Month: May 2017

DiscoverOrg Startup & SMB Dataset

"Building a Winning Dataset" from DiscoverOrg Collateral.
“Building a Winning Dataset” from DiscoverOrg Collateral.

Sales and Marketing intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg announced their latest database earlier today.  The new Startup and SMB dataset covers more than 60,000 small and mid-size businesses and 400,000 executives.  The initial North American coverage profiles companies with between 50 and 1,000 employees.

All of the contacts are editorially verified and will be maintained via the same sixty-day review cycles as their other contacts.  Executives cover “all key departments, including IT, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Operations.”

“DiscoverOrg’s data difference is its team of 250+ researchers who constantly augment and verify the data in our platform,” notes Henry Schuck, DiscoverOrg CEO. “Unlike other vendors that provide SMB lists with thousands of irrelevant contacts, companies, and incomplete and duplicate records, the DiscoverOrg Startup & SMB dataset is as rich and accurate as our enterprise data.”

CMO Katie Bullard said that DiscoverOrg has “aggressive plans” to invest in SMB dataset development due to customer benefits.

With more companies, our researchers won’t have to skip over Triggers that they find through their research. We’re able to return a greater number of companies that use a certain technology, and our predictive tools like AccountView and DealPredict have larger reach with more matched accounts.

  • DiscoverOrg CMO Katie Bullard

The initial dataset is limited to North America as that is where they have the greatest current demand, but DiscoverOrg plans to internationalize the Startup and SMB dataset in the future.  While the goal is to cover all firms with at least 50 employees, the initial dataset consists of firms requested by their customers.

The press release noted how difficult it is to find reliable, actionable intelligence for SMB sales teams.  Along with company and executive profiles, the database provides 6,000 “research verified buying triggers” per month.

In smaller businesses without media coverage or press releases, almost none of the buying intent triggers that DiscoverOrg gathers – including planned investments, key projects, personnel moves, and internal spending budgets – is made available to the public. This is where DiscoverOrg’s team of researchers provides a clear advantage: While there are millions of registered companies in the US, the difficulty is identifying and gathering intelligence on the small percentage of these companies who are 1) legitimate entities and 2) have true spend / budget. By continuously verifying contact info, conducting interviews, and engaging in research activities, DiscoverOrg overcomes the shortcomings of web-scraping for hard-to-find data on the SMB space, ensuring the intelligence customers receive is highly relevant and immediately useful.

  • DiscoverOrg Press Release

“Sales and marketing teams that want to reach the SMB market have had a very difficult go of it,” said Nancy Nardin, President of advisory firm Smart Selling Tools. “There’s been a real dearth of verified, accurate data on SMBs, quite simply because it’s harder for data companies to get. DiscoverOrg is solving for this very real pain point by bringing their best-in-class research verification model to the SMB space. You can expect the same high-quality data you get from DiscoverOrg’s broad datasets. ”

Across all databases, DiscoverOrg now covers 1.5 million executives and 90,000 companies.  Customers may purchase access to the full database or various databases by job function, company size, or region.

 

Boardroom Insiders CxO Bios

Boardroom Insiders AppExchange Profiles
Boardroom Insiders AppExchange Profiles

While most sales intelligence vendors focus on broad coverage, there are several that continue to generate value the old-fashioned way through editorial research focused on high value content sets.  Firms in this category include technology vendors DiscoverOrg and RainKing and industry overview provider First Research.  Another editorially-focused vendor is Boardroom Insiders, founded by Sharon Gillenwater and Lee Demby.  Gillenwater, who was a marketing consultant, realized that several of her key accounts were struggling with CIO-level discussions.  In 2010, she partnered with Demby, the co-founder of First Research (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet / Hoover’s in 2007), to create a C-level executive information service.

“Most companies spend too much time worrying about getting customer contact info and not enough time thinking about what they are going to say to these customers once they get in touch with them,” said Gillenwater.  “While having the right contact info is important, it is useless if you don’t have a strategy for making yourself relevant to the person on the other end of the phone.”

Boardroom Insiders provides deep biographical profiles of C-level executives.  They cover the CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, and COO of the Fortune 500 along with additional top executives requested by their customer base.  In total, Boardroom Insiders publishes 13,000 rich biographies for 3,000 US and international companies.  A team of fifteen editors (ten full-time) research and update their bios.  All of the editors have at least ten years of business journalism or management consulting experience.  While all of the material is editorially researched, executive changes and key events are monitored with just-in-time editorial updates performed.  Furthermore, if a profile has not been touched in six months, a user can request that it be immediately refreshed.  They also retain a pool of in-flux biographies for executives that may be in transition, allowing Boardroom Insiders to quickly revive and update profiles when a high-level executive resurfaces.

