UK-based Sales Intelligence vendor Cognism acquired Ricochet, an outbound sales Chrome extension that displays company profiles from company pages, Twitter profiles, LinkedIn pages, Gmail, and Google search. Ricochet brings with it 1,200 global customers. Ricochet employs data aggregation to profile and qualify businesses in real-time.
“We’ve admired Cognism’s approach and success since the early days of Ricochet, with both teams dedicated to empowering sales teams with actionable and accurate B2B data,” said Ricochet CEO Paul Smith. “We’re thrilled to be working with [Cognism CEO] James [Isilay] and the team, and look forward to Ricochet’s technology helping Cognism’s customers improve efficiency and streamline their sales development activity.”
Ricochet claims to reduce research and qualification time by 60%, showing employee size, investment information, similar companies, industries, markets, locations, and Companies House data. A second tab surfaces company blogs.
HubSpot and Pipedrive integrations indicate which accounts have been added and when they were last updated. Users have one-click access to the CRM records.
“I am delighted to welcome Ricochet to the Cognism family,” said Isilay. “Paul [Smith] and his team have built a very impressive tool that is trusted by thousands of sales professionals in the B2B space. They solve a very difficult problem. Their focus on data quality makes them an easy fit for us at Cognism, being a world-leader in providing compliant business data. I am looking forward to working with everyone at Ricochet and helping our customers find and deliver new revenue opportunities in 2021 and beyond.”
The acquisition is IP-only, with no employees joining Cognism.
The free Ricochet Chrome extension launched this summer and has quickly been iterating, adding new functionality through the summer and fall.
Technology purchase intent data vendor TechTarget added another arrow to its intent quiver with the acquisition of BrightTALK, a leader in the marketing and virtual events space. BrightTALK said virtual event attendance has “high predictive value because IT buyers are making a material investment of their time to engage with vendor-produced content.”
The acquisition increases TechTarget’s universe of opted-in professionals. TechTarget already has over twenty million opted-in business contact records (mostly in technology positions from its 140 enterprise technology sites), and BrightTALK has eight million registered attendees on its media platform. There is likely to be some overlap in names, but having a second source of opted-in professionals increases the scope of measured intent across TechTarget, BrightTALK, and corporate websites (a KickFire OEM deal).
The acquisition offers substantial cross-selling opportunities in 2021 as vendors continue to focus on virtual events in lieu of face-to-face trade shows and conferences. Furthermore, “BrightTALK generates a large volume of valuable content in webinar and video format that is incremental to TechTarget’s current offerings. This content improves TechTarget’s potential ability to attract new users and diversifies the content available via TechTarget’s portfolio of web sites.”
And because both platforms are opted-in, the intent data does not need to be anonymized. TechTarget can deliver person-level intent data that includes contact information, articles read, webinar sessions viewed, potential competitors, and their stage in the buyer’s journey. What’s more, these rich intent datasets are GDPR-compliant across both platforms.
“TechTarget’s leadership position in the market is further strengthened by the acquisition of BrightTALK. This acquisition checks all the boxes. It allows us to increase our original content, grow our opt-in audience of registered members, and add a material amount of proprietary first-party purchase intent data. It’s a very powerful combination that will enhance our customers’ abilities to use our purchase intent data to grow their revenues and increase their market share.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
“We are excited to join forces with TechTarget. They are the leading provider of original expert content and distributor of vendor decision-support content in the B2B tech market, which has allowed them to develop the preeminent first-party purchase intent offering,” said BrightTALK CEO Paul Heald. “Combining our leading platform for online IT events is a winning combination.”
BrightTALK has over 1,000 customers who created 25,000 webinars and videos over the past year. The platform generates over 200,000 unique monthly viewers and six million annual content engagements.
