Tag: Sales Triggers

ZoomInfo Copilot Launched

ZoomInfo Copilot delivers account-based insights, buyer recommendations, and next best actions to sales reps.

ZoomInfo formally launched its Copilot service, which embeds GenAI capabilities within its GTM platform.  The firm claims that Copilot “turns every seller into your best seller.”

Over 20,000 users have participated in the Copilot beta, and “their results and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive.”

ZoomInfo claims its users report being 60% more productive with Copilot. They also reduced time spent on research and manual tasks by ten hours per week, and 71% uncovered new opportunities at existing accounts.

Furthermore, ZoomInfo Copilot surfaced signals related to 45% of the open opportunities in their CRM.

ZoomInfo Copilot improves the efficiency and efficacy of sales reps. (Source: Q1 2024 $ZI earnings presentation).

“In today’s GTM environment, data by itself isn’t enough. Modern sales is becoming a science. It’s not enough to know who your buyer is — you need to know what they care about, exactly when they are in market, and what problems they’re facing right now,” posted ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck on LinkedIn.  “And this information is out there in the form of digital buying signals. We have more information than ever about our buyers, but there’s too much noise.”

While signals such as sales triggers, visitor intelligence, and intent data sets continue to expand in depth and accuracy, delivering them in a coherent, holistic, and actionable way has proven difficult. Simply being told that somebody visited your website or there was an executive change at a prospect isn’t actionable because valuable signals get lost in the noise.  Most individual signals do not assist with prioritization, identifying the buying committee, or writing an email that cuts through inbox noise.  That is why sales assistants such as ZoomInfo Copilot will be warmly greeted.

“We built ZoomInfo Copilot to change that — to push these insights directly to sellers, teeing up outreach for the best leads at exactly the right moment,” continued Schuck. “Copilot turns ZoomInfo from a contact lookup tool into a platform that surfaces the key insights sellers need to take action against each day.”

Copilot also supports AI-guided prospecting that prioritizes sales rep activities on a redesigned home page.  The ranked list of target accounts, based on historical deal analysis, employs sales triggers such as intent signals and executive scoops (ZoomInfo’s term for business events) to prioritize outbound activity.

CRM deal analysis identifies the “DNA of your best-fit customers and uses ZoomInfo’s leading go-to-market data to identify the best-fit accounts for you,” said CPO Dominik Facher.  “Copilot generates natural language explanations of why an account has been prioritized so you have all the context to successfully engage.”

Copilot supports Salesforce and HubSpot for building target account lists, with additional CRMs planned in subsequent releases. Data is ingested from the Opportunity and Account record types.

To further assist prospecting, ZoomInfo surfaces buying committee members “who are most likely to engage,” which admins can curate and push out to their frontline sellers.

Sales Intelligence vendors have long said that their offerings helped reps know “who to call, when to call, and what to say.” However, this data was often raw information that needed to be analyzed by reps and messaged to prospects on an individual account basis. Not only does Copilot prioritize activities across their book of business and suggest the next best actions, but it can even recommend the channels on which individual buyers are most likely to respond.

“Marketers can access a ranked and prioritized list of the companies and buyers in-market, based on millions of signals analyzed and prioritized by ZoomInfo Copilot’s AI every day, directly from the homepage feed,” blogged Schuck. “ZoomInfo Copilot’s intelligent recommendations are presented in the language of today’s sellers to make taking action as easy and intuitive as possible. Users can explore each opportunity in more depth and engage with those opportunities directly from the Homepage Feed.”

Users can select between different persona definitions and filter by CRM presence and “likelihood to engage.”

Copilot sports an AI Email Assistant that employs GenAI to compose messaging around selected insights.

The Copilot includes an AI Email Assistant to simplify outbound, personalized outreach.  Emails are generated based on the seller’s objective, previous account context, additional context offered by the sales rep, and ZoomInfo insights.  The sales rep can select from three generated options and adjust the length or tone.  Users have the option to email one or multiple individuals and can specify which insights should be used when generating the email.

Copilot assists with buying group discovery, “Pulling insights from websites, case studies, earnings call summaries, and many more real-time signals, ZoomInfo Copilot automatically creates buying groups of individuals who are most likely to engage and align with their ideal customer profiles.”

Copilot shortens the time to value for new users by automating personalization, including ICP and persona definition.  Traditionally, new Sales Intelligence platform users spend hours customizing the platform, defining target personas, ICP, companies of interest, topics of interest, etc.  Much of this process is automated by Copilot, allowing sales reps to immediately begin deriving value.

