Month: April 2018

Datanyze Account Intelligence & Triggers Released

The Datanyze Account List with Events.
The Datanyze Account List with Events.

Technology Intelligence vendor Datanyze rolled out an Account Intelligence capability which provides a set of buying signals via a dashboard and daily email alerts. Amongst the sales triggers covered are Acquisition Events, Funding Events, Technology Adds/Drops, Job Postings Added, and Recent News Articles.

Datanyze CEO Ilya Semin said that the firm is looking to expand beyond lead generation into Account Based Marketing. “We could do a really good job identifying companies that our customers should go after, but when they already have a list of companies they want to talk to they use the ABM model, meaning there’s already a list of accounts. How can we help? With an ABM approach we didn’t really have a solution. This new feature, Account Intelligence Dashboard, is designed specifically for companies that use an ABM approach.”

ABM lists can be uploaded as CSV files of ABM domains, generated as a targeting report, gathered from Datanyze tags or matched against Salesforce Opportunities, Leads, or Accounts. Users can then select which technology adds and drops are relevant to their campaigns and account plans.

“Traditionally, the approach for salespeople is, ‘Hey, let me go find the accounts that I want to target and let me see if they’re interested in my solution or product.’  The account-based approach is when companies, usually marketing departments, identify a list of companies that will definitely be a good fit, the sales rep is responsible for a territory and will be given a list of 100 accounts that they need to talk to in the next year. Using our Account Intelligence Dashboard, they can upload this list of 100 accounts, and every time there is a good buying signal it will give them context to reach out to this company.”

  • Datanayze CEO Ilya Semin

Along with Account Based Sales, Datanyze positions the service for competitive intelligence (tracking technology and events at your competitors) and customer success monitoring (identifying growth and opportunity events as well as monitoring complementary and competitive technology).

The service is free to Datanyze Small Team ($500 per month for ten users) and Enterprise customers. A limited free version will be available in a few months.

DemandBase ABM Analytics Launched

ABM Analytics provides auto-generated look-a-like control groups for pipeline stage analysis.
ABM Analytics provides auto-generated look-a-like control groups for pipeline stage analysis.

At its annual conference, ABM vendor Demandbase rolled out a new ABM Analytics module for campaign assessment.  ABM Analytics supports full pipeline analysis “to understand the progression of their most valuable accounts across the buying cycle” for account lists and audiences.  The platform also displays vendor comparisons, performs segmentation analysis, and provides recommendations for “next best actions to drive higher conversion rates through the funnel.”

“The ability to measure and articulate the effectiveness and impact of ABM programs is important to long-term ABM success,” said Alisa Groocock, Research Director, SiriusDecisions. “ABM solutions that bring extended measurement visibility can better support critical decision-making, and as a result, enable ABM programs to grow more quickly.”

Demandbase lists the new capabilities:

Marketers can monitor the health of their ABM strategies by examining the progress of their most valued accounts through the buying cycle; create side-by-side comparisons of audiences with different revenue ranges, employee sizes or verticals to understand how their segments perform at every stage of the funnel; understand the performance of individual marketing tactics such as advertising or direct mail; diagnose problems and opportunities along the customer journey and take targeted actions to improve performance; and build credibility throughout the organization by sharing transparent ABM progress reports.

ABM Analytics also matches and assesses data across advertising platforms, MAPs, content management, web analytics, and CRM to provide a unified view into “which accounts are responding to ads, engaging with content, moving into sales cycles and contributing to revenue.”

“For years, B2B marketers have struggled to connect disparate data sitting at agencies, in their web log files and CRM to measure the true impact of their marketing programs,” said CEO Chris Golec. “Our new analytics functionality leverages the best practices from some of the world’s most sophisticated B2B marketers and brings them to life for every company, no matter where they are on their ABM journey.”

Demandbase also announced a Salesforce Pardot connector which will be available in June. The connector will complement Einstein ABM and deliver “a deeper understanding of every customer” to sales and marketing teams.  According to Michael Kostow, SVP and GM of Pardot, “Einstein ABM arms teams with the insights necessary to deliver personalized campaigns and build relationships with their most valuable accounts.”

