Month: November 2020

TechTarget Q3 2020 Earnings

After a weak second quarter, TechTarget’s revenue rebounded in Q3, rising 7% to $36.2 million (it was 1% in Q2).  Year-to-date revenue hit $102.5 million, up 4.5%.  Long-term revenues, which are primarily subscription contracts to Priority Engine, represented 35% of revenue, the same percentage as Q3 2019.  International sales are up 30%, with strength in both lead-gen services and Priority Engine.

Priority Engine revenue grew 4% during the quarter, with growth slowed by weakness at “smaller customers hesitant to commit to yearlong subscriptions to new products and services.”

TechTarget continues to invest in Priority Engine, releasing a significant upgrade in September that supported prospect-level intent and an improved Salesforce.com integration.  With the release, they initiated a “double-digit price increase” that has been accepted by the market. “We have not had pushback on the pricing so far,” said CEO Mike Cotoia. “So we see that as a positive sign going into 2021.”

Priority Engine’s “early usage is encouraging,” with page views up 80% since January; furthermore, “portal interactions by users that self-identify as salespeople are up over 40% since we released the new sales-friendly version.”

Cotoia called the release the most significant since Priority Engine’s launch.  Unlike previous releases that focused on the marketing function, the latest enhancements were centered around UI enhancements and the sales use case.  Combining account-level intent with prospect-level intent is “really enabling and empowering” sales teams, helping them “rank and prioritize within their own territories.”  Reps now have access to two views: a territory account report and an active prospects report.

Sales reps can now discover intent data and insights for active accounts and prospects within a Visualforce tab in Salesforce.  If a contact isn’t in Salesforce, they can quickly add the contact.

“Building a cohesive and easy-to-use workflow for both marketing and sales has always been in our roadmap,” summed up Cotoia. “The September release has been really, really impactful.”

TechTarget will focus on “leveraging our customer’s first-party data along with our data.  We have other key engagement opt-ins that we are going to be integrating into this as well.”

TechTarget also saw weakness in the large legacy IT vendors, though it was above Q2 numbers, and they anticipate growth in their Global 10 in Q4.  TechTarget has been diversifying its customer base, with the Global 10 accounting for 20% of its customer base, down from 40% a decade ago.

TechTarget anticipates that the shift from event sponsorships to online lead generation will persist after the pandemic.  

“We believe that much of this shift will become permanent as we do not believe the face-to-face business will return to its previous spend levels pre-COVID,” said Cotoia. “This is showing up mostly in our International numbers as those markets had significantly more events as part of their budget mix than in North America.  Today, most of those deals are short term, mirroring the event buy.  The opportunity that we are focused on here is to migrate those budgets from face-to-face to intent-based lead generation and then graduate those customers to annual Priority Engine subscriptions. We believe this is achievable as the vast majority of our customers have a strategic initiative to use data to make their sales and marketing organizations more intelligent, efficient, and effective.”

Customers are focusing on their digital strategy, and TechTarget offers content syndication, content marketing, lead generation, and Priority Engine.  All of these digital offerings help tech firms “get in front of their prospects and their existing customers.”

“Even if it starts with lead-generation and content marketing offerings integrated with some of the brand solutions, at the end of the day, our customers are really focused on leveraging the right intent throughout their marketing and sales cycles when they’re in market,” said Cotoia.  

These lead-gen campaigns provide a beachhead for upgrading to subscription services. “Priority Engine plays a really good place in that as we start transitioning folks from events to content syndication from content syndication to integrated online solution from integrated online intent-driven solutions to Priority Engine integrated campaigns,” said Cotoia. “I think this plays well for us in the long-term.”

“Let’s unpack what we are seeing and what we’ve learned from the pandemic.  First, IT spending is no longer a discretionary item for most companies. They see digital transformation as a necessary investment to remain competitive. This dynamic has benefitted our customers. Second, the migration of IT spending to a subscription model has built in significant resilience and predictability to most of our customer’s business models, which in turn has kept their spending levels on sales and marketing fairly stable as compared to more volatility in past downturns.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

Cotoia credited the shift to subscription revenue as a significant contributor to its success during the pandemic. “We are very pleased at how our business has performed during the pandemic. It reinforces that the changes we made to transition our business to a data subscription business is paying off in terms of building a stronger company with a more sticky and predictable revenue stream.”

