One of the concerns raised by GDPR is fear of draconian fines, but that should not be a concern in the UK, at least for those who act in good faith. “I have no intention of changing our proportionate and pragmatic approach, said ICO Information Commissioner Liz Denham. “Hefty fines will be reserved for those organisations that persistently, deliberately, or negligently flout the law.”
And while many have complained that GDPR is a major hindrance to traditional marketing, it redirects efforts towards better targeted accounts and prospects. “B2B direct marketing is alive and well, and is explicitly envisaged in the GDPR legislation,” said Kevin Savage, Rhetorik’s Chief Revenue Officer. “You can do B2B marketing, and you should because compliance requirements are really a blessing in disguise. Relying on Legitimate Interest requires you to be more mindful and selective about the personal data you keep and use. This selectivity enables you to be more targeted in your messaging, to cut through the noise and engage prospects more effectively.”
Please find the underlying statutes for major European countries, courtesy of Rhetorik:
Yesterday, I presented a discussion of Legitimate Interest as the basis of GDPR communications. For B2B companies in the UK, the 2003 PECR (The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations of 2003) law is often applicable when assessing GDPR and Data Privacy:
GDPR and Data Privacy under UK PECR and Non-PECR scenarios (Source: Rhetorik)
The PECR discusses soft opt-ins for individuals, sole traders and some partnerships, but not B2B. The ICO states that “the term ‘soft opt-in’ is sometimes used to describe the rule about existing customers. The idea is that if an individual bought something from you recently, gave you their details, and did not opt out of marketing messages, they are probably happy to receive marketing from you about similar products or services even if they haven’t specifically consented. However, you must have given them a clear chance to opt out – both when you first collected their details, and in every message you send. The soft opt-in rule means you may be able to email or text your own customers, but it does not apply to prospective customers or new contacts.”
Legitimate Interest also applies to data licensing relationships and marketing partnerships. If personal data interest is maintained for a specific purpose (e.g. Technology Sales), data licensing and sharing needs to be kept within the original scope.
Legitimate Interest and Consent also apply within a company. Data maintained for one product line may not be usable for others, particularly if the firm spans multiple sectors.
The UK Direct Marketing Association published guidance on the subject of Legitimate Interest helping make sense of Article 6.1.f:
“Processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.”
And Recital 47:
“The legitimate interests of a controller, including those of a controller to which the Personal Data may be disclosed, or of a third party, may provide a legal basis for processing, provided that the interests or the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject are not overriding, taking into consideration the reasonable expectations of data subjects based on their relationship with the controller.”
Once the basis of holding personal data is met, companies have additional conditions to meet around transparency (notification and the right to object), data minimization (Is there a legitimate interest in collecting all of the fields? How long is data retained?), and reasonable expectation (limited impact to personal and private life; ensuring data accuracy).
For individuals who opt out, firms must retain suppression lists to prevent the re-collection of personal information. The suppression list should be the minimal information required to ensure the individual is not added back into the marketing database at a later date. With B2B, the list may simply be name and email.
The GDPR also sets out expectations which are relationship specific:
I’ve been looking for a good description of what GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) means to B2B marketers and finally came across a session given by UK technology profiler Rhetorik. There have been a number of issues that have muddied the waters, making it difficult to provide much more than general rules. Amongst the issues are a focus on the implications to consumer marketers, the lack of a general law that spans the EU, and an emphasis on rumors and fears about what will happen to firms that fail to comply with the regulation.
Rhetorik Data Protection Officer Samantha Magee noted that GDPR covers how and why companies hold and protect data. It is focused on internal processes rather than external communications, and is channel agnostic.
In around 18 months, the EU will pass uniform ePrivacy legislation which covers external communications in member countries. Until then, rules will remain fragmentary. For example, Opt-in or Opt-out protocols differ by country with the UK amongst the more liberal countries:
Opt-in / Opt-out workflow by country (Source: Rhetorik)
For the moment, GDPR has given teeth to local regulations. In the UK, the PECR (The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations of 2003), overseen by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), remains the applicable regulation for consumer, single trader, and small partnership communications. It was drafted after the European Directive 2002/58/EC, otherwise known as the or ‘e-privacy Directive’, was implemented in 2002.
There are six bases for communicating with clients and prospects, all of which have equal weight: Consent, Contract, Legal Obligation, Vital Interest, Public Task, and Legitimate Interest. Of these, Consent (e.g. opt-in) and Legitimate Interest are the most common for B2B marketers. Support and service departments would most likely be covered under contractual relationships.
