Month: November 2018

6Sense Sales Intelligence and Alerts

6Sense Account Spotlight
6Sense Account Spotlight

6Sense rolled out enhanced Sales Intelligence features to its ABM Orchestration platform.  New features help track account engagement over time, visualize anonymous intent at key accounts, and display engagement status by personas.  6Sense also added ABM Alerts and updates to its reference company dataset.  

According to 6Sense, “the Sales Intelligence enhancements change the way revenue generating teams create and drive pipeline with easy-to-consume insights designed to drive sales action in coordination with marketing.”

 “ABM is not a marketing-only initiative – it is crucial that account managers, sales development reps and other members of the sales team are collaborating and aligned.  Sharing critical target account insights such as recent topical interest and engagement history in a sales platform that the sales team is familiar with makes it easier for revenue teams to take action.”


Matt Senatore, Service Director of Account-Based Marketing, SiriusDecisions

6Sense Sales Intelligence is based upon CRM and marketing automation data, web engagement data, and 6sense’s anonymous intent data.  Intelligence is displayed across three tabs:

  1. Activities: Buying Stage, Top Branded and Generic Keywords, and Engagement Scores over time
  2. Persona Map: Engagement levels by job and function with associated engagement level
  3. Additional Insights: Firmographics, Technographics, Website Visitors by location, Top pages viewed by account

ABM Alerts deliver weekly activity profiles on key accounts to sales reps.  The email alerts include a spotlighted account “that has shown a significant volumeof relevant activity, making it especially interesting or urgent to act upon.”  6Sense spotlights firms that have not been recently contacted but are showing high-levels of engagement or intent.

The alert also provides up to five accounts which are newly engaged or reengaged, five accounts with multiple people engaging, and five accounts with declining engagement.  ABM alerts provide direct links to account profiles in 6Sense and Salesforce.

ABM Alert account details include a summary of the top activities associated with that account over the past week, including keyword research, and web visits.

“This update was designed as a response to sales teams’ requests to be empowered with insight to prioritize their time better, make their outreach more relevant, and shed light on what their prospects really care about at any given time,” said VP of Product Amar Doshi. “For those who subscribe to the BANT qualification approach, getting an early advantage on learning about need and timing can make all the difference in deal outcomes.”

InsideView Refresh Enhancements

InsideView Refresh Dashboard
InsideView Refresh Dashboard

InsideView rolled out a pair of enhancements to its CRM Refresh product.  Along with Accounts, Refresh now cleanses and enriches Contact records, matching both record types against its reference database of 13 million companies and 33 million contacts.  

Refresh also supports email validation, an important function for maintaining data quality. Both matched and unmatched records are processed on a semi-annual basis. Email validation is performed by StrikeIron, an Informatica company.

The Refresh dashboard (on right) provides match and field-level fill rates for both account and contact records.

“Valid email addresses lower bounce rates and increase deliverability of marketing campaigns, resulting in greater response rates and higher ABM program success,” wrote the Customer Success Team to its customers.  “Successful sales outreach also depends on accurate contact information, including whether anexisting contact has moved on to another job.”

“Employees just don’t stay in one job at one company any more, and keeping up with all that job shifting is a nightmare of CRM management.  Today we’re giving sales and marketing ops one more weapon in the battle against stale CRM data.  Other cleansing solutions only clean the contacts that exist in their systems, but email validation allows InsideView Refresh to add value to any contact with an email address.”

Adam Perry, InsideView director of product management

Pricing is available both on an à la carte volume basis and a seat-basedmodel similar to Data.com.  The idea is to provide an “easy switch” fromData.com Clean and Prospector to InsideView.  “We match allcapabilities and price to make it very easy for customers to switch,” said VPof Product and Solution Marketing Joe Andrews.  “We’ve seen a significant growth in demand for this since it’s become more generally known that Data.comis being sunset.”

Few firms have integrated email validation into their cloud or CRM hygiene offerings, leaving firms with bad contact records which cannot be matched against reference datasets.  Products such as D&B Optimizer, InsideView Refresh, and ReachForce SmartSuite are the exception, helping improve delivery rates and email sender scores by verifying emails, even for unmatched records.

Refresh is available for both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

DiscoverOrg Expanded Content

DiscoverOrg now displays 22,000 global family trees to the subsidiary level.

DiscoverOrg, which has long emphasized technographics and contacts, expanded its company intelligence with the addition of global corporate hierarchies and private equity / venture capital funding intelligence.  DiscoverOrg also expanded its contact / biographic coverage with detailed work histories, educational profiles, and North American mobile phones and personal emails.

“The traditional playbooks for B2B prospecting and corporate recruiting don’t work anymore.  Today’s buyers and hires expect highly personalized outreach at the right time that cuts through the mass-produced noise we’re all inundated with. The additional data we are now delivering make it even easier for our customers to craft the right message and engage where and when they are most likely to get a response.”


DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck

Family trees are color coded and available for 22,000 global companies along with their divisions and subsidiaries.  Tree nodes may be expanded and collapsed, allowing sales reps to customize their view.  Users may link to major subsidiaries that are also contained within the DiscoverOrg company universe while non-covered subsidiaries are grayed out.  Tree nodes include logo, location, and ownership type.

DiscoverOrg has long offered org charts highlighting contact reporting structures, but family trees have been a gap in their service until now.

