Month: July 2017

The TLAs (3-Letter Acronyms) of ABM

"ABM: Taming the Alphabet" slide courtesy of InsideView
“ABM: Taming the Alphabet” slide courtesy of InsideView

As with many other technologies and business processes, sales is subject to its set of TLAs (three letter acronyms) such as ICP, TAM, and ABM.  As I regularly reference these terms in my blog, I obtained permission from InsideView to republish their slide on these acronyms.

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is your best customer definition.  It is a hybrid of both company and contact variables.  While it can be as simple as “the Fortune 500,” a true ICP looks at firmographic, biographic, technical, and signal variables.  By technical, I mean industry specific variables such as which platforms are used, how many beds are in the hospital, or whether the company is a direct seller or employs channel sales.  By behavioral, I’m talking about business signals such as funding events, partnerships, and M&A activity (what InsideView calls agents and other vendors call triggers).

Defining your ICP is key to strategic targeting.  Without an agreed upon ICP, sales and marketing will take an ad hoc approach to customer targeting and prioritization.  At best, the lack of an ICP is sub-optimal.  At worst, it results in sales ignoring marketing leads and taking a “we’ll do it ourselves” approach.

The Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the full set of customers, prospects, and net-new accounts that match your ICP.  Of course, some of your customers and prospects will fall outside of your ICP, but it is the net-new accounts that are the most interesting.  Some call these the white-space accounts, but they are basically the companies you should begin nurturing as they represent your best hope of growing revenue.  Likewise, prospects within your TAM should be a high priority while those outside should be triaged.  Finally, the accounts that fall within your TAM should have high retention rates.  They also represent an easy path for cross-selling, upselling, and expanding to other departments, functions, and locations.  You want to go from beachheads (land and expand) to strategic partnerships with these firms so deep company intelligence is required (family trees, org charts, additional contacts, sales triggers, SWOTs, industry research, etc.)

InsideView just announced the launch of their Expert Services group and its TAM service.  I’ll be covering the announcement in a future blog.

Of course, Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the broader strategy that is supported by a focus on your TAM and ICP.  ABM is the set of programs, campaigns, and activities by which B2B companies target their best prospects.  ABM encompasses sales, marketing, customer support, operations, etc.  Once the firm agrees on which accounts are strategic, it can direct its energy towards landing these accounts and ensuring they receive the white glove treatment.  While traditional demand generation and content marketing have focused on lead volume, ABM directs sales and marketing resources towards targeting and expanding business within your TAM.

Implementing ABM encompasses a set of tools and services for identifying the ideal customer profile, sizing the total addressable market, identifying white space target accounts and contacts (i.e. net-new leads), supporting web forms, automating batch and ongoing enrichment of MAPs and CRMs, prioritizing leads, embedding sales intelligence within workflows, event alerting, prioritizing leads, and assisting with lead-to-account mapping, segmentation analysis, and campaign targeting.  Other ABM technologies include programmatic marketing, dynamic website display based upon real-time firmographics (visitor id), predictive analytics, and proactive sales recommendations.  No vendor provides all of these tools today, much less has them integrated into an ABM suite.

 

ReachForce Partners with Oceanos for Contact Enrichment

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

Data Quality Automation vendor ReachForce recently added Oceanos contacts to its Continuous DataManager (CDM) and SmartForms services.  The SmartForms service provides real-time validation for B2B web forms, enriching leads with up to twenty biographic variables including role, function, location, education, and expertise.  The CDM service then maintains data quality across multiple platforms, providing real-time demographic and biographic enrichment.  CDM also validates records (e.g. phone, email, address), standardizes fields, and de-duplicates records.