Included with subscriptions are credits towards the creation of additional biographies, providing users with on demand professional research.  For requests of up to ten executives, the firm turns around new bios in two business days.

Content is derived from the open web with a focus on earnings calls, executive interviews, and industry articles.  LinkedIn is also employed as a resource, but depth of content varies greatly and executives are often slow to update profiles after departing firms.  What’s more, LinkedIn lacks insights into executive biases, interests, and passions.  Finally, LinkedIn does not contain a broader view of the executive’s division and corporate environment.

“LinkedIn is an essential tool, but the profiles are unpredictable, limited in strategic insight, and biased,” said Gillenwater.  “Boardroom Insiders is rich with strategic insight, unbiased, and provides the full professional story of the key decision maker you are calling on.”

Executive biographies run two to seven pages and contain

  • Headshot
  • Last Updated Date
  • Current Company, Title, Location, Phone, and Email.  The phone may be either a switchboard or direct dial.
  • Social Media Links (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
  • An Executive Summary
  • Personal Attributes and Interests – Family status, interests and hobbies, business philosophy, awards, etc.
  • Current Focus – Job responsibilities, corporate strategy
  • Key Challenges
  • Biographical Highlights
  • Other Boards and Organizations

Executives can be looked up directly, by company name, or via prospecting.  Prospecting is not as robust as large database competitors, but includes F500, Keyword, Title, CxO Function, Industry (NAICS major and minor categories), Alma Mater, etc.  Keyword searching should be particularly effective due to the depth of their profiles.

Search results are downloadable as PDFs.

The Boardroom Insiders service offers email alerts for individuals and companies.  Users are notified when an executive profile for a tracked company or executive is updated.  Company alerts are also sent when new executive profiles are available at tracked companies.

Users may access the service via browsers or a single-sign-on integration with Salesforce.com.  Within SFDC, there is a find button on Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities.  Boardroom Insiders displays biographies or biography lists within the Salesforce frame.

Boardroom Insiders offers an API based upon the JSON protocol.  Clients can use the API to feed information into their corporate data lakes or create custom solutions.

Users span four job functions targeting the C-Suite:

  • Marketers (e.g. field marketers, ABM programs, engagement teams, executive sponsorship programs)
  • Executive recruiters
  • Management consultants
  • Strategic sales (enterprise sales reps and account teams).

The firm has many clients in the technology sector.

Pricing is subscription based with annual contracts beginning around $10,000 and enterprise contracts reaching $250,000.  An SMB account would include three seats and 25 to 50 profile requests.

DocSend Partners with SalesLoft & Outreach

DocSend Analytics are now available to Outreach and SalesLoft users.
DocSend Analytics are now available to Outreach and SalesLoft users.

Both Outreach and SalesLoft rolled out integrations with sales asset manager DocSend in the past few weeks.  DocSend provides sales reps with a managed content library from which reps send trackable collateral links instead of e-mailing large files to customers and prospects.  DocSend then tracks the links and provides read alerts and viewing analytics.  Conceptually, it is similar to the PointDrive service integrated into LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

“By partnering with two leaders in the space, we’re enabling sales reps to see how accounts and individual contacts engage with the content in their email outreach throughout the sales cycle,” blogged DocSend Senior Product Marketing Manager Sonja Jacob.  “Using DocSend Campaign Links, sellers can create a unique link to share content in their email cadences, without ever leaving workflows in either tool.”

The combined services allow reps to directly insert links into Outreach templates and snippets while providing sales managers with sales rep analytics.  The Outreach partnership helps sales reps “find, share, track, and present the documents that close deals,” said Jordan Greene, Director of Product Marketing at Outreach.  “Even better, you’ll have deeper insights into what content works throughout your sales cycle.”

Inserting a custom DocSend campaign link within an Outreach email template.
Inserting a custom DocSend campaign link within an Outreach email template.

DocSend helps reps find the right sales content and create a “fully trackable campaign link without ever having leaving your workflow,” said Greene.  Campaign links are customized for each sales rep and can be added “in just a few seconds.”