BrightTALK also fits with TechTarget’s financial objectives. It is on track for $50 million in 2020 revenue, with approximately half this revenue under long-term contracts. TechTarget hit 35% in subscription revenue last quarter but has stated a 50% subscription revenue goal. With Priority Engine on track for approximately $50 million in 2020 subscription revenue and BrightTALK posting roughly $25 million, the combined pro forma company would generate $75 million in subscription revenues on $195 million in 2020 revenue (Q3 YTD + mid-point Q4 guidance + $50M BrightTALK estimate), or approximately 38 – 39% in contract-based revenue.
BrightTALK has also done well during the pandemic, with revenue on track to grow 30% this year. It added one million additional opted-in professionals over the past year.
The deal is priced at $150 million, a 3X multiple over projected 2020 earnings. The cash transaction will close before the end of the year.
BrightTALK has four offices in the US, two in the UK, and two in APAC (Sydney and Singapore). LinkedIn lists them with 275 employees, a headcount growth of 15% over the past year.
Revenue Operations vendor Clari announced Relationship Insights, its new Revenue Intelligence service. Relationship Insights adds “visibility into all the buyers and sellers actively involved in sales pursuits.” The new service helps revenue professionals assess the “true health of account relationships, more effectively manage their territories, and lead their teams in the new remote selling era.”
Relationship Insights ends the manual auditing of accounts by sales managers and interrogations of sales reps about customer and prospect relationships. Relationship Insights lets them understand
Who are we talking to?
Are we single or multi-threaded at the account?
When was the last time we interacted with the executive buyer?
Have we engaged with the CFO?
Do we have the right internal SMEs working on this account?
“Our data shows that deals over $250k require an average of 19 external stakeholders to close successfully,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne. “With Relationship Insights, we’re providing total visibility to revenue teams so they can drive exceptional execution in their deals, accounts, and territories across their entire revenue process.”
Smaller deals require significant relationship building as well. A Clari analysis of closed-won deals found that opportunities up to $50,000 required relationships with an average of seven external stakeholders. Successful deals between $50,000 and $250,000 averaged ten relationships between the company and demand unit members at the closed opportunity.
“Buying groups are not only getting larger, [but] they’re also diverging in personal and organizational priorities. Sellers need to navigate this big group of influencers and decision-makers, including business line managers, IT practitioners, executives, and finance leaders.”
Hila Segal, Clari VP Product Marketing
Relationship Insights provides sales reps and sales management with a deeper understanding of the demand unit, letting them see all sales activities, including emails, meetings, and file exchanges. This monitoring helps ensure that “all selling motions are multi-threaded.”
“An in-depth understanding of your customer relationship landscape is critical for building full buying consensus, reducing cycle time by uncovering potential blockers earlier, and increasing win-rate by getting multi-threaded (building relationships with multiple stakeholders) when your competition may have only relied on one or two contacts.”
Clari VP of Product Marketing Hila Segal
Clari Activity risk tracking identifies the risk of disengagement, providing reps the opportunity to re-engage before the deal goes south.
“It’s not enough to see who is engaged. You need to understand the strength of the relationship over time—how many meetings did you have with a key individual, when was the last time you met with them, when is the next time you’re scheduled to connect, have they been responding to emails,” argued Segal.
Account auditing ensures that the primary personas and team members are engaged so that reps can run plays to broaden support.
Relationship intelligence also leverages the company’s varied skills and knowledge, so tracking who has been engaged on the selling side is critical. Segal noted that successful enterprise sales “takes a village,” with many team members, including technical SMEs, product specialists, implementation consultants, and executive sponsors, helping close the biggest deals. “A clear understanding of key players in every account drives stronger account relationships resulting in more qualified pipeline, better win rates, faster cycles and more predictable revenue,” said Craig Rosenberg, Chief Analyst at TOPO.
SalesHood Launches Coaching Command Center for Front-Line Managers to Scale Virtual Sales Coaching
Sales Enablement vendor SalesHood released Coaching Command Center, a set of templates, reports, and prompts to assist front-line managers in elevating the performance and win rates of their teams.
