The Lattice Data Cloud Explorer highlights the top fields by category and helps admins determine which fields should be exported to other platforms.
Lattice Engines has taken the pole position in the emerging Predictive Analytics space. In yesterday’s blog, I covered its pricing, value proposition, content, and integrations. Part two covers model building.
When first launched, Lattice Engines and its peers had long deployments and black-boxed models that required data science expertise. The firm now offers 24-hour deployments, simplified model building, and greater transparency around models and recommendations. Furthermore, the system allows marketers to either build their own models or import industry standard PMML files constructed by their data science teams.
Predictive models are built by importing training files which are matched against the Lattice Data Cloud using D&B DUNSMatch logic and Lattice proprietary techniques. Training models contain examples of both positive and negative outcomes (e.g. win / lose, renew / drop). A model is typically available within thirty minutes of the training file upload.
Ideal Buyer Profile scores (Lattice’s term which is similar to Ideal Customer Profile scores) are available to sales and marketing and include both scores and recommendations. Marketing can view the model via a graphical Data Cloud Explorer which highlights the key signals and variables in the model and makes the data available for export to other platforms.
To make the data more actionable for sales reps, Lattice provides Salesforce Talking Points which display recommendations and explanations that include Lattice data, transactional history, and buyer behavior. A Lattice Buyer Insights CRM I-frame contains Lattice recommendations, talking points, company profiles, company fit, engaged contacts, engagement activity, intent analysis (surging topics), web activity, and purchase history tabs.
Lattice Recommendations with related scores. Sales reps can explore any of the recommendations by clicking on them.
Future plans include a user interface for segmentation analysis and simplifying intent scoring to high/medium/low.
Lattice Scores and Enriched Data are available within the Eloqua Canvas campaign builder.
In a 2016 survey of predictive analytics companies, Gartner sized the global market at between $100 and $150 million. Although Gartner remains bullish on the sector, the size must be disappointing to both the firms in the space and their investors. One of the early companies in the space, Lattice Engines, continues as a market leader with over 200 global deployments.
Lattice Engines supports both enterprise clients and high-growth companies with deployments beginning around $75,000. Pricing is based upon the number of managed leads or contacts in the instance along with the number of users. With revenue between $25 and $50 million (GZ Consulting estimate), the firm has a strong position in the nascent market.
Lattice Engines combines first and third-party data to build predictive models. External content includes firmographics, intent data, technographics, social data, and web crawled business signals. Content is licensed from leading vendors such as Dun & Bradstreet (WorldBase global company file), Bombora (intent captured from over 3,000 B2B media sites), and HG Data (technographics). The Lattice Data Cloud covers over 200 million global companies, 21,000 buying signals, 100 million tracked domains, and over one billion daily interactions. Internal content spans transactions, CRM, marketing behavioral data, usage data, and support services.
“Predictive analytics is one of the few types of marketing technology that has the ability to solve issues at every step of the funnel, because it aligns sales and marketing against the right targets, and provides them with the right data to create targeted campaigns. By infusing fit and intent data into our models we enable teams to have a complete understanding of their ideal customer profile, which enhances the programs teams orchestrate against their targets.”
Director of Corporate Marketing Caitlin Ridge.
Firms can build multiple models to support various geographies, product lines, and scenarios (e.g. win/loss, upsell/cross-sell, renew/churn). Lattice scores and modeled data are integrated with many of the key SalesTech and MarTech platforms:
Ads/Web: DemandBase, Oracle Data Cloud, doubleclick (Google), AdRoll, Facebook
CRM: Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Oracle Sales Cloud, SAP
This platform coverage enables Omni-channel ABM campaigns across programmatic platforms, email, direct mail, and field marketing. Scores, insights, and recommendations are provided to sales reps within CRM i-frames.
“Lattice remains the most visible “face” of the market,” said Gartner analyst Todd Berkowitz in September 2016. “With its focus on security, level of integrations and ETL tools, the company is a fit for enterprise clients (both in high-tech and other industries) and/or companies planning to deploy in multiple regions. Gartner clients report that the company’s go-to-market approach is unique in the way it addresses complex problems and help customers operationalize the insights from the models. Lattice is one of the few vendors that can recommend key plays at both the lead and account level across the entire funnel.”
