Sales Engagement vendor Outreach achieved unicorn status following a $114 million round which valued the firm at $1.1 billion. Total funding reached $239 million. Round E was led by hedge fund manager Lone Pine Capital with Meritech Capital Partners and Lemonade Capital joining the round. Also participating were previous investors DFJ Growth, Four Rivers Group, Mayfield, Microsoft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Spark Capital, and Trinity Ventures.
Outreach had
a very strong 2018 and now has over 3,300 customers and 50,000 users. The
firm more than doubled its revenue last year and grew to 315 employees. Outreach
expects to close 2019 with 450 headcount and hit annualized recurring revenue
of $100 million in the next year.
“This
financing will enable us to infuse every aspect of the customer journey with
the power of machine learning so organizations can identify the actions that
move the needle in order to make better, faster decisions,” blogged CEO Manny
Medina. “We will also expand in the coming months by doubling our machine
learning team, increasing our international footprint, and investing in our
partner ecosystem, Galaxy, as well as our recently announced integration with
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales.”
Outreach offers Salesforce and MS Dynamics connectors and plans to release an SAP SE connector by year end.
It’s top competitor, SalesLoft, also received a large funding round. I will cover that tomorrow.
Gartner forecasted continued growth of global public cloud services. The analyst firm projected 17.5% growth in 2019 to $214.3 billion. The fastest growth rate will be in Infrastructure as a Service which will jump 27.5% to $38.9 billion. Platform as a Service is expected to rise by 21.8% this year.
“Cloud
services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Gartner Research VP Sid
Nag. “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose
business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the
increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations. What we
see now is only the beginning, though. Through 2022, Gartner projects the
market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the
growth of overall IT services.”
Gartner
research found that a third of organizations listed cloud investments as a top
three investment priority. Thirty percent of technology providers new
software investments are shifting from cloud-first to cloud only. Thus,
SaaS and subscription cloud models will continue to replace license-based
software sales.
Vidyard GoVideo supports on demand video creation, screen recording, and previously uploaded videos from within ConnectLeader templates.
Vidyard announced six additional sales platforms for its GoVideo platform: Outreach, EveryoneSocial, Reply.io, 366 Degrees, ConnectLeader, and FunnelAmplified. Previously announced partners include SalesLoft, InsideSales, HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, Drift, and Salesforce. Vidyard supports over 40 sales and marketing solutions.
Integrated video helps personalize a message and increases open and clickthrough rates.
Outreach and ConnectLeader offer Sales Engagement platforms with personalized videos being integrated into email steps. Outreach sales reps can include personal video within their sequences and monitor video engagement.
Link Encoding
provides website or content viewing intelligence related to Outreach sequences.
For example, the new plug-ins help Vidyard “record and send videos within
your Outreach email. And when your prospect views the video, that
activity triggers your next task so you can immediately take action to convert
at the highest level.”
“Sales is
becoming more personal every day. You must use the right channel for the
right engagement for the right prospect and customer, and we’re finding video
to be a key channel in engaging buyers,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.
“Vidyard has been tightly integrated with ConnectLeader, which transforms your videos into lead generation machines,” wrote ConnectLeader. Features include camera recording, screen recording, and video uploading of previously saved content in Vidyard.
Reply.io is an email-centric platform with contact management, drip campaigns, reply recommendations, email validation, and reply prioritization. The joint solution “lets users personalize sales drip campaigns, create personal intro videos or product demos, add them to email sequences in Reply.io, and automate one-to-one email engagement at scale.”
EveryoneSocial provides social selling tools for sales, marketing, communications, and recruitment teams. Users can select pre-recorded videos from a library or record custom videos and share with prospects and connections.
366 Degrees and Vidyard support SMB marketing with dynamic content, multi-channel marketing campaigns, and campaign metrics. Video can be integrated into newsletters, promotions, social media, and landing pages.
“With the
changing behaviours of today’s buyers and the availability of new technologies,
sales development is becoming a sophisticated business function that takes a
strategic approach to identifying and developing new sales opportunities based
a wide range of buying signals and sales engagement techniques,” blogged
Vidyard VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard. “On average, SDRs use six
different tools. And the days of SDR teams inheriting tech from the
broader sales and marketing teams—such as customer relationship management
(CRM), email automation, and social listening—and adapting them to meet their
unique requirements for scalable sales prospecting are quickly coming to an
end.”