“We’re excited to release more innovation for virtual sales coaching,” said SalesHood CEO Elay Cohen. “We’re committed to helping front-line managers be better at developing their remote teams and boosting their win rates.”
In a call with GZ Consulting, Cohen emphasized that SalesHood focuses on productivity and outcomes for both sales reps and front-line managers, looking to raise the bar for all managers. The new Command Center is a coaching dashboard that analyzes performance and what sales reps are doing. It fosters managerial actions through celebrations, risk identification, and recommending Next Best Actions. A meetings-in-a-box feature supports coaching huddles and hands-on training, with recorded calls as input, and coaching to-dos.
According to Cohen, “curated coaching can be prescriptive” and should be performance and data-driven. It should also be scalable and repeatable, making it easy to schedule classes, coaching, and call reviews. Templates facilitate discussion and coaching. Open questions and training sessions are noted, and sales reps are notified if task assignments have not been addressed before the next one-on-one.
Along with templates, SalesHood provides a library of sales training tools, including battle cards, product playbooks, and win stories. Video recording guidance helps non-training professionals (e.g., product managers, competitive analysts, sales operations) chunk content into modules and cover key topics.
New Command Center tools include programs and coaching activities, team leaderboards, curated team videos, prioritized coaching activities, and coaching templates.
The graphical program tracker displays a data-driven timeline with drill-down tasks, helping front-line managers view programs and coaching activities. The program tracker assists with one-on-one coaching through automated activities, notifications, tips, and scorecards. A notification flag appears in the right corner of the top banner, letting managers immediately access pending coaching activities. For example, if there is a recorded pitch for review, the manager can review the video and offer feedback.
Team Leaderboards summarize team performance across engagement, completion, and performance metrics.
Team videos are submitted and reviewed by managers for comments and celebration. Videos include pitches, demonstrations, presentation dry-runs, deal wins, and stories.
Prioritized coaching activities are delivered to front-line managers on desktop and mobile devices (iOS and Android native apps) with automated coaching activities for pitch practice, role-playing, quizzing, assessments, and story submissions by their team.
SalesHood is packaged with a set of customizable templates for deal reviews, one-on-ones, and even quarterly business reviews. Templates are customizable to reflect the industry, markets, and sales strategies of firms.
“Right out of the box, SalesHood provides solutions for more structured, more efficient, and more lucrative sales team management,” claims the firm.
“Sales coaching creates space for collaborative skill and deal development conversations. Effective sales coaches give sales professionals the responsibility of ownership and accountability for their deal strategies from planning to preparation to close…
No longer will you be in the dark on how your reps are pitching to customers or handling common objections. You’ll be in the know as to how and if they are onboarding effectively. Are they retaining product knowledge? Do they understand the crucial competitive plays? Is their messaging creating interest? Is it aligned with the corporate message?”
“SalesHood Sales Coaching Demonstration” video
Aragon Research predicted that by the end of 2021, 55% of enterprises will have deployed digital sales coaching and learning.
“High-performing sales organizations are now making sales coaching and learning a daily habit,” says CEO of Aragon Research, Jim Lundy. “Top salespeople are constantly practicing, and the best managers conduct regular coaching.” Despite the known correlation between coaching and performance, managers and their teams have been unable to embed this practice into their daily workflows.
Aragon Research placed SalesHood in its Leader quadrant for Sales Coaching and Learning (July 2020), scoring the highest on strategy, but below the other leaders on performance. Aragon listed a broad set of SalesHood strengths, including sales coaching and learning, sales content management, and front-line manager enablement. However, the firm noted that SalesHood lacks market awareness.
Last week, Seismic announced the acquisition of social selling platform Grapevine6 and immediately launched LiveSocial. Grapevine6 targets professional and financial services companies, including wealth management, insurance, and banking. It supports four of the top five North American wealth management firms. Financial services customers include TIAA, Merrill, and Wells Fargo.
Professional Services firms use Grapevine6 to amplify their thought leadership and share “authoritative content.”
