually customize emails to a one-to-one message, we’re seeing companies not only getting 25% plus response rates to their cold emails, but they’re generating a majority of their pipeline via those emails,” said Allred. “For example, a Forbes ‘Cloud 100’ company is seeing about 1900% more pipeline delivered via these emails.”

Sales reps struggle to provide “thoughtful personalization” as they need to search across their email, CRM, Gong conversations, and Sales Intelligence solutions. Reviewing and synthesizing this content can be quite time consuming. Furthermore, email platforms lack analytics, so are a “giant black box” when it comes to determining which emails are effective.

Sales reps have access to personal and conversational context when drafting emails.

Sales reps can select which context sources to employ when drafting an email, with Lavender recommending potential icebreakers and then generating the message.

Lavender addresses the issue of analyzing personalized emails, which creates a “complete blind spot” for Sales Ops.  If each email is unique, RevOps can no longer perform A/B analysis of templates.

“In our dashboard, we’re helping managers understand exactly why reps are having success when it comes to email because it’s not an A/B comparison,” argued Allred. “There are hundreds of emails going out. They’ve all been personalized and customized. There are hundreds of variables that are at play here, and so we’re measuring all of them and pulling out what’s most important.”

Lavender’s email coach evaluates your message real time against your historical best practices to recommend changes (brevity, short sentences, non-spammy headers, questions) that raise response rates (2-3x on average) and continue deal progression.

Lavender’s email coach provides real time scoring. The AI detects reasons the email won’t get a reply and fixes them using a variety of LLMs.

Allred remarked that cold emails shouldn’t get all of the attention, arguing that the key to moving companies through various stages of the funnel is raising response rates.  Unfortunately, one of the reasons that email threads die is because sales reps stop asking questions. So, Lavender builds in personalization and encourages questions in responses.

“If you actually customize emails to a one-to-one message, not only are the emails getting 25% plus percent response rates, but the pipeline that you’re driving from that is almost 2,000% more per email.”

Lavender analyzes data across the inbox (Outlook, Gmail) and SEP (Salesloft, Gong Engage, Outreach, Groove, Apollo) to create custom scoring recommendations. It also marries CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), Conversational Sales (Gong) and third-party data to assist with drafting personalized emails with high response rates.

Lavender ingests activity from enterprise software platforms, analyzes the emails, and recommends edits based on best practices.

The AI can examine the emails and determine which phrasing, formats, styles, and wording are effective and which are falling flat. Lavender is diving deeper into AI analytics, looking to discern which emails are effective and why.

“Our approach to this [problem] is to stitch together an understanding of what’s happening in both inboxes, pull that together into a single pane of understanding, and then feed that back to the rep in real-time to give them the coaching they need. We pull all of that information to the forefront for the user.”

It’s a pure understanding of why an email works from an activity standpoint just like the metadata that we capture today, to the persona analytics, to the writing style data that’s been at the heart of Lavender since the beginning. Not just the style but the content itself.”

Lavender CEO Will Allred

The new release will also introduce a set of open-sourced email frameworks that help sellers tune their logic based on the scenario.  For example, if a seller is trying to write an email to a prior closed lost opportunity, a framework would help the seller think through the message and subsequent follow-ups.

“We’re going to surface frameworks to help people think through better ways to write the message,” explained COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting.  “We want our users to become better writers and better sellers.  One of the things we found helpful in creating that was open-sourcing and bringing our frameworks to the surface so people could understand the logic behind what makes a great email.”

Lavender also added a ChatGPT style modal that allows the user flexibility to brainstorm, receive writing advice, or research via searching (or prompting) the web.

Lavender launched its service before the Cambrian Explosion of GenAI apps and subsequently built an “LLM stack” that includes its own models, Anthropic, OpenAI, Watson X, and more. This early mover advantage allowed it to build a solid customer base. According to the Chrome Store, Lavender has over 35,000 active users, a scale that exceeds its competitors.

“We have more daily active users than anyone in our space has downloads of their like products,” stated Allred.

team.blue Acquires Leadinfo

team.blue, a European cloud services provider, announced that it acquired a majority stake in European visitor intelligence vendor Leadinfo.  team.blue was formed in 2019 when three hosting groups were merged into a European provider of web hosting and cloud computing services.  The firm supports 2.5 million customers across fifteen European offices, aiming to “supercharge the business performance of small and medium-sized businesses.  It describes itself as a “one-stop partner for web hosting, domains, e-commerce and application solutions, with more than 1,800 experts to support.” 

team.blue’s twenty-five offices provide local-language and market “expertise, knowledge, and insight, serving “a rich European landscape of businesses” in fifteen European countries and Turkey.