TechTarget announced Q4 guidance between $42 and $43 million, almost 20% growth year-over-year.  Some of this growth is the transition from events to online, but some is “pent-up budget” from event marketing that has been held in reserve.

“They have end-of-the-year budget, [and] they want to use it,” said Cotoia.  “TechTarget is viewed as a trusted resource.”

Cotoia was asked about ZoomInfo’s acquisition of Clickagy but wasn’t overly concerned about the real-time intent solution, saying that Zoominfo simply acquired its supplier.  Cotoia called it a “smart move,” but not one that significantly changes its offering.  He also applauded Zoominfo’s contact quality, then pivoted to the differences between their services with opted-in reader intent derived from their media sites.

“What we have is what we call real and observed first-party purchase intent.  You have to start with investing in content.  We are 100% focused on the enterprise IT market.  We have the right engagements coming in.  What we know [is] which people are looking at which vendor content or which editorial content or peer-to-peer content, or were doing a search on a very specific technology segment within a very specific region.  That’s real.  It’s very difficult to leverage things like third-party cookies or bidstream data…[with] a lot of questions about that.  It’s only at the account-level.”

Cotoia said that TechTarget’s approach is “very transparent” in its practices, focusing on the “right” engagement and intent signals. “We’re the largest place on the web where enterprise IT vendors publish their content through their marketing efforts.”  TechTarget generates this content across 146 enterprise IT community websites and can tell its Priority Engine customers which articles were read, which white papers were downloaded, which webcasts were viewed, which terms were searched, which competitors are being evaluated, and by whom.  Owned media sites with opted-in readers deliver “real and observed intent and engagement signals that will help power and transition our customers’ sales and marketing efforts” that are data-driven. What’s more, TechTarget’s intent surfaces opportunities at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

RingDNA Releases Guided Selling

Sales Enablement vendor RingDNA released Guided Selling, a set of Next Best Actions (NBA) for sales reps.  Guided Selling advises sales reps on what to do, when to do it, whom to contact, and what messaging to employ.  Sales managers can create and deploy preferred playbooks to their salesforce, even without face-to-face training.  Both inbound and outbound selling plays are supported, helping “implement proven playbooks at scale.”

“When you know what winning deals look and sound like, you know exactly where to focus to improve outcomes,” said RingDNA CEO Howard Brown.  “Guided selling uses artificial intelligence to provide revenue teams with tools, insights, and next best actions necessary to win deals, grow accounts, maximize revenue.”

“It’s a fool’s errand to expect a 22-year-old sales development rep (SDR) fresh out of university to develop a consistent, scalable, repeatable prioritization, execution, and qualification process.  Be prescriptive in your expectations and methodical in the tools you arm your teams with…for the overwhelming majority of your team—who have never held full-time, quota-carrying roles and aren’t able to think strategically yet—you must be prescriptive.  You need to show them how to think strategically and tactically as they approach their daily work.”

TOPO analyst Phoebe Conybeare

Guided Selling is embedded into the Salesforce Sales Cloud and delivers prioritized actions for opportunities, contacts, and leads, helping reduce sales rep planning time.  The AI-powered task list recommends the tasks that will put sales reps on “the shortest path to revenue.”  The task list is dynamic, updating based upon prospect behavior.  Thus, priorities are reassessed based on prospect interaction with e-mails, web forms, multi-media, and social media.

Guided Selling includes a set of best-practices templates based upon billions of sales interactions monitored by RingDNA since its 2012 launch. Salesforce Dashboards help managers optimize cadences and messaging, allowing them to test and refine rep workflows.  Cadence activities across e-mail, phone, text, and social are synchronized with Salesforce.

Gartner stated that 51% of sales organizations have deployed or plan to deploy algorithmic-guided selling over the next five years.

“Intended to augment more traditional sales tools, such as sales playbooks, algorithmic-guided selling uses sales data to boost the seller’s ability to engage with prospects…Algorithmic-guided selling leverages artificial intelligence technology and existing sales data to guide sellers through deals, automating manual sales actions while reducing the need for individual seller judgment in the sales process.”

Tad Travis, Gartner VP of Research, “Algorithmic-Guided Selling to Have Significant Impact on Sales Productivity”

“In this new remote paradigm, companies are having to do more with less,” said Brown.  “Guided Selling is a total game-changer for sales teams, as it uses AI to focus reps on next best actions while empowering them to build stronger relationships and better solve customer problems.”

