The US 1950’s Civil Defense training film “Duck and Cover” taught school children to “duck and cover” if there were a nuclear flash. (Public Domain)
Thinking back on the Hawaii emergency management snafu (a WWII acronym meaning “Situation Normal: All F****d up), it was clear that they lacked proper controls and situational planning. Apparently, there were no controls to prevent routine tests from sending out real messages. Furthermore, there was no redundancy in the system (e.g. confirmation messages, secondary approvals) and no plan for immediately recalling the message. Supposedly, the governor couldn’t Tweet because he forgot his password.
So, Hawaii was sent into a panic.
This just points out that emergency plans need to be periodically reviewed (what better time than Q1?). Do we have proper backups and system redundancy, state of the art firewalls and virus detection, and plans for managing and communicating hacks? Can we manage operations if a key partner API crashes or content partner shutters? Have we run through PR nightmare scenarios such as the one that H&M recently suffered (and which resulted in their South African stores being vandalized)?
There is no lack of risks (data security, physical security, financial, brand, supply chain, key executive health). Most are highly unlikely. But we’ve seen information services firms suffer problems over the past few years including the theft of the D&B NetProspex contact file from a data licensor and the Equifax hack. So, while many seem remote, the lack of scenario planning makes them more likely and costlier.
Of course, risk planning and mitigation need to be realistic. If it is simply a “Duck and Cover” campaign for PR purposes, then it will do little to prevent the risk or manage the situation should the emergency happen. Emergency planning needs to be robust.
Emergency planning suffers from some of the same issues as data quality. Both are boring investments based upon reduction of hypothetical risks and costs. But part of a C-level executive’s mandate is to plan for business continuity and mitigate risk.
Artesian CEO Andrew Yates recently discussed Artesian Solutions with Sudipto Ghosh as part of the MarTech Interview Series. Artesian was founded to help resolve the disparity between B2B buyer and seller tools. “We saw that businesses had transformed the way they buy, but that sellers had not adapted. This mismatch led us to create a vision of better B2B sales engagement that is customer-centric at its heart, and to develop the world’s most powerful customer intelligence application to support it.”
Yates described technology as “the biggest disruptive force in the world” and his entrepreneurship as “a desire to disrupt the status quo, solve problems, remove complexity and make a difference.” He sees Artesian Solutions as a “disruptive force for good in our sector, providing engagement smarts for companies and markets in the same way that LinkedIn has done for people insights.”
Artesian is incorporating new AI technologies into its platform including the Arti chatbot based upon IBM Watson. As they are doing so, they are repositioning from Social Selling to “A.I.-powered sales intelligence.”
Yates warns that businesses look for CRM platforms to help customer facing departments build customer-centric businesses and a full customer view. Often, though, they become frustrated when CRMs do not provide the desired customer experience and engagement. But CRMs are only as good as the data entered into them and are subject to ongoing data decay. Further compounding this issue is
“the sheer volume of data businesses need to grapple with. Often unstructured, this data is increasingly hard to find, rationalize and interpret. Inaccurate or out-of-date data has several inevitable consequences. Take-up and enthusiasm for CRM input wanes as the volume of data increases, and time spent just keeping up-to-date with existing customer data impacts negatively on time spent researching and acquiring new ones. Opportunities to respond to real-time customer news and market insight are missed, and customers looking for instant action and results are left disappointed. Likewise, deals are lost through mistakes, and errors in messaging and targeting become more frequent. Forecasting accuracy diminishes as emerging trends go unnoticed.”
Yates recommends working with a data partner that provides a full view of customers and contacts, including contextualized customer insight; news, market trends and social media monitoring; real-time intelligence; and single sourced company and contact profiles with “social profiles, opinions, and expectations.”