“When someone gets onboarded, we build out what we call a customer context database. We essentially go and do a lot of research on that company, what are their value props? What are their pain points? Who are their end users?  And then we start to infer what topics, buying committees, types of companies that they’re interested in,” ZoomInfo VP of Data Strategy Brandon Tucker explained to GZ Consulting. “And then as they start to engage with the signals, or set some of those configurations on their own, they start to get even more relevant insights.”

ZoomInfo Copilot supports GenAI account queries.

A GenAI chat interface answers account questions, “giving users the answers they need quickly using conversational AI. Users can request answers on a range of account-level topics to get up to speed as quickly as possible.”

Copilot “meets you where you are,” including desktop, weekly email digests, Slack alerts, Chrome extension, and a mobile app.

“ZoomInfo Copilot also allows salespeople to seize time-sensitive opportunities in real-time with Breaking Alerts delivered through Slack,” blogged Schuck. “These alerts can be shared across multiple channels, allowing teams to quickly triage emerging opportunities and act decisively on high-quality intent signals.”

The Personalized Target Account Digest alerts users when prospects are “showing the right signals” and explains why now is a good time for reaching out to the prospect.  Users can drill down into greater detail, compose an email, or export a prospect to the CRM. 

Thus, “signals drive your actions,” said Facher.

ZoomInfo Copilot ingests ZoomInfo’s first- and third-party data to deliver “detailed overviews of specific accounts, including pain points and use cases, upcoming deals, important contacts, a summary of previous engagements, and more.”

“Finding the time to understand every account is a tall ask,” stated Facher.  However, “Copilot effortlessly summarizes the need to know and the nice to know for any account, based on ZoomInfo, your CRM, and the engagements you’ve had with your customers, like emails or calls, to generate a holistic picture of an account’s health, its history, and the opportunity.”

Thus, reps can have a “detailed understanding” of any account “in seconds” and establish a “shared foundation” of account knowledge across the account team.

“Get briefed, get aligned, and get selling,” concluded Facher.

ZoomInfo contends that its Copilot has a significant advantage over other offerings due to the breadth and quality of its reference content and engagement data.

Account AI summarizes the account with multi-dimensional views.

“What sets ZoomInfo’s Copilot apart from any other solution in the market is that it is sitting on top of our AI-ready trusted data foundation that drives decisions, personalization, and confidence,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “AI is only as good as the data it’s built on, and most solutions are layered on top of static CRM data.”

Schuck argued that ZoomInfo is well-positioned in the emerging Copilot space as it offers high-quality data for maintaining enterprise software platforms and grounding its Copilot.  Among its verified data assets are third-party reference data, second-party intent data, and first-party engagement and conversational insights:

  • 110 million global company profiles
  • 410 million contacts
  • Technographics
  • Streaming Intent
  • Scoops (Business Events and Earnings Call/Filings Summaries)
  • Technology Site Intent Partnerships with G2, TrustRadius, and TechnologyAdvice
  • Conversational Sales Transcripts (Chorus)
  • Chat Transcripts
  • Websights (Visitor ID)
  • MarketingOS engagement data

“Copilot takes signals like website visitors, spikes in job postings, earnings call transcripts, contract renewal dates, and expert calls that indicate spending or competitive threats, then uses advanced entity resolution and matching to combine them with customers’ first-party data,” stated Schuck on ZoomInfo’s recent earnings call. “It then applies AI technology to model and inform users immediately about which companies are in the market for their product and how and why you should engage with them.

“For our customers, understanding firmographics alone is not sufficient to understand whether or not your next buyer is about to be in-market for your product,” continued Schuck. “It’s only when you surround that core data with signals that you’re able to predict who your next customer should be.”

ZoomInfo feeds data and buyer signals into Copilot to identify the right buyer during the buyer research process.

Copilot looks to identify in-market accounts and buyers during the research phase, relying on a broad set of hidden buyer signals (e.g., intent, competitive research, job postings, earnings calls, website visits) before the buyer raises their hand.  The research window is the period during which sales and marketing have the greatest opportunity to influence the problem framing and preliminary vendor list.

But cold-calling into the TAM absent signals is very wasteful, as roughly only 10% of the ICP is in the market.

“Very few of the buyers that you’re looking for are in-market during the time you’re looking at them, and the ability to pinpoint those isn’t very easy today,” explained Product Marketing SVP Jam Khan to GZ Consulting.  “So you can use predictive analytics.  You can make your best guess when you have a fairly broken MQL system. ABM vendors have tried to come up with a different point of view, but it doesn’t quite replace the MQL.”

Copilot looks to identify the “chasm of opportunity” between signal generation and the first point of contact.

“The bridge we’re trying to gap is the difference between being first in a deal and being second in a deal,” argued Khan. “You’re never going to have a crystal ball that lets you anticipate before a buyer ever even starts making their decision. But that short little window is the difference between winning and losing.”