DocSend analytics track where, when, and how prospects and customers engage with sales collateral.  DocSend supports document forward tracking, password setting, and flagging collateral as non-downloadable.  Campaign links are available both within templates and as standard email links.

Both Outreach and SalesLoft users must have DocSend licenses and the DocSend Chrome extension installed.  DocSend Team is priced at $30 per user per month and supports a white label document viewer, instant notifications, team reporting, and mail merge links.

SalesLoft has a freemium DocSend integration in the works.

SalesLoft offers campaign links that dynamically update within templates allowing admins to build Team Templates with a dynamic campaign link tracked to individual reps.  “This means admins can create a SalesLoft Team Template with a dynamic Campaign Link and the content will be tracked separately for each SalesLoft user specific to the recipient, said SalesLoft VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester.

As a former Product Manager, I can understand how frustrating it is when you have a great new capability and a top competitor launches it at the same time.  You think you have a differentiator and all of a sudden you find out it is a checkbox item.  This scenario is more likely to happen with non-exclusive, API-based partnerships as implementation costs and windows are reduced.

One of the vendors was emphasizing that they were first to market, but whether this was by days or weeks is moot if there is little differentiating the new feature between the competitors.  In the end, customers and prospects are interested in value provided with the current offering, not who beat who to the market by a few days.  When vendors are competing to identify and integrate new partner content and features into their offerings, it is the end users that win.  Over the past 18 months, both SalesLoft and Outreach have rapidly expanded their ecosystems providing significant value to their sales acceleration (ABSD) offerings.

Mattermark Salesforce Connector

Mattermark rolled out its new Salesforce.com connector.  Mattermark, which released a sales edition for its PE/VC database in Q3 2015, supports lead enrichment spanning over eighty fields including Last Known Funding, Employee Count, Investors, Growth Score, Estimated Web Traffic, and Location.  Other features include custom object mapping, event triggers, and automated updates.  The Mattermark database now spans four million global companies and is growing at 100,000 companies per month.

Sales reps can also apply triggers and actions to any lead, opportunity, or other object.

“By launching Mattermark on the AppExchange, it allows sales professionals to spend more time doing what they do best, and what computers can’t do,” said Danielle Morrill, CEO of Mattermark. “Whether you’re an SDR, Sales Executive, or VP, your time is best spent on the phone or in person cultivating the relationships that earn you the right to do business.”

The Mattermark Account record displays firmographics, funding details, and recent news.
The Mattermark Account record displays firmographics, funding details, and recent news.

While they do not yet support prospecting, it is on their roadmap.  “The next thing we are building for Salesforce is simple but powerful: we’ll give users the ability to fill up the CRM with the accounts they want,” blogged Morrill. “Instead of starting out empty and filling it up, we want to give you the opposite experience. Every possible account is available to you with Mattermark, and through application of your ideal customer profile criteria you can chisel away at this massive block of possible customers to come up with the best possible targets to go after.”

The app is priced at $49 per user per month.

 

SalesTech Landscape

Snippet of SalesTech Super Graphic developed by Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools.
Snippet of SalesTech graphic developed by Nancy Nardin (Smart Selling Tools).

Yesterday, I wrote about the recently released MarTech Landscape.  While SalesTech isn’t as large, it is also receiving significant funding.  Nancy Nardin, of Smart Selling Tools, published her SalesTech Landscape spanning more than 400 firms.  As it is a first generation edition, there are a number of errors and omissions.  The most glaring gap I spotted was the Installed Tech Stack category which was missing  RainKing, Datanyze, Aberdeen, D&B Hoovers, and Corporate360, but I’m sure she will receive plenty of feedback to fill gaps.

In fact, she is maintaining the graphic and is already up to 1.2a.

If you want more details on the companies in these sections:

  • Database Cleanse & Append
  • Lead/Lists Building
  • Outreach Email Workflow
  • Installed Tech Stack
  • Sales Personalization/Trigger Events/Social Selling

Feel free to reach out to me for my Market Insights Newsletter and market research.  If you are looking for quick profiles of companies, check out CabinetM which focuses on Martech but also covers a fair number of SalesTech firms.

CabinetM helps modern marketing teams build, manage and optimize their marketing technology suite in a rapidly transforming digital marketing environment. The platform enables full lifecycle support around digital tool discovery, qualification, implementation and management by individual marketers, teams, and throughout enterprise organizations.