According to Lattice, customers enjoy a broad set of improved metrics:
2X Higher Conversion
3X Greater Pipeline
35% Higher Deal Sizes
6% Increase in Quota Attainment
85% Rise in Revenue per Customer
20% Reduction in Customer Churn
The firm sells broadly across B2B sectors. Customers include Amazon, Dell, PayPal, Staples, and SunTrust Bank.
Salesforce Lightning Data partners include Clearbit, HG Data, Bombora, MCH, and DataFox. InsideView and Dun & Bradstreet were not included in this week’s announcement but showed up in the above announcement graphic. InsideView has confirmed that they are developing two Lightning apps.
Earlier this week, Salesforce announced a set of enhancement and new partners on their AppExchange. The firm is shifting away from Data.com and setting up an ecosystem of Lightning Data partners.
Salesforce is expanding the vision of the AppExchange to a “full blown ecosystem,” said Leyla Seka, EVP of AppExchange. Along with Lightning Bolts and Data, the firm is also adding intelligent search results, personalized recommendations, industry collections, and Trailhead online learning tools associated with apps. While 87 percent of customers have deployed apps, the new search and personalization tools will help customers “find the right solution and potentially solutions they didn’t know were available.”
With over 4,000 partner solutions, improved search and recommendations are necessary, particularly as they are merging the various AppExchange stores. According to Salesforce VP of Marketing Leslie Tom:
“The way that the AppExchange worked was that there were separate stores, such as a separate store for apps, a store for components, and a separate store for consultants — so consultants stayed within their own store; you couldn’t put the consultants in line with the apps and components and the other tools that people are using. In the new AppExchange, we’ve combined all of those things together to show the power of the full ecosystem.”
Salesforce evaluated B2B and B2C marketplaces when redesigning the AppExchange. “Our aspiration is to be as much like your consumer life as possible in buying your enterprise applications. [To that end, we] tried to bring as many of the best practices from marketplaces into the AppExchange as we could,” said Heather Conklin, Salesforce VP of product management. “We’re really anchoring this around the idea of being the Salesforce store – the store you need for everything that you do with Salesforce. It’s not just about apps anymore; it’s really so much bigger than that.”
HG Data Opportunity record in SFDC provides technographic intelligence.
Salesforce has yet to provide a roadmap for Data.com, so we will likely have to wait until Dreamforce for details. While legacy customers continue to receive Dun & Bradstreet content, new customers are limited to the Salesforce / Jigsaw company and contact file. However, the firm announced a set of Lightning Data partners that will support ongoing account enrichment as native Salesforce Apps.
InsideView was an original partner on the AppExchange but was disinvited after Data.com rolled out. While hidden from AppExchange searches, the InsideView for Sales solution continued to be available to joint customers as a private solution. Furthermore, the firm built additional AppExchange marketing products to supplement InsideView for Sales. These services included Target, a company and contact prospecting platform, and Refresh, a data hygiene service that matched and enriched account records with InsideView intelligence. The two companies share over one thousand joint clients.
As an initial partner in Lightning Data, InsideView is offering two services: Append account record maintenance toward the end of Q4 and Discovery account prospecting in Q1 2018. Both are native Salesforce applications. Unfortunately, Lightning Data only supports Account record enrichment and prospecting. Thus, InsideView clients looking for prospecting against InsideView’s 13 million global companies and 33 million contacts may wish to evaluate InsideView Target instead of InsideView Discovery.
InsideView positions itself as a leader in Targeting Intelligence due to their capabilities across three dimensions: company and people intelligence (Who), business triggers sourced from the news and social feeds (Why), and network connections which support warm introductions (How).
With the launch of their new Lightning Data solutions, InsideView will have strategic relationships with the two most important CRMs: Saleforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.
InsideView CMO Tracy Eiler will be speaking at one of the Lightning Data sessions at this year’s Dreamforce as will other Lightning Data partners.
OTHER PARTNERS
DataFox is offering twenty-two curated data points and five proprietary fields for DaaS enrichment. Amongst the curated fields are standard firmographics, tech stack, and funding data including investors, total funding raise, and last funding round details. Proprietary data includes signal count over the past year, industry keywords, and similar companies. Datafox’s “AI-sourced, human-audited company data” covers over two million companies. Pricing starts at $3,500 per year.