Guided Selling is Generally Available.

Terminus Acquires GrowFlare

ABM Platform Terminus, which has been on an acquisition binge the past year, added another complementary asset to its platform with the acquisition of sales intelligence vendor GrowFlare.  GrowFlare offers Ideal Customer Profiling (ICP) based on psychographics, which are the common phrases and interests companies share.  Other features include account profiling, prospecting, alerting, and a Chrome extension.  GrowFlare recently doubled its US company dataset to 500,000+ firms.  GrowFlare coverage spans over 90% of “US businesses with Purchasing Power.”

“GrowFlare adds a highly-differentiated level of account intelligence to the Terminus platform,” said Terminus CEO Tim Kopp. “Now teams can identify best-fit target accounts instantly, leverage unmatched AI and psychographic data to know exactly what to say and when, all while being more budget efficient.  This kind of psychographic data has long been used by B2C marketers to profile their future customers and now B2B marketers can as well. This is the modern approach to uncovering target accounts, and accelerates our position as the most intelligent B2B sales and marketing and platform available.”

Terminus likens psychographics to Netflix and Spotify, which can recommend similar content based upon user behavior.  Psychographics extend this logic to account selection. GrowFlare’s unique value proposition is its psychographics.  Most vendors only employ firmographics and technographics in their ICP modeling.

Psychographics are based upon AI and natural language processing of company websites, social media, government filings, job listings, etc.  GrowFlare identifies the “key characteristics that are common across your favorite customers (or any set of companies you want to identify).  From there you can find brand new accounts that match up to your customers, the new product you’re launching, the vertical-specific case study you’re about to drop, and so on.  Enter your favorite customer into GrowFlare and it will spit out hundreds of companies that think and act just like they do, instantly,” blogged Terminus.

When users click on a trending psychographic, they are presented with in-context examples of the phrasing with the term highlighted.  The trending topics and psychographics are “invaluable for marketing and sales personalization,” said GrowFlare Founder and CEO Matt Belkin.

Terminus is also positioning GrowFlare as a new form of “observed intent” versus third-party intent that is simply inferred. “If you’re a data-driven marketer, this should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up because you know this primary data is a powerful signal coming directly from the accounts you want to target,” crowed Eisenberg.

“Your friends in sales will receive alerts about accounts that are starting to become interested in different things, almost as if it was trending on Twitter. They’ll be able to understand the most important focuses for those businesses, the psychographic topics that are trending, and just how serious they are about those focuses. They’ll know who to reach out to, when to do it, and what to say to deliver a beautifully personalized experience.”

Terminus Blog

Belkin noted that the two firms complement each other, with GrowFlare helping sales and marketing teams efficiently find accounts and Terminus focusing on account engagement.  With the acquisition, revenue teams can target segments based on firmographic, relationship, intent, and now psychographic data.

In GrowFlare, a similar companies New Prospects list includes a Fit Score, which gauges the level of similarity to the target company along with the shared psychographics.  So if a rep just closed a deal at the target, he or she can be confident that the high fit scores are similar in their market positioning.  Fit Scores are exportable to lead scoring models.  A quick view magnifying glass icon displays the trending topics for any of the prospects.

Any Keyword Search or Prospector Active List is automatically setup for alerts, whereby GrowFlare notifies the customer each week of meaningful changes and new prospect opportunities.  When viewed, the table of new prospects includes a Trend score, which is the change in rank position from the prior week.  An Active List focused on competitors will notify sales and marketing when competitor positioning shifts.  This tool would also be valuable for competitive intelligence analysts and business development reps looking to track a narrow universe of competitors or partners.

” Everywhere you look sales and marketing teams are wasting millions of dollars trying to acquire the wrong customers and saying the wrong things.  It’s crazy and the whole approach is broken.  We started GrowFlare to fix it.  You already know your best customers, GrowFlare helps you find 100 more just like them based on their shared interests.  It’s easy to see how focusing on what buyers care about – their psychographics – is far more effective when marketing and selling to them.  It sounds fancy, but it’s the same magic that powers recommendations for Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify in the consumer world.  We just built it for B2B.”