  • CabinetM About Us

MarTech Landscape

Snippet from the 2017 Marketing Technology Landscape (Source: Scott Brinker, Chiefmartec.com)
Snippet from the 2017 Marketing Technology Landscape (Source: Scott Brinker, Chiefmartec.com)

Scott Brinker published the 2017 Marketing Technology Landscape, his annual exercise in shrinking thousands of logos into a super graphic.  This year, the list grew 40%, to a total of 5,381 solutions (from 4,891 unique companies).  Over the past year, 4.7% of the vendors were removed and 3.5% “changed in some fundamental way — their name, their focus, or their ownership.”

By size:

  • 6.9% have at least 1,000 employees or are public.  Brinker describes these 300+ firms as enterprises.
  • 44.2% are private businesses with either fewer than 1,000 employees or no funding data
  • 48.8% are investor-funded startups at any pre-exit stage

“So for those who assumed most of these companies are tiny, it’s worth noting that over 300 are enterprises of significant scale,” said Brinker.  “It’s also true that over 2,300 others have received some sort of investor funding — which implies scale beyond a couple of rogue developers in a garage (or, for a more modern-day cliché, two people in a coffee shop).”

The bottom group of “investor funded startups at any pre-exit stage,” which makes up nearly half the firms, is a growing phenomenon in the SaaS universe. Analyst Clement Vouillon of Point Nine Capital said that ten years ago, there were few SaaS companies that weren’t looking for VC-funding.  Growth in self-funded SaaS ventures has been fed by a growth in underlying platforms and advice.  Thus, “building and distributing a SaaS product is easier, faster and less expensive.”

Vouillon noted a number of additional reasons for self-funded bootstrappers:

  • Experienced founders have previously worked at VC-backed firms and are looking to avoid the model.
  • Competition prevents firms from scaling but permit the firm to operate as “a lean and profitable SaaS business.”
  • The SaaS firm is a feature that can operate on SaaS platforms (vs. being a full product).
  • The firm’s total addressable market (TAM) is not large enough to attract VC funds, but is sufficient to permit profitability.
  • The firm is local but not easily scalable.

“The majority of these companies have their sweet spot in the tens to hundreds [of] thousands dollars of MRR,” said Vouillon.  “Once reached they’ll continue to grow but more slowly and they won’t scale to millions dollars of MRR.”

The spectacular scope explosion of marketing — and the rate at which new disruptions and innovations continue to roil marketing and business at large — has made it impossible for any one vendor to deliver everything that every marketer needs in a digital world.  Almost all of the major providers now acknowledge this, and they’ve shifted their strategies to embrace the ecosystem — becoming true “platforms” that make it easier for marketers to plug in a variety of more specialized and vertical solutions.

  • Scott Brinker, Editor of ChiefMartec.com

Many of the firms covered in this blog are located in the Audience/Market Data and Data Enhancement section.  This group includes predictive analytics companies, tech data vendors, DaaS hygiene, and alerting companies.

Other groupings with covered firms in this newsletter include ABM; Predictive Analytics; and Sales Automation, Enablement & Intelligence.

ReachForce Unveils 3×360 Lead Hygiene

Data Quality Automation vendor ReachForce unveiled a new technology update it calls “3×360.”  The new release provides improved visibility & control, full-spectrum intelligence, and implementation & integration flexibility.  The MarTech hygiene platform provides real-time data enrichment, cleansing, and updating for Marketo, Eloqua (Oracle), Silverpop (IBM), Hubspot, and Salesforce.  The improved technology enhances both their SmartForms web form enrichment and Continuous Data Management services.

“Marketing technology stack options continue to evolve and change, however, a single fundamental factor remains unchanged in determining the success of any marketing operation – the quality and depth of the marketing lead data that flows through it,” said ReachForce CEO Bob Riazzi. “With our 3X360 update we’ve worked hard to consider multiple aspects of the marketing technologist’s needs and are proud to introduce a full spectrum of new product capabilities that will support them and the way they leverage data through their tech stacks. And why 3X360?…well, we’re a bunch of geeks from Austin.”