SalesWings is a Swiss lead website tracking and predictive lead scoring DaaS startup with a twist – it not only includes real-time website traffic details helping to define which leads are actively reviewing company content and which pages are of interest, but it also enriches lead and company profiles. SalesWings intelligence helps frame conversations by indicating which pages were visited, the recency of the views, and the frequency of views. For example, if a sales rep knows that the Salesforce AppExchange page was viewed, she can infer that the company either has SFDC or is considering it, then share related sales materials or case studies. SalesWings can be deployed within a day by upgrading existing email marketing tools.
“Our solution helps sales reps reduce lead qualification time by providing them with social insights into the nature of the leads’ interest based on their website activity, as well as enriched information about the lead’s profile and company key data. This leads to better collaboration between marketing and sales, faster response rates, and an increase in deal closing rates.”
CEO Philip Schweizer
SalesWings is available as both a browser and integrated service. Users can view profiles and activity directly within Salesforce and Pipedrive. The service also offers Slack and Zapier integrations which ensure real-time notification when a lead turns hot and automated workflows which save valuable time. To begin tracking, a short tracking JavaScript is added to the website. The firm claims webmasters can add the JavaScript in fewer than seven minutes.
SalesWings Slack Notifications
SalesWings users may filter lists by leads flagged as favorites, leads at risk (inactive), or hot leads (as determined by SalesWings). Users can also filter for leads with to do items. SalesWings includes a gamification element which assigns points for followed up leads.
Lead Heat is behaviorally scored and does not yet account for lead fitness based upon firmographics. However, SalesWings is planning on rolling out real-time segmentation and a custom scoring system in Q1 which includes firmographic variables.
Contact intelligence includes job title, age location, place of work, social links (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, XING, Quora, Twitter), email, and Skype ID (if available). Company intelligence covers URL, address, phone, employee count, year founded, LinkedIn hyperlink, and Twitter handle. Because leads are enriched by SalesWings, web forms can be kept short, helping reduce form abandonment rates. Company and contact data is licensed from a credible vendor, but the firm does not publicly disclose the name.
Currently, the full URL of page views is displayed, which slows the sales rep and makes it more difficult to determine which pages have been viewed. However, the firm is working on an improved display of page titles in place of full URLs. Demandbase, which rolled out similar reporting to its clients this week, also displays URLs instead of page titles.
SalesWings provides company and contact profiles alongside visited page frequency and history (SFDC Connector I-Frame).
To prevent users from being overwhelmed by notifications, only one alert is delivered per day for followed contacts. Interestingly, the firm suggests following leads only during the early stage of a deal. Once an opportunity is moving forward, email and site visit notifications are less valuable so can be turned off. However, if a lead is viewed as hot, notifications will be delivered even if the lead is no longer marked as a favorite.
“Think of SalesWings as a fully automated sales support assistant to get the sales timing right. We see many of our clients who don’t log in very often into SalesWings because they’re too busy doing other things,” said Schweizer. “That’s why we setup a notification engine which actually smartly distributes the notification to the right salesperson.”
SalesWings is gaining market traction with 1,000 clients at the end of 2017, a ten-fold increase over the year. 50% of their customer base is in Europe, 30% in North America, and 20% in other territories, with particular strength in Australia.
The Growth edition is priced at $99 per month and supports up to five users with web lead tracking, lead scoring, form tracking, and optional contact data enrichment. The Growth Edition also supports Gmail, Outlook, Zapier, PipeDrive, and Slack Connectors. Additional users are priced at $19 per seat per month.
The Accelerate edition adds API Access and the Salesforce connector for $149 per month for up to five users. Additional users are priced at $29 per seat.
The Enterprise edition is priced at $499 per month and includes Marketing Cloud and Eloqua integrations, premium training, and a dedicated server option. Enterprise is aimed at firms with at least 30,000 monthly site visits.
Contracts are for six or twelve months and include onboarding and support. The firm offers a 14-day free trial and 50 free credits for enriched contact data. Contact credits are purchased in bulk; Admins can purchase 50, 250, 500, 1000, 2500 or 5000 credits. The most popular bulk purchase is 1000 credits for $99 (9.9¢ per record). At 5,000 credits, the price drops to $219 (4.38¢ per record). An auto-renew option allows for automated purchasing of additional credits.