Team.blue CEO Jonas Dhaenens is looking to augment the firm’s hosting services with B2B cloud applications.  Along with Leadinfo, its value-added services include domain registries, website building (webnode), privacy and compliance tools (iubenda), and WordPress hosting (raidboxes).

Leadinfo supports over 3,000 European customers, claiming to be the market leader in Benelux and the largest international provider in the D-A-CH region.  CEO Han Kleppe and the rest of the management team will continue running Leadinfo as an independent subsidiary.

Leadinfo represents team.blue’s entry into the visitor intelligence and lead intelligence spaces.  It provides lead management services, including visitor intelligence and enrichment, personalization, lead generation forms, triggered workflows, screen recordings (mouse movements and clicks), and over fifty sales and marketing platform integrations.  Leadinfo also supports retargeting services for Google ads and LinkedIn.

team.blue visitor information displayed in the Leadinfo service.

Leads are enriched by IP address matching against a reference database of 220 million global businesses.  Firmographics are gathered from global registry filings and web crawling.  Firmographics include address, phone, year founded, industry codes (US SIC 87 and local codes), sizing data, company logos, social media links, business descriptions, etc.  Legal information includes the registration number, entity type, ultimate parent, group size, and employees in group.  Business descriptions are generally available in the local language.  Other information includes a pinned Google map, page view information, Leadinfo’s lead score, and Leadinfo tags.

Leadinfo does not disclose the name of its registered data aggregator. 

Leadinfo company profiles include a proprietary lead score based on visitor behavior.  However, lead scores do not yet adjust for firmographic fit; thus, a company may score high based on behavior but may not be a qualified lead.

Contact data is limited to board members and publicly listed employees from LinkedIn and Xing (a D-A-CH competitor of LinkedIn).  Contacts are searchable by name and title, with users able to link to LinkedIn and Xing profiles.

Leadinfo’s visitor intelligence tracks visitors across the website, providing detailed viewing histories.  The company matches IP addresses against its global company database and enriches the leads with firmographics.  Visitors are viewable from a web application that supports filtering by firmographics, visitor activity, lead score, and Leadinfo tags.  Screened lists may be exported as CSV files or programmatic uploads (LinkedIn and Google Ads).

Leadinfo also offers a set of dashboard widgets for tracking and analyzing website activity:

  • Live Widget – Tracks current visitors and site activity over the past 24 hours.
  • Map View – Displays visitor locations on Google Map
  • Companies per Province – Displays a national heat map with activity by geographic region.
  • Most Active Companies – Top 10 or 25 visitors
  • Company Size – Bar Graph by employment band
  • Branches – The top industries visiting the website
  • Most Visited – The top pages

Liquid Content, its name for site personalization, adjusts the website based on firmographics.  As a result, marketers can customize the text, video, content, and images presented to the visitor, allowing them to segment their website presentation.

Leadinfo supports a set of triggers and can segment them based on how each visitor reached the website: Directly, Referral, Email Link, Paid Search (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft), Organic Search, or Social Link (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Xing, YouTube).  Trigger rules support multiple custom selects; thus, lead scores may be coupled with firmographics to ensure actions are based on both visitor behaviors and firmographic fit.  Based on the trigger rules, users can add or delete tags, send emails, enroll companies, and send to CRM.

Triggers are also controlled by enrollment so that additional research from a recent visitor does not trigger additional activities or notifications.  Administrators set a period between activities to prevent notification spam.  Firmographic variables may be used for assigning leads.

Slack notifications may be sent to a channel or person, with the user selecting the notification language.  Thus, Slack triggers can be routed by firmographics for industry or territory reps and sent in the recipient’s language.

Lead forms are available and leverage Leadinfo’s visitor intelligence.  While lead forms do not support triggers, the inputted lead data can be routed via Zapier to various applications.

CRM integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, MS Dynamics 365, Sugar, and Pipedrive.  Other partners include Salesloft, Zapier, and Slack.  Furthermore, Leadinfo has developed an extensive partner network that spans 1,200 agencies.