Copilot looks to “solve for the chasm” and give sales teams a first-mover advantage.  While this “window of opportunity is really small,” it is the difference between hitting .200 and .300, analogized Khan.  “To the extent where you’re able to act on those, that’s the difference between hitting your number and missing your number.”

Thus, other GenAI or Copilot offerings that pull data from the CRM face a trio of problems when generating recommendations. CRM data is limited to what has been keyed into it. As this data is historical (and reps hate maintaining CRM data), it is likely to be outdated, stale, and inaccurate.

“Third, it lacks the outside signals and insights that drive modern go-to-market motions. ZoomInfo Copilot delivers a full picture built on the foundation of the world’s most accurate and up-to-date business data, publishes real-time insights, and turns that into personalized and relevant content,” stated Schuck.

“Copilot is one of the best pieces of software we built at ZoomInfo, across ease-of-use, end-to-end understanding of our customers’ pain points and product market fit. We have had leading AI models in production for years,” crowed Schuck.  “We expect to monetize Copilot and we’ll roll it out in a thoughtful way, focusing first on the customers who are most likely to get significant value out of the advanced platform. Our go-to-market teams are excited to bring this to their customers, and I have a lot of conviction around the upgrade paths in our customer base.”

Earnings Scoops, the latest content set to be collected and fed into Copilot, extend ZoomInfo’s technology and business event Scoops into SEC filing analysis.  The service ingests 10-Ks (annual), 8-Ks (Material announcements), international filings, and earnings transcripts. It then outputs a set of condensed topical summaries.  Earnings Scoops leverage GenAI to analyze customer and prospect competitors, goals, initiatives, pain points, and SWOT elements.  They are also fed into its beta Copilot service.

Earnings Scoops are assigned metatags from a set of 150 Scoops topics that assist with searching and Copilot customization.  This additional tagging helps tailor Scoop presentation to each firm’s ICP and is displayed in a Scoops Topics column (see a subset of topics from Meta’s recent earnings on the right).

“Many organizations still struggle to provide frontline sellers with actionable go-to-market insights distilled from the myriad of available signals,” said IDC Analyst Roger Beharry Lall. “While AI can sift through mountains of data, solutions must be built on a foundation of fresh, accurate, and clean data in order to deliver meaningful intelligence. Suppliers like ZoomInfo that can combine robust data sets with novel AI capabilities will help customers lead their markets by enabling engagement to the right people with the right message at precisely the right moment.”

While Schuck is confident in Copilot and ZoomInfo’s ability to monetize it, Schuck does not believe it will significantly grow revenue in H2.

“It’s going to take longer than that. I have a lot of confidence because I personally pitched this product across dozens of our customers, across all segments, and all industries,” argued Schuck.  “From a product market fit, I don’t think we’ve been ever so close to fit as we have been with Copilot, outside of the core company and contact data. And so, I have a tremendous amount of confidence that we’re going to be able to turn that enthusiasm into monetization, but I also expect it to happen over time.”

The Homepage prioritizes accounts with next best action recommendations.

Owler Adds Contact Data to Its Max Service

Crowd-based Company Research vendor Owler added contacts to its Owler Max Sales Intelligence service.  Owler was launched in 2011 by Jim Fowler after he sold contacts database Jigsaw (renamed Data.com but now decommissioned) to Salesforce.  Both databases employed a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to collecting data, but Owler offered only the CEO name and executive change news alerts. Broader contact details for its 15 million company profiles were not available until now.

Owler grew into a respected database for competitive tracking, funding data, and news alerts but avoided contact data.  As it increasingly positioned itself as a sales tool, it needed to address its lack of contacts.

Contact Data, which is only being added to its top-end Max edition, includes direct phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles for 150 million North American professionals.  Along with firmographics, users can filter contacts by Job Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Location.

Contact data is available via Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chrome.

‘We are very excited to introduce Contact Data into our Owler Max tool.  This is a powerful way to get in touch with potential customers and partners,” stated CEO Tim Harsch.  “Our goal has always been to make it easier for companies to grow and succeed, and this new addition to our platform will help our users do just that.”

Contacts may be filtered by Name, Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Current Location.

Owler Integrates with HubSpot & Teams

Owler maintains lists of companies that have been synced with HubSpot.

Company Intelligence vendor Owler unveiled a pair of integrations with HubSpot and Microsoft Teams.  Both offerings are available through its Owler Max subscription product for sales reps.

Owler supports competitive and sales intelligence, with data gathered from web mining and crowdsourcing.  Along with standard firmographics, it offers M&A intelligence, funding profiles, company news alerts, and twenty-three sales triggers.

Owler Max is their sales intelligence edition with CRM syncing, email alerts, and prospecting.  Reps control which of the twenty-three alert categories are relevant, including new triggers based on revenue and employee count changes.