“Legitimate Interest aims to provide a solid and lawful basis upon which commercial communication can occur, allowing marketers to promote their products and services to a targeted and well defined audience,” said Magee. “At its heart, is the desire to ensure that commercial practices and communications are relevant to the individual, offering the assurance that high standards of care are applied and that their essential privacy” rights are considered of the utmost importance.”
Part II continues with a discussion of the UK PECR law and additional details on Legitimate Interest.
DealSignal, which offers an on-demand platform for Total Audience and Contact Data Management for B2B marketing and sales, recently rolled out its Total Audience Metrics (TAM) module. The new platform helps sales and marketing professionals improve Go-to-Market and Demand Planning processes by allowing them to measure and visualize their total audience and determine coverage gaps in their CRM and MAP. The new platform analyzes TAM by persona, account segment, and buying committees (what SiriusDecisions calls Demand Units).
“We’ve run hundreds of TAM analyses for B2B marketing teams in various industries and customers are consistently surprised to find that they’re missing more than 80 percent of their target audience—the contacts that fit their target personas and ideal customer profile. TAM coverage is currently averaging 18 percent in existing CRM and MAP systems. It’s a big ‘aha moment’ to learn that you’re missing out on marketing or selling to a large majority of your potential buyers. Often, the best potential buyers – those most likely to convert – are among the missing contacts found in the gap analysis,”
DealSignal CEO Rob Weedn
The firm is seeing rapid uptake on its TAM service which is available as either a freemium (TAM Estimates) or paid option (TAM Actuals). “Early feedback is that this is a great way to verify the counts and size up the Outbound and/or ABM marketing programs over the upcoming year,” said Weedn.
According to DealSignal, TAM Estimates are accurate to ± 20% of Accounts and Contacts. “We’ve been offering this for a few months and it is very popular” with customers and prospects “leveraging this analysis for initial demand planning and budgeting,” said Weedn. “TAM Actuals is a Paid Offering, charged based on credits on our platform, which provides perfectly accurate Total Audience metrics based on Accounts and Contacts.”
The DealSignal platform dynamically discovers, refreshes, and verifies records based on the TAM criteria.
DealSignal has adopted the term TAM, but calls it Total Audience Metrics instead of Total Addressable Market. Weedn explained the difference between the DealSignal and Classic TAM approach:
Total Addressable market is classic and static top down analysis, based on sample/partial market data, typically performed by market research and analyst firms like IDC, Gartner, etc. “Classic TAM” is not necessarily an accurate sizing of the market, it is not frequently updated, and, most importantly, there is no real way for marketing and sales teams to plan marketing and sales programs with a classic and static top-down TAM, and definitely no way to execute against the Accounts and Contacts in that TAM.
DealSignal, is here to help marketers market and sellers sell, so we perform an accurate, bottoms-up, dynamic analysis, based on complete market data, of the actual counts of the Total Audience – which we define as the Accounts that meet Target Market criteria (Industry, Employee, Revenue, Technologies Used, etc.) and Contacts that meet Ideal Buyer Persona criteria. Further, our Total Audience Metrics/Measurements include a process to dynamically discover and verify the underlying Accounts and Contacts, so TAM Analysis is dynamic, based on actuals, and can be updated on demand. The Accounts and Contacts can then be converted, with one click, to fully enriched and verified with full Account/Contact Profiles and Contact Information to be used in marketing and selling initiatives.
Using the DealSignal platform, users can define target personas and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) to build out their TAMs, using micro-targeting criteria such as Titles, Profile Keywords, and Locations that yield results as ranked lists of relevant accounts and contacts. The module compares the TAM against the CRM and identifies gaps by account, industry, geography, etc. DealSignal provides the TAM based not only on CRM data and large third-party sources, but through dynamic sourcing and verification, so the TAM results are “comprehensive and accurate” with net-new accounts and contacts.
DealSignal combines APIs, algorithms, and human intelligence to achieve a much higher level of contact accuracy (95 – 100% according to the firm) than most vendors. The company provides a 100% guarantee on all Account and Contact data. The system enriches and verifies existing leads, contacts and accounts. As it conducts dynamic data sourcing, DealSignal claims account enrichment match rates between 95 and 100% and lead enrichment match rates between 85 and 100%.
DealSignal TAM Analysis Module
DealSignal dynamically discovers, enriches and verifies account and contact lists through a combination of AI robots and researchers combined with CRM and MAP feedback loops. The firm claims a deliverability rate between 94 and 97% and reverifies data on demand for every customer request, with a two week window for contact aging. Records that fall outside of the two-week window are reverified overnight.