MCH enriches accounts with medical facility details. Institutions include hospitals; medical practices; dental practices; nursing homes; home health and hospice; ambulatory surgery; diagnostic imaging; community health; urgent care; and public health departments. Data is updated via a team of researchers annually who populate over seventy attributes across 636,000 facilities. Pricing starts at $500 per year.
MCH has a broader sales intelligence solution in development which will support prospecting and access to two million medical practitioners and support staff.
Clearbit enriches accounts with over forty fields including firmographics, Alexa Rank, Social Accounts, and Technology. The service also includes company news. Pricing starts at $499 per month.
HG Data populates technology product, vendor, and product category information across account, contact, and opportunity records. Also included is an account ranking score based upon deployed technology and workflows based upon complementary or competitive products. Pricing starts at $5,000 per year.
Bombora enriches account records with intent data gathered from 3,500 B2B media sites.
Additional partner announcements are expected.
Enrichment Benefits
There are multiple reasons to enrich records with third-party reference data sets. These include shorter web forms with lower abandonment rates, improving segmentation via standardized data with fewer data gaps, ongoing data maintenance, and enhanced targeting.
Sales rep benefits from enrichment include reduced data entry, improved lead scoring and routing, and improved intelligence for account qualification, planning, and messaging. By enriching company information within the CRM workflow, sales reps have accurate, on demand account intelligence.
Research has shown that short web forms have lower abandonment rates resulting in a higher return on demand gen marketing (Graphic Source: DataFox).
The new Lightning Data services on the AppExchange.
Salesforce announced the launch of two new AppExchange partnership categories offering native Lighting functionality: Lightning Bolts and Lightning Data. Bolts are Lightning Components which offer customer data and business logic.
Lightning Data provides new Data as a Service (DaaS) partnerships in the wake of the non-renewal of the Dun & Bradstreet – Data.com licensing partnership. Three of the partners were announced as Data.com Exchange partners at last year’s Dreamforce:
Initially, Lightning Data only supports ongoing match and enrichment services for Account records. As many AppExchange partners offer batch and continuous services for Account, Contact, and Lead records, Lightning Data will need to round out its enrichment capabilities for it to become a full hygiene and enrichment solution.
OPPORTUNITY LOST
Lightning Data is an indication that Salesforce never really bought into the idea of being a DaaS company. Since August 2011, they have promoted Data.com, but never fully committed to the data ecosystem they promised when they launched Data.com. The original idea was to take the Jigsaw file they purchased in April 2010 for $142 million and integrate it with the D&B WorldBase company file. They were then going to partner with other leading data companies to integrate third-party data matched to either Data.com contact intelligence or D&B Account intelligence. These data sets were to be delivered via Data.com Prospector sales intelligence and the Data.com Clean match and append service.
It was the right idea at the right time. They were playing catch up with OneSource for Salesforce, InsideView for Salesforce, and Access Hoovers, but had the technical and financial resources to quickly leapfrog these offerings (Access Hoovers was phased out as part of the D&B deal). Furthermore, they had a first mover advantage in cross-selling Data.com to their customer base. It could have been a home run, but they rarely hit the ball out of the infield. What’s worse:
The Jigsaw file was never truly internationalized. It remained a U.S. contact file with underwhelming executive coverage for nine other countries.
The Data.com contact counts increased, but only because they were adding contacts at the same rate as they were decaying. Meanwhile, their top two contacts competitors, NetProspex and Zoominfo, continued to expand both their active and inactive coverage in the U.S. and internationally.
They never added biographic details or social links to the contacts file
Prospector features remained underwhelming. They would add small features such as improved industry and geographic screening, but not anything significant until 2016.
They quickly dropped all discussion about an ecosystem.
Then at Dreamforce 2015 and 2016 they seemed to have found their mojo, addressing key weaknesses such as pricing, sales intelligence (Hoovers profiles, First Research industry overviews), and a data ecosystem.
Data.com hit a few doubles and outlined an aggressive 2017 and 2018 roadmap. It looked good. It sounded good. But then Salesforce severed their partnership with Dun & Bradstreet and now only legacy customers have access to Dun & Bradstreet content. For everybody else, there were nine months of deafening silence until yesterday’s announcement of Lightning Data.
