European technology sales intelligence vendor Rhetorik opened a US sales hub in California.  The office will be led by John South, who was named the VP North America.

“Our goal is to meet the needs of US companies seeking European data expertise,” said Rhetorik CEO Meredith Amdur.  “It’s a very exciting prospect to be combining John’s experience and knowledge of the global data market with Rhetorik’s IT databases and data management services in order to achieve this.”

California is a logical location for US market entry (the firm already has a Canadian development office).  Not only is a high percentage of US enterprise software and cloud companies headquartered in California, but the CCPA data privacy regulations are akin to EU GDPR requirements, making marketing departments more sensitive to data privacy and regulatory compliance.

Rhetorik recently expanded its technographics intelligence NetFinder+ service across the EMEA region with support of 17 European countries and Israel.  The service provides “accuracy, completeness, and compliance across Europe,” said Amdur.  Rhetorik emphasizes that contact data is collected subject to the location-level data privacy rules of each jurisdiction and subject to the “Robinson lists” of various jurisdictions (e.g. The CTPS phone opt-out list in the U.K., DNC in Ireland).

NetFinder+ includes a market analytics module that helps product management and competitive intelligence groups evaluate their market position by category and country.  It can also be used to assess complementary partner market share (by installation).

Rhetorik separately offers a DataClinik hygiene and enrichment service.

South has a long history of new business development in the technographics space, having served as the VP of Sales at Datanyze (now owned by Zoominfo) and the head of Client Success and Sales at Aberdeen.  He most recently was the Director of Business Development for Imperium.

South will be “responsible for driving sales, new business development, and planning strategies for the sales teams.”