“Since static data-at-rest quickly becomes dated, we do not trust it, you should not trust it, and you should certainly not rely on it to define or optimize your vital marketing or sales programs. It must be renewed and refined at runtime,” said Weedn. “We believe in dynamically refreshing and re-verifying data on-demand, when it needs to become active and put into a marketing or sales process—and we’ve uniquely designed the DealSignal platform to do just that.”
DealSignal has automated and editorial processes that place its data quality at a level claimed only by DiscoverOrg. Both firms utilize editorial teams for staying ahead of the 25 to 30% contact decay rate suffered by static databases. DiscoverOrg performs a full data verification every 90 days while DealSignal performs a just-in-time data quality review overnight.
“Marketers and sales teams currently rely on solutions that provide 50 to 80% quality. That is a B- or F on a test, and we need to change the expectation to impeccable quality, at 95-100% (A or A+) to greatly improve marketing and sales performance,” said Weedn.
Last month, DealSignal released a GDPR risk assessment module which enriches CRM data with contact locations and flags EU-based leads. Users can also choose to exclude EU-based leads.
“B2B marketers are faced with many challenges today: identify and engage their total audience, try to keep their audience data fresh and accurate, and comply with new regulations like GDPR. Given the negative consequences associated with GDPR, most marketers are scrambling to review and re-verify the location and status of their contacts,” said Weedn.
Leads are pre-purchased on a volume basis with 1,000 credits running $895. Volume discounts kick in at 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 thousand credits.
Dun & Bradstreet rebranded D&B Workbench Data Optimizer as D&B Optimizer for Marketing and announced a set of enhancements to the platform. The Workbench name, now dropped, went back to the product’s origins as NetProspex Workbench, one of the first DaaS Hygiene / Enrichment / Prospecting platforms. The rebranded product includes a series of new features including an Analyze module, Salesforce Contact Optimization, custom email deliverability targets, and NAICS industry code support.
“This new name reflects Dun & Bradstreet’s commitment to deliver the very best in data optimization services,” the firm wrote its clients. The new name is also consistent with its other Optimizer solutions: D&B Optimizer for Salesforce and D&B Optimizer for Microsoft.
The new Analyze module delivers profiling and market opportunity analysis “utilizing D&B Master Data and proprietary machine-made analytics.” Features include dynamic dashboards which help marketers visualize their primary profile by revenue, employee size, and industry. The service also provides look-a-like opportunities to assist with ABM expansion and pipeline growth.
The new Salesforce Integration for Contact optimization supports contact cleansing and enrichment at a frequency determined by the customer. Dun & Bradstreet claims that the Salesforce integration may be setup in fewer than twenty minutes.
Custom Email Deliverability Levels allow marketers to dip deeper into Dun & Bradstreet’s pool of emails and select contacts with lower reliability scores. The default level is 90% deliverability, but highly targeted selects may require using contacts that are below the 90% deliverability threshold. Dun & Bradstreet called the 90% threshold “our recommended level for most email campaigns.”
Finally, D&B Optimizer for Marketing added NAICS industry code selects. The product already supports the older US SIC industry taxonomy.
Other D&B Optimizer for Marketing features include data validation and standardization (email, phone, address), duplicate flagging, data hygiene reports, lead prospecting, segmentation analysis, and data enrichment (firmographics, D-U-N-S Numbers, corporate linkages, technographics, biographics).
I had the distinct pleasure of attending a keynote by Earvin “Magic” Johnson at Zoominfo’s Growth Acceleration Summit. As the summit was held in Boston, there were numerous anecdotes about Celtic great Larry Bird and their rivalry, but the key business-related anecdote was that you have to continuously improve. Bird was a great competitor that forced Magic to up his game. They were great rivals that made each other better and raised the quality of the game.
There were also a set of business insights as Johnson has taken his game discipline to business. A few of his tips:
Find underserved markets and tailor your product to those markets — For Magic, the biggest underserved market was the inner cities. He knew that there were few movie theaters in urban America even though the per capita theater spend of African Americans was high. His first theater in LA had the 10th highest gross in the country. He then convinced Starbucks that they should open coffee shops in marginalized inner city communities (and opened the first non-Starbucks owned shops). Magic tailored the music and food to the community (e.g. sweet potato pie) and his stores had a higher gross than Starbucks owned locations. The key to business success is “you have to know your customer.”