CRM integrations are bi-directional, with Leadinfo performing duplicate checking against lead and account records.  When sending to CRM, companies may be added as Lead or Account record types.  Additionally, company profiles include deal and task information gathered from CRMs, and users can create new deals and tasks from Leadinfo.

Leadinfo displays HubSpot Deal and Task information. Sales reps can also create new tasks and deals from Leadinfo.

“As a leading digital enabler for companies and entrepreneurs across Europe, we want to offer business value to our customers and partners,” said team.blue CEO Claudio Corbetta.  “Leadinfo is converting visitors into leads which makes the return on investment of the software extremely tangible.  Furthermore, their agency model is a perfect fit with team.blue since this customer segment is dear to us.  We were impressed with the track record of Han in scaling Leadinfo to where it stands today.  We’re eager to help to roll out Leadinfo into new territories.”

The 25-employee firm is based in Rotterdam and just opened its first international office in Dusseldorf.  It will remain an independent company but benefit from team.blue’s operational and financial management.

Pricing is volume-based, with no charge for the core functionality (e.g., triggers, connectors, lead forms).  Prices are based on the number of unique matched companies per month:

The only premium services are screen reporting and liquid content.

Leadinfo grew revenue between 2 and 3X last year.  However, it did not disclose its acquisition price or revenue specifics.

D&B Hoovers Internationalizes

The Siemens Company Profile as it would display in German.

D&B Hoovers, a global sales intelligence solution that has long been English-only, began a multi-phase process towards becoming a truly global, multi-lingual solution.  Most sales intelligence vendors support only a single language, but European vendors Vainu and Echobot support multiple languages for their regional coverage.  Last year, when Dun & Bradstreet bought Bisnode, a firm that serves Central Europe and the Nordics, it declared that it would be sunsetting Bisnode solutions.  Internationalizing D&B Hoover’s then became a priority.

The D&B Hoovers’ UX already supports 17 languages:

  • European: Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish
  • Asian: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese

Adding international languages transforms D&B Hoovers from an Anglo-centric solution for multinationals and companies based in Anglophone countries to a localized version.

“In terms of personalization, we’re trying to switch this from being a US product that is sold globally to a fully local version of a global product,” explained International Product Development & Strategy VP Adam Leslie to GZ Consulting.  D&B Hoovers needs to be a “local product” that supports sales reps selling to local customers, regardless of language.  “Historically, it’s been a US product sold in the local market only where the local market user sells to the US and internationally.  If the local market user only sells domestically, they haven’t bought Hoovers.”

D&B Hoovers greatly expanded its industry code standards, allowing users to filter companies by global taxonomies (e.g., ISIC), regional (e.g., NAICS, NACE 2.0, ANZ SIC), or national standards:

D&B Hoover’s also supports two proprietary taxonomies: Hoover’s industry codes and eight-digit SICs.

Country-specific industry code descriptions will be displayed in either English or the local language.

D&B Hoover’s Localization Options

Along with expanded taxonomies, D&B Hoovers recently added website searching to identify companies based on their self-descriptions across one hundred languages.  Website search has gathered 247 million rows of structured data across 30 million websites and 300 million web pages.

This feature helps identify companies with emerging technologies or positioning (i.e., the evolving three-letter acronyms that firms use for classifying themselves).  The feature echoes its Conceptual Search, but instead of identifying companies based on topical references in news articles, it searches global corporate websites.

D&B Hoovers and its predecessor service, OneSource Global Business Browser (GBB), have supported English-speaking multinational teams for two decades.  Their content and functionality have always been the deepest for the US, UK, and Canada.  Yet, they also provided a robust set of international content:

  • Global Public (Quoted) Company Financials, Segment Reports, Executive Bios, and Long Business Descriptions.
  • Financial statements for 15 European countries and global publics.  The reports may be viewed in USD, EUR, GBP, and the As Reported currency, with currency conversion rates based upon the period or statement date.  Thus, revenue from a 2020 income statement (a flow statement) would be based upon the average conversion rate for the year, while assets from the balance sheet would be based upon the applicable rate for the statement date.
  • Global family trees
  • Industry Codes, including US SIC, NAICS, EU NACE, UK SIC, ANZ SIC, and UN ISIC.
  • Regional screening, including city, postal code, and sub-regions (e.g., state, province, county)
  • Regional customization for distances (KM vs. miles) and numeric formats

D&B Hoovers expanded its company coverage to 180 million active firms and 216 million active contacts as part of its internationalization.  Most of the new firms have between one and five employees.  It also increased the number of countries with sub-divisional regions (e.g., counties, provinces), having recently added sub-divisional filtering for the Nordic countries, Denmark, Hungary, etc.  Additional countries are planned.