ReferenceUSA, the library and government sales division of Infogroup, is partnering with Plunkett Research to sell their industry almanacs. Plunkett offers three dozen almanacs including fast-growing sectors such as Green Technology; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine; and Nanotechnology. Plunkett reports are written for the “general reader to readily access and understand the most vital trends, technologies and companies creating change within given industries—even if the reader has no current expertise in that industry.”
Jack Plunkett, CEO of Plunkett Research, said, “We’re excited to team up with the terrific people at ReferenceUSA. Their deep relationships with librarians and understanding of libraries’ unique needs make them the ideal group to spread the word about the Plunkett Research Online industry reference platform. At the same time, ReferenceUSA and Plunkett Research products are perfectly complementary–libraries that subscribe to both will be able to harness the full power of our deep data analyses.”
Plunkett almanacs cover both US companies and industries. They are available as online subscriptions, eBooks, and printed subscriptions. Plunkett helps close a gap in the ReferenceUSA product line. Infogroup provides a deep set of US and Canadian company and consumer files along with new companies, new households, family trees, and prospect list building. The partnership helps ReferenceUSA compete against Mergent Online which provides a company and industry research service in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet.
Subscription users can download custom industry reports as PDFs. Tables, company lists, and association lists may be downloaded to Excel.
Plunkett Online Subscription Pricing
View only subscription pricing begins at $1,295 for a single seat with downloading available for $1,995. Printed almanacs and ebooks are priced at $380.
MarTech growth rate chart courtesy of Scott Brinker and Chief Martech
Scott Brinker published his 2019 Chief Martech eye chart and it now spans 7,040 companies, up 211 since last year. While the industry continues to grow, the rate of growth appears to have moderated. Between 2014 and 2018, the industry was adding over 1,000 companies each year with the biggest jump for the 2018 chart (1,800).
“That’s not
so much a slowing down as a flattening out, a plateau,” said Brinker. “At
face value, it would seem that, indeed, we have achieved ‘peak martech.’ (pause
for dramatic effect)”
While
industry growth may have plateaued, Brinker admitted that 7,040 significantly
underestimates the total number of Martech firms and joked that he may have hit
“peak martech landscape.” Brinker noted five areas where his chart is
underweighted:
Regionally – When comparing to national MarTech landscapes, Brinker spotted hundreds of companies on the UK, Canadian, Chinese, German, Swedish, and Finnish country charts that were absent on the 2019 Chief Martech chart.
Vertical – Likewise, verticalized solutions are also underrepresented.
Apps built for specific MarTech platform ecosystems
Apps built by services companies (but packaged as products)
Apps built with low-code/no-code citizen developer platforms
“Each of
these trends — the growth of platform ecosystems, the blending of software and
services businesses, and the rise of citizen developer platforms — are birthing
whole new galaxies of martech apps.
The major
marketing suites have all embraced becoming true marketing platforms, with ever
more open APIs and official marketplaces for third-party apps.”
Brinker
lists Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, and G Suite amongst the platform
ecosystems, but one would also include browser extensions, mobile apps, and
sales engagement platforms (technically, SalesTech, but there is a fair amount
of overlap between MarTech and SalesTech these days) to the list. Brinker
noted that WordPress has 54,480 plugins.
Audience / Marketing Data & Data Enhancement (2018 MarTech Landscape)
Many of the
DaaS and Sales Intelligence vendors covered in this newsletter are amongst the
204 vendors listed in the Audience / Marketing Data & Data Enrichment
category and the 457 vendors listed in the Sales Automation Enablement & Intelligence
grouping.
Human-verified contact vendor DealSignal added Bombora intent to its B2B marketing data service. The combined solution offers intent-based leads with verified emails and direct dials “so that marketing and sales teams can reach out to ideal buyers directly and drive more conversions.” DealSignal applies Bombora intent data to an Ideal Buyers Profile. Users will be able to identify net-new, surging accounts with accompanying contacts and buying teams.
“We’re
excited to partner with Bombora to help marketing and sales teams finally
answer the most elusive question: Who is out there actively looking for what we
sell and how can we reach them before our competitors,” said DealSignal CEO,
Rob Weedn. ”The integration of Bombora intent data and DealSignal’s
verified contact and account data means that revenue-driving teams can now see
which companies are actively in-market, plus get complete, accurate contact
data for ideal buyers at those companies, so they can reach out and convert
that intent into a purchase.”