Out deliver — It’s not enough in today’s market to meet your customer’s expectations, you need to out deliver. There is no lack of competition. If you want customer retention, you need to out deliver. If you want brand ambassadors, you must out deliver. Magic Sodexho (food service) passed on its first Disney RFP and waited three years before bidding on the Disney Land contract. His firm realized that due to the size of the park, many employees had little time to eat. To support the contract, they developed kiosks and carts to bring food to the staff during their breaks. This example of out delivering helped them win the larger Disney World contract when it came up a few later.
Culture is important — Magic emphasized the value of a winning culture whether helping bring back teamwork to basketball or encouraging principles such as everybody gets onboard, no hidden agendas, and do your job. Furthermore, employees are better motivated if their company has a social mission such as bringing jobs and opportunities to Urban America.
Hire self starters and reward them — Look for young employees that come in early, leave late, and ask a lot of questions. Then give them opportunities to grow with your company. His COO began as a secretary and proved herself at each level. He also emphasized the value of rewarding all employees and not falling into the trap of rewarding only the executives. You can win the big contract, but if you only reward the execs for the victory, then you won’t have a team ready to out deliver.
Not many people have the pleasure of excelling in one field of battle. Magic has had great success in both Basketball (Hall of Fame, 5 NBA Championships, 12 All Star Teams, NCAA championship, Olympic champion) and business.
InsideView announced a set of enhancements to its recently launched Apex Go to Market ABM platform. Apex provides ICP, TAM, and segmentation analysis along with similar company prospecting. New features include Lead Analytics and Enhanced Text Editing.
“Lead Analytics helps executives analyze leads coming into your CRM and Marketing Automation systems that are within your desired market segment(s). Gain insights into how market segments are performing in relation to each other so you know where to focus your energy.”
InsideView
Lead Analytics provides a dashboard for tracking the performance of published market segments and leads over time or across market segments. “With the Lead Analytics Dashboard, a CMO, VP of Sales or C-Level executives can analyse leads coming into your CRM or MA system based on the market segment and visualize performance against their target segments in real time to optimize for success and focus resources on the targets with highest potential.”
InsideView Apex Lead Analytics
Customers must license both InsideView Enrich and InsideView Apex services to access the Leads Analytics dashboard.
Enhanced Text editing allows sales or marketing managers to publish rich text notes about customer segments which appear in other modules. The notes both identify the account as belonging to a key segment and provide advice on messaging to the account.
InsideView Apex Segment note pushed to InsideView for Sales
InsideView boasted about “great traction in the market” for Apex.
As I discussed in Part I of this article, technology media and intent purchasing firm TechTarget recently launched a set of enhancements to its Priority Engine service that improved the user experience, added persistent URLs, list assignments, and added user roles.
The release also supported a new Salesforce widget and a repackaged offering. The Salesforce widget identifies which technology topics are actively being researched by the prospect and whether the prospect is actively evaluating vendors. Other features include a persistent URL link to the full dashboard and available prospect counts.
TechTarget repackaged its offering with the Q2 release. While it has premium pricing compared to other technology sales intelligence service, TechTarget’s ability to identify firms which are actively looking for solutions by product segment, recommend the key stakeholders around the buying decision, and flag which competitive or complementary vendors are of interest to each prospect differentiate it from other vendors. This “Active TAM” approach helps sales reps focus their attention and messaging to the best opportunities currently in the market for solutions.
Priority Engine has market momentum. TechTarget added 50 new Priority Engine accounts in Q1 after adding 40 new accounts in Q4. Revenue more than doubled in Q1 versus a year earlier. The firm is also shifting its sales and marketing focus from media and lead generation to data solutions and insights. On his recent earnings call, CEO Michael Cotoia remarked that the firm has “the leadership position” in B2B IT purchase insights and that the TechTarget salesforce is now leading with data solutions.
Cotoia described the Priority Engine value proposition as “purchase intent insights happening in our world across our universe of sites and topics” which are integrated into the customer’s workflow. Furthermore, Priority Engine informs sales and marketing about “what accounts are active and what accounts are active with your competitors, oh, and what accounts are not active with you.”
TechTarget is successfully rolling out the service to firms which target technology companies, nearly doubling its user base over the past six months.
Priority Engine account profiles combine TechTarget intent signals with HG Data platform insights and DiscoverOrg executives
Technology media and intent purchasing firm TechTarget announced a set of enhancements to its Priority Engine service “that vastly improve ABM performance, increase sales productivity and maximize demand generation success for enterprise B2B technology organizations.” Amongst the enhancements are improvements to the user experience, a new Salesforce widget, persistent URLs, list assignments, user roles, and improved topic filtering.