Several enhancements came from local customer research.  In many European countries, departmental emails are employed in sales and marketing outreach.  These emails lack any personally identifiable information, so they are GDPR compliant.  Dun & Bradstreet is adding over seven million “entity-level emails” for European countries, including over three million entity-level emails for the D-A-CH region, 1½ million for the Nordics, and 2½ million for Eastern Europe.

Text searching was enhanced to recognize accents and diacritical marks (e.g., when performing location searches).  Leslie called synonymous search with or without special characters a “major ticket to the game.”  While it “sounds like a simple fix,” it was “extremely complex.”

As Dun & Bradstreet began its localization research, it realized the importance of small companies and informational depth in the context of national sales vs. international sales.

“We speak to local markets and say, ‘Well, what is it that will help you sell your products and use our products?’” explained Leslie.  Dun & Bradstreet’s research found that many customers and prospects sell locally to organizations with five or fewer employees.  “That becomes really important now that you can reach them.”

Leslie listed other findings and subsequent upgrades: “We capped the number of contacts at eleven.  That’s been changed.  We were missing the middle name.  That has been changed.”

When I was a product marketing manager at OneSource (2001 – 2010), I explained that we delivered the top N companies in each European country because “you aren’t selling to Polish abattoirs.”  That logic made sense when selling to multinationals and exporters based in English-speaking countries.  After all, they weren’t selling to Polish slaughterhouses.  But this approach fails to meet the needs of sales reps based in Poland, EU industrial manufacturers, or logistics companies. 

Localization requires local language support, content depth, national standards support (e.g., industry codes, geographic districts, GDPR), in-language news and triggers (coming in phase II), market knowledge, and in-market sales and support. Dun & Bradstreet also simplified the UI and improved its dynamic display for various screen sizes and devices.  The new UI was implemented in September, and 96% of browser users and 98% of CRM users have switched to the updated format.

D&B Hoover’s old and new company profiles.

In-product tutorials also enhance the user experience.  For example, if a user utilizes a feature inefficiently or has not used core functionality, the tutorial will provide on-demand coaching.  This feedback is also provided to account representatives to provide guidance.  The in-product tutorials were launched last summer, and Dun & Bradstreet continues to collect data for honing its training recommendations.

There is also a new onboarding virtual assistant for providing on-demand training.  Tutorial translations should be available to users in Q2.  Expanded in-product training and virtual onboarding are consistent with the emerging Work from Anywhere expectation of business professionals.

Dun & Bradstreet provided its internationalization roadmap through the end of the year.  The firm intends to extend local content, expand time-dependent sales triggers, and support multi-lingual news.  New content includes more digitally sourced data, detailed financials, and country-specific datasets such as country export data for Chinese companies, product codes, and expanded tech data for India.

Ostensibly, Phase I, which completed at the end of March, serves as a minimal viable product for localized products (or what Leslie called a “ticket to the game”), and Phase II continues internationalizing the content and expanding localized content. 

“We are working with each local market to collect these [data requirements], source the data, transfer to D&B, and load into the product,” said Leslie. Finally, D&B Hoovers will continue to expand its email and direct dial coverage.

6sense Acquires Slintel

Account Engagement Platform 6sense, which acquired Fortella at the end of August, is also bringing Slintel into the fold.  Slintel augments 6sense’s data with technographics, buyer and market insights, and contacts.

“The acquisition of Slintel reaffirms 6sense’s commitment to leading the RevTech Revolution by providing the foundational data sales and marketing teams need to achieve predictable revenue growth,” stated the firm.

Slintel expands 6sense’s marketing data for audience segmentation, AI-driven predictions, account prioritization, campaign outreach, and personalization.  Slintel insights also highlight business and market trends for sales reps, assisting with activity prioritization, outreach, and personalization.

Slintel’s technographics and renewal predictions improve rep timing and targeting.

Slintel’s account insights are gathered from historical data, verified data sources, natural language processing, and human validation. 

Slintel Account Intelligence includes Intent, Technographics, Firmographics, Events, and Decision Makers.

