This was one of the two weeks a year that I take off from writing my Market Insights Newsletter, but I wanted to let you know that I’m splitting the newsletter into two newsletters. When I started writing the Market Insights Newsletter back in 2012, it focused on Sales Intelligence, Social Selling, and B2B DaaS. Since then, B2B DaaS has increased greatly in importance, and I’ve added adjacent topics including Sales Engagement Platforms, data privacy / compliance, ABM, and Customer Data Platforms. The result was a doubling in the length of the newsletter and an increase in the frequency that articles were bumped. Some features are often bumped for a month or longer due to length.
In August, I
took my summer vacation, but there was no August news break. It took me a
few months to catch up on announcements from that week. This led me to
the realization that I needed to split my newsletter in half to improve both
topical focus and story currency. The split will also allow me to profile
more startups.
Most of my readers will continue to receive a Sales Intelligence (SI) newsletter which covers
Sales Intelligence
B2B DaaS
Data Hygiene
ABM
B2B Data (Companies, Contacts, Intent, Technographics, and Triggers)
Customer Data Platforms
Compliance (GDPR, CCPD, KYC, AML, PEP)
The SI
edition of Market Insights will continue to publish on Sundays.
Contact me if you’d like to be set up with a trial edition of either newsletter. I offer SMB pricing for startups, so don’t assume that I am unaffordable like other analyst services.
Sigstr location intelligence analyzes the strength of connections at the metro level.
ABM platform vendor Terminus acquired email analytics vendor Sigstr earlier this week. The full 60-person Sigstr team will be joining Terminus, including CEO Bryan Wade. Sigstr has received $11 million in funding across multiple rounds. Sigstr’s flagship product inserts customized banner advertising in signature blocks. In 2018, the firm launched Pulse, which tracks relationship strength based upon email opens, response times, messaging velocity, and generated calendar invitations.
“Combining
our solution with the Terminus platform activates an untapped channel that
changes how businesses engage with target accounts,” wrote Wade. “We’re
long-standing partners from both a technology and go-to-market perspective,
making this combination a no-brainer and massive opportunity for our combined
customers, and account-centric businesses everywhere looking to sharpen how
they engage across the entire customer lifecycle.”
The merged
company will be able to “determine their best-fit segments,
prioritize accounts, and identify the next-best-action for execution.” Terminus
can now align account-based messaging across the full lifecycle, prioritize
accounts and assess buying team interactions, and integrate ABM messaging with
employee email marketing.
“[Pulse] Relationship data adds a rich 1st-party piece of intelligence to your account-based efforts. To deliver this information, Sigstr uses its proprietary Relationship Score, which analyzes the email and calendar interactions between employees at your company and those at your customer and prospective customer accounts. It provides detailed insights into the sentiment and strength of relationships at an account, buying team, and individual level. Utilizing this data set alongside engagement and intent intelligence already native to the Terminus platform supercharges how your revenue teams prioritize efforts and take action.”
Bryan Brown, Terminus Chief Product Officer
“I couldn’t’
be more excited about bringing two powerhouse teams together to shape the future
of B2B marketing,” said High Alpha managing partner Scott Dorsey.
“Category leaders are built around great teams and innovative products.
This team has exactly what it takes.”
Sigstr
customers include AT&T, Amazon, and United Way. Terminus was also a
long-time customer. The firm blogged that the deal was “a reflection of
both our confidence in and reliance upon Sigstr as a staple of our marketing
strategy.”
Terms of the
deal were not disclosed.
Earlier this
month, Terminus named Tim Kopp their new CEO and Chairman. Kopp is the
former CMO of ExactTarget and is a Partner of Hyde Park Ventures. Former
Terminus CEO Eric Spett continues as a member of the Board.
“Marketing
and business are at a crossroads. We’re shifting to a new frontier of
automation that prioritizes more effective account targeting, engagement, and
acquisition,” said Kopp. “The emerging generation of CMOs is
transitioning toward hyper-targeted campaigns and intelligent, data-driven
digital marketing. ABM has moved past marketing, and Terminus is the
definitive leader powering account-based transformation and helping businesses
achieve rapid, long-term growth.”
LeadSpace rolled out its Customer Data Platform (CPD) fall release with improved processing of first-party data, enhancements to their Salesforce app, and refinements to their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) modeling. Automated ingestion of first-party data and custom data sources deliver unified customer profiles “for use across systems.” Automated data onboarding assists with AI modeling, scoring and analytics, and enterprise software activation.