GrowFlare CEO Matt Belkin

Along with Prospector, GrowFlare offers a Prospector Bulk feature that executes against a full customer list.  According to Belkin, “The resulting output averages between 25x-100x more high-fit prospects that sales and that sales and marketing teams can target with account-based outbound campaigns.”

GrowFlare also offers Keyword Search for identifying companies that are using specific terms in their marketing along with shared psychographics, locations, and company sizes.  Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT are supported (e.g. “food delivery” NOT pet).   Keyword search “is valuable if you want to know what companies dominate specific messaging terms or if you are launching a new campaign and want to see who else may be positioned there,” said Belkin.

While many companies offer keyword searching, it is usually against a mined business description.  Only a few products, such as D&B Hoover’s Conceptual Searching, provide broader topical searching to build company lists.

GrowFlare is Terminus’ third acquisition over the past year.  They also acquired Ramble and its Chat Anywhere service and Sigstr for its email signature banner ads and relationship intelligence.

Belkin and the rest of the GrowFlare team are joining Terminus.  Belkin has twenty-five years of SaaS-industry experience at Adobe and Omniture.  At Domo Belkin was the Chief Operating Officer.  Belkin is Terminus’ new EVP of Data, Strategy, and Partnerships.

ABM platforms have emphasized top of the funnel audience engagement and given sales prioritization and messaging short shrift.  GrowFlare will help Terminus pass the ABM baton from marketing to sales.

I profiled the GrowFlare service back in June.

Global Database Credit Reports

UK-based Sales and Risk Intelligence vendor Global Database is launching company credit checks for nineteen countries.  Credit data is gathered via APIs from leading regional European providers of company and credit data.

The new reports include credit scores and limits; payments and inquiries; mortgages, charges, and county court judgments; directors and shareholders; group structures; trading addresses; five-year financials; key performance indicators and ratios; credit score and limit histories; company identifiers (e.g. registration numbers, tax ids, tradestyles), year incorporated; auditor; and document filings.

US data includes UCC (liens), bankruptcies, and payment histories.

Coverage currently spans

  • Americas: The United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil
  • Europe: The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Benelux, Ireland, and the Nordics
  • Asia: Japan, Thailand, Vietnam

Credit reports are available for all registered companies in the supported countries.  What’s more, coverage will grow rapidly with plans to support 120 countries by the end of the year with “instantly available credit reports.”

“By the end of Q1, we will have a credit report for every single country, including offline reports in areas where company information is much more difficult to get. Essentially, a client will make a fresh investigation request, and our partners will collect this information from on the ground sources.”

Global Database Managing Director Nicolae Buldumac

“We now offer a unified solution to our customers where they can identify their customers, get contact information for key executives, and run due diligence checks on new suppliers,” wrote Buldumac.  

Buldumac emphasized that the Global Database platform supports multiple global departments. “All this information is available in one single license, and this will save cost for many companies, as very often you need to pay a license for sales and marketing solution and another license for compliance.  Also, not many companies offer such information globally, and this is where we have a USP.”

During Q3, Global Database onboarded Amazon, Vodafone, WeWork, Dyson, and the Italian Trade Agency.  Global Database’s business has increased during the pandemic as firms look for more clients, require tools for assessing business risk, and source digital sales and marketing solutions in the absence of event marketing.

The credit risk solution will be offered both as a bundle with the existing sales and marketing platform and as a standalone product.  Pricing will depend on volume and countries, with discounts available for bundled subscriptions.

Global Database has sales and support offices in the UK and Moldova.

Dun & Bradstreet Launches D&B Email IQ

Dun & Bradstreet recently launched D&B Email IQ, which “allows clients to get some free data from us — a number of free data contacts per month,” said CEO Anthony Jabbour. The service is an automated data exchange with email signature blocks mined in exchange for access to Dun & Bradstreet’s company and contact intelligence.

D&B Email IQ is an Outlook plug-in that displays company and contact intelligence, contact and prospect recommendations, and related companies. Firmographics include address, phone, social links, sizing data, ultimate parent, and D-U-N-S Numbers.

D&B Email IQ users that share signature blocks receive 50 free leads (e.g. additional contacts at a company) per month.  Users that only share emails receive ten emails per month.  There is also a ten lead bonus for referrals.