Company prospecting selects include industry, location, company status, revenue, employee counts, funding history, and competitors.  Owler profiles 15 million global companies, with the option to push companies and lists to the CRM.  Company data is passed bi-directionally, while news can be used to create HubSpot Tasks or display alerts via email, HubSpot, or Slack.

News and company profile links are embedded within HubSpot Tasks.

“Owler Max provides sales teams with resources they need to do their jobs the best they possibly can,” said Owler CEO Tim Harsch.  “Our new integrations and data insights offer sales teams key improvements to organization, workflow, and research efficiency.  Sales professionals can leverage data better, drive desired results quicker, and grow the capacity of collaboration in the remote work era.”

Owler syncs data every six hours and can match and upload 1,000 records per minute.

The Teams integration was launched back in August.  Owler Max users will see their MS Teams instance in the Owler Max dashboard.  They then click connect, name the connection, and syncing commences for all followed companies.  Team members can then read, collaborate, or share company intelligence via Teams or email, with alerts automatically posted to Teams channels.  Alerts may be aggregated from all lists or customized.  Users can also control which of its nearly two dozen event categories should be shared so that only relevant topics are posted.

“Owler Max’s new offerings put sales teams on a straight path to winning.  To unlock their full potential, sales teams need efficient access to personalized data and tools for seamless workflow.  By providing this scaffolding, Owler Max gives sales professionals an immediate competitive edge.” 

Owler CEO Tim Harsch

Owler Max is priced at $600 per annum with a minimum of five seats.  Owler Max also supports a Salesforce connector.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q4 Release

LinkedIn Sales Navigator unveiled its Q4 release this month with new account and relationship intelligence lists, improvements to buyer intent, refined searching, expanded revenue and technology data, and a more streamlined ability to upload a sales rep’s book of business.

The new My Current Accounts homepage prompt lets sales reps load their book of business as a CSV list matched against LinkedIn company profiles.  In addition, LinkedIn offers a quick field mapper to ensure the CSV is properly ingested and matched to the correct LinkedIn company profiles.

Account Lists provide several benefits to sales reps.  Sales Navigator users can

  • Target in-market accounts based on LinkedIn Buyer Intent
  • Review real-time alerts around sales triggers such as funding events, leadership changes, and headcount growth/decline
  • Streamline search and prospecting efforts by spotlighting specific saved searches based a user’s book of business

“Yes, it’s great on its own,” blogged LinkedIn Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray.  “But it reaches a whole new level of capability when you can manage your entire book of business in Sales Navigator – insights surfaced via features like Buyer Intent are more actionable, searching becomes more powerful, and it’s that much easier to stay on top of what’s happening at your most important accounts.”

LinkedIn already aggregated Buyer Intent scores spanning 180 different intent signals, and it added four isolated visible Buyer Intent activities as part of an early beta in Q3.  LinkedIn plans to release additional Buyer Intent activities in future releases.  These specific activities are displayed with the associated account.  Furthermore, when the intent activity is public-facing, the individual completing the activity is also presented to the sales rep.

The four isolated Buyer Intent activities are

  1. Who’s followed a company
  2. Who’s visited your profile
  3. Who’s a new connection to yourself
  4. Who’s filled out a lead gen form
Reps can view LinkedIn buyer intent against their account list and then target accounts with high intent levels.

LinkedIn contends that its intent insights differ from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence.  Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account.  Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”

Sales Navigator said that it will offer a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement.”

Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.

Current Account Lists and Buyer Intent are available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.

Buyer Activities capture account and contact-level intent.

LinkedIn did not expand the Buyer Intent categories in Q4 but added two new features: Filtering for Buyer Activities and new Buyer Intent account hover cards.  On Account Pages, sales reps can filter for activities by time range and level of decision-making ability.

Reps can also hover over accounts on Alerts, Lists, and Lead Pages to better evaluate an opportunity and refine account messaging.  The hover popup displays the level of buyer interest, recent news, and decision-makers changes “so sellers can easily double check any account’s level of intent as the work through Sales Navigator, without disrupting the current workflow.”

Hover cards provide account intelligence without disrupting research flow.

The New Executives at Saved Accounts List is an auto-generated list based on the saved accounts list.  The list identifies VP and CxO executives hired by tracked accounts.  While the executive view restricts the report to top-level executives, it doesn’t yet support filtering by function, a valuable report extension.

I’ve long extolled the value of identifying new executives at companies.  Fortunately, sales intelligence solutions are doing a better job of leveraging executive change insights in their products:

  • D&B Hoovers supports exec change alerts and triggers by job function.
  • ZoomInfo offers executive tracking of champions to new companies along with backfill contact recommendations at their old employer.
  • LinkedIn identifies new execs at saved accounts.

