Month: October 2019

Artesian Business Categories and Company Buzzwords

Business Categories expand the set of synonyms associated with UK SICs
Business Categories expand the set of synonyms associated with UK SICs

Artesian Solutions announced the availability of Artesian Business Categories and Company Buzzwords functionality to its Artesian Engage sales intelligence service.  Company Buzzwords are a set of common product and service descriptors not found in standard industry taxonomies.  The buzzwords are mined from company websites.  For example, firms manufacturing or selling craft beer can be targeted within Artesian’s Prospector module.  Likewise, technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things, which span many industries, may also be targeted.

Artesian Business Categories expand the categories and synonyms associated with existing UK SIC codes.  Artesian gives the example of Drink Production as a synonym of Manufacture of Beverages with the word Drink returning industries such as Drink Retail and Drink Wholesale.

“As a business, we constantly aim to exceed customer expectations, so in response to their feedback, we not only improved the way they use SIC codes (with Artesian Business Categories), but also created a whole new way of finding companies in niche or highly specialised industries,” said Richard Clark Artesian’s VP of Product Management.  “These two new features will help our users get hyper-specific when searching for companies using Artesian’s prospecting tools, thereby enabling them to uncover new opportunities that may otherwise have been missed, and keeping them one step ahead of the competition.”

Artesian Business Categories are available for the UK SIC taxonomy, but not other industry code structures (e.g. NACE 2.0, NAICS).  When multiple codes are employed, Boolean AND / OR operators are supported.

“The SIC code system of categorising a company’s primary activities was first introduced in the UK in 1948 and although it has since been revised, the most recent update was back in 2007.  It is widely criticised for excluding categories to cover the latest sectors and for misrepresenting the activities of many businesses.  For example, Google UK Ltd is listed on Companies House as ‘82990 – Other business support service activities not elsewhere classified’ (a generic category for companies struggling to identify a suitable alternative).”

Artesian Solutions Press Release

Other new features include a news topic search (previously, users had to navigate menus) and expanded prospecting selects for Export Turnover (Export Revenue), Location Type, TPS (UK Telephony blocking), and roles.  Users can also exclude companies with estimative turnover, employee counts, or net worth values instead of actuals.

Bombora Workflows & Partnerships

A/B Testing analysis of Company Surge variables in LinkedIn Campaign Manager
A/B Testing analysis of Bombora Company Surge variables in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Intent data vendor Bombora has enlarged its direct sales team and is looking to shift from data resellers to OEM partnerships.  The OEM partnerships will deliver a “limited but powerful amount of data (or limited supported use case)” to customers and partners that want full, direct access.  Terminus is their first OEM partnership, but Bombora is looking to roll out three or four OEM relationships in Q4.

Shifting to OEM workflow solutions for intent data makes sense.  Unlike firmographics, technographics, or contacts, first and third-party intent data is more difficult to present to end users as it is both ephemeral (i.e. changing weekly) and statistically based (i.e. firms with a score above 70 are in the top 6% of signaled intent).  Thus, filtering the data by topic, company, and surge score provides confidence to end users that the data is meaningful.  OEM deals also place the intent data in the proper workflows for sales and marketing end users.

“Say a 200 person software business has Boeing as an account record in their Salesforce. We will append the topics surging at Boeing that that customer has licensed from Bombora onto the account object in Salesforce.  Once it’s there, it becomes searchable, so they can create tasks for salespeople, or they can use Salesforce as a hub and pipe that data to sales platforms, or marketing automation platforms.  Once the data’s in the system, it can be piped out to a bunch of different workflows.”

Bombora SVP Data Sales Michael Burton

Bombora also recently began providing intent-based audience feeds to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for sponsored content, sponsored InMails, text ads, video ads, and dynamic ads.  Each week, Bombora provides an updated list of domains to LinkedIn based upon ABM lists or firmographic selects.  The domain list is updated dynamically based upon surge data with the first set of matched audiences available within 48 hours.  On the LinkedIn side, LinkedIn member targeting is available (e.g. job function, level, interests) through the Campaign Manager.

Bombora recommends that users perform A/B testing against the standard B2B audience list and the company surge list.