Funding data includes total funding and round details such as amounts, dates, and investors.

DiscoverOrg did not disclose the sources of their new data sets beyond saying they were licensed from “leading third-party data providers.”  The new content was verified by their 250 editors and DiscoverOrg’s automated verification processes prior to being presented to clients.

DiscoverOrg continues its rapid content build out with 4.3 million human-verified contacts across 160,000 top global companies.  Additional functionality around the family trees is planned for the next three months.  The firm also expects to add funding data screening to their build-a-list functionality.

“Our biggest differentiator is our ability to bring together proprietary technology,automated tools, and integrations that gather data – plus a layer of human verification to ensure its accuracy.”


Katie Bullard, DiscoverOrg President.

DiscoverOrg confirmed that they are on target for their $160M end of year ARR.

Oracle Acquires DataFox

Oracle recently acquired DataFox, providing them with access to 2.8 million company profiles, including funding and M&A data.  DataFox “gives customers real-time insight to know when a business exhibits noteworthy behaviors.”

“The combination of Oracle and DataFox will enhance Oracle Cloud Applications with an extensive set of trusted company-level data and signals, enabling customers to reach even better decisions and business outcomes,” wrote Oracle’s EVP of Applications Development Steve Miranda to customers and partners.

Oracle provides the following deal shorthand:

Oracle Cloud Applications + DataFox = Even Smarter Decisions

DataFox is growing its database at 1.2 million companies annually.  The database will deliver real-time insights into its cloud-based ERP, CX, HCM and SCM platforms.

DataFox Data Engine Overview (Oracle Presentation, October 23, 2018)
DataFox Data Engine Overview (Oracle Presentation, October 23, 2018)

In a bit of extreme puffery, Oracle described DataFox as the “the most current, precise and expansive set of company-level information and insightful data.”  Bureau van Dijk and Dun & Bradstreet have 50X the active company coverage including detailed global linkage, risk models, and multi-year financial data.  Bureau van Dijk also offers the Zephyr database, an M&A and funding dataset with over twenty years of closed, pending, and rumored deals.  Where DataFox may have an advantage is in their focus on mid-size and emerging companies which have been recently funded, but this is a small subset of the company universe.

DataFox will continue to sell and support its products.  However, the DataFox roadmap and product line are fluid:

“Oracle is currently reviewing the existing DataFox product roadmap and will be providing guidance to customers in accordance with Oracle’s standard product communication policies. Any resulting features and timing of release of such features as determined by Oracle’s review of DataFox’s product roadmap are at the sole discretion of Oracle. All product roadmap information, whether communicated by DataFox or by Oracle, does not represent a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.”

Along with AI insights, Oracle called out the needs for quality data to back data maintenance, artificial intelligence, and business signals.

Customer Data Challenges (Oracle Presentation, October 23, 2018)
Customer Data Challenges (Oracle Presentation, October 23, 2018)

DataFox has over 275 customers including Goldman Sachs, Bain & Company, Outreach, Live Ramp, and Twilio.

DataFox raised $19 million in funding.  Terms of the deal were not disclosed.  In January 2017, DataFox was valued at $33 million by Pitchbook.

Oracle should study Salesforce’s acquisition of Jigsaw (later renamed Data.com) as a cautionary tale.  Software companies struggle in selling data files as company and contact data decays rapidly and it is difficult to push data quality above 90% absent large editorial investments.  Furthermore, Jigsaw never represented more than 1% of Salesforce revenue so quickly fell off of the company’s internal radar.  The firm is now looking to decommission Data.com and asking its AppExchange partners to fill the sales intelligence and data hygiene gap left in its absence.  Coincidentally, DataFox is one of Salesforce’s Lightning Data partners.

On the positive side, LinkedIn hit $1.3 billion last quarter and has thrived under Microsoft’s ownership.  However, LinkedIn was a much more mature company at acquisition than DataFox with multiple revenue streams and a unique user generated content model.  Microsoft has provided LinkedIn with development capital and allowed it to maintain its independence.  It has also looked to leverage LinkedIn and Microsoft strengths when building sales and marketing products, instead of simply copying other vendors.  For example, Sales Navigator continues to respect the privacy of its members while using aggregated data to provide hiring and employment insights that other companies cannot deliver.  Navigator has also added strong messaging tools (chat, InMail, and PointDrive) which work around its lack of company emails.  Other innovations include SNAP workflow connectors, its new Pipeline CRM updating tool, and Buyer’s Circle for identifying the buying committee at large firms.

Sales Lead Best Practices

In their recent Information Industry Outlook 2019, Outsell provided the following “last mile to the sale” recommendations for sales lead best practices:

  1. Be at the top of organic search results
  2. 1-2 sentence company description on Home page
  3. Home page links to Services page
  4. Zero dead links on Home, About, or services pages
  5. 2 clicks max to get to contact pages
  6. Person answers phone in 1-3 rings
  7. Zero routing to right person
  8. 5 seconds or less to reach the right person

“If you are doing all the marketing in the world and you’re not picking up your phone or there’s no phone number on your website, you’re not going to have the results that you want,” said Outsell CEO Anthea Stratigos.

While the above recommendations were made for the information industry, they are broadly applicable to businesses regardless of size or industry.

Stratigos did not discuss conversational marketing bots such as Drift, but rapid response times and appropriate routing should be goals when implementing those tools as well.