Sales Navigator added new screening filters including headcount growth by company and department.
LinkedIn announced additional search tools for Sales Navigator. New filters helps sales reps target accounts and leads. Amongst the new screening options are searching for new execs, searching for specific departments by size, headcount growth at the company or department level, public company revenue, and headquarters postal codes.
One of the new search filters is senior leadership changes at companies which help identify new contacts with a higher likelihood of considering new products and solutions. “Multithreading is critical to ensuring your deals don’t go dark. Start by identifying companies where senior leaders have changed roles or joined the organization in the past three months,” said LinkedIn Product Manager Alex Lee. “These could be great indicators that it’s time to reach out.”
Revenue screening will be underwhelming as it is limited to public companies listed on global exchanges. While the data is screenable in multiple currencies, the revenue data is limited to US, British, Indian, and Australian companies; the vast majority of companies would not be screenable via this filter. Furthermore, because the data is limited to four countries, it is likely to cover fewer than 20,000 of the 50,000 active global publics. Unless a company is specifically targeting public companies, users should screen based upon LinkedIn employee sizes. Employee values are based upon the underlying membership data and screenable to the department level. As such, they provide much better filters for targeting by size, growth rates, and departmental size.
These new options offer a range of new opportunities in account targeting, utilizing LinkedIn’s vast professional data banks to help optimize and improve your outreach efforts. And as data usage and personalization becomes increasingly commonplace in marketing circles, the need to customize and focus your outreach will becoming ever more important – LinkedIn’s well-placed to capitalize on this trend and help give forward-thinking businesses an advantage.
Andrew Hutchinson, SocialMediaToday
LinkedIn has published the full list of company and people search filters. Sales Navigator filters operate against LinkedIn’s universe of eleven million companies and nearly half billion members.
Predictive analytics company Fiind rolled out a set of product enhancements at the beginning of March to assist with company analysis, framing discussions, and identifying potential product issues. According to the company, “Fiind helps businesses find their customers efficiently using machine learning – by enabling marketers and sellers tune into signals that customers send prior to buying. Fiind’s library of over 100 million signals serves as a Customer GPS with answers to questions such as who is likely to buy (and what and why).”
The company announced the following additional insight visualization tools for sales reps:
Pitch Points – Guidance on signals and supporting points to script effective Sales pitch.
Forum Talks – Topics (technologies, complaints, issues, etc.) classified based on the discussions in the forums.
Success Stories – Case studies/success stories on tech usage
Top Picks – Visualize corporate hiring patterns
Survey Results – Run a survey (externally) and display the key findings (e.g. DB Admin for a DB product)
The Pitch Points feature identifies company insights and frames them within the context of a company’s product offerings.
Fiind Pitch Points assist with account messaging.
Forums helps identify potential pain points based upon public forum discussions while case studies/success stories extract intelligence from published case studies.
Company Hiring patterns are useful for discerning the underlying technology and emerging staffing requirements at companies.
Fiind Company Hiring patterns
Fiind predictive scores and insight visualization tools are available via browsers, email alerts, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft Dynamics. They can also provide a “personal briefing agent” within Office 365 or Google Apps.
KiteDesk added a set of 2,200 searchable technologies across 525,000 companies to its FIND prospecting service. Screenable technologies may be used for competitive, complementary, and adjacent / enabling technology targeting. Along with technographics, users may screen by firmographics, department, keyword, and job title across multiple vendors. The technographics are accompanied by contact information including email, direct dial, and social links.
KiteDesk marries their FIND Account Based Sales Prospecting engine with their FLOW Account Based Sales Engagement platform. Thus, both list building and lead engagement (e.g. workflow, dialer, email, calendaring, analytics) are managed from the same platform.
KiteDesk FIND technology screening supports filtering by technology categories.
“We’ve taken what is already widely considered the pre-eminent lead generation software tool and made it even better,” said Eric Quanstrom, CMO at KiteDesk. “Discovering who you should be targeting is the most time-consuming, yet important part of outbound lead generation. Pinpoint data is the very heart of prospecting effectively.”
Other recent additions to the FIND service include auto-preview which displays dynamic data provider counts as a search is built and identification of multi-site vs. single location companies.
Owler rolled out a new Insights feature which highlights data changes such as significant increases in press coverage, blogging volume, and CEO approval. CEO approval ratings are based upon community feedback. Additional insights are in development.