Update (December) As with all DaaS vendors, pricing evolves over time. While the described bundles are still available, the pricing has changed and SalesWings no longer posts its prices online.
“SalesWings offers flexible pricing plans based on the companies size, integration needs and feature requirements,” said Schweizer.
SalesWings targets SMBs with 10 to 100 employees in the SaaS and Technology industries, Digital Marketing Agencies, Finance, Insurance, Pharmaceutical, and Manufacturing sectors. While SalesWings can be used for high-value consumer products and services, they view their sweet spot as B2B. Typical buyers include the heads of sales and marketing, startup founders, Salesforce consultants and admins, and email marketers.
SalesWings automatically assigns leads to reps who send a tracked email. Reps can also claim them from a general pool of unassigned leads simply by clicking on the “not yet assigned” icon. For companies using the Salesforce or Pipedrive CRM integrations, lead or contact ownership is automatically synchronized. The manual assignment process seems dicey as it is based upon a first-claimed basis instead of territory definitions. A better method would be to support automated lead assignments based upon territory (industry, geographic, size) and named account definitions, a feature which is on SalesWings’ roadmap.
Leads are created when a sales rep sends a tracked email or traffic is driven to the site via marketing (for instance filling in a web form), but there are no tools for targeting prospects. Nevertheless, the tracking of web traffic and marketing messages combined with lead enrichment is a compelling combination for identifying and scoring the most sales-ready leads. These are features not generally available to SMBs.
Todd Berkowitz, Research Vice President at Gartner, sees Account Based Marketing (ABM) as increasing tensions between sales and marketing in the short-term. While ABM has long been advocated as a facilitator of departmental alignment, he sees ABM as disrupting sales processes and generating friction:
“Between ABM and adoption of various new technologies and data types, there is a lot of disruption that is happening with regards to sales teams. Even if these changes are going to be beneficial to tech companies in the medium-term, and some of the “A sellers” get on board quickly with the changes, there are many sales reps that will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world. (This is why I always advise trying an ABM pilot with a select set of reps). So even if there is pretty good alignment and agreement between CMOs and sales leaders, don’t expect all reps to magically do what they are being asked to do. There needs to be an adjustment period, along with good sales enablement, before everyone plays nicely.”
So, while ABM will facilitate agreements in process, messaging, and metrics in the medium-term, it will generate resistance amongst sales reps unwilling to adopt new processes and tools or unconvinced of its value. This friction is probably exacerbated by predictions of sales force reductions due to the implementation of AI and other information and workflow technologies.
WWII Era Poster (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
Resistance to technological change has long been an issue. Early in the Industrial Revolution, The Luddites sabotaged British plants, particularly cotton and wool mills. While sales reps are unlikely to sabotage initiatives (or their careers), they may hesitate to learn new platforms or adopt new processes. As such, the problem may be more akin to soldiering, the assembly line equivalent of reducing individual productivity to the level of the laggards on the line. Frederick Taylor, the father of time and motion studies, was very concerned about soldiering and recommended piece work rates to create productivity incentives. But sales reps are very attuned to incentives. While they may be hesitant to adopt new technologies, they will do so if they help make them more efficient and effective at selling. So long as sales reps are paid on a commission basis and long-term employment is tied to making quota, the level of soldiering should be minimal.
This isn’t to say that sales reps won’t resist learning new tools. If they believe the time invested in such training is less than the incremental revenue for the lost selling time spent in training, then they will avoid training and learning new tools. However, if they see others on their team benefiting from the new tools, they will not hold out long term. Thus, tool training needs to be visibly supported by management with an emphasis upon the benefits to sales reps (e.g. less time spent on non-sales tasks and more time interacting with customers and prospects, improved account intelligence, improved account targeting and message timing). With the proper incentives and information, resistance should be minimal.