“Stronger engagement is critical. To drive better engagement for companies committing to an ABM approach, it is essential to have a full prospect or customer picture. This can be completed by enriching the data set to include accurate contact data and combining it with account or company information,” said ReachForce CEO Bob Riazzi. “Too often Demand Gen marketers are burdened with the ambiguity of generic titles leaving them to question the quality of the lead when they, as a company, are targeting a very specific role. Our Contact Enrichment solution addresses this problem by associating the job role/responsibility to the title allowing marketers to quickly hone in on leads and prospects that are the best fit. Using this added insight, the marketer can increase the lead score, lead quality, and ultimately supply the sales team with more context.”

Oceanos has built a dataset of 150 million B2B contacts.  They also recently inked a deal with Engagio to provide contacts.  In January, Oceanos released a Contact API for integration partners.

Earlier this year, ReachForce unveiled its “3×360” lead updating.  The new release provides improved visibility & control, full-spectrum intelligence, and implementation & integration flexibility.  The improved technology enhances both their SmartForms web form enrichment and Continuous Data Management services.

Artesian CEO on Their 89% Daily Engagement Rate

­­This is the last of a series of blog posts containing interview transcripts between Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and me.  This excerpt discusses how Artesian drives high engagements rates across their multi-platform social selling service.

 

The Artesian Ready app supports company and contact profiles for meeting attendees, shared meeting notes, and event triggers.
The Artesian Ready app supports company and contact profiles for meeting attendees, shared meeting notes, and event triggers.

Michael: You quote an 89% daily user engagement rate for your platform. 

Andrew: Yes.

Michael: Having looked at competitors, nobody is close to that rate.

Andrew: I know, that’s true.  It’s because we go beyond the 80/20 rule*. We work really, really hard to make sure that the interdependency with Artesian isn’t limited to a desktop or web app-based user interaction. We’ve invested a ton in things like optimization for mobile devices, smart calendar apps, real-time alerting, actionable insights from an alert and an action center that sits midway between the web app and the mobile app. Consequently, we keep people interested in using the service on a daily basis because there’s so many different ways to interact with it.

Also, our philosophy is a key differentiator. Others talk about this, but I don’t see them doing it. When we’re teaching users what to do with Artesian, we say, “If all you do is consume, then we’ve not done our job, and you’ve wasted your opportunity.” What we are encouraging you to do is think about how you can drive actions from the insight. If you drive action, good things will happen. Not only will we make it easy for you to drive actions, but we’ll also measure the outcome.

Everything you do in Artesian is tracked, as is everything you output. When you share a link or you share a piece of insight, not only does it come in a nice condensed form, but it’s fully trackable.

I know you’ve opened it.  I know you’ve shared it.  I can do the same thing on social media for posts to LinkedIn. I know how many people have clicked on it, how many people have viewed it. We give you all that feedback plus an influence score to really gratify you that you’ve done something great, and it’s working. That’s the big difference from just providing access to a service.  What we are about is not force feeding the patient, but encouraging the user to interact with the service and really do something with the insight.

Michael: What percentage of your users have installed your Ready mobile app?

Andrew: Artesian Ready has about 25% penetration.  That’s pretty good considering we mainly work with large enterprises, many of which place limitations on what you can do with your mobile device.  The very fact that it’s an app is a barrier. That’s why in [the recently released version] 16.1 we’ve done a fully mobile-optimized version of the web app for the mobile phone.  It’s not an app.  You don’t need to download anything to use it and we don’t hit the buffers in terms of corporate [security].

Michael: And what percentage of your users are accessing Artesian through Salesforce?

Andrew: About 25%, which might surprise you, because what we found in the larger corporates is, we’ve introduced Artesian as an integrated part of our concept but people have said there’s a backlog, like a queue of apps that they want to get approved and installed. We tend to say to the customer, “Well, get going with Artesian standalone, then integrate it with Salesforce later.”  That said, with the release of 16.0 which had the first Opportunity View integration, we’ve seen our Salesforce pipeline opportunities go from 20/80 to 80/20.

This is the last of four blogs derived from an interview of Artesian CEO Andrew Yates.  The previous blogs covered:

I’d like to thank Andrew and the team at Artesian for supporting this interview.

