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.