Selecting Bombora Intent Topics
Marketers
begin by defining their target buyer personas on the DealSignal platform and
then select up to 50 Bombora intent topics. DealSignal identifies
accounts that match buyer profiles along with surging intent and delivers a set
of accounts with contacts and firmographics. By tying together intent,
firmographics, and human-verified contacts, DealSignal delivers a set of leads
that are more likely to close than with traditional firmographic prospecting.
“Intent-based leads help B2B marketers uncover accounts that are actively in-market — even if they’re not already on their target account/ABM lists. We then deliver complete, enriched and verified contact and account data that helps marketing & sales teams reach out to prospective target buyers with highly personalized messages, to help them convert more intent into a purchase,” said Weedn.
Third-party Intent data from Bombora and The Big Willow has suffered from poor actionability as intent scores lack context and clear next steps. Several vendors have begun to address this issue by combining intent with company and contact intelligence, turning an intent number into an ABM lead. DealSignal ties together Ideal Buyers, Personas, Bombora Intent Data, and Human-verified contacts to indicate which ABM targets are in market and who should be contacted.
DiscoverOrg redesigned its OppAlerts service to identify companies with surging interest in key topics, rank companies by purchase intent, route high-intent prospects to sales reps, and synch intent data with Salesforce for key topics.
InsideView added the Bombora intent file into their Apex ICP / TAM service to help identify ABM accounts which are currently searching on key topics.
By converting intent signals into leads or opportunities, firms are beginning to translate billions of weekly datapoints (thousands of intent topics across millions of companies) into actionable intelligence for sales and marketing teams.
In December, Aberdeen acquired The Big Willow to deliver Intent Qualified Opportunities which combined third-party intent with technographics, firmographics, content, and research.
“Intent data has been trapped in marketing tools as just another score,” said Aberdeen CEO Marc Osofsky, Aberdeen’s CEO. “Aberdeen Intent for Salesforce delivers what sales wants – accounts looking to buy that are fed directly into Salesforce for sales to engage and increase pipeline.”
I profiled SalesIntel and its human-verified contacts last summer but failed to cover a series of announcements from them over the past nine months (they were covered in my newsletter, but didn’t make it into my blog).
SalesIntel continues its database build out with company intelligence alongside their database of nearly three million high-quality US contacts. Each of these contacts is reverified each quarter, providing a smaller, but significantly higher quality email and direct dial dataset than other vendors. The exception is DealSignal which is performing overnight data validation so also delivering recently verified contacts.
Along with high-quality contacts, SalesIntel added company profiles which provide contact context. Company profiles are accessed by performing a company name search and clicking on the company name in the resulting contact list. The new profiles contain the following sections:
Company logo and name
Executive Intel — the names and titles of the top-level executives at the firm. Users can click on the executives to view their details.
Firmographic data from Owler
HQ info
Industry & Sector info
Tech Intel — vendors and product deployed at the company
Contact Intel — a grid containing the number of executives available within SalesIntel by job function and level. Clicking on a number takes the user to a list of contacts for the company at that function and level. Users can also obtain filtered lists by clicking on the totals by job function or level.
The most recent enhancement is the incorporation of Owler firmographics into their database. SalesIntel users can also view Owler’s real-time news alerts for their prospects including IPOs, Funding, and Acquisition news.
“Owler helps sales teams work faster and smarter. We provide accurate and up-to-date information about companies and their top competitors, as well as deliver real-time actionable insights about the companies that matter to your pipeline.”
Tim Harsch, CEO of Owler
SalesLoft released sales engagement connectors for Outreach and SalesLoft late last year. Duplicate checking is performed. Records are tagged and assigned to SalesLoft cadences and Outreach sequences.
A HubSpot connecter was also released. The integration allows users to select contact owners and assign exported contacts to a workflow. Duplicate record checking is supported.
New targeting features include US metro areas and technographic searching. Users can screen by product, vendor, or category. The technographics file was licensed from HG Insights (FKA HG Data).
Category searching may be performed by keyword or navigating a technology category tree. Technographic searching is a component of the company module.
SalesIntel Technographic Screening
Contacts are sold in annual plans with contact records beginning at a dollar per record.
SalesIntel was launched last summer. Ramnani said his firm is receiving “very positive feedback from the market.”