Bombora was spun out of Madison Logic in 2014 and made the Inc 5000 list for the first time in 2019 placing #997.  2018 revenue hit $26.4 million, up 425% over three years.

Bombora – LiveRamp Partnership

LiveRamp - Bombora data flows for audience targeting.
LiveRamp – Bombora data flows for audience targeting.

This is Bombora week in my blog. Yesterday I covered their Bombora for Growth offering and today I’m discussing their August LiveRamp partnership. It is one of many partnerships they’ve formed over the past few years

Bombora’s latest partnership is with LiveRamp, an identity resolution firm that also supports data onboarding.  Bombora identifies audiences based on intent data to develop in-market audiences for both large and small companies.  Large company attribution is fairly straightforward as IP addresses can be employed.  For smaller companies, attribution is performed behaviorally based on thirty attributes with an 86% confidence level.

Bombora then layers in their topical surge data to determine which companies are showing high levels of intent by topic.

“What typically we’d receive from Bombora is a list of IP addresses which map a specific business profile,” said LiveRamp B2B COO Pieter De Temmerman.  “For example, we might be asked, ‘Can you find small businesses that are currently in-market to buy a CRM system, or accounting software, or you name it’.”

“What Bombora has done, and patented, is we’ve looked at IP addresses from a behavioral perspective, and because we see 30 to 40 billion business transactions a month, we’re looking at them through the lens of the behavioral attributes of a business (versus a home, Starbucks, or hotel) IP address.”

Bombora CSO Mark Dye

“What we realized is that a lot of these B2B marketers are wanting to target large companies, which are easy to identify, but are also wanting to have a conversation with the longer tail of customers,” said de Temmerman.  “When you’re dealing with these smaller companies, you might be dealing with a large number of prospects, but you don’t necessarily know who they are,”

The combined offering pulls together a set of third-party cookies and associated devices for anonymous users, expanding the universe of targetable in-market SMBs.  According to Bombora, “This solution, being the first of its kind in the B2B market, produces a high likelihood of the SMB audience to be susceptible to the ads they are seeing.  Thus, producing a higher return on ad spend and a lower customer acquisition cost.”

Bombora targets 7.5 million global SMBs with up to 100 employees based on IP addresses.  Bombora audience targeting is initially available for North America and the UK with plans to expand to additional markets “in the coming months.”

LiveRamp charges $2 per CPM for SMB targeting and $4 per CPM for Bombora surge-based SMB targeting.

Other articles on Bombora Partnerships:

Bombora for Growth

Bombora gathers company website intelligence (1st-party intelligence) through its NetFactor Visitortrack service and combines it with 3rd-party intent data from B2B Media Companies.

Bombora announced the availability of a Growth package which provides a “concentrated” set of intent data for SMBs.  Both first and third-party intent data are delivered through CRM, MAP, and CDPs including Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Oracle, Lattice Engines, Leadspace, and Everstring.

First-party intent data is derived from a firm’s own website. Bombora quietly acquired NetFactor for visitor intelligence and packages it alongside its third-party intent data from dozens of B2B media websites. Combined, first and third-party intelligence help identify which companies are actively in-market for solutions. Firms can opt to run campaigns which target high-intent companies (e.g. programmatic, email), or deem the leads marketing qualified and pass them to sales.

Growth provides an unlimited feed of high-intent companies spanning up to eighteen topics.  Bombora identifies companies with a surge score of at least 70, which approximately represents the top 6% of companies with interest in a topic.  As multiple topics are being measured, the feed covers approximately the top 25% of companies.  Because Bombora compares surge scores against topical baselines, surge scores are normalized such that companies in industries related to a topic and very large companies do not dominate.  Surge scores are updated weekly and available for 2.8 million company domains across 6,100 B2B topics.

The Growth package also includes dedicated support, visitor intelligence, browser access, and integrations.  Pricing begins at $17,500 plus integration fees.

“What’s happened over the last five or ten years is that the way companies buy products and services has changed pretty significantly” as buyers conduct a significant percentage of their research prior to raising their hand.  “In the past, if you were going into a buying cycle, you’d just engage with the companies that you think you might ultimately work with; and those companies would be part of that process from the beginning.  The promise of intent data is to tap into that part of the process which is no longer visible to a vendor during the prospect’s buying cycle.”