“Data has always been an essential component of the 6sense platform, and we continually look for ways to bring more actionable and accurate data into the platform,” said 6sense CTO Viral Bajaria. “After evaluating many data providers over the past year, we selected Slintel because of the way they capture data as well as the uniqueness and accuracy of the data provided in their platform, all of which will help 6sense customers outperform their competitors.”

Slintel gathers data for 100 million contacts and 15 million companies.  Half the contacts have business emails, and 15% include direct-dial numbers.

“Slintel amplifies 6sense across four critical dimensions adding: modern business contact data from verified sources; enhanced technographics, including AI-powered confidence scores and predictions; robust buyer insights powered by account and contact-level psychographic data; and deep market insights on account events, expansions, and other noteworthy changes. Collectively, these data-driven features deliver a unique intelligence layer that helps fuel 6sense’s powerful ability to uncover buyers both before and during their purchase journey.”

Slintel Press Release (October 5, 2021)

Slintel was enjoying rapid growth at the time of acquisition, with revenue up 500% year-over-year.

Slintel CEO Deepak Anchala noted he had been approached in the past about acquisition but passed on the opportunities as they wanted to continue developing the Slintel vision.  However, he viewed 6sense differently due to the alignment of the firms’ world views.

“Both teams strongly believe that the market is becoming more buyer-driven and that to succeed, revenue teams need to be smarter, more data-driven, and empathetic to the buyer’s interests,” blogged Anchala.  “Our offerings perfectly complement each other.  One is a market-leading GTM Intelligence product, while the other is a best-in-class GTM Orchestration product.  One has an inbound-heavy, product-led motion while the other is great at closing enterprise deals.”

“When thinking about extending the capabilities of the 6sense Platform, our philosophy is to seek companies that add competitive differentiation, maintain high customer satisfaction, and deliver superior customer value,” blogged 6sense CEO Jason Zintak.  “Slintel checks all of these boxes. What makes Slintel’s approach unique is how it captures and delivers data to customers, resulting in superior levels of data coverage, accuracy, and diversity. The combination of Slintel’s data intelligence with 6sense’s industry-leading insights and orchestration capabilities will deliver better outcomes, faster time to value, and a greater return on investment.”

Due to this alignment of vision, product, and GTM expertise, Anchala felt that both companies would be stronger together and “can power better experiences for our customers.”

Anchala was also impressed with 6sense as a “clear market leader” that is outpacing its competition and has “a near-perfect Glassdoor employee rating.”

“Together, we will enable organizations to:

1.Plan, uncover, prioritize, engage, measure, and forecast progress against revenue opportunities

2. Get technographic, firmographic, and business insights at the account level as well as modern contact data to drive more relevant, personalized, and timely campaigns

3. Receive market alerts about relevant changes captured from hundreds of attributes across millions of companies every week

4. Capture more intent signals to uncover revenue opportunities more accurately”

Slintel CEO Deepak Anchala

Anchala advised Slintel’s customers that the sale “isn’t an exit,” but “the beginning of bigger, better things together, and an opportunity for two phenomenal companies to join hands to realize our vision faster.”

6sense is on a roll with 114% revenue growth year-over-year.  Along with acquiring Fortella, it opened offices in London and Australia, expanding its footprint.  In March, it closed on a $125 million Series D.

D&B Rev.Up ABX Integrated with Folloze

Continuing my discussion of the launch of D&B Rev.Up ABX.

Dun & Bradstreet also announced that the Folloze B2B personalized marketing platform is fully integrated into D&B Rev.Up ABX.  Folloze is available in both standard and advanced editions.

The D&B Data Cloud personalizes Folloze for landing pages from both inbound and outbound prospects. D&B customer profile data supports campaigns executed on display, email, or via sales outreach.

With Folloze, Rev.Up ABX customers can create and launch “data-powered, personalized omnichannel experiences across the entire buyer journey.”  Folloze captures first and third-party account and individual behavior analytics which are fed back to the CDP.  Folloze can also orchestrate targeted campaign activities across sales, account development, and channels.

The Folloze Buyer Experience Platform

“B2B buying and selling has changed forever,” said Eric Bauer, Chief Growth Officer at Folloze.  “Today’s digital-first buyers want to be treated as partners – not campaign targets.  As such, creating the engaging account-based experiences across the entire buyer journey represents the new table stakes for every marketing team.  Our alliance with Dun & Bradstreet makes it easy for marketing and revenue teams to retool and quickly deliver dynamic contextual experiences across a wide range of digital touchpoints.”

