Programmatic advertising vendor Demandbase, a leading advocate of account based marketing, acquired web crawled company intelligence vendor Spiderbook.  This is Demandbase’s second acquisition in the past six months as they acquired WhoToo late last year to augment their company file.

Spiderbook combines predictive analytics with web crawling and sales intelligence to help identify and research additional prospects.  As Demandbase had no ABM offering below the top of the funnel, Spiderbook allows them to extend into ABM prospecting and sales intelligence.  Spiderbook positions itself as a “a system that replicates the intuition and knowledge of a successful strategic account executive who knows the account intimately through years of working with them.”  To accomplish this task, Spiderbook has “automated some of the best account executive practices, such as knowing the right account to pursue, identifying the buying team at the account, having high quality sales conversations as the deal progresses, and leveraging existing relationships to get the deal signed.”

The combined solution allows Demandbase to expand its ABM solution down the funnel to provide what Spiderbook CTO Aman Naimit calls “the world’s first end-to-end Account-Based Marketing Platform that spans from account identification all the way to deal close, all while providing a consistent brand experience.”

According to Spiderbook, their first large customer, Host Analytics, was using Spiderbook to identify ABM targets for programmatic marketing.  The target list was then fed into Demandbase as an advertising targeting list.  Positive feedback from Host Analytics resulted in rolling out the Spiderbook solution to the Demandbase sales and marketing teams.  “Spiderbook has quickly become a household name within our marketing and sales teams,” said Demandbase CEO Chris Golec.  “We were so impressed with the results generated from our Spiderbook campaigns, the scalability of the technology and the team, that it quickly became clear that trheir technology was a critical element of a complete ABM funnel.”

“Over the last several years, we have evaluated multiple solutions to help our marketing and sales teams more efficiently identify the accounts most likely to buy our own products,” said Golec. “Spiderbook’s technology was simply head and shoulders above anything we tried, and we heard similar feedback from our mutual customers.  We were so impressed with the results generated, scalability of the technology and their team, that we decided to join forces to bring the most robust and comprehensive ABM solution to the marketplace.”

Company intelligence includes business descriptions, company news, company ecosystems (partners, suppliers, customers, competitors), phone numbers, emails, and social links.  Company news is tailored to the topics specific to the client.  Thus, a sales rep could target company news around social media and digital marketing.

The ecosystem allows the firm to identify mutual corporate connections and competitive threats:

Not only does Spiderbook gather company ecosystems of business relationships, but they allow users to filter the graph.  Relationships include supplier, partner, competitor, purchaser, investor, and litigant.  Thus, sales reps can identify companies that do business with Boeing from the software industry:

This business relationship graph is a concept I’ve long waited for a vendor to build out.  Revere Data gathers an ecosystem graph tied to a deep product/service taxonomy, but it is focused on public companies.  Likewise, DCA has a partial graph, but it is focused on corporate advisors and banks.  I haven’t seen the Spiderbook business relationships graph in action so cannot speak to whether they have a true business relationship graph solution or simply have it for highly visible companies.  Nevertheless, the idea is compelling.

While mining the web, Spiderbook identifies the “skills, people, and deals” relevant to the target company and suggests talking points and contacts.  These are represented as a set of topics (e.g. Director of Social Media, NLP, Brand Strategy).  Executives are tailored by function, level, and have indicated an interest in the product category being sold (i.e. Marketers that are interested in social media).

Contact profiles include social links, direct email and phone, executive specific talking points, extracts from “recent and relevant documents” linked to the source, deals involving the executive, and the executive’s team.  Contact data is licensed from Zoominfo.

There is no mention of broad company and contact list building or peer searching beyond the relationship filter.  However, sales reps can search for execs at a company by name, title, or keyword.

“B2B marketers are evolving their Account-Based Marketing strategy to what we call Account-Based Everything—the coordination of personalized marketing, sales development and sales efforts to drive engagement and conversion at a targeted set of accounts,” said Craig Rosenberg, chief analyst at TOPO. “The Demandbase acquisition of Spiderbook extends their account-based platform into sales development and sales and allows organizations to move closer to realizing this vision and ultimately see significant lift in pipeline and revenue.”

Spiderbook has 10,000 sales users.  Spiderbook clients include IBM, Appirio, and Host Analytics.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.