UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions recognized significant growth in the technology sector in 2018, with tech sector revenue up 255% in 2018. Artesian attributed the growth to the “vast return on investment that can be achieved by leveraging millions of data points to create new relationships, establish credibility, address individual pain points and wider market challenges, and create new opportunities.”
The Artesian
social selling platform provides users with a rich set of sales triggers
combined with company intelligence.
“Technology
companies are increasingly investing much of their valuable brain power into
crafting long-term, powerful relationships from the start of the customer
journey,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “By harnessing technologies such as
Artesian they’re uncovering opportunities to act in more contextually aware,
empathetic and personalised ways and in turn are seizing opportunities to
differentiate in an entirely different way, rather than focusing on features,
benefits and brand reputation alone.”
Yates continued
describing Artesian’s value proposition to technology sales reps:
“Harnessing the most valuable company information, market data and customer insights means Artesian’s technology customers can build innovative propositions for their products and services, prioritising ideas based on solving actual business challenges in each customer segment they serve. The sheer pace of change in the technology sector, including new entrant disruption, means enterprise providers can quickly fall behind if they’re not able establish deep, value-based relationships, especially when they may not be able to react as quickly within product development as their smaller competitors. Artesian’s growth in the sector highlights a shift in focus towards customer experience and value-based selling. Our technology customers are great examples of how to stay relevant and grow, even in a challenging political and economic environment.”
Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates
Artesian’s technology customers include Oracle, Amazon Web Services, SAP, BT, Infinity Tracking, and Canon.
Artesian Solutions has also shown strength selling to British banks and insurance companies. Another 2019 object is the infusion of artificial intelligence into financial services onboarding and compliance tools. The firm has 30,000 users located in the United Kingdom and United States.
SalesLoft looks for partners that help “activate the authentic seller in everyone,” boost their productivity, and help customers scale their business. Vendors should be adjacent to Sales Engagement, filling the gaps of functionality in the platform.
Partners pledge to serve joint customers first, invest in the success of integrations through co-marketing, and “support our developer community, thus enabling innovation,” said VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester.
Kester noted that the partner ecosystem provides a strategic market advantage as it “creates a moat in the ecosystem supplanting us as the dominant #1 player.” It also “significantly enhances customer LTV (lifetime value) due to the sticky nature of usage” and “drives customer acquisition through the roof, and CAC (customer acquisition cost) down due to leads driven from partners.”
The SalesLoft ecosystem has grown to 54 partners with a million “integration actions executed” over the past six months. Nearly 2,700 teams have one or two integrations with 800 having implemented three and 500 having four or more integrations.
The top partner integrations are LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Sendoso, Showpad, and Vidyard. VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester called Sales Navigator “by far the most popular integration we have.” The SNAP integration supports four cadence steps: Account and Lead (contact) research, introductions, connection request, and InMail (Salesforce is an investor in SalesLoft).
Sendoso provides a direct mail service. Integrated cadence steps allow sales reps to send direct mail, company swag, handwritten notes, eGifts, and Amazon items.
Showpad is integrated with the sales reps’ workflow. Within SalesLoft, users can easily add content to their email campaigns, and gauge their prospects’ level of interest. Showpad also provides context-specific content recommendations.
Vidyard GoVideo helps sales reps “easily create polished and personal videos for your prospects using Vidyard GoVideo webcam and screen recorder,” said Kester. Sales reps can “boost response rates and humanize sales outreach by adding video to your sales emails in SalesLoft.
SalesLoft
includes a freemium version and has supported 175,000 platform videos.
SalesLoft
announced several partnerships that are in their development pipeline including
LeanData, Drift, Ramble Chat, and Seismic.
LeanData provides Lead-to-Account assignments with automated cadences by persona and customized conditions. Sales Operations defines the lead assignment and routing rules which are displayed as a flow diagram with Send to SalesLoft Cadence steps. Duplicate checking will prevent a second cadence from being kicked off.
Drift and Ramble Chat are joining Intercom as chat partners. “Ramble empowers sales engagement customers with a unique ability to extend chat directly through their platform,” said Kester. “Ramble creates an additional channel of communication for their customer interactions.”