D&B Email IQ appears to be a tool for collecting email signature blocks similar to Zoominfo’s Community edition.  According to their FAQ, “Business contact data collected via D&B Email IQ may be incorporated into the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud and be used to enhance and improve our products by enabling businesses to manage their financial risks, protect against fraud and dishonesty, know who they are doing business with, meet their compliance and regulatory obligations and better understand organizations, industries and markets.  Where permitted under applicable law, this information may also be used for sales and marketing purposes.”

Unlike the Zoominfo Community Edition, the Dun & Bradstreet contacts are integrated into the Outlook workflow.

Dun & Bradstreet states that collected data includes emails, meeting invitations, and signature blocks, including “name, job title and department, company name, email address, telephone number, fax number, company address, corporate URL, and social networking URL.”

Dun & Bradstreet is being careful to comply with data privacy rules including GDPR, CCPA, and CASL.  The plug-in is blocked in Europe and they are careful not to collect data about EU citizens.  To ensure GDPR compliance, records with European emails, phones, or addresses are filtered out of the database so not available for sharing.  As GDPR is extra-territorial, it is critical that private data concerning EU citizens not be collected and shared without opted-in permission, even if all of the parties sharing, collecting, and using the data are outside of the EU.

To comply with CCPA, no California mobile numbers are collected.  To comply with the Canadian CASL regulations, no Canadian emails are collected.

D&B Email IQ users are likely to be small businesses and job seekers.  Larger firms are less likely to permit sharing of emails and signature blocks.  Small firms with fewer resources would be more willing to trade signature block intelligence for fifty leads per month.  Assuming a value of $1 per record for detailed contact profiles at small firms, the potential market value of the leads is over $500 per user.

SalesIntel Acquires TUDLA; Adds Marketo Enrichment

Sales Intelligence Platform vendor SalesIntel acquired Latin American technology contacts vendor TUDLA.  The acquisition provides SalesIntel with Latin American data and the TUDLA research team. The TUDLA research team, based in Tijuana, supports a research on-demand call center in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

All TUDLA employees, including CEO Gary Gorton and contract research staff, are joining SalesIntel.

TUDLA has over sixty Fortune 500 customers that license human-verified contacts for the Latin American region.  TUDLA CEO, Gary Gorton will be assuming a strategic business development role, helping cross-sell the complementary contact databases and SalesIntel’s B2B DaaS offerings.

“This acquisition gives SalesIntel a fantastic opportunity to offer our customers high-quality B2B data and intelligence, which now includes the LATAM marketplace. We are especially pleased that Gary Gorton (CEO of TUDLA) and many members of the TUDLA team with decades of experience will join SalesIntel as we integrate TUDLA’s LATAM B2B data, customers, and research processes into the SalesIntel platform.”

SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani

TUDLA covers 34 countries across Central and South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.  The firm has one million verified Latin American contacts and another six million mined regional contacts.

SalesIntel also expanded its EMEA coverage with contacts for fourteen new countries, including France, Germany, Benelux, Italy, Ireland, Spain, New Zealand, Israel, and the UAE.  The TUDLA dataset will be available later this month in SalesIntel platforms.  The SalesIntel database has grown to over 6.5 million human-verified and over 80 million machine-processed contacts.

SalesIntel also announced that it supports Marketo data enrichment on both a batch and real-time basis.  Marketers may auto-enrich web forms and maintain contact and account records with current firmographic, biographic, and technographic intelligence.

Data enrichment may be performed as

  • Triggered webhooks that execute when new records are added to Marketo
  • Scheduled webhooks that regularly execute to prevent database decay
  • Filtered webhooks that run against a subset of records such as MQLs, event lists, and webinar registrations

SalesIntel supports dynamic forms that hide fields available from their reference database.  The auto-fill feature reduces the time spent entering data, lowering the likelihood of form abandonment, and improving the ROI of marketing campaigns.  Dynamic forms also enhance the user experience as prospects have fewer fields to enter and improve data accuracy and form completeness.

With dynamic forms, you can significantly reduce the number of fields by skipping those that could be automatically filled using third-party data,” blogged Creative Director and Marketing Coordinator, Ariana Shannon. “This smarter type of web form will allow you to capture more leads without having to sacrifice the data your sales and marketing teams require to convert them.  Leads who fill out a form will easily navigate through the form, be prompted with suggestions, and avoid the frustrations and reservations associated with filling out multiple fields.”