Priority Engine combines executive intelligence with purchaser specific demand signals spanning 10,000 IT Topics across its technology research sites. The service marries HG Data technology intent intelligence with DiscoverOrg contacts, Owler firmographics, and TechTarget intent data and prospects. Priority Engine assists sales and marketing professionals by “expanding access to total buying teams at active accounts and showcasing rich purchase details such as installed technologies, vendor shortlists and specific, relevant topical interests.”
Priority Engine is GDPR compliant across its 18 million professional profiles who have opted into TechTarget partner marketing programs. Furthermore, because TechTarget has opted-in user profiles, it is able to provide intent data at the individual level. This contrasts with other intent networks which gather anonymous intent information at the company level.
User Experience enhancements include a left-side navigation menu and search bar. The navigation bar provides account list management, export functionality, and export monitoring. The search bar provides a type-ahead company list to expedite account searching.
Account profiles contain Owler headquarters information along with a business description, logo, sizing data, and social media links. Also displayed in the business summary are an account interest gauge, Buying Team counts, Vendor Interests based upon downloaded vendor content, and Top Interests. The account Interest gauge evaluates site readership (number of readers, type of content, scope of vendor interest) to determine whether the prospect is Evaluating Vendors, Ramping Up, or Not Active in the segment.
TechTarget also offers a set of intent signals based upon readership patterns: Widespread, Sustained, Late Stage, Stakeholder, and Cross-Vendor. According to the firm, “the more blue dots that are lit up, the more focus sales should commit to the account.”
TechTarget Priority Engine Intent Signals
At the top of each Account Profile are the licensed segments. Sales reps can click on any of the segments and the profile is filtered for the segment across TechTarget Buying Teams, DiscoverOrg Contacts, HG Data products, and the business summary. TechTarget offers 300 technology market segments with over 200 available for North America.
Priority Engine users are now assigned to one of three roles: Administrators, List Builders, and Read-Only. Administrators have full system functionality along with account management responsibilities. Both Administrators and List Builders can build and assign account lists to other users. Only Administrators can export records. Priority Engine suggests that Administrators are usually marketers and that List Builders are typically Sales Managers. View only users would be inside sales reps that would be working account lists but not building them.
Account List Building was redesigned with reorganized and expanded filters displayed on a single page. Filters have been separated into common and advanced screens with common filters spanning firmographic, technographic, and intent variables. Advanced filters include Last Touch, Purchase Signals, and HQ location. Within any filter, users may select Includes Any (OR), Include All (AND), and Exclude (NOT) Boolean logic.
Users can also rank results by market segment. Most Priority Engine subscribers have between one and five licensed segments. Except for the largest technology firms that operate in many segments, the firm contends that focusing on key segments provides better results than including adjacent technology segments.
Previously defined lists are available for both suppression or sub-list targeting.
TechTarget Priority Engine List Building
Lists are ranked according to intent signal strength for a market segment. Clicking on a different segment results in a different set of priorities.
The new Ranked Accounts list view includes the navigation bar along with company logos, the top areas of interest, and the company most influencing the account over the past 90 days (based upon TechTarget content viewing patterns). Clicking on any account takes the user to the account profile.
The persistent URL provides a direct link between sales and marketing platforms to the Priority Engine Dashboard. “The sales-to-marketing handoff can be one of the most challenging aspects of implementing modern marketing strategies, especially ABM. To properly inform and empower salespeople, you must be able to pass along valuable account-level insights with each lead — and few systems or workflows support this,” said Michael Cotoia, CEO, TechTarget. “Priority Engine addresses this challenge by providing a persistent and portable account link that can be embedded within any existing sales or marketing systems.”
Please continue to Part II which discusses the Priority Engine Salesforce connector, product repackaging, and market momentum.
It was only a few years ago that Dun & Bradstreet’s WorldBase file reached 200 million records, but this week the file hit 300 million active and inactive company profiles. The dataset is used for sales, marketing, research, master data management, credit risk, and supplier risk products. It is also licensed to many other vendors (the majority of which are not allowed to publish the provenance of their data). While sales reps do not use inactive companies, they are important for risk products, master data management, compliance, and database cleansing.
Two key features of the WorldBase data set are the D-U-N-S Number, their de facto global numbering system, and global linkages which tie together global company family trees.