Companies that deployed Rev.Up ABX include Thomson-Reuters, Schneider, Citrix, Rackspace Technology, and Sierra Wireless.

D&B Rev.Up ABX is GA across all five modules (the four channels plus the Advanced edition that combines the four).  The Folloze integration will GA in June.

D&B Rev.Up ABX pricing starts at $30,000. This fee includes the ability to acquire data from the Data Cloud and the embedded CDP (D&B Lattice) along with a single channel to activate a campaign such as email, sales, or web. Other Standard features include visitor intelligence, lead form enrichment, a seat of D&B Hoover’s, Salesforce and MAP import connectors, Salesforce Buyer Insights (10 seats), the Outreach connector (10 seats), analytics, and programmatic audience building.

The Advanced edition applies to clients looking to license at least three modules.  It supports broad data ingestion, social activation, paid search, and real-time visitor intelligence feeds to content management systems, along with all four channels.

D&B Rev.Up ABX 90 Second Demo (YouTube)

Demandbase ABX Personalization

Demandbase, which reframed itself as an Account Based Experience platform last month, announced a pair of enhancements to its service: Site Customization and Form Enrichment.  Site Customization lets marketers display “unique site experiences for their target account” based upon more granular segmentation (e.g., firmographics, intent, website activity).

Other customization enhancements include

  • Preview links for stakeholder review before release
  • Account list targeting with personalized ads
  • Tailored landing pages based upon the stage of the buying journey

The website can be personalized based upon industry, stage, geography, company size, or other variables.  Messaging, CTAs, collateral, and creative elements can be customized based upon the visitor.

“The creative elements and the experience you want to give to your customer or prospect are up to you,” blogged Demandbase Director of Product Marketing Ruth Juni.  “One thing is for sure: Taking the time to think through the messaging from the consumer’s perspective will ensure you’re delivering the right message to the consumer at the right time.”

Marketers can also display unique web form designs with minimal field display.  Demandbase then enriches the submitted form with additional prospect details.

“ABX is rooted in an intense focus on the customer at every stage of the buying cycle, using intelligent insights to know when and how to engage, and what to say to each account,” said Jon Miller, Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Demandbase.  “Your website is one of the most important interactions a customer or prospect can have with your brand, which is why it’s critical that your website experience should be as personalized as email or other channels.  Our new features for Demandbase Personalization make it easy to deliver the right website experience and elevate the entire journey.”

According to Gartner, 98% of marketers argue that personalization enhances customer relationships. “Gartner is predicting that smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 25% by 2023,” said Demandbase Product VP Seth Myers.  “Personalization is taking center stage in business today.  This makes the case even more for our enhanced Personalization product and its industry-leading features that treat personalization as seriously as it should be treated. We’re bound and determined to keep anticipating what our customers want and need, in order to continue to elevate ABX.”

A screenshot of the Demandbase One Dashboard showing the top trending Intent keywords over 12 weeks.

MSD 365 Customer Insights Enhancements

Microsoft has begun beta testing a set of enhancements to its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights CDP.  The upgrades focus on extending CDP capabilities into deeper insights and AI capabilities.  The new functionality will GA during the first half of 2021.

Engagement Insights, currently in preview, provides cross-channel analytics that assess customer behavior and intent across the web, mobile, connected devices, and other touchpoints.  Engagement Insights combines behavioral analytics with transactional, demographic, survey, and other data sets “to create interactive and rich insights that help drive the next best actions and personalized experiences.”

Engagement Insights begins with standard analytics around web site visitors, pages viewed, and visit duration.  A custom report builder lets marketers “curate the exact views to answer the business questions at hand.”  Funnel reports track customer journeys, identify gaps and opportunities, and inform next best actions.

“Engagement Insights is about directly funneling web, mobile and connected product data back into Customer Insights to help continue to enrich that understanding of the customer in order to better serve them.

James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Applications.

Insights are deployed across the customer lifecycle and assist with personalizing offers, including presenting new product or services that better match customer needs.

“As everything’s gone digital, the need to deeply understand your customer and to increase the efficacy of those engagements has really been heightened through this pandemic,” said Phillips.