“We’ve found a lot of success internally being able to see when a new executive comes in,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions Head of Product Marketing Neil Khare explained to GZ Consulting during a briefing.  “They’re generally more willing to think about new vendors or have a mandate to change things up a little bit.  It’s a great time to capitalize on it, and we find that we’ve had some success internally on it, so we wanted to bring this up externally as well.”

LinkedIn also released a Recently Accepted Connections and InMails List highlighting individuals who responded to connection requests or InMails over the past thirty days.

The lists are available online from the list tab or via a weekly email digest.

“These are people that you are going to want to follow up with,” stated Khare.

Users can access two updated filters when building lists: Technology Used and Revenue.  Both filters have been improved with new data licensing agreements from undisclosed data partners. 

Accounts may be filtered by preset revenue ranges (vs. discrete values determined by the end-user).  All revenue data is in US Dollars.

To improve regional screening, users can paste a set of postal codes.

LinkedIn Sales Insights, LinkedIn’s DaaS enrichment service for sales ops, also benefited from expanded revenue data sourced from LinkedIn members, third-party vendors, and AI models.  95% of Fortune 500 and 75% of publicly traded companies display discrete revenue data.  More broadly, 60% of companies have at least a modeled revenue range.

To improve the Sales Insights workflow, LSI added exclusion filters for companies and personas, helping Sales Operations “focus on industries and geographies that are relevant to your business.”

LinkedIn Sales Insights now offers exclusion criteria to improve reporting filters.

Flash: Echobot & Leadfeeder Acquired & Merged

Growth equity firm Great Hill Partners invested €180 million in Echobot and Leadfeeder, merging the firms into a Sales Intelligence and Go-to-market platform.  Both firms are based in Europe (Germany and Finland) and will benefit from the roadmap set out by North American RevTech firms.

The merged firm will be based in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg continuing as CEO.  Leadfeeder CEO Pekka Koskinen will become the CPO.  The combined company has a headcount of 250 across six offices in Europe and the US.  The new firm’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeds €20 million. 

Leadfeeder serves around 7,000 customers and Echobot 1,500.

Echobot’s European data coverage

Echobot offers a Sales Intelligence and B2B DaaS platform for the D-A-CH region, UK, and France.  Late last year, it added a broader European data pack.  It supports a database of 20 million European companies and over 60 million GDPR-compliant contacts.  Company and contact data is derived from both registered filings and open web sources and includes directors, shareholders, and financials. 

Echobot takes a “True Compliance” approach which gathers data only from publicly accessible sources.  Furthermore, it provides verification links to the source URLs that allow reps to answer the question, “where did my data come from?”  All data is hosted in Germany.

Echobot’s products include TARGET (prospecting), CONNECT (Sales Intelligence), DATACARE (B2B DaaS), and an API.  In addition, Echobot offers CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM.

“It is our goal to be the leading sales intelligence and go-to-market platform to our core European and North American markets,” said Karweg.  “Thanks to Great Hill, we have now assembled the best data, AI / ML, talent, and operating experience to achieve just that.  We are increasingly seeing organizations looking to take advantage of their own data and third-party data, and then to augment this intelligence with better, more personalized outreach.  The combination of Echobot and Leadfeeder is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a massive market opportunity at the early stages of adoption.”

Leadfeeder IP-to-Account Visitor Intelligence

Leadfeeder offers website visitor intelligence that maps IP addresses to company intelligence.  During the pandemic, it worked to identify remote workers and map them to their employers, helping refine which companies are in-market.  It also supports connectors for Google Analytics, chatbots, audience retargeting, major CRMs, Zapier, and Slack.

“Integrating Leadfeeder’s web visitor identification system with Echobot’s data and prospecting solutions creates a unique platform upon which we can both enable organizations to identify and engage high-intent prospects as well as introduce incremental applications that enhance B2B sales and marketing operations,” said Koskinen.

Karweg envisions an ABM workflow that begins with an ICP analysis that identifies net-new accounts.  The ICP is then mapped against Leadfeeder’s visitor intelligence and Echobot’s firmographics and event triggers to identify high-value, in-market accounts for programmatic marketing.  While programmatic campaigns are not yet supported, they are in development.

Great Hill Partners has also committed an additional €50 million toward future acquisitions.  In an interview with GZ Consulting, Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg indicated that the €50M in dry powder would be used towards acquiring talent, RevTech functionality, or expanded content.

The equity acquisition is a combination of primary and secondary funding, with Great Hill Partners buying out many of the original investors.  It named Growth Partner Derek Schoettle Chairman of the Board and placed Great Hill Partners Managing Director Chris Gaffney and Vice President Greg Stewart on the board of the merged organization.