Ramble
Chat performs a reverse IP lookup that identifies the account and logs it to
Salesforce or SalesLoft, providing a form of first-party intent intelligence.
Both inbound (anonymous) and outbound (Cadence driven) chat are supported
with outbound chat connected to the originating sales rep.
“We are excited for our partnership with SalesLoft. Ramble’s unique architecture enables us to deploy chat within third-party applications, like SalesLoft, which changes how sales leaders utilize chat for pipeline contribution. We not only make chat ‘outbound’ and ‘inbound,’ but we give companies the ability to extend chat anywhere online as a means of instant connection and sales acceleration. Moving beyond ‘omnichannel’ and towards ‘omnipresence.’ The full breadth our chat technology can be deployed organically, directly from SalesLoft, which provides a more seamless client experience and new channels for Sales Engagement.”
Ramble CEO Justin McDonald
Seismic offers an enterprise-grade content management system which recommends the next-best action for content. The platform employs analytics to recommend which content is most likely to resonate with a prospect based on buying stage, vertical, etc.
DataGrail provides a GDPR and CCPA compliance tool which “enforces on-demand access and deletion of a requester’s personal data across all first and third-party/external business systems.” DataGrail also centralizes customer email preferences. Other features include the “detection of non-consented or high-risk contacts, including geographic fingerprinting and migration for consented to non-consented purposes” and alerts if a deleted contact is being recreated in a sales or marketing platform.
Current apps are displayed on SalesLoft’s App Directory which helps admins see how integrations work, understand their use cases, and co-market the integration. A developer’ portal is in development.
At their Rainmaker 2019 conference, SalesLoft announced a doubling of their partner ecosystem, mobile functionality, a rebuilt analytics engine, and a hot leads feature, and expanded CRM connectors. The show attracted 1,300 attendees to hear 164 speakers.
SalesLoft released an iOS mobile app that allows users to place digital calls through the SalesLoft platform. Calls are directed through a Twilio dialer and then analyzed by SalesLoft. Post-call automated features include automated transcription and indexing, call analytics, and CRM sync. Thus, if the rep places a call on the road, she will have a fully transcribed, indexed, and analyzed call when she returns to the office.
Prior
to making the call, the user can set one-sided recording or local number calling.
Users can also add new contacts to cadences and will be notified when
prospects engage with a cadence. An activity stream is on the mobile app
roadmap.
For
inbound calls, the rep can quickly enter call notes which are synced to the
CRM.
There
are no immediate plans for an Android app.
“I believe sales is about relationships and sales engagement is essential to building those relationships. Through data science, meeting intelligence and efficient account-based workflows, SalesLoft lets you focus on what matters most: building relationships and solving customers’ problems.”
SalesLoft VP of Product Butler Raines
SalesLoft
is implementing a new reporting framework with an event-driven architecture
which supports an open data API. Two reports, a Cadence Performance
report and an Account Report, have already been rolled out. The framework
supports configurable dashboards which can be quickly built with advanced
analytics and visualizations using Business Intelligence tools. Sales Ops
can also build real-time reports and dashboards within Salesforce.
SalesLoft is extending machine learning and AI into its platform. For example, SalesLoft machine learning tools detect the prospect’s position and level at a firm and selects the optimal persona-based cadence. A new Hot Leads feature prioritizes prospects based on content engagement and website activity.
SalesLoft, which has long supported Salesforce, will be adding connectors for Microsoft Dynamics and SAP.
“We have seen a sizeable increase in CRM demand beyond the Salesforce ecosystem. SalesLoft is excited to enable organizations running on SAP C4C and Microsoft Dynamics to better serve their customers.”
Sean Kester, SalesLoft VP of Platform Strategy
SalesLoft will be regionalizing its data hosting by region or usage. “This not only allows for customization (for example, keeping data that originates from the European Union in the EU) but also improves security and platform performance,” blogged the firm. “Whether it’s through regulation compliance, security-minded development, or thought leadership, SalesLoft looks to partner with our customers for mutual success.”
SalesLoft announced a set of additional partners available through their app directory. I will discuss these on Monday.