A new 360° Console provides a central dashboard for tracking lead enrichment and data quality.  Analytics include

  • The health of web forms that use SmartForms and the enriched leads submitted.
  • Rich drill-down reporting for Submits by form, Abandons by form, Match Rate by Geo and Marketable Submits.
  • [A] “Service Snapshot” provides summaries of enriched leads, match rate & usage enabling timely tracking and management of service contract.
ReachForce Service Snapshot for SmartForms
ReachForce Service Snapshot for SmartForms

Future Console enhancements include “client-driven configuration management and on-demand file uploads for immediate data quality improvements and enrichment.”

While ReachForce has long provided firmographic enrichment combined with contact validation and verification, they are now supporting contact-level data enrichment.  The new matching capability enriches leads with business card details, job role and function, and a social profile.

SmartForms before and after Contact Enrichment.
SmartForms before and after Contact Enrichment.

ReachForce simplified their SmartForms integration via a “simple, one-line implementation” for one or multiple forms.  The new functionality helps marketers rollout SmartForms “via multiple unique configurations without additional implementation steps.”  Their JavaScript API also “allows developers to integrate SmartForms into dynamic lead form workflows and enables decision-making based on individual SmartForms interactions.”

Moody’s Acquires Bureau van Dijk

Moody’s announced this morning that they are acquiring business intelligence vendor Bureau van Dijk for €3.0 billion (approximately $3.27 billion). Moody’s stated that “the acquisition extends Moody’s position as a leader in risk data and analytical insight.”  The deal is subject to EU approval and is expected to close in Q3.

Bureau van Dijk will be acquired with approximately $1.3 billion in offshore cash and $2 billion in debt.  Bureau van Dijk will be folded into Moody’s Analytics’ Research, Data & Analytics (RD&A).

Last year, Bureau van Dijk earned $281 million (€258 million) and posted and EBITDA of $144 million (€132 million).  Bureau van Dijk has a ten-year Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR ) of 9.3%.  The firm anticipates $45 million of annual revenue and expense synergies by 2019 and $80 million by 2021.

Source: Moody's Investor Site (May 15 2017)
Source: Moody’s Investor Site (May 15 2017)

Bureau van Dijk offers three major product lines:

  • Orbis – Financial analysis tools spanning 220 million companies.  Information includes firmographics, public and private company financials, original documents, global family trees, shareholdings, news, and M&A research (Zephyr).  Orbis provides the deepest set of global private company financial coverage tied to very strong linkage data including minority shareholdings.  Orbis was redesigned last year with a new user interface and workflows.  The Orbis product line is also available as regional and local products such as Amadeus in Europe, Oriana in AsiaPac, and Fame in the UK.
  • Mint – Sales intelligence product line
  • Catalyst – Set of workflow tools for valuation, transfer pricing, credit analysis, wallet sizing, etc.

All three product lines leverage the Orbis global company file which is collected from 160 information partners.

“Bureau van Dijk is a high growth information aggregator and distributor that positions Moody’s at the center of a unique network of global risk data,” said Raymond McDaniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of Moody’s. “This acquisition provides significant opportunities for Moody’s Analytics to offer complementary products, create new risk solutions and extend its reach to new and evolving market segments.”

The Bureau van Dijk customer base is split fairly evenly across 6,000 financial institutions, professional service firms, government authorities, and corporations.  Key use cases include compliance, KYC/AML, risk decisioning, purchasing, transfer pricing, B2B sales and marketing, financial analysis, and economic research.

Source: Moody's Investor Site (May 15 2017)
Source: Moody’s Investor Site (May 15 2017)

Moody’s listed a three-pronged product strategy post-acquisition:

  • Apply MA analytics to data to generate off-the-shelf financial metrics

  • Package BvD data subscriptions with MA analytical software & models

  • Enrich MIS/MA data sets with BvD’s proprietary identifiers

Moody’s will also be looking to extend Bureau van Dijk’s commercial presence beyond Europe and to non-financial customers.  The acquisition helps Moody’s extend its addressable market beyond credit to provide “Moody’s-branded scores/assessments for tax risk, transfer pricing, compliance, financial crime, [and] supply chain management.”

“Moody’s is a highly regarded, authoritative source of credit ratings and analytical tools, with a strong brand and global reach,” said Mark Schwerzel, Deputy CEO of Bureau van Dijk. “The addition of Bureau van Dijk’s powerful information platform to Moody’s Analytics’ suite of risk management solutions presents a wide range of opportunities for us to better serve our combined customer base.”