The devolution of Data.com will not have a significant effect on Salesforce’s bottom line as it represents perhaps one percent of company revenue (hence, the lack of urgency in replacing Dun & Bradstreet content). Furthermore, the legacy offering will continue to be supported for several more years so the revenue decline will have little material impact. Perhaps we’ll hear about replacement content at Dreamforce, but Lightning Data suggests they are leaving B2B DaaS to partner companies.
DiscoverOrg is partnering with technology media and marketing company TechTarget to deliver its IT intelligence through TechTarget’s Priority Engine platform. The new offering, which will be available on November 2nd, provides a “unified data feed” of DiscoverOrg executive intelligence alongside TechTarget intent and Active Prospect insights. DiscoverOrg doubles or trebles the contacts available for Priority Engine prospects.
TechTarget provides real-time analysis of the “most active accounts and named prospects conducting purchase research” and ranks those accounts by “likelihood to engage.” Prospects are segmented by geography and hundreds of marketing segments. The joint solution “creates a world-class ABM solution that combines breadth of reach, purchase power insights and the ability to pinpoint and influence key prospects in one place.”
Joint customers will have full access to DiscoverOrg’s editorially verified decision makers alongside TechTarget contacts that are conducting active research. Priority Engine customers that have not licensed DiscoverOrg will be limited to ten names per account. The partnership displays the “Target Buying Team within a single dashboard.”
“Our goal is to help B2B tech providers discover and influence the Target Buying Team at accounts in their market segment,” said TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia. “Our partnership with DiscoverOrg means that our sales and marketing customers have the ability to create, prioritize, influence and convert new pipeline opportunities faster and more cost-efficiently than ever before.”
TechTarget provides both TechTarget active researchers and DiscoverOrg decisionmakers and influencers.
TechTarget has embraced ABM and recently published a three-part blog on the topic. According to TechTarget, classic demand generation is based upon generic value-generation arguments:
Classic B2B targeting methods have relied too much on size and seniority. We assume that if a company is huge it must have a need. It’s logical. We assume that the CXO will ‘get’ our value proposition — makes sense, we think, because those people are really smart and our value prop seems super compelling to us. In the end, it’s the very obviousness of this kind of thinking that’s its downfall. Not only is everyone else targeting the same people, but they’re also raising up their message to a CXO level of abstraction to make it very clear. They’re talking “value delivery”, TCO, “next generation” and all those generalities that make everyone sound like everyone else. This can’t possibly work. And it doesn’t. We all know that.
To be effective, you’ve got to think long and hard about who you’re talking to and how what you do can make a substantive difference to them in their business lives. It starts with targeting the right people. Then it’s all about speaking to them at a level that will resonate…
For many of our clients, it’s simply the availability of these new data sources that starts to change everything for them. They now begin with a much better picture of what is actually happening within their target audience so all their campaign activities become more focused in nature. And as they become more adept at using the material, we see them start to refine their approaches to a very granular level. When they start adjusting their messages to address install changes within an account and the concerns of real people within these targets, they achieve another level of performance yet again.
TechTarget argues that firms should micro-target and micro-message to individuals in the enterprise that are dealing with the issues which a vendor’s solution addresses. Furthermore, campaigns should be based upon win research and persona development. ABM programs span renewal and upgrade campaigns, add-on/complementary solution campaigns, and competitive targeting.
TechTarget manages a set of 140 technology research sites. “By understanding these buyers’ content consumption behaviors, TechTarget creates the purchase intent insights that fuel efficient and effective marketing and sales activities for clients around the world.”
TechTarget publishes 275,000 technology articles and claims to have “more 1st page Google results than any other B2B publisher.” Traffic and site activity is then mapped against their taxonomy of over 5,000 technology topics across 300 segments.
Priority Engine offers marketing automation and Salesforce connectors which provide “weekly feeds from Priority Engine to your MarTech stack.” MAP partners include Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, Pardot, and Integrate.
Along with DiscoverOrg, TechTarget also partners with HG Data to provide product / vendor insights.
Priority Engine customers include Cisco, McAfee, and White Hat Security.
Artesian responses tend toward the overly broad. A question about the news taxonomy provided a general overview of Artesian content and functionality.