The
CX Cloud provides Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Total Addressable Market
(TAM) modeling based on DataFox firmographics and signals spanning 3.5 million
companies. DataFox is adding 7,000 companies each day.
“We
see B2B sales shifting from a field-first model to what we call a digital
selling model. By that we mean that increasingly organizations are moving
to inside sales teams that are aided by digital selling tools like Eloqua or
like Slack,” says Des Cahill, head CX evangelist at Oracle. “We believe
that a combination of data enrichment from DataFox and then AI and ML systems
to guide employees is the future of sales.”
Eloqua
integration with the Oracle Data Cloud and DataFox provides marketing with
improved intent and account behavior insights.
The
ERP integration supports supplier risk assessment with supplier scoring, risk
signals, and categorization.
“As
more organizations apply machine learning to core business processes, the
quality of data being fed to algorithms is the single-most important factor
that determines the value of AI results,” said VP of Product Management for
Adaptive Intelligence Bastiaan Janmaat. “We built our smart data platform
for the AI era and will continue to extend the capabilities beyond sales and
marketing to include company-level data for use cases in finance, HR and supply
chain.”
DataFox Account Scoring
DataFox
began as a dataset for investment banking, but “we just found a huge gaping
hole, in terms of the quality of B2B datasets that were available in the
market,” said Janmaat.
Whereas
15 years ago it was difficult to find company information, there are now
filings, press releases, corporate websites, tweets, blogs, and other content
which make it difficult to collect and assess company intelligence.
“There’s gold to be mined, but it’s a small percentage of what’s out there in the public domain. And that is a perfect problem to apply artificial intelligence to.”
Former DataFox CEO Bastiaan Janmaat (Oracle VP of Product for Adaptive Intelligence)
“Stagnant data sitting unchanged in sales and marketing systems and low-quality public data sources threaten ROI and reduce the effectiveness of AI deployments,” said Clive Swan, SVP of Applications Development. “DataFox is a key element in Oracle’s AI strategy and will help customers gain more value from the AI embedded in Oracle Cloud Applications. We plan to include more integrations across the entire suite of cloud applications to further enhance AI capabilities across finance, human resources and supply chain.”
DataFox
is now available as an Oracle data cleansing and enrichment service, but will
support three additional functions by mid-year:
Similar company identification based on the ICP
Account prioritization
Providing “embedded dynamic signals” (talking points) to sales reps
Additional
Eloqua enhancements are planned.
DataFox is also touting its dynamic territory planning service which was launched prior to the acquisition. Territory planning combines DataFox intelligence with internal company data such as win rates to dynamically assign and maintain balanced territories.
“What’s most interesting though, is that when Oracle DataFox detects a new account, that for whatever reason newly satisfies certain criteria and to make it a great target, it will dynamically enter that territory,” said Janmaat. “Either sales ops or the account executive gets pinged for that opportunity. So instead of a once a year exercise, it dynamically updates territories. They’ve seen tremendous results in terms of conversion rates and in deal size.
Over the past year, Sales Engagement has become the third pillar of my coverage (alongside Sales Intelligence and B2B DaaS). So it is only fair that I write an overview of the space.
Sales Engagement began about four or five years ago as Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) with a focus on automating the SDR function. Its initial functionality consisted of a cadence tool which automated emails and outbound dialing for appointment setting. Cadences, also called sequences, are a set of scheduled steps that usually begin with an email but also include outbound calls, social steps (many vendors have integrated LinkedIn Sales Navigator via SNAP connectors), and direct mail.
Cadences can be paused if the prospect is out of office or halted if the prospect unsubscribes. Outreach just announced out of office functionality which pauses the call and checks whether an alternate contact is listed. Functionality is similar to that of LeadGnome. Outreach noted that 18% of email responses are out of office emails. 25% of out of office emails include an alternate contact name with over half the names being manager titles or above. The Out of Office reply detection extracts the return date and alternate names then pauses sequences until the prospect returns. The sales rep is notified of automated actions.
Email is supported by targeted templates which can be personalized. Thus, reps can call cadences by function, level, industry, etc. and the associated templates are customized by target audience. Reps can view the emails prior to sending and personalize them. This helps bring authenticity to the email. SalesLoft estimates that the peak personalization level is 20%.
Most sales engagement solutions include a digital dialer for outbound calling. The system suggests the best time of day and adjusts for time zones. Other features include local dialing, call recording, and voice mail drops. Upon completion, the rep enters call disposition and sentiment information which is synched with the CRM.