Owler Company Insights track social media, revenue, and CEO approval changes.
Aberdeen Group, which invested significantly in reviving the technology content of the former Harte-Hanks Market Intelligence database (aka AccessCI), announced the addition of twenty million technology installs across five million companies to their coverage. Data is available at both the enterprise and site level.
“We’re very excited to provide our customers with a whole new level of targeting information based on the combination of our proprietary analytics, and our new technology installation information,” said Aberdeen CEO Gary Skidmore. “Originating and curating this data, along with our already vast data set, gives us the kind of precision to be able to provide our customers insights that nobody else can.”
Lead Essentials Account Prospecting
Aberdeen offers over one hundred analytic models which benefit from the improved data. The content is available through its Lead Essentials service which combines account data and content in a single platform. Thus, sales and marketing professionals can target active buyers and “engage them with relevant content trending within their category.”
The enhanced data is also available via a free Google Chrome browser extension Lead Essentials Lite. The extension provides technology and footprint intelligence for the current website. Other content includes contacts, buying centers, and purchasing plans.
“Our enhanced data set creates a whole ecosystem of data and content,” said Chief Data Officer Charlie Allieri. “For example, if our data analysts see a surge in installations of a particular type of technology at a certain company or category, they can create content about the best practices surrounding that technology. This represents a strategic change that lets us leverage all data points and business knowledge to provide more powerful marketing.”
A NetProspex breach sample record for journalist Zack Whitaker (originally published by Troy Hunt with permission)
A 52.5 GB NetProspex file of nearly 34 million US business contacts was recently stolen. Dun & Bradstreet did not indicate how the MongoDB database was purloined, but indicated it suffered no data breaches and the file was likely stolen from a customer. “We’ve carefully evaluated the information that was shared with us and it is of a type and in a format that we deliver to customers every day. Based on our analysis, it was not accessed or exposed through a Dun & Bradstreet system,” the firm said in a statement to ZD Net.
The file was believed to be six months old. While it was built and sold for legitimate sales and marketing purposes and complies with US law, it could be used for spamming and spear phishing. “It’s an absolute goldmine for phishing because here you have a huge amount of useful information from which to craft attacks,” said Internet security advocate Troy Hunt who publicized the breach. “From this data, you can piece together organizational structures and tailor messaging to create an air of authenticity and that’s something that’s attractive to crooks and nation-state actors alike.”
Content includes business contact information; job titles, functions, and levels; current employer; and employer firmographics including size, industry, location, and D-U-N-S Number. Their file does not contain personal emails, phones, biographics, or any kind of consumer credit data as Dun & Bradstreet strictly collects B2B company and contact intelligence. However, the file does contain extensive business and government employee data such as 100,000 Department of Defense and a combined 75,000 Army, Air Force, and VA contacts.
Dun & Bradstreet should evaluate whether retaining titles for military and security agencies is in their best interest (and the country’s). For example, being able to identify 715 military Intelligence Analysts makes it easy for nefarious parties to spearphish them. This may be a case where losing the actual job title and simply mapping the title to a job function (e.g. procurement, security, medical, R&D) would make sense. Another option might be to track only government officials whose name appear in official sites and publications. As the government publishes bid data through FedBizOpps, procurement contacts would still be available for commercial purposes.
“Whilst you could piece together parts of the data from information already in the public domain, having it aggregated and so easily searchable in this fashion is enormously valuable,” said Hunt. “It also serves as a reminder that we’ve lost control of our privacy; the vast majority of people in the data set would have no idea their information is being sold in this fashion and they certainly don’t have any control over it.”
If you would like to check on whether your personal or business email information have been stolen, Hunt has setup a free site which tracks over 200 stolen databases. Registration takes about 3 minutes (you need to validate that you are researching your own contact information). The site will also advise you if your email appears in future breaches.
The Corporate360 Team in Kerala (Source: Corporate360)
Indian-based technology sales intelligence vendor Corporate360 recently opened a marketing data research center in Pathanapuram. The new facility plans to hire up to 100 new staff over the next year. The additional headcount will support marketing campaigns and be staffed by data research specialists, data quality analysts, inside sales representatives, and data scientists.