“Customers
can use data on engagement, product use, relationship, and other information
unique to their business to power real-time orchestration of activities and
processes,” stated the firm. “Decisions about how to route leads, assign
nurture programs, segment for campaigns, and personalize interactions can now
be made with all the intelligence of the CDP and a complete customer view.”
The fall release also supports data hygiene with the sunsetting of Data.com Clean in mid-2020. Both real-time and on-demand matching and enrichment are supported. Triggers automatically identify new or updated records and automatically look to match them against the LeadSpace CDP. At the end of the year, a sync button will be displayed within individual records.
“Getting a complete view of the customer is critical to improving the customer experience for B2B. Buyers no longer tolerate generic and impersonal content and interactions. Our Customer Data Platform gives B2B marketers a real path to being able to orchestrate the ideal customer experience at scale. Improving the ability to ingest 1st party data makes that even more powerful because it is unique to each of our client’s journey with their customers.”
LeadSpace CEO Doug Bewsher
Enhanced
ICP Analytics help select the right accounts and personas for ABM targeting.
Interactive, filterable reports display account, contact, and intent data
matched against conversion and revenue data to “uncover which categories and
segments have performed well historically.”
LeadSpace On-Demand look-a-like segment building now supports company suppression.
LeadSpace customers include Microsoft, HPE, SAP, Iron Mountain, IBM, and Symantec.
Cien contends that a sales rep is only as successful as his or her weakest skill permits. Therefore, it is best to determine skill deficiencies and coach for them.
Cien announced the availability of its Hidden Revenue Assessment report which analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of sales reps to determine which qualitative factors are limiting their success. Cien ingests data from Salesforce Enterprise to “reveal the factors that are preventing their teams from achieving their numbers.”
Cien Head of Marketing Damien Acheson noted that firms such as Gong and Chorus are more prescriptive while Cien is diagnostic, helping managers identify skill gaps and determining where reps add or destroy value during deal flow.
Presented as
individual scorecards, Cien employs over 100 AI models to identify issues in
sales enablement, training, and onboarding. Cien does not believe in
cloning the best sales reps as reps have different strengths and weaknesses.
Instead, reps are assessed for value-add across the pipeline, helping
determine where reps need coaching, which reps are creating value, and which
reps are benefiting from a rich set of leads but not adding significant value
to them.
Furthermore,
their models indicate that addressing weaknesses is the best method for
improving sales outcomes and reaching quota. If a rep is weak at any of
the key sales skills, he or she is unlikely to reach quota. As reps are
only as successful as their weakest skills, it is better to identify gaps and
coach accordingly. Cien holds that the best path to driving revenue
growth is focusing on mid-level success reps as they are the ones with the
greatest opportunity to improve their performance.
“When
it comes to managing sales teams, it’s important to understand that no sales
rep is created equal, and no opportunity is created equal,” contends Cien CEO Rob
Käll. “To date, Cien’s
Hidden Revenue Assessments have uncovered between 20-40% worth of lost revenue
due to gaps in selling skills.”
“Cien’s AI models search for correlations between reps’ skills and attributes and their impact on the final value of opportunities. This is the basis for a set of patented algorithms called the Cien Value Chain. Cien determines the relative value of each lead as it enters your CRM and tracks its value at the end of the sales cycle. The Cien Value Chain measures the value-added at each stage of the opportunity and the skills and attributes that drive incremental value.“
Cien FAQ
The
Hidden Revenue Assessment is available as a free report to technology companies
with at least ten sales reps and a minimum of one year of Salesforce data.
It provides an assessment of a few sample reps across work ethic, product
knowledge, engagement ability, and closing ability. The Hidden Revenue
Assessment also evaluates CRM data quality to provide a level of confidence in
the assessment. Firms that have deployed Sales Engagement Platforms such
as Outreach and SalesLoft often have complete data as they automatically gather
activity data and sync it with their CRM.
Cien “Baseball Card” Profile
The
Hidden Revenue Assessment includes a 30-minute walkthrough.
The
Cien app, available for $49 per month per rep, provides mentor prescriptions
that help prioritize coaching. While flagging weaknesses can be
demotivating, Cien inverts the model and calculates the revenue opportunity
available to reps who focus on developing their skills. Being told that
you are weak at prospect engagement is unlikely to motivate a rep. Being
told that focusing on prospect engagement can retire $200,000 worth of quota is
much more likely to motivate the rep to focus on his or her weak-link skills.