* The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle, when applied in a sales context states that 20% of your customers typically represent 80% of your sales.

Artesian CEO on Sales Intelligence and being “Customer Curious”

The Artesian Solution Watchlist tags stories by trigger topics and allows users to filter by both triggers and topic cloud keywords.
The Artesian Solution Watchlist tags stories by trigger topics and allows users to filter by both triggers and topic cloud keywords.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including how they fit into the sales intelligence space and being “customer curious.”  Artesian provides a social selling solution for the UK, US, and Canada.  Their sales intelligence is delivered via a web browser, Salesforce.com, and their Ready mobile app.

This is the third interview excerpt.  Earlier this week, I posted blogs concerning Artesian’s 2016 US market entry and how artificial intelligence fits in the Artesian roadmap.

Michael: How do you view yourself versus firms in the sales intelligence space?

Andrew: I had a chat with [CEO] Henry [Schuck] from DiscoverOrg just recently. It took us a while to realize that we didn’t really compete with DiscoverOrg. We might compete for share of wallet.  Certainly, some of the words on the website are saying [similar things]. Fundamentally, we’re two different types of organizations.

I think there are companies that make data, curate data, sell access to curated data. I would include in addition to DiscoverOrg, RainKing and InsideView.

I talked to Henry. I said, “Somebody would buy your service because they would want to get the inside track on when the projects are coming up, on particular types of initiatives. Who’s who in the zoo? What’s their phone number and email address?” The stimulus would be, “I’m contacting you to talk to you about this project on which I can help you.” [That’s] The bit where we take over guiding the conversations which follow over the remainder of the sales cycle, we can do that.

We use natural language processing, machine-based learning and AI to take data from people who already aggregate it. Then we take it through our own process because there isn’t anything out there that has anything like the superior capabilities we’ve got around topic classification, tagging, and all the things that go with our value proposition. As I said to Henry, “We’re never really going to compete directly because we’ve got no intention of hiring a bunch of people to build various specific data.”

I think he’s on fire at the moment…In the States, there’s a real shortage of quality contact insight. Where we take over is where DiscoverOrg leaves off. At the point where you’ve identified an opportunity in a customer and then you want to build that relationship and keep that relationship going over time not just maybe sell them one product or service but sell them multiple products or services and keep going back. That’s the area we’re really, really good at.

Michael: Okay. Right, so basically being aware of what’s going on in that organization and maintaining the relationship.

Andrew: Yes. That’s why we look for organizations, customers that we sell to who have a relationship management model at their heart. This “customer curious” concept came from one of our customers, NetApp. The chap that was running Europe came up with the phrase. He drew me this picture and said, “There’s three ways we can differentiate ourselves in the market. We can differentiate ourselves with products,” he said. “And NetApp’s got the same product that three or four other companies have got. We can do it with price, but that’s a race to the bottom or we can do it with service. We want to do it with service, and we want to be the best. The best company in this space. We can have a product that is good or better than anyone else’s, but we’ll differentiate ourselves by being customer curious.”

There’s nothing like getting inspiration for where your headed from a customer.

Michael: This topic is near and dear to Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff: being customer obsessed.

Andrew: Yes. Being customer obsessed is where we try to complement Mark Benioff’s vision.  The Salesforce platform is an excellent system of record, and I think people buy CRM expecting it to help them sell, and it does. It helps them sell by getting more organized and orchestrated with the customer at the center, but it’s not a system of engagement. That’s really where we feel we come in as a complement and supplement to that system of record.

The interview will wrap up on Monday with a discussion of how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users.