The Pardot solution evaluates activity at both the contact and company level.  The new solution will flag target account visits to corporate websites, relevant keywords and topics for online search, contact page viewing details on the website, and news and blog mentions.  These insights will be provided within SFDC, email alerts, and Slack.

“ABM has transformed how marketing teams drive new business and retain customers,” said Golec.  “But many B2B companies still struggle to deliver the comprehensive account view that can help sales teams drive pipeline and close business.”  The Salesforce partnership “gives marketers the ability to empower sales teams with a complete picture of their target accounts so they can increase their productivity and win rates.”

OrgChartCity: New Source of Top Company Intelligence

OrgChartCity provides family trees by function and division.
OrgChartCity provides family trees by function and division.

Five years ago, there were several options for editorially researched org charts. These included DiscoverOrg, RainKing, SalesQuest Crush reports, and iProfile. But DiscoverOrg acquired both RainKing and iProfile and SalesQuest was acquired by OneSource which was later acquired by Dun & Bradstreet and bundled into the D&B Hoovers technology premium. Thus, the options for org chart intelligence narrowed significantly. However, Bowman Marketing Services (BMS), a company profile research firm based in Austin, TX, now offers OrgChartCity as both single profiles and a subscription service.

OrgChartCity intelligence includes both organizational structures and notes concerning budget data and responsibilities. Licensees receive both a PDF org chart and an Excel CSV containing first and last name, department, email, phone, and title.

CEO David Bowman, describes the OrgChartCity value proposition as “contacts in context” which provides org charts “handcrafted by business experts, not some nested database of contacts that a computer nerd put together.”

Information is collected through both primary and secondary research along with automated checks. Each data source is assessed by recency, context, and source type with records included only if they meet a 90% confidence threshold. If a company has not been updated in the prior 90 days, the licensee is provided with the current profile and a refreshed profile within a couple of days.

The firm focuses on the Fortune 500 and Global 2000. Coverage currently spans 500 companies with the firm adding dozens of org charts each quarter. Overall, the firm has around 35,000 active, profiled executives.

Individual profiles may be purchased by credit card on the OrgChartCity website for $125. An annual subscription to the full database is priced at $10,000 and includes alerts and full access to updates.

While Bowman Marketing Services is initially focusing on org charts, the firm performs detailed custom research for its clients and plans to market additional datasets in the future.

Custom research topics include company overviews, competition, segments, budgets and departments, social media presence, sustainability, news (specific to the client), technology platforms (specific to the clients), awards and recognition, financial outlook (summarized for sales reps), and 2018 initiatives. Custom report pricing runs between $1,000 and $5,000 per company based upon the number of topics covered and the size of the company.

BMS has been providing custom research since 2005. The custom business is profitable and OrgChartCity is nearing breakeven. The firm maintains a staff of 20 to 25 researchers.

 

Outreach Amplify Brings AI to Sales Engagement

Outreach Amplify provides response analysis, helping firms select the most effective message.
Outreach Amplify provides response analysis, helping firms select the most effective message.

Sales Engagement vendor Outreach is teasing a new predictive analytics capability called Amplify which leverages the history of a firm’s sequences and workflows. The firm will not be employing a black-box AI strategy but providing recommendations with explanations.

CEO Manny Medina faults deep learning strategies which lack “the ability to make inferences, such as the ability to figure out why things work” and require users to trust the recommendations without providing a basis for the suggestions.

“We believe we need to tackle this problem following general scientific principles. Hypotheses need to be testable, data should be very carefully examined to verify the quality of the data.”

  • Yifei Huang, Machine Learning Lead, Outreach

“When we built Amplify, we built it with the core belief in mind that, the human needs to understand why things work so that machine can understand why things work so that the machine can get better at helping the human,” said Medina.

For example, Amplify deploys natural language processing (NLP) around email responses to help identify whether responses are unsubscribes, objections, or positive.  Outreach claims that their NLP classification is 92% accurate, only three points behind manual classification.

NLP will also be used to assess objection handling to identify reps who handle objections well and which ones need improvement.  This feedback is then available to managers to assist with coaching.

Amplify addresses two key managerial questions: “Is my team adopting the new technology? Is the new technology delivering a measurable lift?”