Seismic and Grapevine have a background in “meeting the needs of the financial services market with industry-leading compliance technology,” said Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr.
LiveSocial employs Proofpoint and SafeGuard Cyber integrations “to meet the varying security, compliance, and archiving needs of each of our clients.” Every share is checked for regulatory and company policy compliance. LiveSocial also archives “contextual information, including remediation workflow and content classification, which saves you time and money during an audit.”
Grapevine6 also sells into the technology sector and “is the largest social selling program at SAP.”
“Social media has transformed the buyer’s journey. Savvy buyers now use social media to not only gather information and connect with peers but also to research the sales professionals and advisors they’re partnering with. The current sea change to digital communication is an opportunity to better serve customers by enabling salespeople to humanize relationships with personal stories — the true promise of digital selling. Partnering with Seismic over the past few years in creating a content ecosystem, we realized how aligned we are in our vision for digital selling and that an acquisition created a win-win for all Grapevine6 and Seismic customers.”
Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr
LiveSocial is a mobile-first platform available on iOS and Android devices as well as desktops. Employees may share content on social channels, SMS, and email. Other features include “one-touch” sharing and scheduling, automatic scheduling optimization, and AI-suggested comment starters that “receive 32% more engagement.”
Grapevine6 supports leading email platforms as well as client email platforms. It integrates natively with SFDC Marketing Cloud and MS Outlook.
LiveSocial pricing details were not disclosed.
The full Grapevine6 team is joining Seismic, with Orr heading up the LiveSocial team. LinkedIn lists 97 Grapevine6 employees, with 67% headcount growth over the past year and 169% over the past two. The firm maintained steady hiring throughout the pandemic.
Sales enablement and marketing orchestration platform Seismic acquired long-standing partner Grapevine6, a Toronto-based digital and social engagement platform. Grapevine6 helps customer-facing professionals deliver “relevant content” from over 11,000 third-party publishers in six languages. The Grapevine6 service, which is being re-launched as Seismic LiveSocial, improves sales engagement with customers and prospects through “meaningful, authentic online conversations” on social media platforms. LiveSocial shifts social media communications from companies to trusted advisors, fostering social selling.
Grapevine6 will be integrated into Seismic and underpin the new Seismic LiveSocial service for sales and client-facing teams. It will continue to be available as a freemium offering.
“LiveSocial will leverage the AI engine built by Grapevine6 to help sellers become trusted advisors by authentically engaging with their clients across the social media landscape,” said Seismic. The combined service will help customer-facing professionals share “timely, reputable, and compliant content in their own voice” across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Users are fed a daily stream of tailored content “that best fits their interests and the needs of the markets they sell or serve.” Marketing content is included in the feed, and users can search their corporate content library.
“Each organization, and every individual seller, has a different perspective on the right balance of content,” Seismic stated in an email to GZ Consulting. “Authenticity demands that there be no single correct approach. Once the seller has connected their social profiles, Grapevine6’s AI platform intelligently serves up content that sellers can share on their social profiles based on an interest graph developed from previous activity and earned engagement. Sellers can also calibrate their interest graph from within the platform. Additionally, with the risk and compliance controls in place, sellers do not have to worry about vetting each and every post. Content is already evaluated and approved based on hundreds of risk factors.”
Grapevine6 said that most employee advocacy programs fail because social content is focused on the individual and the company but lacks a broader perspective and “fresh, relevant content” that speaks to broader topics and industry issues. Furthermore, the adoption rates are low because reps don’t know what’s in it for them. By offering a steady stream of personalized content that can be quickly shared and monitored for compliance, LiveSocial mixes in a broad set of compliant content consistent with the brand while avoiding the problem of narcissistic messaging about the individual and the company.
“People engage with and do business with, people that they know, respect, and trust. Leading firms now recognize that their brand lives at the edge of the organization. It lives in the personal brand, the reputation, and the conversations of every client-facing employee. It’s no longer enough to rely on centralized communication and advertising channels to get the word out about the great work your firm does. Modern marketing success comes from empowering every employee to show up, speak up, nurture new and existing relationships, and spark conversations on social media.”