Schoettle is also on the board of ABX Platform Terminus, another Great Hill investment.  He was the CEO of ZoomInfo when DiscoverOrg acquired it in 2019 (DiscoverOrg subsequently assumed the name ZoomInfo), so he and the new board members offer deep Go-to-Market domain expertise.

“Go-to-market is one of the fastest-growing areas of B2B software.  Sales and marketing organizations need timely, accurate information and intelligent systems to identify and engage their prospects in an increasingly personalized, automated fashion.  By bringing together Echobot and Leadfeeder, we can create the next-generation sales intelligence and go-to-market platform,” stated Derek Schoettle.

The transaction is a merger of equals bringing together two firms of roughly the same revenue and employee base.  Both firms have over €10M in ARR and are growing rapidly.  Echobot grew 70% last year, while Leadfeeder had a 50% growth figure.  Echobot has long been profitable, and Leadfeeder is nearing profitability. 

The firms will initially run as independent brands as they merge their operations and platforms.  The deal closed a few weeks ago but was announced this morning.  Thus, they have already begun combining finance and HR.  The two brands will be maintained in the near term with rebranding under consideration for 2023 as Echobot is also the name of a Mirai malware variant.

Valuation figures were not disclosed, but the final price was determined before the recent valuation declines and did not change.  The firms were both being advised by GP Bullhound, which suggested that packaging the two firms together would result in a more effective growth equity round.  Furthermore, the two companies offered features on each other’s roadmap so were logical complements.

Europe has been tracking behind the US in the Sales Intelligence space, with several national champions now looking to offer European datasets and local UIs.  European sales intelligence and B2B DaaS solutions must meet higher data compliance and privacy standards, incorporate registered data from national registers, support multiple currencies, and many languages.

Echobot covers the D-A-CH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), the UK, and France, with a general European data package added late last year.  A Nordic data package has been accelerated due to the merger, which would increase its competitiveness against Dun & Bradstreet and Vainu.

“One of the most requested developments for 2021 was to access data from the entire European market.  That was not only requested from German customers with a strong export to European countries, but also from new, international users that want to expand into Europe,” explained Karweg last November when Echobot added coverage of over twenty European countries.

“Europe is not one country but many, and there are differences between them, whether it’s to do with culture or data compliance,” remarked Schoettle.  “Having a platform that is unique and linguistic-specific, and serving its markets with high-quality data, is a differentiator.”

“It’s a dream match,” argued Koskinen.  While previously the firm purchased contact data from multiple sources, “it has been difficult to get sufficiently up-to-date and accurate data.”  With the merger, Leadfeeder will offer better data quality and “have all the expertise in-house” to expand its coverage.

Along with higher quality data, Leedfeeder will benefit from a broader set of firmographics, financials, and sales triggers for data enrichment and lead scoring.  Leadfeeder will also be able to cross-sell Echobot’s sales intelligence, prospecting, and data enrichment services to its 7,000 customers.

“We want to be the biggest in Europe,” stated Koskinen.  “It’s going to take a few years, but I think we’re succeeding…We have long had customers all over the world.  After the merger, we will be able to offer something that no one else can.”

Echobot offers German and English-language Sales Triggers.

Echobot European Expansion

German Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot closed another successful year of product enhancements and revenue growth.  Echobot offers deep sales intelligence and data hygiene services for Germany, Austria, Switzerland (D-A-CH), and the UK.

In late 2020, Echobot launched its UK database and English language UI, providing a secondary market beyond the DACH region.  The firm grew MRR over 70% this year and hit 1,500 clients.  New business rose 80%, and the firm hired its 100th employee (up 44% this year).  Echobot continues to be EBITDA and Cash Flow positive.  Echobot is self-financed, not having taken any funding since 2013.

The firm also moved into a larger headquarters office in Karlsruhe with 16,000 square feet.

Along with fit-and-finish work on their UK services, the firm rolled out version 2.0 of their TARGET prospecting database.  TARGET offers a refreshed UI, improved data quality, and AI tools for ICP and segmentation analysis.

Users no longer need to build company and contact lists separately.  Instead, build-a-list results are displayed as tabs, allowing users to analyze both company and contact results without requiring them to rekey their query.

Echobot’s product vision is based on its “first principles of data” delivered through its service.  “For data to be useful, it has to be high quality, connected, and fully compliant,” said CEO Bastiaan Karweg.

Data improvements include an Email Validation Engine (EVA) and a “True Compliance” process for GDPR.  EVA “eliminates stale records” and implements mail server and pattern checking to improve data quality.  The EVA reduces bounce rates by up to thirty percent.