Artesian CEO on AI and RegTech / RiskTech

The Artesian Opportunity View ties together Salesforce Opportunity data by stage with Artesian Sales Triggers, helping surface key opportunity insights in context.
The Artesian Opportunity View ties together Salesforce Opportunity data by stage with Artesian Sales Triggers, helping surface key opportunity insights in context.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including artificial intelligence and risk tools they are integrating into their social selling service.  This is the second in a series of interview excerpts I am publishing this week.  On Monday, Andrew discussed Artesian’s 2016 entry to the US market.

Michael: You have recently begun to introduce AI capabilities into your platform.

Andrew: What we’ve done in our first incarnation of bot-driven AI is we’ve created something that we call an “insight agent” that, through an API into Salesforce, can build you a view of threats and opportunities within your pipeline. Which, in itself, is pretty damn useful; much more useful than a forecast report or a dashboard which is the way you see it in Salesforce today. Then we’ll lay out all of those deals by stage and value and overlay today’s new social and demographic context on top.  That’s pretty useful.

With the latest release, we’ve created a bot which literally reads and interprets the news in relation to the stage of the sales process that you’re at. And, where it sees a particular trigger that has meaning in relationship to a particular stage, it flags that. Most organizations have implemented the concepts of sale stages when they’ve implemented CRM.

Typically, when I ask somebody, “how many stages do you have?” They’ll say, “between five and seven.” The system automatically builds you a view depending on how you’re implementing Salesforce, however many stages you’ve implemented and what you call them. Then what the bot does, is it crawls all over the news looking for things that could impact those opportunities at the stage they are at.

Let’s say, I’ve got a six-stage process where stage six is closed and stage five is a negotiation.  Artesian’s insight agent finds out about a CIO who has left the business. The insight agent will notify the user that there’s a potential problem with the deal in their pipeline. The agent will tell them why there is a problem and how it’s been categorized.  There’s half a dozen next-best actions that we bundle up with the insight as we deliver it. That’s our first attempt at taking the concept of machine-based learning and natural language processing, combining it with an AI bot, and trying to make that useful for customers.

We’ve introduced the ability for the user to customize their own topics, keywords, and trigger events. We offer a bunch out of the box, and we also wrap a managed service around it and easy implementation to every customer.

We’re also seeing a lot of activity in the “RegTech/RiskTech” arena with the growth of cybercrime and terrorism, and the sensitivity around regulation of any financial, FCA [UK Financial Control Authority] regulated [business]. There are regulations that organizations need to comply with. We’re increasingly being asked by our financial services customers, particularly the banks, to get deeper into being able to provide those capabilities inside of Artesian.

Organizations want to mitigate risks. They want to fall within the arena of whatever the regulation is and comply with the law, but they also want to exploit the technology as best they can to make sure they write the best business that they can. We’re doing some work at the moment in conjunction with one of our demographic data suppliers. What we’re looking to do is extend the capabilities in Artesian to provide some of the capabilities that our customers are asking for in the RegTech / RiskTech environment. We’re going to introduce risk agents. Risk agents look at the real-time present and it looks at the past. It specifically looks at things that are in-line with the regulations and also in-line with the stated risks that the customer has mapped out.

What that translates into is a service that is not only compelling in terms of customer acquisition, customer retention, and yield, but also compelling from a kind of, you don’t go to jail if you’re using Artesian because it’s doing the regulation and risk job for you as well.

Michael: When you say risk app, are you talking more about supplier risk, compliance risk, credit, reputational?

Andrew: There are 40 or 50 pretty big companies doing this thing already. What we’re talking about is company-centric intelligence, but also the people associated with that company and the intelligence that we’ll need to derive around whether something is risky or not. It could be the performance of a business. It could be some adverse news in relation to that performance. Or it could be that an individual who has a beneficial ownership, more than a 5% stake in a business, happens to be on a naughty list in terms of the PEP [Politically Exposed Persons] or sanctions.

At the moment, we have risk triggers in the opportunity view. They’re not compliance risk triggers. If you’re going to a client, they need to know about key beneficial ownership.

Michael: Is that part of the opportunity view or is that a new type of view?