The office park in the state of Kerala is designed to promote “impact sourcing that benefits in meaningful job creation and digital skill development among educated youth from rural areas,” blogged VP of Sales Demy Dcruz. Thus, local graduates with digital skills can stay in the region instead of moving to a large city for employment. The facility supports up to 150 staff.
70% of Corporate360’s staff are women. “By building a strong women team at Corporate360, elevating co-workers and ‘working smarter,’ we have been able to help them pursue all their innovative interests that make a difference,” blogged CEO Varun Chandran.
The goal is to provide local work opportunities for women and the disabled in Kerala. “Because the bulk of Indians live in villages, governments are neglecting a critical opportunity to both improve economic potential and basic services by creating smart villages,” Chandran told Forbes. “I believe in creating jobs for people who need them, where they need them. “By going back to these small, often forgotten communities, we are able to offer them housing, scholarships and health assistance so they have a chance to grow without being forgotten or left behind.”
“Our new expansion into India fulfills that critical value and represents a strategic step in growing our company,” said Dcruz. “With that foundation, Kerala is primed to enter into the next phase of support for Fortune 100 companies by supporting their marketing campaigns and by taking on more advanced Big Data-focused roles.”
Corporate360 solutions include a DaaS Cloud service which provides “full profiles of target prospects with contact intelligence and sales triggers;” CI-Square competitive intelligence and take-away campaign data; and Data Factory services for marketers. Products include the ProspectR predictive marketing data cloud; Tech Sales Cloud IT sales intelligence; and EmailR email campaign data with real-time verification.
“Our customers aren’t looking to Corporate360 as a ‘data vendor’—they’re asking for ‘sales-intelligence’, which means providing them with the right data, in the right geographic markets and relevant sales triggers,” said Chandran.
“As we see a continuation of growth in our large western markets, our focus is to expand coverage in the Asia-Pacific and become a market leader,” said Sajeev Pushpamangalam, Vice-President and Head of Businesses.
The firm now maintains six locations including offices in Singapore, the Philippines, Dublin, and San Francisco. Corporate360 has over 300 global customers.
The Sales 2.0 shows, which have been held for almost a decade, were rebranded Sales 3.0. As with Sales 2.0, the focus remains on people, process, and technology. I am not convinced that there is actually a discrete break from 2.0 to 3.0. For example, the conference site states, “B2B buyers are online, digitally empowered, and looking for salespeople who can articulate value,” but this has been true for the past decade. One can argue that two other differences are more current, the rise of artificial intelligence and Account Based Marketing. Both have risen to the forefront of sales and marketing intelligence over the past two years due to the maturation of technology.
The final Sales 3.0 difference focuses on coaching sales reps to “embrace the power of mindset [to] achieve peak sales performance.” Mindset is a set of attitudes and beliefs that we begin assembling at birth and which shape behavior. The pre-frontal cortex of the brain stores these mindsets as networks of “cognitive elements, memories, and associated feelings from past experiences.”
“When your mindset is functioning at optimum levels, you’re better able to excel in tough sales situations. That’s because – according to scientific research conducted by Professor Michael Bernard at the University of Melbourne, Australia – high achievers consciously create a belief system that helps them cope effectively with difficult situations at work,” says a Sales 3.0 Conference report. “We all have the capacity to direct our minds to become powerful, positive, productive forces for ourselves.”
The report noted that successful and positive individuals have a growth mindset which focuses on self-improvement. “They believe that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, instruction, and persistence. They don’t necessarily believe they can become geniuses, but they believe they can become more skilled and intelligent by working hard. People with a growth mindset tend to achieve higher levels of success.”
This year’s Sales 3.0 shows will be held in San Francisco (May 1-2), Las Vegas (September 18-19), and Philadelphia (December 4th).
Dun & Bradstreet has begun the process of monetizing its new Avention acquisition by rebranding it as D&B Hoovers. The OneSource platform had an identity crisis — first launched as Avention and then rebranded Avention OneSource. Bringing the service under the Dun & Bradstreet and Hoovers branding umbrella should stabilize the brand as both are better known than Avention and OneSource. Dun & Bradstreet has been associated with company information and credit research since the 1840s while the Hoovers brand has a thirty-seven year lineage that goes back to reference books. Hoover’s was an early company research portal via the web and America Online and still offers a freemium site.