Amplify will be unveiled at their May Unleash conference.

SFDC Unplugging Data.com Connect

Salesforce Lightning Data partners include Clearbit, HG Data, Bombora, MCH, and DataFox. InsideView and Dun & Bradstreet were not included in this week's announcement.
SFDC is promoting Lighting Data solutions as an alternative to its Data.com Prospector and Clean offerings.  Salesforce Lightning Data partners include Clearbit, HG Data, Bombora, MCH, DataFox, InsideView and Dun & Bradstreet.  Additional partners are planned.

Salesforce told its Data.com Connect customers that the product will no longer be available as of May 4, 2019.  As such, the firm will not renew any customers after May 3rd of this year, and users will not be able to license any points, contacts, or plans after May 3rd.  However, users will be able to earn points through community updates through the expiration of the product.  While Salesforce has not announced shutdown dates for the native Salesforce Data.com Clean and Prospector offerings, their shutdown is “currently targeted for some time in 2020.”

Data.com Connect contacts data will continue to “used in the maintenance of the Data.com Clean and Prospector products,” said the firm.  “After the Data.com end-of-life is complete, the contact database may be archived by Salesforce.”

Data.com Connect is the successor to Jigsaw, which the firm acquired in 2010 for $142 million.  Connect Members either purchased plans or earned points through adding and maintaining records within Connect.  After acquiring the database, Salesforce realized that Jigsaw company data was too weak to be sold and partnered with D&B (now Dun & Bradstreet) to deliver the WorldBase company file alongside Jigsaw contacts.  This partnership was in place until early 2017 when SFDC announced the end of the licensing relationship.  Legacy customers continue to receive Data.com WorldBase account data, but the firm is encouraging clients to evaluate Lightning Data partnership offerings from Dun & Bradstreet, Bombora (intent), HG Data (technographics), DataFox, Clearbit, MCH (healthcare), and InsideView.

Future Lightning Data partners include Thomson Reuters, Aberdeen (technographics), Datanyze (technographics), Compass, and Equifax.

“We’ve built a powerful, flexible set of capabilities into the Salesforce platform we call the Lightning Data Engine.  It uses sophisticated matching algorithms and machine learning to make it easy to implement and deliver strategic data and insights from trusted, third-party sources. Lightning Data apps give customers next-level data quality, enabling them to create more intelligent processes built on better, more targeted data, which improves CRM user adoption and ROI. Best of all, seamless integration requires minimal ongoing maintenance, and makes data readily available on any device without IT involvement.”

  • Salesforce.com

Dun & Bradstreet said that it expects Data.com revenues to decline 30% in 2018.  The announcement that the Data.com Prospector and Clean products will be shuttered in 2020 is likely to expedite the revenue wind down.

Salesgenie UI Enhancements & Platform Upgrades

The new Details / Profile page provides a combined list view and detailed profile view to expedite list analysis and qualification.
The new Details / Profile page provides a combined list view and detailed profile view to expedite list analysis and qualification.

Sales intelligence service Salesgenie released enhanced UI and platform upgrades which increase “system speeds and overall productivity.” Other enhancements include a streamlined details / profile page for reviewing prospecting lists and a file library for organizing sales and marketing content within Salesgenie and InfoUSA products.

The new File Library provides a centralized content store for sales and marketing professionals which can be quickly accessed within email campaigns. Content is available within both personal and shared team folders. Shareable content includes logos, images, HTML, PDF, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets. Content is shared as hyperlinks.

“This is great for keeping sales quotes, pricing templates, and marketing efforts organized in Salesgenie,” said VP of Product Neil MacLeod.

The customizable details / profile page, which will be available in early Q2, allows reps to review lists more efficiently. The new view “will give you access to the same in-depth data you have today, but it will allow you to stay on the same page as your results list,” Macleod told Salesgenie users. “That means no more going back and forth between pages while working on your leads. You can easily pop out new tabs for records that you want to return to later or keep open while you move through your list.”