Bombora SVP of Data Sales Mike Burton

“Over the last 12 to 18 months, the market has figured out that this data is really important, in terms of getting into sales cycles and driving pipeline,” continued Burton.

Bombora tracks first and third-party intent to the location level.  Thus, there are no issues with GDPR compliance or the collection of personally identifiable information.

Bombora identifies surging topics by location with topics often acting as proxies for personas.  “If Boeing, in Texas, is in a big research surge on accounting software and budgeting software, there’s a really good chance that’s coming out of a finance department, or a finance persona, rather than H.R. or a sales department,” said Burton.

Bombora has had several recent product and partnership announcements. Part two of this blog covers their new LiveRamp partnership and part three discusses intent-based workflows. They also recently licensed their data to Zylotech, a CDP.

Zylotech Incorporates Bombora Intent

Zylotech Account 360

Zylotech added Bombora surge data to its Customer Data Platform (CDP).  Bombora’s third-party intent file is gathered from over 4,000 B2B media sites and helps identify accounts with surging interest in B2B topics.  The partnership helps “find and drive active demand into the funnel, empowering sales teams to prioritize accounts and win more business.”

Zylotech describes itself as a “self-learning B2B customer data platform that ensures customer profile enrichment, predicts purchases, and brings relevancy-based recommendations towards unprecedented lift.”  Features include data health reports, next best actions, lead scoring, propensity predictions, prescriptive micro-segments, dynamic segmentation, GDPR support, ID resolutions, anonymous visitor data resolution, look-a-like audience prospecting, and 360 Customer Views that incorporate hierarchies.

“Self-learning” means that the CDP automatically and continuously detects and creates customer matches across different data sources.

“Bombora’s intent data coupled with Zylotech’s unified view of all customer data means marketing and sales now have a single, seamless way to identify ideal B2B buyers and drive more conversions.  Marketers can personalize their campaigns specifically to the buyer’s intent, allowing sales to focus on buyers with expressed interest, and proactively engage in the decision-making process armed with customer insights.”

Zylotech Chief Revenue Officer Patrick O’Brien

Zylotech supports HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, Tableau, MailChimp, and LiveRamp.

Zylotech is based in Cambridge, MA and has 40 employees.  It received a $5.5 million Series A last October and $6 million in total funding.

Evaluating Sales Engagement Platforms: A Guide for Purchasing SEPs

I am pleased to announce that my next enterprise software purchasing report is available through this website and my partners at Tenbound. “Evaluating Sales Engagement Platforms: A Guide for Purchasing SEPs” assists with the purchasing decision of this rapidly developing SalesTech category.

Evaluating Sales Engagement Platforms

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The report is available as both a single buyer license for smaller firms evaluating the sector and as a buyer-committee license for larger firms. The Buyer Committee license covers a team of seven and includes a Word document checklist to assist with the evaluation.

Evaluating Sales Engagement Platforms – Buying Commitee License

Seven-User License (October Discounted Price) + Word Document Checklist

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Report Coverage

The 13-page report covers the following topics:

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    • Definition
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I also offer detailed overviews of several major vendors:

  • SalesLoft Product Overview
  • VanillaSoft Product Overview (coming October 18)

GZ Consulting / Tenbound reports are independently written and not sponsored by any of the profiled vendors. Michael R. Levy of GZ Consulting wrote this report.

Clearbit X

Clearbit X Audience Builder
Clearbit X Audience Builder

Data vendor Clearbit officially launched Clearbit X, their new marketing and sales “growth engine.”  The new service provides digital marketing and demand generation functionality with first and third-party intent data enrichment.  The Clearbit X platform consolidates data from CRM systems, activity data such as web events, visitor intelligence enriched with IP and domain information, and Clearbit’s third-party business data on companies and employees (e.g., company size, industry, contact information, etc.).

“Never before has a company created a growth suite built from the ground up to be data-first and focused on B2B buyers.  And what’s more, X is the only platform to natively combine both data the customer owns with our popular Clearbit data.  I’m looking forward to a future where marketing data is democratized, data-enabled, and smart.  Clearbit X is a big step towards this future.”

Clearbit CEO Alex MacCaw.