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter Gave the Opening Keynote at the SalesLoft Rainmaker 2019 Sales Conference.
At their Rainmaker 2019 conference, SalesLoft announced a doubling of their ecosystem, mobile functionality, a rebuilt analytics engine, and a hot leads feature. The show attracted 1,300 attendees to hear 164 speakers.
“We’re in the middle of an evolution in the relationship between sellers and buyers,” said SalesLoft’s CEO, Kyle Porter. “Sales teams need to tear up their playbooks and start fresh with a blend of human, relevant sales tactics and the modern technology needed to create an authentic sales experience that is repeatable and scalable.”
SalesLoft’s
purpose is to “to activate the authentic seller in all of us” and elevate the
sales profession by offering “world-class experiences.” The firm operates
under a quintet of values that inform its hiring and operations:
SalesLoft Operating Principles.
These
principles led to SalesLoft being named the top-midsized employer in Atlanta
for the second year in a row. “We embrace the transformative power of
technology innovation for our customers, but we believe in people first,” said
Porter. “Our founding purpose is to create an environment where others
can come to learn more, do more, and become more. Team members are
encouraged to take their talents and skills and apply them to serve others and
find fulfillment. We show love to our people so they can share that
sentiment with our customers.”
SalesLoft’s
sales engagement platform is designed to support evolving buying behavior.
B2B buyers are swamped by messaging and “super busy,” yet need to solve
complex problems. Buyers are looking for an “engaging, authentic
experience” that understands buyer needs and solves their problems.
However, sellers are inefficient and operate with broken processes.
SalesLoft is looking to address process failures by centralizing sales
workflows and encouraging best practices. Objectives include elevating
the sales profession through community, encouraging diversity amongst its staff
and event speakers (54% of whom were women or minorities at Rainmaker), and
transparency in its policies and outcomes.
Porter
described his future vision of sales where “every single seller has a digital
assistant by their side” along with a “sales coaching network” which is a
“giant distributed network of sales activity.” Sales reps are supported
by a digital assistant which delivers broad data and context-specific insights
based on seller, stage, and customer to help reps “connect authentically with
the buyer.”
Porter
contends that “you can’t take the human out of the equation” but you can make
it “easier to distribute a world-class experience to your customer.”
“[It’s time to] elevate the profession of sales to focus on delivering customers world-class experiences. With that, you can maximize revenue. A sales experience must be authentic, engaging, relevant, human, one-to-one and, most importantly, it understands buyers’ needs and solves their problems.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
Sales
reps have long suffered from a bad reputation, being forced to take ethical
shortcuts to meet managerial demands. SalesLoft is looking to lead by
example. According to Porter, when “we do right,” SalesLoft customers are
able to hire, innovate, and invent new things.
SalesLoft’s
other goal is to improve the efficiency and efficacy of sales teams. A
SalesLoft study found a 22% increase in opportunities created when comparing
the 90-day windows before and after implementing their platform. To back
up their research, they commissioned a Forrester study of their customers which
found a
2.5X improvement in response rates
20% lift in conversion and productivity
Doubling of the funnel
13% increase in renewals
329% ROI
“Many
people say we’re in a state of digital transformation,” said SalesLoft CMO
Sydney Sloan. “For sales, we’re entering a revolution of how we engage
customers.”
Buyers are looking for partners that work with them to identify and resolve issues. “Today’s successful seller has to be a problem solver and you do that by asking great questions and collectively solving the problem with and for your customer,” said Sloan. “It doesn’t matter if the product goes 10 miles an hour or 50 miles an hour, it’s the people I want to work with in partnership and, at the end of the day, it’s the people I want to work with. I’ll pick a company because of the relationship. The product still has to solve my problems but if two things are equal, I’ll go with the partnership.”
The DiscoverOrg acquisition of NeverBounce was in the works for six months and began with DiscoverOrg’s search for a verification vendor that could better handle large scale processing. “It’s a core competency we wanted to own,” said DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck.
DiscoverOrg is retaining the NeverBounce team of fifteen, but shuttering its smaller Salt Lake City office with employees being relocated to Cleveland. The acquisition was announced on March 5th.
