Technology Sales Intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg closed out another year of significant growth in customers, product, content, and revenue. “DiscoverOrg saw significant advancements in its workforce, physical locations, data insight, product development, and market share,” blogged the company. “In the process, we are creating jobs, establishing a stronger presence, and delivering more product value to customers. As DiscoverOrg succeeds, we are primed to level the playing field in business-to-business sales and marketing … to help small companies grow into big companies … to create a global revolution in B2B sales.”
Amongst the growth metrics they published on their blog:
- Customer accounts increased 36 percent.
- Platform users increased by 17 percent.
- Search queries increased from 721,862 in 2014 to 733,277 in 2015.
The firm discussed three of their 2015 objectives: strategic hires, physical presence, and greater data insight.
In 2015, the firm added 93 employees, nearly doubling their staff to 203. Hiring centered around their research team as “data accuracy is a top focus”. Some of this growth was from the mid-summer acquisition of iProfile, but the majority was organic hiring.
2015 hires included a new SVP of Customer Success and CFO. The firm also added three new Board Members including the former COO of Forrester Research and the former CEO of Capital IQ.
Along with moving into larger facilities in Vancouver, Washington (20 miles from Portland), they opened satellite facilities in Gaithersburg, Maryland and Philadelphia.
2015 also saw significant database growth and new product offerings. The iProfile acquisition helped accelerate their global build out. The database grew by more than 50% with the marketing dataset growing by 85%. During 2015 they added datasets for finance and Europe along with the OppAlerts intent data service.
”More platform perks, datasets, and integrations are in development for release in 2016, including: a new, responsive platform design; a new product development dataset; an updated Google Chrome Extension; and an updated, ‘Lightening Ready’ Salesforce Native App.”
Their “new and improved platform” is currently in final stage beta rollout. The enhanced platform “offers a complete redesign of the user interface and numerous ‘under the hood’ speed and functionality enhancements.”
Chrome Extension Update
The Google Chrome extension enhancements, which were released just as the year closed, provide context based intelligence from all of their datasets including IT, marketing, and finance. The Chrome extension will support additional databases in 2016.
The Chrome extension works as a side panel that automatically displays company intelligence, including contacts and company overviews, based upon the current website. The system stores account credentials so that company overviews are immediately displayed. From the browser, a user can quickly select a contact or company name and look it up within the Chrome extension. Thus, the service is bi-directional with users switching between the extension and browser without additional logins and without having to reenter information to conduct company searches.
DiscoverOrg provided the following Chrome Connector data workflow scenario on their blog:
Assume you’re an information security vendor and you are researching Fannie Mae, the Chrome Extension will return the CISO’s full group and contacts to you right in the browser – no need to login to DiscoverOrg and run another search. From there you can easily add contacts to your CRM tool, research the company further in DiscoverOrg, or lookup a similar company or contact.
Because DiscoverOrg also supports CRM platforms including SFDC, MS Dynamics, NetSuite, Talent Rover, and SugarCRM, users can begin with a company, contact name, or URL for research then upload the company or contact information to their CRM from DiscoverOrg. Company and contact data is not mined from the web but collected by its team of researchers, ensuring higher quality information.
Other Chrome Extension features include executive lists with filtering; executive headshots with responsibilities, contact information and social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) links; technology details; similar companies; and sales triggers.
The Chrome extension is free to current subscribers.
Chrome Extensions
While Google Chrome has only garnered limited support from sales intelligence vendors, it has seen significant development from vendors providing technology overviews. Along with DiscoverOrg, there are Google Chrome extensions from HG Data, Datanyze, BuiltWith, SimilarTech, W3Techs, and HIveMind. Most of these services are limited to an analysis of online technology associated with the corporate website, but DiscoverOrg utilizes researchers and HG Data employs semantic mining of news and websites to obtain behind the firewall platforms and vendors.