Once calls are recorded, they are transcribed and indexed, allowing sales reps or managers to quickly review calls and quickly locate pain points, objections, pricing, and next steps. Vendors such as Outreach and SalesLoft are going a step further and analyzing the calls, providing a set of team reports. More broadly, machine learning tools are being applied against the calls to determine best sales practices.
Meeting Management is emerging as a key feature set. Some vendors offer simple Calendly-like scheduling while others provide full meeting transcription and analytics.
Video is becoming increasingly important. Vendors support both video meetings (e.g. Webex, Zoom, BlueJeans, JoinMe) and video attachments (e.g. Vidyard, Videolicious).
The Outreach Partner Directory offers ten categories of partners. Sales Intelligence and Data supports lead generation, intelligence, and management.
Other information and decisioning tools include leaderboards, dashboards, AI recommendations (e.g. who to call or email next), CRM synchronization, and A/B testing. Some of these tools are directly integrated into the service while others are available through app directories. Similar to the Salesforce AppExchange or Marketo LaunchPoint, functionality may be free, freemium, or premium. Likewise, you may need to separately license the partner solution prior to enabling the integration. Outreach and SalesLoft offer a broad set of app partners.
Sales Engagement platforms are evolving into a system of engagement that sits alongside CRMs (systems of record). There is already a shift taking place from CRMs to Sales Engagement platforms. While Sales Engagement platforms are not looking to displace CRMs, sales reps are increasingly shifting screen time from CRMs to Sales Engagement platforms with the Sales Engagement platforms syncing with the CRMs. This is one of the reasons that Salesforce.com recently launched its High Velocity Sales service which combines cadences, Salesforce Inbox, the Lightning Dialer, work queues, and Einstein. High Velocity Sales starts at $75 per user per month ($90 with outbound calling).
The Salesforce Lighting Dialer supports click-to-call, power dialing, inbound calling, voicemail drops, and call logging.
At the Salesforce World Tour in Boston this week, a sales rep told me that Salesforce is heavily investing in Sales Engagement and hopes to catch up to the market leaders in the next year (I think this is overly optimistic as the leaders are quickly building out functionality and partnerships). While Salesforce could catch up in a few years, I believe it is more likely that SFDC will acquire one of the leaders in the space followed quickly by Microsoft and Oracle acquisitions in the sector (of course, Microsoft or Oracle could be the first movers). Adobe, which recently acquired Marketo, may also be interested in expanding its presence in B2B sales and marketing applications.
The top vendors in the space are SalesLoft, Outreach, Salesforce High Velocity Sales, Groove, and XANT (FKA) InsideSales. Other vendors include ConnectLeader, Yesware, Toutapp (Marketo), Mixmax, and VanillaSoft.
I am pleased to announce that the first in a series of sales and marketing intelligence profiles is available through this website and my partners at Tenbound. These reports are written to assist with the purchasing decision. InsideView is the first purchasing profile to be completed, but additional reports for D&B Hoovers, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and DiscoverOrg are planned for release.
InsideView Buyer’s Guide
Buyer's Profile of InsideView Sales and Marketing Intelligence (Single License)
$349.00
InsideView, based in San Francisco, provides a set of sales and marketing tools for browsers, CRMs, Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs), and mobile devices. Key tools support sales research and account monitoring, list building, sales connections (“six degrees”), CRM viewing and hygiene, company and contact enrichment, web form enrichment, Ideal Customer Profiling (ICP), Total Addressable Market (TAM) sizing, and marketing automation hygiene.
InsideView targets technology, finance, corporate/consulting services, manufacturing, commercial real estate, etc.
Firms of all sizes license InsideView solutions.
Report Coverage
This 22-page report covers the following topics:
Company Overview
Content
Content Coverage Numbers
Product Screenshots
Functionality
Sales Products
InsideView for Sales
InsideView for CRM
InsideView Append (Lightning Data)
InsideView Mobile
Marketing Products
InsideView Enrich
InsideView Refresh
InsideView Target
Analytics Products
InsideView Apex
Other Products
InsideView Open API
Expert and Data Services
Recent Enhancements
Futures
Unique Features
Strengths
Weaknesses
Competitors by Category
Pricing
Resources
GZ Consulting / Tenbound reports are independently written and not sponsored by any of the profiled vendors.