NeverBounce 2018 revenue was $4 million and included both B2B and B2C marketing file enhancement revenues. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
NeverBounce
will continue as both a standalone offering and be integrated into the merged
DiscoverOrg / Zoominfo platform.
The combined platform is planned for launch in five months.
“When we made the ZoomInfo acquisitions, the promise was that this would strengthen differentiators around the quality of data we deliver. The NeverBounce acquisition is a very clear incremental addition to that value. It helps us enhance the quality of information we deliver immediately.”
DiscoverOrg President Katie Bullard
If
you count Zoominfo’s September acquisition of Datanyze,
DiscoverOrg has acquired three companies in the past six months. The
transaction doubled the company headcount to around 1,000 employees. But
Schuck isn’t closing the door on acquisitions saying that he will be
opportunistic in his approach.
“There are a lot of companies in our space that we follow,” he said. “If the opportunity is right, we have been quick to do acquisitions. There’s a big opportunity for consolidation in our industry so that customers don’t have to go to 19 different vendors for data and data cleansing needs.”
SalesLoft Meeting Intelligence transcribes and indexes Zoom calls to share with stakeholders.
I always enjoy hearing about companies eating their own dogfood, but it is rare that it is the CEO utilizing his or her own platform to demonstrate product value post-sale and collecting meaningful customer intelligence.
Last week, Kyle Porter gave a master class on how he has deployed SalesLoft functionality to build relationships with SalesLoft’s top new clients. Not only does it magnify goodwill at the beginning of a relationship, but Porter garners insights into his company’s product and sales process while offering tips to new customers.
Briefly,
here is how SalesLoft leverages Salesforce and SalesLoft to delight its top
customers:
Salesforce kicks off a cadence email for each closed/won opportunity over $50,000. The email is a congratulatory note to the primary account rep who closed the deal. It includes a request for an introduction to the executive sponsor.
The email is forwarded by the sales rep to the sponsor with Porter cc’d.
Porter responds and forwards his open times (SalesLoft calendaring technology)
Porter joins the Zoom call with four objectives: Thank them for their business; solicit feedback on the SalesLoft sales experience; share the company vision and roadmap; and share three pro tips which “If they get out ahead of these, they will be wildly successful in sales engagement.” (Zoom is a SalesLoft partner)
The SalesLoft bot automatically transcribes and analyzes the conversation which is shared with internal stakeholders.
Porter sets up a follow-up cadence for six months later.
Before sales
engagement, this would have required a substantial number of manual tasks and
likely have been limited to top brands or million-dollar contracts. But
with SalesLoft’s cadence and meeting management tools, it is likely that the
time involved on the sales side is four minutes for Porter (note response and
scheduling the six-month follow up), two minutes for the sales rep (email
forward), and the time meeting with the executive sponsor at the new customer
(a high-return use of Porter’s time).
Technographics vendor HG Data officially rebranded as HG Insights, rolling out a new name, logo, and website. The rebrand coincides with the launch of their new HG Insights platform. They have retained HG (Holy Grail, not mercury) and shifted from being a data company to an insights company, moving up the knowledge pyramid.
Customers are asking them to “help us isolate on tech
insights farther down the funnel,” said VP of Product and Marketing Kineon
Walker.
Outsell places information value along a five-level pyramid with raw data in the base and smart data (“normalized and standardized, categorized, linked, and indexed”) at level two. HG Data resided at level two with a highly regarded dataset of product / vendor data that was broadly licensed to sales intelligence vendors, customer data platforms, and predictive analytics companies. While a pure data licensing strategy can provide initial funds for a startup, it quickly caps the growth of the organization as much of the potential value add resides in licensor tools and insights, not the smart data. Thus, to continue growing, HG Data began developing customer-facing workflow tools (Outsell’s level three) a few years ago and expanded its content value with the September acquisition of London-based Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.
The Pivotal
IQ acquisition provided HG Data with an “opportunity to redefine what
technographics means and what technographics is” said Walker at the time.