Grapevine6 FAQ
LiveSocial metrics include the ROI of a company’s social engagement strategy. Other user and administrator metrics include activity, engagement, impact, top-performing assets, and top-performing topic areas.
“In today’s dynamic sales landscape, buyers increasingly want to hear from and connect with trusted individuals, not companies, on social media,” said Seismic CEO Doug Winter. “Grapevine6 will be instrumental to providing additional customer value by combining Seismic’s industry-leading sales enablement platform and Grapevine6’s digital engagement platform, further empowering sales teams to educate and engage with buyers online — while simultaneously helping to build their personal brands in an authentic way.”
“Social media has cemented itself as a critical front line between organisations and their customers with IDC reporting that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions,” said Seismic Asia Pacific and Japan VP Richard Kulkarni. “With the global pandemic as a catalyst, social selling skills, and digital eminence have become vital competencies for workforces. Seismic LiveSocial not only empowers sales teams to engage clients more effectively on social media channels but also helps turn every employee into a brand ambassador, delivering a strong advantage in this new business reality.”
Sales Enablement Platform vendor Seismic included a set of new reports, dashboards, and alerts in its fall release. Seismic users may deploy pre-built dashboards or build custom reports and visualizations specific to their business requirements. Other new tools include report auto-sharing and data change alerting. [Part I covered Seismic’s approach to bottom of the funnel metrics.]
Seismic offers multiple levels of reporting:
Out-of-the-box reports and dashboards
Bespoke reports built from out-of-the-box reports
Business Intelligence (BI) integrations for Tableau, Domo, and other BI services
Snowflake Secure Data Sharing.
Bespoke dashboards are available by persona and role. Reporting supports KPI filters and widgets that let users drill down to answer specific questions.
Five role-based dashboards support content owners, CROs, CMOs, sales managers, and platform admins. Seismic’s Content Analytics “now includes actionable, curated, out-of-the-box reports, and visualizations tailored to the distinct challenges of specific roles,” blogged Seismic Product Marketing Manager Elaine Stone. There are no “superfluous metrics to distract you or slow you down; just the relevant reports and visualizations you need to understand what’s happening and take informed action, leverage your discipline’s best practices, and create your own custom reports to go deeper.”
“By merging your bottom-of-the-funnel data with other cross-functional data sets such as CRM, HR, and customer success, your go-to-market team will have a holistic, yet singular, source of truth to answer its most challenging business questions. Armed with shared answers, you’ll be equipped to build executive alignment, boost confidence in the teams’ ability to hit numbers, and scale best practices that truly move the needle…Proof of their team’s impact on revenue becomes the Holy Grail—the key to justifying headcount and budget.”
Seismic Product Marketing Manager Elaine Stone
“With Seismic, we’ve been able to gain visibility into ‘dark data’ — all the data you usually can’t access and can’t analyze. There’s no greater repository of dark data than around the use of content in sales and marketing. We use Seismic to shine light on that data,” said Eric Duerr, Domo VP of Marketing. “When we create content, we can look in Seismic to determine what’s being used by sales, and what’s working and what’s not with prospects and customers. And we can ensure sellers are using the most effective content as possible to support the customer journey.”
Snowflake Secure Data Sharing is supported out-of-the-box, delivering “an extra layer of insights” and reducing the time spent on data prep tasks such as merging and loading data. Snowflake improves “time to insights” with “ready-to-query” content data.
“Snowflake Secure Data Sharing enables frictionless, secure sharing of live data within an organization and between organizations, so users can unveil insights to help transform their sales process and deliver meaningful business value,” said Snowflake VP of Customer Product Strategy, Matt Glickman. “We’re excited for Seismic and their customers to leverage Snowflake for fast, easy, and secure access to their content analytics.”