SalesIntel already supports lead prospecting for Marketo.

SalesIntel is on track to more than double its revenue in 2020.  Ramnani sees many opportunities for his firm as market consolidation has reduced the number of vendors.  Ramnani positions SalesIntel as a high-quality data competitor to Zoominfo.

Warmly, Seed Round

Warm leads startup Warmly, (yes, with a comma as when signing a letter), raised a $2.1 million seed round led by NFX.  Y Combinator, Matchstick Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Mike Vernal of Sequoia, and Harry Stebbings’s 20VC also joined.

The new funds will be used to build out their sales team and hire additional engineers to embed machine-learning capabilities into their software.

“We want to end cold outreach altogether because we should be able to show you the shortest-path warm intro into any company you want to sell to, and the number of hops [it] takes to get there,” said Warmly CEO Max Greenwald

Warmly tracks job changes and tracks champions that have decamped to other companies.  They leverage a firm’s CRM to identify relationship strength and identify former users of a firm’s products and services.  Alerts are sent to sales reps when a former user or advocate resurfaces at other organizations.  Warmly also notifies the customer success team when a user or advocate has left.

“We’re going to make customer success teams more powerful than sales teams in generating revenue.  Now that 84% of all b2b sales come from a referral, traditional methods of customer acquisition like outbound sales & marketing are less effective.  Warmly is building the first ever customer network graph, a novel way to leverage customers to drive new sales.”

Warmly, Website

Warmly was founded in early 2020 by three former Googlers (Greenwald, CTO Carina Boo, and Chief Product Officer Val Yermakova) and VP of Engineering Alan Zhao.

“They’ve got this wide-open market.  It’s this fantastic fertile soil [that] they’ve put themselves in,” says NFX managing partner and Warmly board member James Currier.  Currier also emphasized that customer success software is in its early stage of development.

ZoomInfo Acquires EverString (Part III)

Company counts will hit 100M once the Everstring Business Graph is incorporated into their coverage.

Last week, ZoomInfo announced that it was acquiring Business Graph vendor EverString to grow its company coverage five-fold.

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck noted that large enterprises license and integrate a broad set of content from many vendors.  They struggle to “stitch” all these disparate content sets together via “a complicated system relying on data analysts, engineers, and product managers.”  Furthermore, different analysts manage datasets for other countries, further complicating the situation.  “Each one restarts a process of understanding the nuances and integrating, normalizing, matching, managing, and maintaining that unique data source.”

This data sourcing and loading process is “inefficient, costly, and introduces a complex web of operational challenges and compliance vulnerabilities.”  Data ends up being siloed and fragmented, reducing its value to the organization.  “It has to be integrated, unified, validated, cleansed, enriched, deduplicated, and delivered to the right people and systems, at the right time, in the right form for it to unlock the value it was intended to create.”

Shuck argues that other vendors overly complicate data projects and offer expensive consultations and complex solutions.  ZoomInfo’s vision is to be the “first unified, single source of truth for sales, marketing, and all other go-to-market functions.”

“With the data from EverString, ZoomInfo will provide data on virtually every high-level parent company, local parent company, franchise, and satellite office in America.  This broader data set enables better search, scoring, and account assignment, and provides greater access to buyers and buying centers.”

CEO Henry Schuck

“The combined ZoomInfo and EverString data asset will be unparalleled in the marketplace,” said EverString CEO J.J. Kardwell.  “We’re excited to join ZoomInfo and work together to bring sellers and marketers the most extensive company and professional data that will help make their go-to-market motions even more effective and efficient.”

Kardwell will serve as an advisor to ZoomInfo and will remain with ZoomInfo through the transition.

ZoomInfo is moving to combine the two databases quickly.  As it has a track record of acquiring and rapidly integrating datasets, the merged database should be available soon (ZoomInfo declined to provide a target date).  In the meantime, customers can already enrich data via a superset of the EverString and ZoomInfo databases. Financial terms were not disclosed, but ZoomInfo indicated the deal was not expected to have a material effect on the fourth quarter.

ZoomInfo Acquires EverString (Part II)

On Friday, I began coverage of ZoomInfo’s acquisition of EverString. Continuing with part II…

Over the past few years, ZoomInfo has been rapidly building its go-to-market intelligence through acquisitions and capital investment.  Initially, ZoomInfo (then called DiscoverOrg) rolled up competitors iProfile and RainKing, but in February 2019, they acquired ZoomInfo, a leading global contact information source.  The firm also managed two tuck-ins last year: NeverBounce email validation and Komiko Inbox AI.