To help ensure adoption, vendors should be looking to integrate solutions into CRMs, email, and mobile devices so that new tools are integrated into current workflows. They should also be providing inline tool tips, initial training focused on their capabilities which provide high levels of efficiency and efficacy improvements, tool-based win stories, and usage tools for tracking training, usage, and ROI. A few gamification elements may also be in order, but they should be organic to the product and not hokey.
An Opportunity Smart Panel provides direct access to Salesforce Opportunities
Sales Acceleration vendor SalesLoft added two new integrated features at the end of last year. From a SalesLoft smart panel, sales reps can view, edit, create, and one-click access Salesforce Opportunities. SalesLoft also added a “log emails from anywhere” feature which captures prospect and customer communications from mobile devices.
Integrated Salesforce Opportunity data provides greater conversational context by surfacing current and historical opportunities and associated information. It also reduces the workflow involved in toggling between applications and rekeying key details across platforms. Bi-directional synching ensures that “opportunity status and stages synced as you’re engaging with your prospects and customers.” SalesLoft also supports one-click new Opportunity creation functionality.
“Opportunities are both a core component of your sales cycle and a leading indicator of the success of your revenue team. Your SDRs are hustling to create them, your AEs are actively working them and bringing them over the line, and your success team is keeping your customers happy and renewing them.”
Product Marketing Director Chris Murphy
The new email synching feature helps teams “log all email activities from their connected email accounts regardless of the device that it was sent from or whether they ‘loft’ their emails from Gmail or Outlook.” Admins control which team members are logged and can choose which domains to capture.
“So, for example, we will automatically prevent emails sent to your company email domain from being logged as activities as well as those “pick up milk on the way home” reminder emails sent to your personal email address,” said Murphy.
Administrative Control Screen for Email Synching.
SalesLoft also announced an extended partnership with Vidyard which provides freemium recording and transmission of videos from within SalesLoft. Sales reps may attach video “selfies” to emails and email templates which display a custom video image. The integration also supports video playlists, making it easy for reps to include topical videos which address customer questions or concerns. Vidyard maintains view analytics, providing sales and marketing information about who watched and for how long, helping sales reps hone both messaging and identifying which videos are connecting with prospects.
SalesLoft claims significant improvements in response and bottom line impacts from including video in the communications mix:
8X higher response rates
5X higher click-through rates
20% higher close rates
30% larger annual contract values
“We all know you can’t simply communicate through a single channel,” said VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester. “However, when paired together in an intelligent combination of communication channels, process, and technology will ultimately increase conversion rates.”
Email address compiler Every Market Media (EMM) announced the “early access launch” of its B2B list tool LeadPorte. The Build a List service provides access to 55 million US and 7 million international contacts. All of the records have emails and a subset have direct dials. The service, which is nearing the end of its beta period, has already delivered 7,500 counts and over 2,000 CSV file downloads to over a dozen beta customers.
Users have access to global company and contact screening via standard filter variables such as job function, job level, SICs, size, location, domain, and title keyword search. Advanced features include deployed technologies; email, domain, and past download suppression lists; SOHO business suppression; and maximum downloads per company, domain, or website.
Leads are ranked by quality with the option to filter leads by quality strata:
Leadporte quality strata allow users to select high-quality data specific to their primary outreach channel.
When the max records per company field is selected, LeadPorte selects records based upon job level and data quality.
Max downloads combined with suppression list functionality allow outbound call centers to pull records on an as needed basis instead of pulling bulk files which quickly begin to decay.
A data rebate is in place to encourage a positive quality feedback loop. “We were having trouble getting feedback on our data outside of our OEM channel partners.” said EMM CEO Rick Holmes. “LeadPorte connects us to the feedback of the final user of our product. With hundreds of thousands of records a week being fed back to us from top telemarketing and email firms we’re improving and adding new data in a tremendous way.”