The
Cien app provides data on all of the reps and covers a broader set of skills.
The app also provides dynamic data indicating how the reps are performing
over time.
Cien is Privacy Shield certified and does not gather Personally Identifiable Information beyond rep names. Cien received a $3.5 million seed round in June.
The new Funding Events Spotlight Filter allows reps to focus on accounts with recent private equity or venture capital funding events.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out its Q4 release to end-users and admins over the past few weeks. Yesterday, I covered their new data validation flag and Admin tools. Today, I am discussing the rest of the release including new alerts, list sharing, and SNAP (Sales Navigator Application Partner) enhancements.
Sales Navigator added two more Saved Account Alerts: headcount growth and Senior Leadership Hires.
When sharing lists, owners may now designate them
view-only or editable.
“List collaborators with edit permissions will be able to add, remove, and comment on Leads or Accounts within a Shared List, and alerts will be sent to collaborators when Leads or Accounts have been added to or removed from a Custom List or when there are new comments on a Custom List.”
LinkedIn Sales Solutions VP of Product Management Doug Camplejohn
LinkedIn added SNAP integrations for Tableau and Power BI. They also extended SNAP integrations to Oracle Sales Cloud Lead and Account pages (Contacts were already supported).
Teams will benefit from improved TeamLink recommendations on “who to reach out to first for a warm introduction, using connection strength scores based on a members’ interactions.”
PointDrive Roadmap
Finally, LinkedIn teased an improved PointDrive service that will be “deeply integrated” into Sales Navigator beginning in early 2020. PointDrive provides sales reps with a custom landing page for delivering multi-media content with descriptions and company branding. The multi-quarter release will streamline access to PointDrive functionality. However, PointDrive will no longer support shared content.
SalesLoft Leveraging Data Validation Flag
SalesLoft is one of the first vendors to take advantage of the Sales Navigator Data Validation process. SalesLoft uses the Data Validation flag to notify the SDR or sales rep. SalesLoft automation rules can then trigger workflows based on whether a prospect on the decision-making committee has left or whether an admin or champion at a customer has changed jobs. These insights help reps evaluate whether an opportunity may be in jeopardy, the likelihood of closing this quarter pushed out, or they need to move quickly to identify new buying committee members or champions.
“Customers leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Data Validation are now able to use real-time insights to influence critical
workflows when their prospects and customers change jobs,” said SalesLoft CMO
Sydney Sloan. “Ultimately, this saves time spent reviewing customer data
manually, and it will increase the quality of all opportunities as salespeople
progress through the buying cycle.”
LinkedIn Sales Solutions has begun rolling out its Q4 release to Sales Navigator subscribers. New features include a data validation flag for contacts, improved geographic filters, a funding events spotlight, two new alerts, additional SNAP partners, and extended administrative tools.
A new data validation flag warns users that a contact
is no longer at a company listed in the CRM. If the company differs
between LinkedIn and the CRM a “Not at Company Flag” is written to the CRM.
The flag is both displayed to the rep and available as a trigger for contact
clean-ups and removal from marketing campaigns.
LinkedIn added three new reports which leverage the
field:
Opportunities at Risk: Proactively identifying when a buyer has left an open opportunity
Past Customers at New Companies: Identifying contacts at current customers (potential champions) who have joined new companies
Out-of-Date Contacts: All potential contacts that need to be updated
LinkedIn is hemmed in by commitments to its members’
data privacy. Thus, it cannot append or sync full contact information
like other vendors. The data validation flag simply alerts sales and
marketing that a contact is no longer at a firm. It does not upload
information on the member’s new company to the CRM.
The Data Validation flag is available to Enterprise
Edition licensors with CRM sync enabled in Salesforce and MS Dynamics 365.
LinkedIn redesigned its usage reporting with
time-series charts for messaging effectiveness. Expanded analytics
include InMail messages sent, InMail acceptance rates, messages sent, and total
unique connections. The report also includes the top five reps for each
category.
Other new administrative tools include
Coaching/training levels
Chart filtering by custom date ranges, groups, and users.
Data Updates – Saved Leads and Accounts
LinkedIn has integrated Bing location data, making
prospecting more precise. The service covers 2.4 million more cities and
over 2,000 new states/provinces.