HG Insights is emphasizing ABM targeting and strategic account intelligence:
“HG Insights helps you ignite opportunity. Opportunity that helps your business accelerate growth by providing you with an unprecedented view of the global markets, industries, and companies you sell to. Intelligence that empowers your business to generate more revenue from your Account Based Marketing programs by scoring your accounts and leads to pinpoint the best prospects. Insights that enable you to increase deal sizes by identifying the company profiles with the highest revenue potential. Insights that help you build better account strategy plans so that your sales team can increase win rates and shorten sales cycles. HG Insights delivers strategic account intelligence that allows your business to remove subjectivity from sales territory management and ensure that your team is focused on the best prospects in every market. Insights you can use to gain market share and outperform your competition. Insights you can trust.”
“We wanted to elevate the look and feel of what has become an
extremely sophisticated company,” said Walker. “No one has the quality
technographics that we have, which include the most accurate technology spend
data available in the market. The new on-demand capabilities of our HG
Insights Platform are unmatched by any competitor. Our unique ability to
work proactively with customers to deliver the Holy Grail of business insights
is reflected in our new name, and we’re excited to see our new HG Insights
Platform drive growth for businesses around the world.”
The HG Insights platform covers two million global company
locations with technographics and spending models. Technographic
intelligence spans 10,000 products across 4,500 vendors.
“We’ve always been an inventive company that finds new ways to help customers stay a step ahead. After seeing so many customers use our technology intelligence to make important strategic decisions, we knew it was time to define our company around the unique insights we deliver. Our new HG Insights Platform gives us an incredible opportunity to showcase our depth and expertise to new audiences with a fresh new image.”
Elizabeth Cholawsky, HG Insights CEO
HG Insights enterprise clients include Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AWS, Cisco, Tata, Workday and Red Hat. Data partners include DataFox (Oracle), TechTarget, Lattice Engines, and Dun & Bradstreet.
The following is a Quora post answering the question, “Does LinkedIn Sell Your Info?”
This is likely to fall into a semantics question. If data is employed in the aggregate and your personally identifiable information is not disclosed, then I would argue that your information is not sold. Likewise, if you are presented an ad because your LinkedIn profile conforms with a target audience definition, your data is also not being sold.
I can’t answer for LinkedIn Recruiter, but can answer in the Sales and Marketing context.
LinkedIn offers a sales product called Sales Navigator. Users can view company and contact information on Navigator just as they can on the free service. It even supports viewing this data within third-party SNAP products. However, Navigator and SNAP are view only. Sales reps cannot download your profile or sync it with any of their partner platforms. They also restrict display of your email and phone information to your direct connects as well as other content you flag as restricted.
LinkedIn Marketing sells advertising on LinkedIn and Bing based upon your profile attributes. Advertisers define their target audience across a broad set of firmographic, career, and location variables, but these segments are not provided directly to the marketer. Instead, they are used for advertising display. Thus, your data isn’t sold, just your eyeballs.
LinkedIn treats its member’s data with respect. Microsoft, its parent company, has called for a US version of GDPR, the European data privacy standard. CEO Satya Nadella stated that “privacy is a fundamental human right” on an April 2018 earnings call and said that the firm has implemented an “end-to-end privacy architecture” which is GDPR compliant.
The LinkedIn SNAP AppExchange connector displays LinkedIn content and functionality within Salesforce, but does not sync any company or contact data with SFDC.
DiscoverOrg announced another acquisition this morning, its third in the past eighteen months. NeverBounce, an email verification and list cleansing service, is being folded into DiscoverOrg. NeverBounce offers real-time email verification, a verification API, a JavaScript widget for webforms, and free email list analytics. Connectors are available for a broad set of MAPs and Email Services including Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, MailChimp, and Constant Contact.
NeverBounce claims a 99.9% email delivery rate and a 97% SLA. Emails are classified into five categories: Valid, Invalid, Accept All, Unknown and Disposable. The service confirms that domains are live, flags duplicates, and repairs syntax prior to processing.
“A big part of our value proposition to customers is we provide the highest quality data in the marketplace. A big part of that is ensuring the email addresses are deliverable and high accuracy.”
DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck
Integration will be a significant operational issue for DiscoverOrg. While they previously acquired iProfile and RainKing, those were similar companies, so the integration was focused on quickly reprocessing their datasets through DiscoverOrg editorial validation and migrating customers to the DiscoverOrg platform. The recent acquisitions – NeverBounce, Zoominfo, and Datanyze, which was acquired by Zoominfo in September – are complementary assets so merging applications present a greater level of technical risk than their previous acquisitions. However, email validation is already part of ongoing data quality processes at Zoominfo and DiscoverOrg, so the execution risk associated with NeverBounce is lower than Zoominfo and Datanyze.
NeverBounce
is a logical acquisition following Zoominfo as it allows them to build email
hygiene services into Zoominfo and DiscoverOrg while reducing the cost of email
validation across Zoominfo and DiscoverOrg’s set of contact profiles with
emails. Over the past few years, the sales intelligence vendors have been
building out B2B marketing services including email verification, data
enrichment, and ICP / TAM analysis. As DiscoverOrg has long positioned
itself as the highest quality source of executive contacts, NeverBounce helps
burnish that positioning as they expand their contact coverage twenty-fold.
“While finding net new buyers is always going to be vital to sales and marketing efforts, it has become equally as important to manage, update and cleanse existing data that is going stale sitting in CRM and marketing automation systems. Our partnership with NeverBounce makes solving both of these challenges easier for our customers.”
DiscoverOrg President Katie Bullard
“When
we announced the combination of DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo, we promised to
deliver on the B2B data trifecta: the best, bar-none, quality, quantity, and
depth, and this announcement only reinforces our quality differentiator in the
market,” said DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck. “We are now embedding
NeverBounce’s email verification tools directly into our data and research
team’s processes to lower the email bounce rates in both platforms AND over the
next few months, we will integrate it into several of our customer-facing tools,
including our data enrichment platform, Enrich.”
NeverBounce Volume Pricing
NeverBounce
will continue as a standalone data hygiene offering. DiscoverOrg and
Zoominfo may purchase NeverBounce services at a discounted rate. NeverBounce
list pricing begins at 0.8 cents on 10,000 processed emails and drops to 0.3
cents on one million records. Marketers can pay for each list or purchase
credits in bulk. There is no charge for de-duplication services. There
is also no charge for manual list reviews kicked out by the platform to their
deliverability team.
A
10,000-record file is processed in two to ten minutes with 100,000 records
processed in 45. NeverBounce claims bank-level security and European
privacy support (GDPR and the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S Privacy Shield Frameworks).
“I’m
thrilled to partner with DiscoverOrg to extend our mission to improve the
success of go-to-market efforts,” says Brad Owen, NeverBounce CEO. “Every
bad email address can cost an organization up to $11 per record, which equates
to millions of wasted dollars for many companies. Together, DiscoverOrg
and NeverBounce are committed to ending the curse of bad sales and marketing
data.”
NeverBounce has 100,000 clients and was established in 2014. The acquisition price was not disclosed. NeverBounce has fifteen employees and will retain its office in Cleveland with Salt Lake City employees being relocated.
Update (3/5/19 5:30 PM EST) Amended the last sentence about employees.
CEO Kyle Porter attributes SalesLoft’s revenue growth to a strong company culture.
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter announced that his sales engagement firm hit $50M in ARR while maintaining a 4.9 Glassdoor rating. 96% of employees would recommend SalesLoft to a friend, 99% approved of the CEO, and 96% had a positive business outlook.
Porter
equated SalesLoft’s success with respect for his employees:
“Our owners and exec team loves on our employees so they love on you (our customers and soon to be customers). Here’s to keeping healthy as you scale.”
Porter had been advised by a founder / CEO that maintaining such a high-level of employee respect would be increasingly difficult with growth.“I remember a slight tinge of fear when they said this because organizational health is the most important focus area for me as CEO,” said Porter. “But…this team has channeled that fear and delivered. So take that naysayers! :)”
SalesLoft is holding its Rainmaker Conference in Atlanta March 11 – 13. Coincidentally, one of their top competitors, Outreach, is holding its Unleash Conference in San Diego March 10 – 12.