Salesgenie, an Infogroup offering, is designed for both SMBs and enterprise sales teams. The service offers both business and consumer files along with New Businesses, New Homeowners, and New Movers. While the service was designed as a sales prospecting database, the service has broadened its functionality over the past few years:

  • Sales Engagement: email templates, notes, tags, dialer support, File Library
  • Marketing Tools: suppression files, lead enrichment, SEO, marketing design services, best prospect identification, direct mail marketing, display advertising
  • Mobile App: search near me, research and manage leads, map leads
  • Team Tools: lead assignments, activity tracking
  • Connectivity: Salesforce and MS Dynamics integrations, API

Separately, Infogroup announced that its business and consumer files now integrate with the Adobe Audience Marketplace. Marketers will be able to access Infogroup data within Adobe and perform data hygiene and enrichment on customer profiles.

DiscoverOrg Outreach Connector

Sales reps can upload individual records, selected records in batch, or all records to Outreach. A similar process supports uploads to CRM or Marketing Automation Platforms. Leads may be uploaded as new accounts or matched to current accounts within Outreach.
Sales reps can upload individual records, selected records in batch, or all records to Outreach. A similar process supports uploads to CRM or Marketing Automation Platforms. Leads may be uploaded as new accounts or matched to current accounts within Outreach.

Sales and marketing intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg announced a “refreshed” connector with sales engagement platform Outreach.  The update provides improved “synchronicity” between the two services, making it “faster and easier for reps to sequence DiscoverOrg contacts,” said Russell Van Leuven, DiscoverOrg Senior Director of Sales.

According to Van Leuven, the updated “solution will remove barriers and help people sell more by addressing three mission critical sales problems: (1) a disjointed sales tech stack, (2) inconsistent or untrustworthy data, and (3) maintaining governance practices to preserve data quality.”

“The value of great data lies in what our customers DO with it.  The integration of Outreach with DiscoverOrg means sales teams can get the best data and insights on their target accounts, engage them with the right message at the right time, and never worry about that data going stale again.”

  • DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck

The solution addresses both the dearth of quality data for small teams that perform open-web Google research and “tech overload” at enterprises that are balancing email, CRM, and “a huge stack of tech tools to find, cross-reference, and confirm the information they need,” said Van Leuven.

Van Leuven highlighted the difficulties of maintaining data quality in CRMs:

It’s hard to trust the murky origins of the data in your CRM. It’s usually old (Did you know: data decays at a rate of 30% per year). A lot of distrust comes from the fact that most people have had a traumatizing experience with bad data or bad data providers that’s landed them in spam filters, blacklists, or worse. And when your sales team doesn’t feel like they can trust the data, they stop trying to keep records updated. Bad data perpetuates a burdensome cycle of bad data.

The connector feeds editorially researched prospect data into Outreach and Salesforce.  Both individual records and bulk prospects are pushed to Outreach and assigned to Outreach sequences.  There is “no downloading, uploading, copying or pasting required,” said Van Leuven.

Prospect lists can be assembled in DiscoverOrg and assigned to specific Outreach sequences and tagged by the owner.  Company and contact information can also be passed to Outreach via DiscoverOrg’s Chrome extension.  Thus, a sales rep can identify a prospect on LinkedIn or a company website, match and enrich the record against the DiscoverOrg reference file spanning 130,000 companies and three million companies, and then upload the enriched record to Outreach.

“Great sales results require an in-depth understanding of who you are targeting, and then reaching those individuals with a message that moves them to take action,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “The partnership between Outreach and DiscoverOrg makes that simple.”

The joint service also offers automated DiscoverOrg enrichment of new leads within Outreach.  The nightly scan appends DiscoverOrg contact information, firmographics, and technographics to Outreach for both new records and records updated within the DiscoverOrg reference library.  The nightly scan also identifies bounced emails and departed employees.

The connector supports field-level configuration allowing admins to set custom field mappings.  Admins are also provided with a weekly summary report which lists all account and contact updates.

DiscoverOrg has a 95% data quality SLA based upon their 90-day editorial review cycle and monthly bounce testing.

Along with Outreach, DiscoverOrg supports sales engagement vendors SalesLoft and Tellwise.  DiscoverOrg plans on enhancing those connectors along with adding additional sales engagement vendors.

D&B Hoovers Q1 Enhancements

Users can now filter by corporate employee counts or location employee counts. Both numbers appear in the results list.
Users can now filter by corporate employee counts or location employee counts. Both numbers appear in the results list.