Andrew: A new type of view.  We have risk triggers in the opportunity view, but they’re not compliance risk triggers.  If you go into a bank, they need to know about beneficial ownership, adverse news going back three years, PEP, sanctions, real-time alerts from stock exchanges.  None of that is feasible within a generic instance of Salesforce.com in an opportunity view.

Michael: It sounds you’re looking to move beyond the sales and marketing teams to start to get to into things like onboarding, KYC [Know Your Customer], AML [Anti-money Laundering], PEP, and other compliance aspects that really go into monitoring of clients as well as the initial onboarding.

Andrew: Yes, if you go back to the whole customer curious mantra and deep relationship management, we like to say that we put the R back into CRM.  We are all about that relationship.

The conversations we are having with our large customers would indicate we are on the right track with that.

The interview will be continuing over the next few days with discussions of what it means to be a “customer curious” business and how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users.  Monday’s blog discussed Artesian’s 2016 entry into the US market.

Artesian CEO on US Market Entry

Artesian Solutions provides deep trigger functionality combined with word cloud and filtering, helping sales reps hone in on talking points.
Artesian Solutions provides deep trigger functionality combined with word cloud and filtering, helping sales reps hone in on talking points.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including their 2016 entry into the US market.  Artesian provides a social selling solution for the UK, US, and Canada.  Their sales intelligence is delivered via a web browser, Salesforce.com, and their Ready mobile app.

Michael: You launched in the US exactly a year ago, officially. How’s your product buildup going?

Andrew: It’s going pretty well. I have to say, most of the progress has been in the last three to six months, because it took us a couple of releases to really get the US edition right. We learned quickly that there were some nuances in terms of the way sales teams work together in the US. The US sales focus is a very contact-centric mechanism. We realized pretty quickly because contact data is so sparse and difficult to get a hold of. We doubled down on our efforts to implement. We’ve got three contact data intelligence aggregation partnerships.  We got those into the product pretty quickly which dramatically enhanced not only access to the contact intelligence but also the social profiling capabilities.

Then in the third release, we were able to start to bring in some refinements. In the States, news gets syndicated a lot more than it does in the UK, in Europe. The same story you can get syndicated and copied many, many times. We were getting an unacceptable level of duplication, and, even if the stories were similar, we hadn’t trained the algorithm to discard similar stories. Only stories that were the same.

We rewrote the algorithm and we created the ability to group stories which are similar together. What we do now is we publish one and then underneath it there’s a little icon that says similar stories. Again, these are things you don’t learn until you deploy the software for real [in the US], and customers start beating it up and giving you their feedback.

Michael: Can you provide any growth stats for the US?

Andrew: We’re not publishing the numbers at that kind of level, but in percentage terms it’s huge because we started from virtually nothing. It’s growing steadily. The majority of the growth is still coming in the UK. I don’t think we’re backward in coming forward in terms of explaining that we’re a UK-centric organization with relationships in the US and capabilities in the US. In the last eight weeks. we’ve had a number of pretty decent large corporate opportunities land and I don’t know if that’s as a consequence of one of our competitors unraveling.

Michael: How else do the US and UK markets differ?

Andrew: A big learning for us was how much customers didn’t want to meet face-to-face. We weren’t ready for that. We need to go visit these customers, and we would be flying all over the place.  I think it was four months in and somebody sat me down and said, “You know you’ve got to stop this flying around stuff.” Nobody expects that. People just expect to do things on the phone. From a kind of scaling standpoint, we’re doing a bit of scaling locally, but we’re also doing a bit of scaling remotely because to the customer, as long as the time zones are aligned, it doesn’t matter where you are.

The kind of sales pursuits we’re getting more involved in are the ones that are better suited to our sweet spot. We’ll walk away from opportunities that we think are better suited to others. We might even recommend others.

The interview will be continuing over the next few days with discussions of artificial intelligence, what it means to be a “customer curious” business, and how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users.