Users may also filter by a new funding events spotlight. The new filter “brings these updates to the top of your search results within the Spotlight tab, giving you a helpful cue that it’s the right time to check-in,” blogged Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management, LinkedIn Sales Solutions.
In a blog titled, “Maintaining the Trust of our Members,” LinkedIn recommitted itself to a members-first approach. The Microsoft subsidiary frames its decision-making with the question, “Is this the right thing to do for our members?”
Along with a members-first policy, LinkedIn employs four principles to frame decisions:
Members maintain clarity, consistency, and control over their data. This goal is manifested in a broad set of privacy settings, observing the stated wishes of each member, and protecting their data. Microsoft employs a global GDPR standard and does not transfer member data to other companies. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator limits data access to member-data view-only access, which displays profiles within CRMs and other partner applications but does not transfer data to those platforms.
LinkedIn will remain a safe, trusted, and professional platform. The firm removes content which violates their Professional Community Policies and removes fake profiles, jobs, and companies.
LinkedIn is committed to removing unfair bias from its platform so that individuals with equal talent have equal access to opportunity. “To achieve this goal, we are committed to building a product with no unfair bias that provides opportunity to all of our members. There is a lot of work still to do, but we are focused on working across our company, with our members and customers, and across the industry to close the network gap.”
As a global platform, they are committed to respecting the laws that apply to them and “contributing to the dialogue” about legal frameworks.
LinkedIn Advertising is subject to an initial review. LinkedIn vets ads to ensure they are non-discriminatory:
“Even if legal in the applicable jurisdiction, LinkedIn does not allow ads that advocate, promote, or contain discriminatory hiring practices or denial of education, housing, or economic opportunity based on age, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, or sexual preference. Ads that promote the denial or restriction of fair and equal access to education, housing, or credit or career opportunities are prohibited.”
Blake Lawit, LinkedIn General Counsel
The statement of principles comes at a time when other social media firms are struggling to develop rules and policies around political advertising. LinkedIn does not carry political advertising and also restricts adult content, illegal, health, gaming, weapons, multi-level marketing, alcohol, tobacco, and financial (payday loans, cryptocurrency) products.
LinkedIn continues to grow its customer base with 660 million members across 200 countries and 30 million companies. The top countries are the United States (165M members), India (62M), China (48M), Brazil (40M), and the UK (27M).
LinkedIn maintains offices in nine US cities and 24 international locations. The platform supports 24 languages.
Priority Engine improved its Buying Team contacts and added contact card display.
TechTarget announced a set of enhancements to its Priority Engine sales intelligence service. New features include improved Salesforce sync, refined Buying Team display, contact hygiene, and LinkedIn profile hyperlinks. Improved Salesforce synchronization gives “sales reps easier access and dynamic visibility into active accounts in their territory, with even more accurate and actionable data on the buying teams within them,” said the firm.
Priority
Engine now supports sales territories based on Salesforce account assignments,
uploaded account lists, or firmographic rules (e.g. Industry, Geography, Size).
As accounts are added or reassigned within Salesforce, territories are
automatically maintained, allowing Priority Engine to dynamically showcase
activities within the territory.
Managers and directors can view individual rep account lists or multiple territories at once.
Priority Engine territories may be defined by SFDC, list uploads, or firmographic variables.
TechTarget acquired contact hygiene vendor Oceanos in 2018 and has begun to leverage it in Priority Engine for contact data enrichment and update to its 20 million opted-in contacts.
“Priority
Engine helps sales and aligned marketing teams reach and engage more of the
right prospects at in-market accounts to improve response and conversation
rates,” stated TechTarget
TechTarget
also adjusted its contact selection algorithm to improve its buying committee
display, “vastly improving the fit of 3rd-party supplemental contacts in
Priority Engine.” A new contact card provides a detailed contact profile
within the Buying Team list view. Previous and Next buttons allow the
sales rep to quickly view individual profiles.
Priority
Engine also deployed improved persona logic to determine which DiscoverOrg
contacts to display for accounts.
Within
account views, Buying Teams now list emails, direct dials, and LinkedIn
hyperlinks.
“Priority Engine has long provided essential intelligence to help sales teams fuel pipeline and close more deals. These new enhancements are the first in a series of releases specifically designed to make it even easier for sales pros to access better data and powerful insights to maximize opportunities with active accounts in their territory.”
TechTarget VP of Products Andrew Briney
TechTarget
collects second-party intent and opted-in contacts from readers of its 140
technology research sites. TechTarget sites are available in English,
French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese.