Bureau van Dijk has been owned by a series of private equity firms with EQT acquiring the firm from Charterhouse Capital Partners in September 2014.  At the time, the sale price was not disclosed.  Charterhouse acquired Bureau van Dijk in 2011 from BC Partners for €960m.

EQT noted the following areas of investment during its ownership period:

  • Development of the organisational structure to prepare for further growth

  • Investments in the sales organization, including the introduction of a matrix sales structure, implementation of a global CRM system, and expansion of the salesforce

  • Strong focus on the development of new products and continued improvement of existing ones, e.g. the launch of a new user interface

  • Substantial investments in marketing and corporate branding

LinkedIn Hits 500M Members

LinkedIn hit the half billion member mark, continuing its pace of adding 50 million members every nine months.  LinkedIn also supports ten million job listings and over nine million company profiles.  Members continue to post 100,000 articles per week.  However, the active monthly user rate remains around 25%.

In comparison, Facebook has 1.8 billion members and Twitter has 328 million.  The top five countries are the United States (138 million), India (42 million), China (31 million), Brazil (29 million), and United Kingdom (23 million).

LinkedIn published connection data by country and region for the first time with the top five most connected countries (i.e. average member connections) listed as the UAE, Netherlands, Singapore, UK, and Denmark.  UAE profiles average 211 connections.  By metro area, London leads in average connections with 307 per member followed by Amsterdam, San Francisco, Jakarta, and Milan.  Staffing and recruiting is LinkedIn’s most connected industry (unsurprisingly as the firm’s largest revenue source is their Talent Solutions products), and human relations its most connected job function.

LinkedIn connectivity rates by job function and level indicate a strong focus on staffing, consulting, and PE/VC roles.
LinkedIn connectivity rates by job function and level indicate a strong focus on staffing, consulting, and PE/VC roles.

LinkedIn connectivity rates by job function and level indicate a strong focus on staffing, consulting, and PE/VC roles.

The top five industries are all highly networked occupations including staffing and recruiting, VC/PE, human resources, management consulting, and online media.  With respect to job functions, product management was the number two most connected occupation after human resources.  It was surprising to see that sales reps did not even make the top five (outside of Business Development which is a senior level mix of partnership, licensing, and relationship management), but product managers had very high connectivity.  Of course, the sales function would span both junior and senior sales reps along with business and consumer sales, while product management consists of more mid and upper-level management.

“The impact of half a billion professionals connecting and communicating is very real, and very accessible to anyone who wants to take part today,” said Aatif Awan, LinkedIn’s VP of growth and international products.  “We’re excited to think about the potential of what a highly connected global community of professionals can do, and the value that is created for every member of the global workforce.”

LinkedIn, which is operated as an autonomous division within Microsoft, has over 10,000 employees.

Emissary and Tacit Knowledge

Emissary Sales Coach Profile
Emissary Sales Coach Profile

I had the recent pleasure of interviewing Emissary CEO David Hammer in Jinfo, an information industry trade publication.  Topics included tacit knowledge, working with their Emissaries, and how they identify Emissaries.  I profiled their offering back in November when they launched the service.

Emissary provides a concierge service for enterprise sales reps.  Emissaries are former employees of companies, generally high-level execs that departed the firm in the past 18 months.  Emissaries provide access to a great deal of tacit knowledge that isn’t available on the open web.  This would include informal reporting structures, executive biases, language, culture, and purchasing processes.  According to Hammer:

Tacit knowledge is what we all acquire in the day-to-day of living our lives. It’s what we know simply from interacting with the world. People don’t know what they know. I worked at Google for six years but it would take me a lifetime to document every useful thing I learned there, even assuming I wanted to. And that’s assuming I know what’s actually useful! There are plenty of things I wouldn’t even think of that would be transformatively powerful to someone else. I just don’t know what, and I don’t know who it’s useful to.

Tacit knowledge can be both big and small items that provide an edge when selling.  Again, Hammer:

It can be an emissary pointing out that the pitch deck for an upcoming meeting uses the word “customers” when the internal culture always refers to customers as “guest”. It can be sharing a past mistake that cost the company $500,000 that your product would have prevented. It can be telling you the CEO has a pet project to address educating millennials and informing you exactly how to tie your product to that messaging, or that the decision-maker actually cares more about ease of implementation than the direct ROI.

Unfortunately, Jinfo is a subscription service and the article is behind their firewall.  Hopefully, you have a subscription.  If not, reach out to me and I’ll send you a copy from their platform.