British social selling service Artesian Solutions launched their new Arti chatbot (artesian.ai) this month. According to their press release, “Arti enables intuitive customer interaction in a relatively human-like way, answering questions about Artesian’s capabilities and providing expertise in real time. No longer do customers need to search through content on the company’s website, instead they can now interact directly with Arti and uncover the information they need in an instant.”
The Arti screen is split into two with the user keying questions on the left. A text response is displayed alongside the question as a British voice reads the answer. If there is ancillary content or videos, it is displayed in the right window.
“Our business is all about pushing the boundaries of web-based technology to deliver commercially valuable and immediately actionable insights for our customers,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “Telling the user what they need to know and the action they need to take, at the right time, means client facing teams can capitalise from every business moment. Arti is a great example of how the application of AI can be a significant enabler of productivity, lead generation and importantly enhanced customer experiences.”
A quick test proved disappointing with Arti misunderstanding basic questions such as “Which countries do you cover?” or “do you publish financials?” Many of the responses are tangential answers usually suggesting a “meeting with the team.” Of course, AI tools are able to learn and the content and response sets should improve over time. Thus, Arti users are likely to have better results in the future.
And as evidence of learning, the system has been updated to provide the following answer to “do you publish financials?”
We provide access to Experian credit ratings directly within Artesian, along with lots of other valuable information such as corporate family tree, shareholdings and detailed financial information.
“Arti is more than just a bit of fun, although we’ve certainly had fun building it,” said Director of Marketing Stuart Newton. “It has the potential to be an incredibly powerful marketing tool for us. Arti will continue to get smarter the more our customers engage with it, learning from previous conversations to become more effective and valuable to our web visitors. I am delighted to place Artesian amongst some of the leading brands in the world, leveraging chat bots to connect with customers. It will change the customer experience by replacing clicks with sustained conversations and personalised interactions.”
When training sales reps, I emphasize staying “above the fray.” Besmirching a competitor’s product also sullies your reputation. It shows a lack of class and a sense of desperation. Oftentimes it can backfire.
“It is a mistake to believe that you can win hearts and minds by attacking your competitor. When you have no idea how strong the relationship is, you can make a complete fool of yourself, doing more harm than good, and doing nothing to create a real opportunity.
Speaking ill of your competitor is an indication of who you are, not who they are. There are better strategies available to you.”
It is much better to position the value of your offering and focus on areas of differentiation than it is to throw mud. You should lay landmines for competitors, not besmirch their reputation.
A landmine is simply an emphasis upon those features and benefits where your product or service offering excels. The goal is to frame the discussion around the dimensions in which your product provides superior value to the end user. Keep in mind that value is dependent upon the customer in question, so you need to factor in job function, industry, company size, etc. Also, be careful to select areas in which your firm excels overall, not dimensions in which you are superior to competitor X that is vying for the deal but inferior to competitor Y. Otherwise, you may later find out you lost the deal to Y.
Likewise, you should expect your competitors to be laying landmines for your sales reps. They need to understand where these mines are laid and how to diffuse them.
One tool I recommend is the quick parry. This is a quick response to the question, “how are you better / different than company X?” A quick parry is only three or four sentences and usually begins by saying something positive about the competitor before transitioning with a BUT or HOWEVER. The positive item can be a recognition of some dimension in which they are the acknowledged leader or a dimension which is of limited importance to the customer in question. Thus, if you are selling to an SMB, you might emphasize the breadth of their solution for enterprise customers vs. the ease of use, quick implementation, and pricing models you offer for smaller firms. Such a tool differentiates your service from the competitor without throwing mud.
Of course, sales reps will only be able to deploy landmines and respond with quick parries if they understand both the value proposition of their offerings, the needs of their clients, and the strengths and weaknesses of their offerings vis-à-vis competitors. This is where tools and training come into play.
B2BSignals departmental filters are more granular than most vendors and span functions across the organization.
Technology sales intelligence vendor B2BSignals offers data enrichment and prospecting across a database of 50,000 global companies, 700,000 locations, and 27 million executives. Emails are available for over 20 million executives with emails suppressed in countries with opt-in email regimes (e.g. Canada, Europe).
B2BSignals maintains a proprietary taxonomy for product categories, roles, departments, seniority, skills, and industries. Over 20,000 technology products are tracked across 8 million product users. Products and executives are identified at the location level.