Seismic also enhanced the integration with Percolate, its enterprise content marketing platform, allowing marketers to measure content performance across their sales and marketing channels. Marketers can determine how sales reps are consuming and using Percolate content published in Seismic.
Improved analytics and reporting associate work to outcomes, optimize content and go-to-market strategies, drive data-driven decisions, identify what is and isn’t working, and quantify and communicate platform adoption and ROI.
Seismic grew 537% between 2016 and 2019 and placed 234th on the 2020 Deloitte Fast 500 Technology list. With the Grapevine6 acquisition (covered tomorrow), the firm now has over 1000 employees across fourteen offices. Its 600 enterprise clients include American Express, ADP, SunTrust, T-Mobile, and IBM.
Sales Enablement and Account Orchestration vendor Seismic announced General Availability of its Q3 release with enhanced analytics, alerting, customization, and dashboards. The release emphasizes improved recommendations and metrics for the bottom half of the funnel. The fall release aims to improve reporting, alerting, content recommendations, attribution, and context-specific messaging.
“Sales content performance data has become a critical source of buyer feedback,” said Seismic CEO Doug Winter. “Businesses are looking for ways to engage buyers through personalized, resonant messaging, but haven’t had the visibility into what content performs well and what doesn’t. Our improved analytics capabilities unite revenue teams, changing how deals are closed, how content is produced, and ultimately, how business is done.”
In an interview with GZ Consulting, VP of Product Marketing Jam Khan emphasized that sales and marketing professionals are becoming “increasingly data-driven,” but doing so across the full funnel. The historical pattern of marketing identifying and nurturing leads before handing them off to sales no longer holds. Instead, sales and marketing work in tandem, with sales taking broader ownership over email messaging and marketing looking to maintain conversations post-sale.
Top of the funnel marketing has a series of well-defined metrics, but lower down the funnel, analytics are murkier. Sales and marketing struggle to determine which content is working, what the best-sellers are doing that differentiates them from their peers, which messages are most effective, and the coachable moments. Reps also want assurances that they are using the most current and compelling content.
Sales Enablement platforms typically report on views and time spent with content but lack attribution that ties content to close. Thus, content efficacy remains cloudy. A 2019 Forrester study commissioned by Seismic found that 85% of “buyers will dismiss a seller in the first interaction if they don’t receive tailored information” but that 54% of organizations aren’t able to “effectively generate actionable insights from sales asset data.” Thus, revenue teams need to understand better what buyers want and replicate best practices across the revenue organization.
Part II discusses Seismic Fall Release reporting enhancements.
Revenue Acceleration platform vendor Drift launched Drift for Salesforce, a new integration that creates and updates Salesforce Leads and Contacts then syncs chat conversations. Drift also offers the option to pass leads into Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, or HubSpot.
Drift employs Contract Attribute mapping that derives contact attributes from chats, with both standard and custom attribute variables supported. Drift Admins map the variables between the two platforms and set overwrite rules at the field level.
When leads book sales meetings through Drift, the sales rep is assigned as the lead owner in Salesforce, a Salesforce event is created, and the chat transcript is stored as a live chat record once the chat has closed.
Drift also syncs with opportunity records, helping operations teams understand which Drift conversations impacted opportunities, the dollar value of the interactions, and which conversations influenced the deal. Thus, revenue operations teams can understand which conversations affected the bottom line, wherever they occurred across the buyers’ journey. Drift reports and dashboards assist with attribution.
“Drift’s pre-built reports and custom dashboards give you an at-a-glance view of your performance so you always have the information you and your stakeholders need – right at your fingertips. You can also use the app to analyze your performance across the business, by specific metric, or by teammate, so you can easily identify specific areas where you should double-down.”
Drift can also display customized welcome messages for target accounts and immediately route important contacts to sales reps.
Drift looks at the email and domain to map records. If a domain is new, then a new lead is created, but if the domain already exists, either a new contact record is created or the email is used to match the conversation to a current contact.
Drift for Salesforce is available for Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer, and Performance plans.