AI enhancements focus on better customer predictions.  The AI functionality employs Azure Synapse Analytics and includes a set of pre-built templates for predicting customer churn, automating product recommendations, and evaluating customer lifetime value.  The templates help marketers gather customer insights without requiring data science or IT professional support.

A new integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice captures customer sentiment and feedback.

According to Phillips, Customer Insights is the “fastest-growing application in the Dynamics 365 portfolio.”

Part II covers Customer Insights partnerships.

Terminus Full-Funnel Marketing

Terminus announced a set of additional “full-funnel marketing” features to its ABM platform.  New B2B account-based marketing capabilities include dynamic web personalization, lead-to-account matching, account engagement scores, expanded ABM reporting, and streamlined workflows.

Dynamic Web Personalization ensures a “consistent and relevant experience” to website visitors independent of their originating channel.  With web personalization, markers can serve up “visually impactful content [that] appears depending on what segment a visitor is in, allowing every page on your website to dynamically deliver relevant information.”  Marketers do not need to build multiple landing pages.  Terminus supports personalization by industry, revenue range, intent, relationship, engagement, CRM stage, or Target Account List in the Account Hub.

The new Lead-to-Account matching ties leads to the appropriate Salesforce Account record.  The Lead-to-Account capability is powered by the Terminus B2B Account Graph that helps marketing “maintain CRM accuracy, enable custom reports and workflows, and keep sales teams organized and thinking about the entire buying committee.”

Terminus, which already provides relationship scores, added engagement scoring to its analytical tool kit.  As engagement varies by company and market, “users can now configure how valuable various digital touchpoints are to better report on what accounts are engaged in the ABM Scorecard.”   The ABM Scorecard is a marketing dashboard that evaluates marketing’s impact on engagement, pipeline, and revenue.  The ABM Scorecard assesses engagement impact across both time and segment.

“If you are struggling to understand how to measure the ROI of your account-based marketing program, the updated ABM scorecard with Trends is a great way to prove that you are driving desired business outcomes.  You can do this by segmenting by your targeted accounts and layering in Terminus firmographics to quickly see pipeline and revenue by industry, revenue range, employee range, etc. to show your CMO how you are driving results over time.  This enhanced scorecard allows you to quickly see how each one of your ABM programs is getting to engagement, pipeline, and revenue goals.  By trending your key marketing KPIs you can see if you’re accelerating or decelerating toward your goals, so you can easily pivot if necessary.”

Terminus VP of Growth and Product Marketing Janet Polyakov

Terminus completed its Sigstr integration following its late 2019 acquisition of the relationship intelligence firm.  Sigstr analyzes communications patterns in employee emails, helping determine both account and contact relationship strength.

“These Relationship Scores are a unique, first-party data source that informs teams how their relationships with specific accounts and contacts are improving or degrading over time by providing buying intent signals, sales coaching opportunities, and more accurate pipeline forecasting,” said Terminus.  “Additionally, Sigstr’s email marketing capabilities enable users to unify messaging across the web, owned websites, and the inbox.  The new capability provides users the ability to centrally control the email signatures of their employees while promoting dynamic, personalized content to the most engaged audiences in the inbox.”

Other new features include a native integration with Google Analytics and enhanced ad campaign reporting with trended advertising metrics.

“With these new capabilities, we’ve doubled down on our effort to be the most complete account-based platform on the market,” said Bryan Brown, chief product officer at Terminus.  “As marketers’ jobs become more demanding, it’s critical that they are able to execute with agility across multiple points of interaction, be it ads, web, or email, all from a single platform.  Terminus enables users to easily measure business outcomes well beyond clicks and leads that facilitate better collaboration across teams and deliver higher quality engagements.”

SalesLoft: Sales Engagement for WFH Sales Teams

I had the opportunity to discuss the benefits of using Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs) for work from home (WFH) staff with Sunshine Levin of SalesLoft.  Levin emphasized that many Sales Engagement tools assist remote sales reps and managers.  SEPs help with sales productivity, activity and account prioritization, sales messaging, activity capture, pipeline analytics, and rep coaching.

Levin was recently promoted to Director of Customer and Analyst Relations and had expected to be discussing SalesLoft’s new product positioning and product packaging at their March REV2020 conference.  Instead of greeting 2000 customers and prospects in San Francisco, the firm conducted its keynote session virtually and is now communicating their value proposition in a new work environment.