Domain and company name downloads support ABM campaigns focused on best-fit companies. According to Holmes, “Strong ABM campaign case studies often use referral outreach to other stakeholders in the business at companies that have a good fit for your product. That’s why we want to get ‘supporting cast’ contacts we can ask for referrals to the right person in the organization who makes decisions about our product. Successful organizations lever this strategy using different messaging than to a direct prospect, generally asking for a referral to the person who handles the decision.”
Company data is sourced from several companies and combined with EMM’s own data. Content is blended at the field level subject to a vendor hierarchy. A company-level data module will be available shortly.
Administrative features include a search-only restriction, the ability to pull team saved searches, and visibility into monthly data consumption.
LeadPorte is priced on a volume basis with significant discounts for large call centers. At 2,000 records per month, contacts cost $0.15 each, but fall to $0.01 at 250,000 records per month. Additional discounts are available for annual purchases. Unused records are rolled forward on annual accounts but not monthly subscriptions.
LeadPorte volume-based pricing provides significant savings for large call centers.
Roadmap features include their first sales enablement connector, machine learning, and social login.
While a number of tier one SalesTech vendors have been acquired this year, it is refreshing to see some of the data vendors such as EMM, HG Data, and Oceanos step into the void with cloud-based data services for sales and marketing.
Predictive Analytics and Audience Management vendor Leadspace completed its Series C. The funding round was led by Arrowroot Capital and joined by JVP. The $21 million round will be used “to grow our customer team in San Francisco and Denver, and our AI and data management product teams in Israel.”
The firm is assessing additional locations, including possible offices on the East Coast and Europe, “perhaps” London.
Arrowroot has taken a seat on Leadspace’s Board. The firm wanted growth equity advisors instead of traditional VCs for Round C. “At this point the investment is not just in the idea and the team, but also the underlying metrics and performance of the business,” said CEO Doug Bewsher. “Once you have “Product/Market fit”, the kinds of questions investors ask are whether you are ready to scale; what are the opportunities for further growth; and apart from additional investment can we be an investment partner that can help you address these opportunities?”
Bewsher noted that marketing has been transformed over the past seven years since Leadspace was founded. Firms are switching from tactical demand generation programs to targeted Account Based Marketing (ABM) communications. “No longer is it OK to just send out blanket “nurture” emails to everyone and hope that will generate positive customer engagements. No longer can you rely on a single data source as the basis to know your customer. No longer is it enough for marketers to just think of leads — they need to market to accounts, and teams of people. Neither can marketers afford to ignore intelligence and information from external parties, and simply rely on the limited info they gather internally.”
Not only has the nature of B2B marketing been transformed, but “world class B2B sales and marketing organizations” need to become more like consumer companies with a deep understanding of the account at multiple levels. Echoing Sirius Decisions, Bewsher said that B2B marketers need to “really know your customer at the account, demand unit and individual level, and then target and personalize your messaging to cut through the noise. And think customer-first.”
As an analytics company, Bewsher talks up the value of AI for sales and marketing as it begins to address specific problems and workflows:
AI is everywhere. While there is no doubt that it is going to change every corner of our life, both as private users and business people, I think we will start to move from the promise to the reality in 2018. In business-to-business sales and marketing in 2017, it was enough to say: “We have a ton of great data scientists who are working on new ways to better engage your customers.”
But in 2018 customers will look to see actual results — like the 90 percent increase in email connection rates we have seen from the deployment of AI to recommend the right way to engage a specific user. This will require a maniacal focus on specific use cases from the emerging area of AI.
One area where AI will improve revenue generation effectiveness is in ABM programs which has been limited by the human ability to consume information and the historical lack of data availability. However, “AI is changing all this, with the ability to consume and understand unprecedented amounts of information and turn this into action at scale and in real time. So sales and marketing teams now have the opportunity to drive much more relevant and effective engagement programs for their entire potential target audience.”
According to Leadspace, they are trusted by over 130 B2B brands and seven of the top ten enterprise software companies. Clients include Microsoft, Marketo, Oracle, and RingCentral.