Dun & Bradstreet continues to invest in their D&B Hoovers platform with a set of content and functionality enhancements. Since the beginning of the year, Dun & Bradstreet expanded its prospecting selects, added deeper technology and company coverage, tightened its Microsoft Dynamics integration, and increased the number of fields available for export to connectors.

Dun & Bradstreet added a series of new display and screening variables including Employees 1-Year Growth, Area Code Exclusions, and Employee Counts at the company or site level. D&B Hoovers now supports over 175 prospecting variables.

Three additional domestic location filters were also added. The Domestic Ultimate D-U-N-S Number identifies the top location within a country, helping with territory expansion and cross-selling. Related variables include Is Domestic Ultimate (Select for the top national offices) and Domestic Ultimate Company (all children of the Domestic Ultimate Company).

The new selects are generally not available in competitor products.

Avention (now D&B Hoovers) platforms have long supported variables for screening by ultimate parent country and ultimate parent. The new Domestic Ultimate D-U-N-S Number selects expand the options for sales and marketing to target accounts at the country level. Thus, if a company is looking to enter a new market, they can evaluate their ABM account presence within that market and focus sales and marketing campaigns around those prospects.

The Technologies premium offering was also enhanced with coverage expanded to 195 countries, 2.7 million companies, and over 20 million tracked technologies. Technologies are screenable at the vendor and product level and viewable as part of the Technologies in Use report. Dun & Bradstreet did not indicate whether they gathered the data or licensed it from a third-party.

Microsoft Dynamics admins can now set D&B Hoovers to automatically use D-U-N-S Numbers populated by the D&B Optimizer for Microsoft enrichment service.

“This feature eliminates the need for the manual match and selection step that is used to populate records in D&B Hoovers.  Once D-U-N-S Numbers are attached, the records become automatically eligible for de-duplication when sending to CRM.”

  • Phil McWade, Dun & Bradstreet Director of Product Management

D&B Hoovers added 15 additional CRM and MAP export fields including D&B Prescreen score, Franchise Status, Import/Export Status, Manufacturing Status, Owns/Rents, 8 Digit SIC and Description, Latitude and Longitude, Tradestyle, and Square Footage. Most of these variables were added to D&B Hoovers over the past year and are also available for display, screening, and download.

In March, D&B Hoovers added over seven million companies including 6.8 million from Brazil, 360,000 from Argentina, 210,000 from India, and 78,000 from Australia. The Russian Federation and Vietnam also added over 50,000 company profiles. D&B Hoovers now covers 21 million active companies in South America and nearly 129 million global entities.

SFDC Lost its Leg in Boston This Year

I attended the Salesforce World Tour Event in Boston yesterday and came away a bit underwhelmed.  I’ve attended it for the past four or five years, so that may be part of the reason I didn’t stay for the full day.

In attending, I had several topics top of mind:

  1. What is the future of Data.com?  Will it be phased out and when? If they are attriting 30% of their revenue this year (a Dun & Bradstreet estimate), how are they guiding their customers to AppExchange solutions in lieu of Data.com?
  2. How is Einstein being infused into their Sales Cloud?  How are they ensuring that Einstein Insights are based on accurate and timely data?
  3. What is the future of SalesforceIQ CRM technology (it is being decommissioned in 23 months)?
  4. Meeting with Sales and Marketing Intelligence vendors on the floor.

I stopped by several of their sales and platform booths, but nobody had any answers on Data.com.  This is the second year in a row in which there was no mention of data or the future of B2B prospecting, data enrichment, or sales intelligence at the event.  Salesforce has never been much of a data company.  They botched Data.com from Jigsaw acquisition through decommission.  A few months after announcing a detailed roadmap at Dreamforce, they cancelled their Dun & Bradstreet content partnership in early 2017.

Eintein Insights 1But if you are going to build analytics into your platform, license the iconic Einstein name for it, and tout it as an enabling technology for all of your clouds, then maybe you should have a strategy for ensuring that Einstein Insights are based upon quality data.