Priority Engine supports English, French, and German UIs.
Of the 20
million contacts, 18 million are technology decision-makers or influencers and
2 million work in other functions but are researching technology. 9
million of the contacts are North American, 5 million are located in EMEA, 5
million in APAC, and 600,000 in Latin America.
Priority
Engine pricing is customized based on market access and customer
feature/function requirements. Typical individual subscriptions begin
around $100K. Designed specifically for the needs of small companies, the
Priority Engine Express (PEX) offering – currently in beta release – starts at
$36K.
There are
over 600 customers for TechTarget intent data products, with 51 added last
quarter. Priority Engine Express will be generally available in 2020.
Workflows deliver triggered audiences to CRMs, MAPs, and SEPs.
Zoominfo which launched its combined Zoominfo powered by DiscoverOrg platform in September, released Workflows, their “first data automation tool that streamlines sales and marketing activity and effectiveness by enabling customers to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right audience.”
Workflows
identify new and existing prospects based on real-time B2B intelligence.
The prospects are then deployed to automated sales and marketing
campaigns. Audience segmentation can be applied according to intent,
event, and news-based triggers including new technology installations, funding
rounds, product launches, first- and third-party web activity, spending
priorities, and other buying signals with additional company attributes.
One of the
triggers is visitor intelligence gathered from their recently launched
WebSights service. “Now, you can engage prospects from organizations
researching your site with direct-dial phone numbers and accurate email
addresses. What’s more, you can view your data and segment it according
to firmographic filters, for instance, enabling better, more personalized
outreach.”
Workflows
support a set of sales engagement, CRM, and MAP platforms including Outreach,
SalesLoft, Salesforce, HubSpot, Eloqua, and Marketo. Sequences can drop
audiences into campaigns or kick off sales cadences. For example, a
trigger can be set up for specific events and filtered by firmographics,
technographics, biographics, or event-specific parameters such as Funding
Amounts.
“Integrations with popular sales and marketing applications give customers the opportunity to marry ongoing custom triggers with essential prospecting information from ZoomInfo and connect with potential buyers in a personalized, more efficient way.”
Zoominfo
“Modern B2B
buyers demand a personalized experience,” said Zoominfo CEO Henry Schuck.
“Solely relying on standard and static company criteria to identify key
prospects restricts sales and marketing’s ability to meet those expectations,
especially when timing is so often the difference between a deal that is won or
lost. ZoomInfo Workflows solves this problem with features that capture
dynamic buying behavior across first- and third-party channels, as its
collected, along with hundreds of rules to automate as little or as much of the
go-to-market motion as they’d like.”
Zoominfo has
migrated 1,000 customers to its new platform.
Revenue Growth Data from Inc. 5000 (2011 – 2017) and Debtwire (2018).
The day before Thanksgiving, Zoominfo began the process of filing an IPO in accordance with Rule 135 of the Securities Act. According to the firm, “The initial public offering is expected to commence after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”
Zoominfo is profitable and has a valuation in excess of $1 billion. The number of shares and offering price have yet to be determined. 2019 revenue is estimated to be around $350 million up approximately $100 million thisyear.
“The paperwork is a draft registration for a common stock offering. The confidential draft filing is a mechanism built into the 2012 Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups, or JOBS, Act, and was designed to make the IPO process for companies with less than $1 billion in revenue easier. Companies must file information publicly 15 days prior to starting an investor roadshow or the effective date of the registration.”
Malia Spencer, Portland Business Journal
Zoominfo, formerly named DiscoverOrg, has a long history of organic and inorganic growth. It is now the number two sales intelligence service, behind only LinkedIn Sales Navigator, with around a 25% market share. Acquisitions include Zoominfo, RainKing, NeverBounce, Komiko, and iProfile.
Zoominfo released the Zoominfo Powered by DiscoverOrg platform in September. The new platform combines the DiscoverOrg technographics, Inside Scoops (sales triggers), editorially verified bios, and top global company profiles with the Zoominfo deep contact data with emails and direct dials. New features include WebSights visitor intelligence and FormComplete web forms.
Last week, Zoominfo released Workflows, their “first data automation tool that streamlines sales and marketing activity and effectiveness by enabling customers to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right audience.” I will be covering Workflows tomorrow.
Zoominfo offers pricing and packaging similar to its legacy offerings, helping ensure a smooth transition to their new platform.