After going public in June, ZoomInfo acquired intent data service Clickagy in October before acquiring Everstring.

ZoomInfo is exceptionally strong across many of the core B2B data categories, including

  • Global contacts (e.g. emails, direct dials, phone numbers, bios, social links, job function, and job level)
  • Technographics (e.g. vendors, products, projects, IT professionals)
  • Intent data (1st Party IP-matching and the recently acquired Clickagy real-time intent signals)
  • Sales Triggers (e.g. M&A, Exec Changes, Partnerships)
  • Org Charts (human-verified and modeled)

However, ZoomInfo has lagged behind other vendors in firmographics and linkage.  The Everstring acquisition plugs this gap across core firmographics, SMBs, and company linkages, putting the firm in a stronger sales intelligence, digital marketing, and B2B DaaS position.  The expanded company universe will significantly improve ZoomInfo’s match rates for batch, real-time, and continuous data enrichment.

In a multinational telecom provider test, the match rate doubled to 98% due to three factors: M/L-powered matching, historical matching against outdated records, and record completeness.

“EverString’s machine learning powered entity resolution (aka matching) algorithms are designed to accept and process multiple identifying inputs from a customer’s file, such as phone number and address, alongside the company name and website, improving the likelihood of returning a matching record.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

Maintaining a historical file of inactive and out of date records provides significant value when batch processing enterprise records sitting in CRMs and MAPs.  Much of this legacy data is bad, but without a reference file with historical data (e.g. inactive and closed companies, former addresses, FKAs), operations teams don’t know which records are defunct businesses.

Everstring has nearly 100% fill rates on core firmographic fields such as employee count, revenue, and industry codes. The expanded firmographics improve field fill rates, lead scoring, lead routing, and analytics (e.g. ICP, TAM, segmentation).

Nevertheless, ZoomInfo has a few remaining gaps around public company financials and filings (e.g. SEC, Companies House, UCC) that would hold them back at financial services companies and European firms.  Everstring does ingest filing data (e.g. Secretary of State incorporations, UCC liens, 5500 ERISA filings with the Department of Labor, federal contract bids, OSHA, fleet data, UK Companies House) when building its business graph, but source data viewing is often required.

Continue to Part III.

ZoomInfo Acquires EverString

ZoomInfo continues building up its data assets with the acquisition of EverString, expanding Zoominfo’s coverage of companies and contacts.  EverString employs machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to build profiles on 100 million companies, 120 million locations, and 70 million business professionals. Data are ingested from both online and offline content.  The expanded company universe is five-times larger than ZoomInfo’s current company universe, with roughly 30 million international profiles.

EverString also provides ZoomInfo with over one million linkages.  “This additional data gives sellers and marketers across all verticals better access and visibility to their total addressable markets, more complete enrichment results, and additional points of contact at their target accounts.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck described the combined EverString and ZoomInfo data cloud as the “first-ever business identity graph of its size with a level of accuracy and completeness purpose-built to help go-to-market teams identify actual buying centers rather than legal entities with no purchasing power.”

Along with corporate hierarchies, EverString expands ZoomInfo’s intelligence concerning website redirects, legal entities, and aliases.  Firmographics include sizing data, URLs, social links, contact information, year founded, DBAs, FKAs, and long-tail industry keywords.

“The acquisition of EverString gives ZoomInfo a comprehensive business data graph, providing the foundation needed for enterprises to identify their total universe of customers and prospects, define their ideal profiles, leverage granular keywords and attributes to predict success, and focus their go-to-market motions.”

Director of Communications Steve Vittorioso.

Headquartered in San Mateo, EverString was founded in 2012 and has 50 employees.  It made the 2020 Inc. 5000 list with three-year revenue growth of 112%. Customers include Snowflake, FedEx, Nokia, Seagate, and Staples. 

EverString’s DaaS platform delivers firmographics, technographics, contacts, machine learning insights, and intent signals.  

EverString also offers predictive analytics which will be incorporated into the ZoomInfo platform.  Other functionality includes similar companies, ICP modeling, and TAM modeling.

Continue to Part II.