In other news, Drift ranked #6 on the Deloitte Fast 500 North American list, with 35,474% revenue growth between 2016 and 2019.
“We founded Drift because we recognized that we were going through a paradigm shift,” commented CEO David Cancel. “We were moving from a world where the company controlled the buying process — to one in which the buyer was in control. This is even more true now — and we’re just getting started. Our mission is to change the way businesses buy from businesses, and we’re thrilled that our customers have chosen us to create frictionless, more human experiences.”
Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD) acquired intent and technology intelligence vendor Aberdeen. The acquisition brings together intent data from Spiceworks and The Big Willow, Aberdeen and SWZD market research, Aberdeen’s technology profiles (the old HHMI / Access CI datasets), and Ziff Davis B2B media sites.
SWZD describes itself as “the trusted global marketplace for connecting technology buyers and sellers across all marketing channels and the leader in demand generation and integrated intelligence-driven marketing, connecting technology buyers and sellers across IT, marketing, HR, and finance. SWZD has a massive reach into the entire buyer’s collective with a monthly audience of 71.5M across powerhouse IT brands.”
Aberdeen will be managed as a wholly-owned subsidiary of SWZD, but initially operate independently. Along with third-party intent, Aberdeen adds a library of industry intelligence, technographic and firmographic data, and a demand generation call center.
The union positions SWZD as a credible competitor to Zoominfo and TechTarget in the B2B technology intent space, helping customers identify “businesses that are truly in-market for their product.” Unlike the two larger technology sales intelligence vendors, SWZD does not offer a sales intelligence platform.
“We give our clients actionable visibility into the businesses that are truly in-market for their products and unparalleled access to quality, scale, and diversity of B2B tech intent data to make meaningful connections with those buyers. With the union of businesses, we immediately married our data and boosted our intelligence, resulting in a 15% increase in businesses, 70% increase in segment scale, 30% richer intent data, and expansion into fifteen new verticals.”
Richard Jalichandra, EVP and Global GM of SWZD
Continued Jalichandra, “We’re just starting to explore opportunities to further enhance our business-level data and invest in our combined product roadmap.”
Jalichandra also identified “synergies around research,” a core function at both firms. Aberdeen offers a “rich library of data-backed reports,” while SWZD offers custom market research.
The combined resources deliver account-level insights across 14 million companies and 24 million contacts. Over 11 billion intent signals are collected monthly from over 10,000 B2B websites. Intent data is available for over fifty technology segments.
The merger improves the depth of B2B intent data, expands the scope of account and contact intelligence, and grows their market research capabilities.
“We’re excited about the opportunity to expand the reach and identity of Aberdeen as a subsidiary of SWZD to put customers in even closer contact with the very buyers and influencers they’re targeting,” said Aberdeen CTO Mark DePalma. “Through the power of our combined data sets, vertically integrated demand generation capabilities, and continued innovation in our technology and services, we help customers with unparalleled targeting and marketing outcomes.”
SWZD’s Intelligent ABM delivers “actionable intent signals,” target account list prioritization, data appends, look-a-like expansion, built-in campaign activation, purchase intent scores, campaign analytics, and “seamless integration with marketing automation platforms.”
“With the combination of SWZD’s first-party intent data and Aberdeen’s third-party intent data, you get greater visibility into the entire buying collective. Not just that, our intent signals captured on the basis of the actions our audience takes; whether it is troubleshooting tech issues, comparing product reviews, connecting with an expert or accessing strategic content, provides an incredible quality and diversity of data right from the boardroom to the server room.”
Spiceworks Ziff Davis Website
SWZD offers a set of technology marketing services, including
Direct and programmatic advertising
Email marketing and newsletter sponsorships
Content marketing (e.g., whitepapers, e-books, infographics, case studies, interactive content, custom video, and market research)
Lead generation (e.g., content syndication, BANT qualified leads, intent-based leads)
Market research (e.g., online surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews)
Virtual events (e.g., webinars, video meetups, panel discussions)