That Avention and Dun & Bradstreet could quickly match their large databases and begin the integration of the WorldBase file into the new Hoovers platform does not surprise me. Both companies have strong data matching capabilities for companies and contacts. Furthermore, the new Hoovers platform is designed to manage the integration of additional datasets into its global coverage.
Sales Acceleration Positioning
In a press release, Dun & Bradstreet described their new offering as “an innovative new Sales Acceleration solution” which helps “sales and marketing teams shorten sales cycles, increase win rates, and accelerate revenue growth.” The new offering combines “Dun & Bradstreet’s largest commercial database with best-in-class prospect intelligence and an intuitive user experience” which goes ”beyond traditional prospecting to more quickly and efficiently engage with customers.”
Sales Acceleration vs Traditional Prospecting Chart (Source: Dun & Bradstreet)
Since acquiring Avention in early January, Dun & Bradstreet Sales and Marketing Solutions has focused its messaging around Sales Acceleration. Barry Parr, Lead Analyst at information advisory service Outsell, described Sales Acceleration as follows:
B2B sales and marketing’s job is to turn information into relationships. Sales Acceleration refines information to increase the yield and improve productivity, by making the information more current, connecting it with buying signals, and providing relevant context. This market is evolving quickly from static company and contact data into information enhanced by software and technology.
On his Q4 earnings call last month, Dun & Bradstreet CEO Bob Carrigan picked up on the theme of Sales Acceleration which had not been used on the previous earnings call.
“Now, when we talk about sales acceleration, we mean helping companies advance relationships from prospects to paying customers by using data to give them insights into who to talk to, when to talk to them, and what to talk to them about,” said Carrigan in February. “The market for sales acceleration is substantial. Outsell, the preeminent research firm covering the information industry, pegs the market size at about $10 billion worldwide, and it is fragmented and underserved. Given our data advantage, we are the best positioned to capture market share and grow faster than the overall market. So our aspiration is much bigger than creating a better prospecting tool by rebuilding Hoover’s. We are the market leader in sales acceleration now, and we have all the capabilities to substantially expand that lead.”
D&B Hoover’s Capabilities
Along with rich company profiles, the new Hoovers provides access to more than seventy million global contacts. The press release highlighted the following key capabilities:
Target intelligently: SmartLists® dynamically update sellers on top opportunities, business intelligence and analytics, and enable account scoring; and more than 175 search filters create precise targeting while supporting natural-language and conceptual search.
Enhance sales productivity: CRM QuickView provides seamless access to account intelligence; desktop dashboards and automated workflow features include triggers, alerts, Ideal Profiles®, and Conceptual Search®; and mobile-ready features support sales and marketing teams on the go.
Enable informed conversations: Business Signals® deliver predictive insights based on the deepest and broadest global data coverage; intelligent data is integrated into strategic technology platforms like CRM and marketing automation systems; and real-time triggers keep sellers posted on key business events.
The D&B Hoovers Company Profile for Xerox
Legacy Avention OneSource customers will continue to receive their currently licensed content and feature bundles. However, they will immediately benefit from the company and contact data quality and coverage improvements.
“Businesses of all sizes have the opportunity to grow by better leveraging today’s enhanced software and technology to more quickly drive pipeline, and garner marketing ROI,” said Dun & Bradstreet CMO Rishi Dave. “D&B Hoovers is the best solution for enabling sales and marketing teams to align around the same connected, dynamic data and analytics to make their efforts more impactful, and help them go to market and close deals at a faster rate.”
Pricing & Packaging
The packaging model appears to be a hybrid of previous Hoovers and Avention packaging. The service is being split into three product tiers with all having access to the global database:
D&B Hoovers offers companies and contacts along with sophisticated prospecting against 175 variables, Conceptual Search, SmartLists, competitors, peers, news, and trigger events.
D&B Hoovers – Advantage adds additional features to the base edition by including global family trees, CRM/MAP integrations, SWOT reports, quoted and European private company financials, SEC filings, and administrative dashboards. The Technology Crush reports (FKA SalesQuest Crush) are available as a premium.
D&B Hoovers – Premium adds additional features to Advantage edition including Ideal Profiles and Business Signals.
All users will have access to the full Global Contact Authority file of executive names, titles, and bios. However, there is a premium “Business Contacts” dataset containing emails and direct dial phones.