D&B Hoovers Enhancements

D&B Prescreen Scores are available in company and contact Build a List.
D&B Prescreen Scores are available in company and contact Build a List.

Dun & Bradstreet continues to quickly enhance the D&B Hoovers service (FKA Avention OneSource) as it integrates the WorldBase and Hoovers files into its newly acquired sales intelligence service.  In June, Dun & Bradstreet added the D&B Prescreen score, Parent and D-U-N-S Number, the Ultimate Parent D-U-N-S Numbers, Franchise Status, Owns/Rents, and eight-digit SICs.  D&B Hoovers also added the Hoover’s editorial profiles of 41,000 global companies.  Finally, Dun & Bradstreet added on demand enrichment of files with up to 10,000 D-U-N-S Numbers.

With the D&B Prescreen Score, users can screen US and Canadian companies for delinquency risk.  Companies are rated on a High / Medium / Low risk score allowing sales and marketing to quickly filter out prospects with a high likelihood of late payment.  According to Director of Product Management Phil McWade, “D&B Prescreen Scores predict the likelihood of a firm paying in a severely delinquent manner (90+ days past terms) over the next 12 months.”

The Prescreen score is available when prospecting for companies and contacts.  Users will find it alongside other Dun & Bradstreet variables including Owns/Rents, Franchise Status, and Minority Ownership flags in the Corporate Overview report.

The Parent and Ultimate Parent D-U-N-S Numbers provide family tree linkage via Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary company identifiers.  These values are displayed in custom grids, exports, and as data points on the Corporate Overview report.

Eight-digit SICs expand the standard 4-digit SIC to provide 18,000 distinct industries.  The expanded codes are displayed within company profiles, contact records, industry summary reports, custom grids, and prospecting selects.  8-digit SICs provide “the most specific and granular industry classification available in D&B Hoovers,” said McWade.

The Hoovers company profiles provide additional company insights including multi-paragraph business descriptions, company histories, and products and operations.  The additional content is displayed across three new reports.  Roughly three-quarters of the profiles are for American firms with the remainder spanning major multi-nationals.  Both public and private companies are profiled.

The new Products and Operations report is gathered by Dun & Bradstreet's editorial team. Other new reports include Company Description and Company History.
The new Products and Operations report is gathered by Dun & Bradstreet’s editorial team. Other new reports include Company Description and Company History.

D&B Hoovers now supports file uploads of up to ten thousand D-U-N-S Numbers with immediate enrichment.  D&B Hoover’s allows users to maintain and monitor multiple lists including suppression lists.  D-U-N-S Numbered lists support multiple use cases:

  • Lists can be downloaded to Excel, winnowed, and re-uploaded for ABM targeting.
  • D-U-N-S numbered lists can be cross-referenced with other platforms (e.g. MAP, ERP, CRM)
  • Following a territory split, Sales Operations can provide reps with an updated list of ABM candidates
  • Sales Operations can provide a list of named accounts which are excluded from sales territories.

Dun & Bradstreet continues to add companies and contacts to D&B Hoovers, iSell, and Business Browser.  The company and contact counts are both approaching 100 million.

Last month, Dun & Bradstreet rolled out a set of migration courses and materials to assist with migration from Hoovers Classic.  I previously blogged about D&B Hoover’s enhancements in March when Avention was rebranded D&B Hoovers.

Synthio Series B

Synthio Use Cases
Synthio Use Cases

Synthio, formerly known as Social123, closed on a $10.5 million equity round to expand its Customer Data Platform.  The Series B round was led by Fulcrum Equity partners, bringing its total funding to $18.5 million.  Other participants included current investors Vocap Investment Partners, Spinnaker VC Direct, LLC,  Bahns Stanley, Stanley Partners, Ellis Capital, Buckhead Investments, the AIM Group, and Silicon Valley Bank.  The round valued the firm at $33.5 million.