B2BSignals does not license any data but acquires it through an open web crawl combined with social listening and editorial review by 900 staff in the Philippines and India. The web crawl completes every 45 days.
Company prospecting filters include company name, industry and sub-industry, product category and sub-category, employee range, revenue range, domain, international region, country, state/province, city, and “HQ only”. Contact filters add name, title, email availability, email id, department, and seniority level. Users may upload suppression files as well as suppress previously downloaded records.
Executive profiles display location address, emails, corporate phones, work histories, roles held, title, department, level, tags and firmographics. Users may add tags and download the profile as a PDF.
B2B Signals Contact profiles are quite detailed and include emails, titles, roles, products used, work history, tags, and firmographics.
While the prospecting module has clear strengths concerning product and functional responsibilities, sizing data is limited to ranges and location prospecting lacks postal codes, counties, metro areas, and ZIP radius filters.
Company profiles include contact information, Google map, revenue and employment ranges, products installed, contacts by department, and tags. However, the profile lacks social links, news, sales triggers, and business descriptions, all content which could be gathered via its web crawl.
The User Experience is modern and straightforward. Separate home pages are provided for sales and marketing. The Sales Home focuses on prospecting with filter variables, saved searches, recently viewed companies and contacts, and company and contact counts.
Pricing begins at $500 / month with unlimited search, read, and discover, but restrictions on the number of exported contacts and users. If multiple users download the same record, the user is not charged for subsequent downloads.
In Q4, they will roll out an enterprise edition with APIs and connectors. A recently introduced Salesforce connector supports batch and on-demand enrichment; custom field mapping; “stare and compare” updates; company and contact prospecting; and i-frame display within account, contact, and lead records.
The B2BSignals Find Contact Prospecting tab in Salesforce
The company has an analytics product in beta called Market Insights which provides installed technology segmentation analysis by geographical region, industry vertical, company size, and department. The product is similar to analytics offerings from BuiltWith, Datanyze, and HG Data.
The data cleanse and enrich function pre-processes the records before attempting to match them (many vendors skip this step). The cleanse steps validate company and contact data, flag obsolete records, remove special characters, dedupe the file, and normalize company data. Cleansing helps improve match rates while flagging out of business companies and contacts no longer at a firm. Data enrichment then appends firmographics, installed products at both the company and contact level, title, role, department, email, and products used at the contact level.
Salesify had 2014 revenue of $16.9 million according to their Inc 5000 listing. The firm was acquired in 2015 by Ziff Davis. They launched B2BSignals last October.
Correction: B2BSignals was spun off as a separate business unit from Salesify after the Ziff Davis acquisition. The article originally referenced Salesify, but that is a separate business unit.
The Nimble Smart Contacts App captures the Name, Email, Mobile Phone, Work Phone, Job Title, Company, Website URL, Physical Address, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, and LinkedIn URL contained within an email signature.
Nimble partnered with CircleBack to add two contact maintenance features into its social sales and marketing CRM for individuals and teams. Users can capture email signatures or take a photo of business cards to populate Nimble. Email signatures are gathered from Gmail, Google Apps, Outlook / Exchange, and Office 365. Furthermore, CircleBack appends missing fields such as social links, corporate addresses, and URLs which may not always be available. It then updates the records to ensure they remain accurate.
“CircleBack’s collaboration with Nimble brings tremendous opportunity to leverage and enhance our open API ecosystem, and to enable Nimble to enrich contact information from social data in new and increasingly effective ways.” said Manoj Ramnani, CEO, CircleBack. “What makes Nimble such an incredible Social CRM is its ability to provide instant context to its users, and now through the power of our APIs, we want to empower Nimble to do it with greater precision.”
Nimble browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge allow sales reps to capture and enrich contacts while browsing the web. Thus, a sales rep could be on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or a corporate website and add the contact record with a single click. CircleBack then enriches the record with missing details. What’s more, the sales rep doesn’t need to key information into Nimble or guess at email structures.
Nimble plans include 25 free lookups per user per month. Additional contacts are priced in bundles between 20 cents (50 credits per month) and 10 cents (1,000 credits per month). While credits are shared across the team and reasonably priced, they do not rollover. Thus, the true per record cost is higher.