At the heart of Sales Engagement Platforms are multi-channel cadences that provide a multi-step approach to establishing an initial relationship with prospects.  Reps are not only working from home but so are most of their likely targets. Thus, cadences and messaging should be adjusted in the near-term. Reaching out to prospects via standard channels is likely to be low yield due to WFH, so diversifying communications across multiple channels such as phone, email, social, SMS, and tactile (swag and e-gifting) make sense.  

Also, with prospects at home feeling isolated, personalized one-to-one videos are likely to be even more effective.  Reps can insert personal videos into emails or social links. SalesLoft research indicates that videos from Vidyard, Videolicious, and VidGrid generate two to three times the email open rates versus general emails.

While Sales Engagement Platforms offer templated emails, they are more effective if  personalized. SalesLoft’s research found that 20% personalization is optimal.  Personalization helps refine the message for each client and conveys authenticity.  It also allows reps to modify their messaging around the current work, health, and economic environment.

SalesLoft, along with many of its peers, offers LinkedIn SNAP connectors, which are integrated into cadences.  Reps can send InMails, request connections, submit introduction requests, and conduct research from within SEPs and CRMs. 

“LinkedIn-specific steps help salespeople stay focused, do less application switching, and deliver a better sales experience.”

Sunshine Levin, SalesLoft Director of Customer and Analyst Relations

SalesLoft now supports LinkedIn’s Data Validation Flag, which warns users that a contact is no longer at a company listed in the CRM.  If the company differs between LinkedIn and the CRM, a “Not at Company Flag” is written to the CRM. The flag is displayed to the rep and available as a trigger for contact clean-ups and removal from marketing campaigns.  SalesLoft automation rules can then trigger workflows based on whether a buying committee member has left or whether an admin or champion at a customer has changed jobs. These insights help reps evaluate whether an opportunity may be in jeopardy, the likelihood of closing this quarter pushed out, or they need to move quickly to identify new buying committee members or champions.

“Customers leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator Data Validation are now able to use real-time insights to influence critical workflows when their prospects and customers change jobs,” said SalesLoft CMO Sydney Sloan.  “Ultimately, this saves time spent reviewing customer data manually, and it will increase the quality of all opportunities as salespeople progress through the buying cycle.”

Continue to Part II of this discussion.

6Sense – PathFactory Partnership

Content intelligence vendor PathFactory announced a partnership with ABM Orchestration vendor 6Sense to “give marketers complete visibility into the quality of account engagement, as well as what content and topics are accelerating them through their customer journey.”

The new partnership taps 6Sense’s account identification capabilities and combines it with PathFactory’s content consumption data, providing richer account engagement intelligence.  “They can even watch a buying committee’s activities populate and track their journey in near real-time,” said PathFactory.  Account intelligence is synced with the CRM and displayed to sales reps, helping them understand which content and topics resonated at target accounts.

PathFactory offers a set of content tracks, either defined by marketing or PathFactory’s AI.  Content tracks are a sequence of relevant content associated with specific calls to action.  Content tracks “keep people engaged longer and helps them self-educate” while encouraging them to “binge on your content.”  By assessing which individuals and accounts are binging on account tracks, PathFactory can determine when accounts are “getting serious.”  Highly engaged accounts are more likely to turn into deals.  

Content insights suggest the next best content and next best action, with PathFactory personalizing content tracks in real-time.  PathFactory tracks engagement at both the individual and account level while assessing content attributes such as type, topic, and reading length.

“While B2B marketing organizations have invested heavily in ABM over the past several years, many marketers still struggle to successfully execute campaigns, scale programs, and report on results.  We are confident this integration will give marketers the unprecedented ability to optimize the customer journey and generate revenue from their ABM efforts.”

Dev Ganesan, CEO of PathFactory

PathFactory clients do not require a separate 6Sense license.

“PathFactory and 6sense are marrying two of the most critical data sets necessary for successful ABM execution,” said Jason Zintak, CEO of 6sense.  “With 6sense’s industry-leading account identification capabilities and PathFactory’s content consumption data, sales and marketing teams can get deep insight into anonymous buying behavior of individuals and accounts, and deliver hyper-personalized content journeys.”

PathFactory placed 186th on Deloitte’s Fast 500 list, and Gartner named them a Cool Vendor in their 2019 Technology Marketing category.

6Sense recently closed on a $40 million Round C.