“For your outreach to be truly GDPR compliant, you not only need a Legitimate Interest but also be mindful of the preferences of the people you are trying to contact,” stated Karweg.  “Using Echobot, each contact record comes with a public source URL so you can be 100% confident when a prospect asks you, ‘Hey, where did you get my data from?’” Also new is a subject taxonomy that covers over 100,000 topics and industry keywords.

Echobot offers data for DACH, the UK, and the EU. A French dataset will be available in Q1.

Echobot is launching an EU Data pack that “covers the most important companies from all of Europe,” Karweg informed GZ Consulting.  “It’s not as deep data as with DACH, UK, or France, but it will give clients access to essential brands and contacts in each market.”

All four regions (DACH, UK, France, and EU) will be available in all three products (TARGET prospecting, CONNECT Sales Intelligence, and DATACARE hygiene) and the API in any combination.  However, the EU Data Pack omits company and contact data for the DACH countries, France, and the UK.

A French dataset, spanning six million companies, will be launched in Q1 with a French UI and localization.  French sales will be managed from the Karlsruhe office as it is only three miles from the French border.

Finally, Echobot expanded its sales triggers to 33 English-language event categories spanning the full UK universe.  French triggers are in development.

“We are excited to start 2022 with our new product and data assets,” said Karweg.  “Our goal is to continue on our strong growth trajectory and gain more market share in other EU countries.”

Vainu Workflow Triggers

European Sales and Marketing Intelligence vendor Vainu released Workflow Triggers for target account monitoring.  Workflows leverage recent enhancements to the company’s firmographics, user interface, and CRM integrations.

Workflows are available for Salesforce, Dynamics 365 Online, HubSpot, and PipeDrive and support Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, and Task records.

Workflows setup requires four steps:

  1. Select the target group for tracking
  2. Define the filter options such as signal events (e.g., funding, new hires, M&A), data changes (e.g., revenue, employees, address), or new companies in the target group.  Over 70 triggers events are available.  Data changes may be triggered by any licensed data field.
  3. Choose the destination (CRM, Slack, email, or webhook).
  4. Set context including the number and frequency of triggers, additional information, and notes.  “For example, if you’re monitoring accounts to launch account-based marketing campaigns, you can update a data field in your CRM object with custom text saying ‘ABM campaign Q3/2021’,” wrote Head of Marketing Aamer Hasu.

Sales Operations can map data fields with custom text, providing context to data updates and workflows.

Workflow Triggers identify “any significant changes in real-time and use them to trigger workflows across your business systems,” said Hasu. “They’re perfect for nudging prospects over the line and discovering sales opportunities you never knew existed.”

Vainu data covers Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, France (beta), and the United Kingdom (beta).  Users may license one or multiple countries.

One gap in the offering is the lack of support for Sales Engagement Platforms (SEP) such as SalesLoft and Outreach.  SEP functionality is a logical extension to Workflow Triggers. While SEPs are less established in Europe than in North America, both companies have opened EMEA sales and support offices in London.

Vainu is offering fourteen-day free trials to the service.  Email as a trigger destination is available for all users, but CRM integrations are sold separately.

EXPLORE Sales Intelligence

EXPLORE.FR, which has historically been more of a niche data provider for the French market, now offers a full sales intelligence and DaaS offering covering the entire French market.  In March, EXPLORE took a minority stake in Societeinfo and published its set of registered Sirene data for ten million active businesses.

“With Societeinfo, we can offer a wide range of data enrichment scenarios, contextualized email generation, semantic targeting without equivalent on the market,” said Laurent Nicouleau, Associate Director of EXPLORE.  “These data can, of course, be integrated into the information systems of our customers, including those deployed by GESTINNOV, our subsidiary dedicated to CRM & ERP integration.”

EXPLORE describes itself as ”a designer of high value-added B to B behavioral data solutions” that “identify all the life stages of your prospects and customers and transforms them into a lever for commercial performance.”

EXPLORE French market intelligence includes company and executive profiles, financials, and triggers.  Features include prospecting, list mapping, news alerts, and mobile apps.

EXPLORE offers connectors for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Oracle, SugarCRM, Efficy, and SAP.

A new Microsoft Teams feature lets users look up and share company profiles within the Teams discussion stream.  Company profiles may be looked up via their Siret # (registration number), name, or address.  From the mini-profile, colleagues can link to the company website or view additional details in EXPLORE.  The service works as a freemium with non-EXPLORE users viewing a limited profile and EXPLORE users viewing a complete profile.

The Teams application is French only.

EXPLORE captures business signals from news, social media, the open web, and governmental sources.

EXPLORE triggers are gathered from regional and national news, social media, the open web (e.g., governmental sites, real estate developers, public purchasers), and public data resources (e.g., building permits, legal announcements).  Triggers fall into three categories:

  1. Strategic events such as M&A, Fundraising, IPO, Investment Projects, and Restructuring.  EXPLORE captures 3 million strategic events per annum.
  2. Relocation Projects and profiles spanning 15,000 annual events.
  3. Legal News such as company registration, dissolution, change in capital, divestitures, litigation, etc.  EXPLORE tracks 2.7 million legal events per annum.