Features include Facebook and Google targeting, Slack and email alerts highlighting active opportunities based on intent, and Clearbit’s visitor intelligence which matches visitor activity to account intelligence via IP addresses.  Visitor intelligence assists with dynamic chat and website personalization.

Clearbit is positioning X as the “center of your data universe.“  According to the firm, “The power supply of any great growth engine is real-time access to what we call your entire dataverse – all your user data, activity data, and enrichment data.  Clearbit X brings all of that together in one place.”

“Being able to layer Clearbit firmographic data onto our existing data in Salesforce is really powerful,” said Yuri Daniels, director of performance marketing at Zenefits.  “X has helped ensure that we are targeting customers in our ideal customer profile as well as being able to exclude people already inside of our funnel to make new leads.  We can target very specific lists on Facebook with much more efficiency and LinkedIn-level specificity.”

Clearbit is focused on onboarding their first twenty-five customers and will release more product details towards the end of the year.

DealSignal CRM Data Health for Salesforce

B2B DaaS and contacts vendor DealSignal announced the availability of CRM Data Health, a Salesforce module that continuously refreshes, enriches, and reverifies lead, contact, and account records.  DealSignal data is GDPR-compliant and based upon AI validation and human verification.

“Rather than comparing dirty CRM data against other static data sources that may themselves be outdated, DealSignal CRM Data Health takes a dynamic, on-demand enrichment and verification approach that uses both AI and human intelligence to ensure near-perfect accuracy,” stated the firm.  “DealSignal CRM Data Health delivers a reliable alternative for companies looking to replace Data.com.”

Like other CRM hygiene apps, CRM Data Health includes a free data health audit.  The CRM data enrichment includes detailed contact profiles, Bombora buyer intent, and firmographics.  Along with CRM hygiene, customers can enrich inbound leads, events lists, and third-party lists.

“Bad CRM data is a pervasive issue that has a negative ripple effect on B2B marketing and sales performance: from inaccurate ABM targeting, to bounced emails that can damage sender reputation, to outdated or irrelevant contacts that clog marketing automation systems at a great cost,” said DealSignal founder & CEO, Rob Weedn. “Industry studies find that up to 50 percent of CRM data is incomplete, out-of-date, or inaccurate. Compounding the issue, data decays at a rate of over two percent per month, so maintaining data health is a constant challenge that requires an on-going solution—much like you can’t get in shape by going to the gym once.  We’ve introduced DealSignal CRM Data Health to help Salesforce customers continuously maintain rich, accurate and verified target audience data, and keep it fresh on a regular schedule.”

With the decommissioning of Data.com, vendors like Dun & Bradstreet, InsideView, Zoominfo, and DealSignal are jumping into the fray. If you are looking to make your sales reps more effective, your segmentation more accurate, or your Einstein predictions more precise, then you should be evaluating a Lightning Data or general data quality solution for your CRM.

Gartner IT Spend Forecast

Gartner forecasted 3.2% growth in global IT spend in 2019, with turnover hitting $3.8 trillion.  Growth will be driven by Enterprise Software (up 8.5% this year and 8.2% next year) and IT Services (up 4.7% this year and 4.8% next year).  Slower growth segments include Devices (1.6% growth in 2019), Communications Services (up 1.3% in 2019), and Data Center Systems (growing in 2019 but retreating in 2020).

“Despite uncertainty fueled by recession rumors, Brexit, and trade wars and tariffs, the likely scenario for IT spending in 2019 is growth,” said John-David Lovelock, research VP at Gartner.  “However, there are a lot of dynamic changes happening in regards to which segments will be driving growth in the future.  Spending is moving from saturated segments such as mobile phones, PCs and on-premises data center infrastructure to cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.  IoT devices, in particular, are starting to pick up the slack from devices.  Where the devices segment is saturated, IoT is not.”

“IT is no longer just a platform that enables organizations to run their business on.  It is becoming the engine that moves the business.  As digital business and digital business ecosystems move forward, IT will be the thing that binds the business together.”

David Lovelock, Gartner Research VP

The shift to the cloud and SaaS will continue to benefit Enterprise Software spend with global expenditures hitting $466 billion in 2020.