Pricing is on a named-user basis dependent upon the purchased edition. Volume based discounts are provided as the number of seats increase. For example, a mid-sized company with forty sales reps can expect to pay approximately $62 per seat/month to $114 per seat/month depending on the package purchased (and before any annual or multi-year discounts are applied).
Whereas legacy Hoover’s strength was in meeting the sales intelligence and research needs of small and midsized companies, D&B Hoover’s pricing and packaging is intended to support companies of all sizes. “The flexibility of the new packaging model is designed to support both the growth needs of emerging businesses as well as the requirements desired by enterprise organizations while providing the pricing flexibility to meet their various budgets,” said Director of Product Marketing Sean Crowley.
The new Hoover’s benefits from access to the Dun & Bradstreet datasets, some of which has already been integrated into the new platform. The WorldBase file provides D-U-N-S Numbers, global company linkages, Tradestyles, and additional firmographics. The Global Contact Authority provides additional global contacts, emails, and direct dial phones.
With this first release, the new Hoovers platform contains an additional six million marketable company records, expanded global linkage, D-U-N-S Numbering, and Dun & Bradstreet firmographics (e.g. addresses, sizing data, contact information, industry coding, bank names, Tradestyles, and geocoding).
For the first time, D-U-N-S Numbers and D-U-N-S Number company lookups are available to the Avention customer base. D-U-N-S Numbers are the de facto global numbering system. They are often required by banks and US government agencies. Firms also employ D-U-N-S Numbers as part of their master data management strategies. Having D-U-N-S Numbers tied to the D&B Hoovers service allows developers to build custom calls to the D&B Direct API to obtain non-Hoover’s content such as credit and supplier risk reports.
Other Dun & Bradstreet content such as Hoovers top company profiles, competitors lists, and First Research industry overviews will be available in the future. The firm is also planning on expanded WorldBase coverage, additional WorldBase fields, and supplementary Dun & Bradstreet business signals.
Although D&B Hoovers is being initially pitched for the US, UK, and Ireland, the service is available globally. The emphasis on those three markets was simply one of sales enablement. The UK and Ireland are an important opportunity for Dun & Bradstreet as the legacy Hoovers service had little traction in those markets due to the lack of registered data from Companies House (UK) and Companies Registration Office (UK). The new D&B Hoovers provides full financials for companies across a dozen European countries including the UK and Ireland (available in Hoover’s Advantage and Premium editions). The platform also supports company details matched to UK registered data including trading addresses, additional contacts and emails, and corporate phone numbers.
D&B Hoovers is planning a financial add-on service which includes analyst reports (Investext brokerage house reports), the industry research module (MarketLine, Freedonia, RMA), and UK registered company intelligence including Directors and Shareholders reports; Mortgages, Charges, & County Court Judgments; and Companies House Images.
LeadGnome’s email reply service mines emails for intelligence such as left the company, out of office, change of position, change of name/email, and unsubscribe requests. “LeadGnome is unique in its ability to mine the unstructured body of reply emails for account based intelligence. It was, therefore, important to acquire EU-U.S. Privacy Shield certification to assure our customers of our commitment to the privacy of their data,” said Matt Benati, CEO of LeadGnome.
Because the firm collects emails, titles, and business phones, they did not have to go through the more stringent approval level for firms that store credit, payment, or personal data. This helped expedite the approval process with the Department of Commerce. As LeadGnome was already Safe Harbour compliant, the approval process was focused on conforming to changes between the Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield. LeadGnome worked with the Better Business Bureau as a compliance partner and completed the process in about two months. Benati believes the process will speed up as the certification backlog clears, but noted that his firm benefited from having Safe Harbour certification.
The LeadGnome platform is integrated with major CRMs and MAPs including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Oracle Cloud.
“LeadGnome is committed to data privacy and business transparency. We had already employed many of the required best practices, so the certification process was completed significantly ahead of schedule,” said Benati.
Other vendors that are Privacy Shield compliant include Dun & Bradstreet, Avention, Zoominfo, Infogroup, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SalesLoft, ReachForce, and Outreach. The US International Trade Administration publishes a list of Privacy Shield compliant firms.
The Sales 2.0 shows, which have been held for almost a decade, were rebranded 
Dun & Bradstreet
Account Based Intelligence vendor