Just before the pandemic hit, Canadian behavioral intent vendor LeadSift hit $1 million in revenue with a 6% per month growth rate. As the firm began to absorb the recession, CEO Tukan Das adopted a policy of radical transparency with his team, providing them with daily updates on the company’s status and letting them know they had cash in the bank to avoid layoffs.
“I would say we have navigated COVID pretty well. Fortunately, we were in a position where there’s more of a tailwind in our industry, with more data needed, and data specifically for helping other B2B companies identify their buyers.”
LeadSift CEO Tukan Das
The firm did take an initial 8% revenue hit, but it is now growing at a 5% a month, bringing their run rate above pre-pandemic levels.
“When COVID hit…a lot of companies just went into a little bit of a freeze,” said Das. “Some of our customers were B2B companies in the travel and event management space, and some of them, their whole marketing teams were fired. So they obviously had to pause any other spend.”
The end of trade shows meant the loss of some customers, but they went on the offensive and added technographics as an alternative source of technology-specific leads. LeadSift also added a full-time marketing manager and part-time social media manager, bringing their headcount to 14 (two part-time). The firm is profitable.
LeadSift also worked a deal with Halifax-based Innovacorp to deliver six months of intent data to Nova Scotian firms at no charge, with Innovacorp picking up half the foregone revenue.
LeadSift is developing a new control panel for delivering intent data and technographics to its customers. The new platform will support additional analytics and customization. The Q4 platform release will be more scalable and will provide administrators with greater control over which companies and topics are to be tracked.
LeadSift generates intent data via web scraping across company websites, blogs, job boards, social channels, SEC filings, etc. LeadSift looks for public actions such as likes, comments, job postings, executive hires, and technology implementations. It then associates these events with contacts.
The LeadSift company universe spans 40 million contacts associated with 8 million companies and domains. Contacts include emails with twenty percent also providing direct-dial phones. LeadSift contacts are GDPR compliant. The company universe focuses on English-speaking countries.
LeadSift Head of Growth Alex Field views their event intent data as complementary to other intent data sources, with LeadSift helping verify other intent signals such as visitor intelligence or third-party media site visits. LeadSift scores accounts based on persona (who is active), event type, event recency, and size of the company. These scores can be combined with other intent scores to provide greater confidence around buyer intent.
Leads are fed daily to CRMs and MAPs, including Salesforce, Pardot, HubSpot, Marketo, and Eloqua. Pricing begins at $1,000 per month for company-level intent and $1,500 per month for contact-level intent. Das is not looking for his next funding round but isn’t ruling it out. “We are going to be opportunistic. If we continue to grow at the rate we are, even during COVID, if we see an opportunity and the terms are right, we would certainly consider raising capital. But it’s not something where I’m saying, ‘We need to raise capital or we are going to run out of money.’”