EXPLORE targets commercial real estate, real estate developers, financial services, building supplies, and B2B services.  EXPLORE pricing begins in the €2,000 to 3,000 range.

EXPLORE has 160 employees, with offices in Paris and Nantes, and an annual turnover greater than €14 million.  EXPLORE has 1,500 clients and over 40,000 users.

In other news, EXPLORE acquired Belgian data vendor CODATA which collects information about retailers in France and Benelux.  The dataset covers 370,000 retail locations at 4,600 sites (e.g., city centers, shopping centers, outlets).  The new content augments EXPLORE’s coverage of commercial real estate.

“EXPLORE has been present for many years on the commercial property market; our offer is mainly “project” oriented (construction and renovation of buildings, urban development, CDAC-CNAC decisions, etc.),” said Nicouleau.  “We were very impressed by the high quality of the teams and the data produced by CODATA in the field.  Associated with EXPLORE, CODATA will have new operational resources to develop and strengthen their positions.”

Artesian Solutions Engagement Signals

Artesian Solutions released Engagement Signals, a set of bespoke rules for its Connect platform.  Engagement Signals deliver “a constant supply of highly relevant intelligence and insight on their clients to facilitate advanced prospecting, customer monitoring, efficient onboarding, ongoing assessment of portfolio risks, and automated underwriting.”

Artesian Connect applies customer “Know-How” to structured and unstructured data, identifying “highly targeted calls to action.”  Engagement Signals combine triggers with Next-Best-Actions related to accounts.

We make it a priority to listen to our users and evolve our platform to solve their highest value challenges and ability to deliver transformational results. Financial Service organisations are now in a position where they must urgently transform their digital business strategies. With Artesian Connect, modern frontline banking and insurance teams can rapidly merge disparate data sources, create bespoke rules for risk selection utilising rich firmographic data and, most importantly, deliver insight from unstructured data that paints a much deeper picture for next-generation client experiences. Engagement Signals represent a simple way for our users to leverage the power of the Connect Platform through a pre-built set of features and rules.

Rich Clark, Artesian VP of Product Development

Artesian also launched a new Briefing Page that provides a snapshot of a company’s health,  financials, and signals.  At the top of the Briefing Page are financials and ownership flags, followed by Engagement Signals.  A set of tabs below Engagement Signals lets finance and sales professionals review the latest news, data, blogs, tweets, and pinned stories.

The Company Briefing provides current financials and Engagement Signals.

ZoomInfo Workflows Enhanced (Part III)

Continuation from yesterday’s article about ZoomInfo Workflows (Part I).

ZoomInfo hinted at an even broader vision of automated lead qualification and workflows in a recent blog that listed four categories of qualifying data:

Source: ZoomInfo, “How To Automate Lead Qualification for Increased Response Rates,” March 8, 2021 Blog.

ZoomInfo does not support programmatic advertising, chatbots, or Slack notifications, so there is significant running room for product development, particularly around expanded intent.  For example, a recent study by XANT found that inbound lead response rates decay quickly, but reps fail to respond promptly, and many fall between the cracks.  The study analyzed three years of inbound leads at over 400 companies.  XANT looked at 5.7 million inbound leads and found that 57.1% of first call attempts took place after a week or more, and only 0.1% of inbound leads were responded to within five minutes.  However, firms that responded within those first five minutes had an 8X conversion rate versus later return calls.

“Maybe we simply didn’t realize what we were leaving on the table,” wrote XANT.  “Maybe we over-rotated on targeted ABM strategies at the expense of speed-to-lead.  Marketing automation shouldn’t replace meaningful and quick sales engagement.”

XANT proposes a second problem that slows lead response times: the manual assignment of leads to individuals, resulting in two sets of delays – the lead routing process and the sales reps’ ability to respond quickly when a batch of leads is handed to them.

Tying inbound leads (emails, webforms, chatbots) to workflows is the next step beyond enrichment.  It allows for immediate lead scoring, assignment, and routing decisions, speeding up the response rate while determining each lead’s best course of action.  The Trigger / Filter / Action methodology for intent and event-based leads fits perfectly with these other inputs.  Furthermore, Chatbots and FormComplete often gather a few extra qualifying details that would be filter inputs.

“There is perhaps no greater need than for sellers to be calling on the right people at the right time,” said SalesTech analyst Nancy Nardin.  “Fortunately, the level of accuracy and timeliness of data has improved by leaps and bounds with the emergence of AI, and improved data collection, cleansing, and enrichment.”