“Cloud shift is not just about cloud.  As organizations pursue new IT architectures and operating philosophies, they put in place a foundation for new opportunities in digital business, including next-generation IT solutions such as the Internet of Things (IoT),” said VP Ed Anderson earlier this year.  “Organizations embracing dynamic, cloud-based operating models position themselves for cost optimization and increased competitiveness.”

Lovelock warned that companies are failing to upskill their internal staff quickly enough to support newer technologies such as IoT, AI, machine learning, data science, APIs and services platform design.  Gartner was concerned that “nearly half” of the IT workforce is in “urgent need” of upskilling to “support their digital business initiatives.”  The risk for businesses is that emerging technologies “are changing faster than we’ve ever seen before.”

Aberdeen Behavioral Technographics

Behavioral Technographic Use Cases from Aberdeen.
Behavioral Technographic Use Cases from Aberdeen.

Intent and technographics vendor Aberdeen announced Aberdeen Behavioral Technographics, their next-generation installed technology dataset.  Aberdeen is the successor to the pioneering Ziff Davis and Harte-Hanks Access CI dataset that was developed over two decades ago.

Aberdeen notes that traditional technographics are binary, static flags at the corporate level whereas Behavioral Technographics “actively measure technology usage down to company location, number of users, and pains and priorities of the usage.”

“Technographic data has been overdue for innovation,” said Aberdeen CEO Marc Osofsky.  “The reaction to our data has been amazing, companies have signed up within days of seeing the data.”

Aberdeen claims that its technographics are “up to 55% more accurate than legacy install (technographic) data” resulting in improved account prioritization, pipeline, and win-rates.

“Historical technographic data is actually still pretty new for most firms.  And the way that it’s most commonly collected, at least in recent days, is focusing on job boards and individual websites to determine whether or not technology’s actually installed at a company.  And they do this by…focusing on the job boards to see if a technology is present within the actual job description.  There are a lot of fallbacks to this, and this new method gets around that way.”

Benjamin Cavicchi, Aberdeen Senior Data Analyst

Behavioral Technographics are based upon technology usage and topical queries, not simply installation.  Data is captured from over 1,100 websites that host educational content concerning technologies.  This takes them beyond traditional job board scans to include forums, tutorials, and educational sites.  365 days of behavioral data are captured which include deployed technology, pain points, and topics.

“We focus on the education of an individual about a technology because that is clear evidence that they use it,” said Aberdeen Senior Data Analyst Benjamin Cavicchi.  “So what we’re looking at is a handful or a couple of thousand websites that resolve to user tutorials or user forums where people ask questions and answer them about a technology, as well as a host of other, I would say, technology-specific blogs where experts write about it.”

Cavicchi’s idea was to focus on those pages ”that answer these very specific questions that you would have in your daily work working with the technology.”  This is the content that shows up when technology questions are typed into Google.

For example, if employees are researching topics about Excel, they are likely using it.  “The idea is that if you aggregate all of the individuals associated with a company and you look at this historical activity on Excel, you can get a better understanding of whether or not they use it.  So other users at his company may be googling other, more advanced things like how to write efficient VBA code, or creating dynamic Excel dashboards,” said Cavicchi.

And because they are looking at trends and technology questions, they can discern which companies are using precursors to more advanced solutions, usage levels, and current pain points.  Behavioral Technographics are available at the location level.

“Excel is the natural antecedent to a BI solution, a more advanced one.  So if you have a lot of people at a company that are writing VBA code, that are trying to create these dynamic dashboards, but they don’t have any activity on any other BI solution, it seems to me that they probably need one.  We’re finding the problems of the company, and helping companies to essentially find them, too.

“Behavioral Technographics is a perfect complement to Intent Data,” said Aberdeen.  “Both provide full visibility into your target market: Intent Data identifies companies in-market to buy and Behavioral Technographics provides technology in use insights to prioritize and target the remaining accounts not yet showing intent.”

Behavioral Technographics are patent-pending.  Aberdeen describes its new technographics as “dynamic and quantitative.”

The next step will be behavioral profiling which is common in B2C but has yet to be extended to B2B.  Behavioral Profiling will look at groups of individuals to determine buyers and influencers.  For example, high levels of research around python indicate the presence of a data science team.

Aberdeen entered the intent market when it acquired The Big Willow last December.