Synthio will be dedicating the funds towards platform and product enhancements along with “significantly” expanding their sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Synthio is perfectly positioned to become the must-have solution for business-to-business enterprise marketers tasked with managing complex and rapidly changing customer data.  The new funding allows us to continue investing in our unique ability to synthesize 1st and 3rd party data into the highest quality contact, firmographic, and technographic profiles.  Our contact-centric approach to customer data is unique in the market and is an indispensable solution designed to address the major pain points hampering marketers’ productivity and performance.

  •  Synthio CEO Aaron Biddar

Synthio emphasized the need for high quality data to fuel Marketing Automation Platforms and ABM campaigns.

“High quality leads and prospects are the mined gold on which companies spend fortunes and today’s marketers and sales professionals require that this data be in pristine condition,” said Jim Douglas, Partner at Fulcrum.

Synthio has over 200 active subscription customers and made the last two Inc. 5000 lists.  According to Inc., the firm posted $2.8 million in revenue in 2015 with a 123% three-year Compound Average Growth Rate.  The firm claims to have doubled their revenue in both 2015 and 2016.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator in Hubspot CRM

Sales Navigator contact intelligence and functions within Hubspot CRM
Sales Navigator contact intelligence and functions within Hubspot CRM

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is now delivering company and contact intelligence within Hubspot CRM. Along with firmographic and biographic information, Sales Navigator for Hubspot CRM displays related leads, mutual connections, and common interests.

LinkedIn intelligence is displayed within left-hand sidebar squares. By clicking on the contact square, users have access to a richer profile along with three tabs (see image above):

  • Icebreakers: shared connections, experiences, and interests, plus a link to the lead’s recent activity stream.
  • Get Introduced: quickly ask a mutual connection for an introduction.
  • Related Leads: find other leads at the same company, and quickly save them to your Sales Navigator leads list.

Company profile tabs also support three functions:

  • Recommended Leads: Identifies those in the organization that share connections or interests
  • Connections: Current and potential connections
  • News: Recent news and posts

Hubspot customers must separately license Sales Navigator to receive LinkedIn intelligence. LinkedIn content is view only within Hubspot. Users cannot upload content to Hubspot CRM.

LinkedIn rolled out an extended version of Sales Navigator for Microsoft Dynamics called the Microsoft Relationship Sales Solution on July 1st.

DataFox for Salesforce

DataFox for Salesforce Contact Tab
DataFox for Salesforce Contact Tab

DataFox released its Company Intelligence & CRM Orchestration for Salesforce service this week.  The new Lightning app supports company research and firmographic enrichment within Account, Contact, and Lead I-frames.  The service includes DataFox signals, contacts, lists, and similar companies.

Company and contact enrichment includes business descriptions, DataFox scores, investors, funding stage, year founded, social links, technographics, conferences attending, and revenue estimates.  When contacts are listed, the system identifies which names have already been synched and which names can be uploaded as new contacts or leads.  Duplicate checking on upload provides management options.  For example, a duplicate contact can simply be synched or the user can create a new contact or lead.

Lookups can be performed against keywords, companies, conferences, or DataFox lists such as the Inc 5000 by sector.  Lists can be further filtered by DataFox variables as well as whether the company has been synched with Salesforce.  Companies in lists can be uploaded individually or via batch to SFDC.  Within DataFox lists, Salesforce account data may be displayed and used as filter variables.  For example, prospecting lists can suppress current Salesforce accounts.

DataFox for Salesforce Contact Tab
DataFox lists can be filtered by a broad set of variables

Trigger events may be filtered by topic so that only the most relevant categories are displayed.  DataFox collects 100,000 signals every week and maps them to 68 topics.

DataFox offers both an initial data cleanse and daily data maintenance.  A data integrity report provides statistics on verified records, duplicates, incompletes, and incorrect records.

Along with SFDC, DataFox supports integrations with Chrome, Marketo, and Slack.