I did get to see a quick demo of Einstein Insights for the Sales Cloud.  It provides lead scoring with recommendations so a sales rep can see whether a lead is likely to convert (or other goals) and review the top reasons for the score.  It even goes so far as to recommend additional contacts but fails to justify those names.  It appeared the names were mined using the SalesforceIQ technology, but all that was demonstrated was the name — no title, level, or reason to reach out to that individual.  Salesforce is on the right track here but needs to expand its explanations for lead scores to its contact recommendations.

As to sales and marketing intelligence, there was only one vendor on the floor — Zoominfo.  They were demonstrating their new Clean and Complete services for Salesforce.  Clean provides batch account, contact, and lead record enrichment while Complete provides account, contact, and lead record appends during data entry and batch upload.  Due to the depth of the Zoominfo database, the Complete service has an 80% account match rate and a 65% contact match rate.

Both services support custom mapping.  Pricing is based upon record volume.

The keynote lacked the energy of prior years when Keith Block, COO, performed the duties.  While Sarah Franklin, EVP of Developer Relations did a fine job, Block is from Boston and made sure the event was localized.  Missing this year were sports heroes (e.g. Tom Brady, Bill Belichick) and the Drop Kick Murphys.  If you want to wake up a 10:00 AM keynote, the Drop Kicks and their Irish punk are a great way to do so.

I’m a sailor peg
And I’ve lost my leg
Climbing up the top sails
I’ve lost my leg!
I’m shipping up to Boston, whoa…
  • “I’m Shipping up to Boston,” Drop Kick Murphys

There was a presentation on Year Up (an inner city business training program) with a local success story, but the 75 minutes were basically rehashed Dreamforce partner videos and content with a focus on B2C.  Even the B2B example, 21st Century Fox, was equally a promo for “Dead Pool 2” and other Fox properties as it was a demo of Quip and its marketing and project management tools.  The distributor relations aspect of the story was a bit light.

So let’s bring back Keith Block next year and expand the exhibition space.  The Hynes Exhibitor Floor was too crowded, too hot, and too noisy.

I don’t mean to grouse.  Salesforce is a terrific company.  They have a strong social mission, a market leading product, and an ability to keep things fun.  It’s just that this year didn’t match prior Boston events, and the company has diversified into so many clouds and capabilities that the Sales Cloud and Sales Partner solutions get crowded out.

 

 

 

SalesLoft $50M Series C

SalesLoft supports email templates and cadences for managing multi-channel communications.
SalesLoft supports email templates and cadences for managing multi-channel communications.

Atlanta sales engagement vendor SalesLoft received $50 million in Series C funding this week, bringing their total funding to $75 million. Insight Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Emergence Capital, which had participated in previous rounds, and LinkedIn. Funds will be deployed to add another 200 employees in Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, and Europe.

While the market value was not disclosed, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported the valuation at more that $200 million.

“Things have gotten very noisy for buyers these days. They are bombarded with sales activity via phone, email, social, and many other channels,” said CEO Kyle Porter. “When buyers are able to peel away from those distractions, they still have problems to solve — and an overwhelming range of solutions to sift through. Now more than ever, buyers really need sellers who can rise above all this noise and provide them with a better sales experience — through our product innovation and our people, it’s our mission to help sellers do just that.”

SalesLoft will soon be releasing its SalesLoft Assist artificial intelligence module “which is informed by more than 500 million sales interactions, providing users with dynamic and real-time suggestions.” The firm is also looking to expand its development and partner network.  The recently launched app partner directory already supports thirty partner solutions.

“SalesLoft is one of the most innovative companies in the sales engagement category and a leading provider on the Sales Navigator Application Platform.  SalesLoft has integrated Sales Navigator into their application in a way that provides great user value while protecting LinkedIn member data. We look forward to working with SalesLoft to create even more value for our joint customers in the future.”

  • Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product, Sales Solutions, LinkedIn

“We didn’t create the sales engagement category; our customers did,” noted Porter. “They weren’t satisfied with the tools their teams had to connect and engage buyers. They made their needs clear, and we listened. As a result, sales engagement has evolved from a point solution to the system of record for sales organizations. Users are spending more time within SalesLoft than any other technology, including their CRM. Our customers are leading the way in this exciting new category, which is really just a reflection of their efforts to serve their customers in new, authentic ways.