Month: February 2021

Terminus Enhancements

ABM Platform Terminus rolled out a set of platform enhancements for “optimizing ABM strategies.”  New features include global targeting, chat playbooks, and Live View.  Global targeting expands Terminus’ coverage beyond the US, letting marketers create and manage international campaigns.  The functionality is generally available as of February 24.

International Targeting is country-based, with campaign-based budgets and timelines.  Users can also target ABM accounts or focus on an enterprise account in specific countries.

Terminus Chat now supports playbooks that “intelligently collect visitor data, trigger sales automation with prospects and customers, and qualify inbound traffic in real-time,” blogged Terminus Product Marketing Senior Director Audra Felten.  The new functionality simplifies chat set-up with a “powerful new chatbot builder and logic builder.”

The new Live View feature lets reps proactively engage website visitors.  Users can view live information about accounts visiting the company website, along with page views, before reaching out on the chat channel.

In March, a new Advertising Insights report will be available in the Measurements Studio.  The report tracks brand awareness, lead and opportunity creation, pipeline acceleration, and closed-won deals.  Advertising Insights measures advertising effectiveness and ties its impact to account-based execution.  Digital Marketers can assess site visits and leads driven through Terminus advertising.  Likewise, Demand Gen Marketers can evaluate visits, conversions, and pipeline directly associated with Terminus Campaigns and adjust the marketing mix accordingly.

“With our February release, we’re going all in on building the ABM platform of the future, which means bringing ABM and sales engagement together even more seamlessly,” said Terminus Chief Product Officer Bryan Wade. “At the end of the day, it’s all about revenue. Customer-facing teams have to be focused on the best-fit accounts and engage at exactly the right time to drive results, but that can only happen when efforts are coordinated. These new capabilities make it easier than ever for sales and marketing to operate as one team.

Terminus just announced a $90 million Series C that valued the firm at $400K. I will cover the round on Monday.

Terminus – Outreach Integration

ABM Platform Terminus and Sales Engagement Platform Outreach rolled out an integrated solution to enhance ABM workflows based on shared account data and personalized messaging.  Terminus account data identifies “high-value accounts in real-time to easily kick off highly personalized sequences to the accounts that their marketing teams are targeting.” Outreach multi-channel sequences have been tied into Terminus chat, email signature advertising, and website personalization, providing a personalized customer experience and account-based routing.

“It’s our mission to help marketing and sales together drive full-funnel account engagement,” said Terminus CEO Tim Kopp.  “Now with Terminus, Outreach customers can leverage the powerful account intelligence available in Terminus along with their existing sales engagement programs.   This makes it easier than ever for marketing and sales to better engage with the right accounts and deliver a cohesive experience at every point of the customer journey.”

The integration helps promote sales and marketing alignment through shared data and messaging tools that reduce the friction across email, website, and chat.  

“Meaningful revenue growth happens when sales and marketing are completely aligned and focusing on the accounts that matter most,” remarked Terminus Marketing VP Justin Keller. “Most of the time, that’s easier said than done, but we’re extremely jazzed about this integration because it makes that alignment simple and automatic.”

Terminus’ Chat from Anywhere functionality, based on their 2020 Ramble acquisition, routes chats to the most appropriate sales rep.  Chat from Anywhere links may be embedded in Outreach emails as a CTA.  The chatbot initially manages the conversation before routing the chat to the sales rep.  If the rep isn’t available, the bot can offer to schedule a meeting, offer content, or qualify the prospect.

Chat conversation logs are stored within Outreach notes.

Along with email, Terminus Chat from Anywhere links can be embedded in LinkedIn, Twitter, Landing Pages, etc.

“Rather than an asynchronous back-and-forth on email, you can pull the people you’re emailing directly into a live conversation with your sales team where they can provide a highly-personalized experience based on the account data available from Terminus,” blogged Keller.

The partnership also supports email banner marketing based upon Terminus’ Sigstr acquisition.  Terminus can embed targeted, personalized ads within the signature block of sequenced emails. “This capability opens up a massive new advertising channel ready to promote your most important initiatives,” wrote Keller.  “From general promotion of things like content or events, to targeted one-to-one campaigns that garner outrageous engagement.”

Conversations that originate on a website are now automatically routed to the appropriate account owner in Outreach.  Based on the conversation, those visitors can be automatically enrolled in Outreach sequences to ensure they stay engaged after the chat ends.

“While some segments of the economy are coming back strong, there are still many sectors struggling to find their footing in this new world. Sales and marketing teams are looking to make the most out of fewer accounts and are relying on account-based marketing to drive more revenue,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “But a solid ABM strategy is nothing without powerful data behind it. This integration brings together the actionable insights from Outreach with Terminus’ account intelligence data in one single solution. These connected workflows help sales and marketing accelerate the cycle from engagement to revenue and meet growth expectations as they navigate evolving sector dynamics.”

Insent Seed Round

Chatbot vendor Insent.AI closed on a $2 million seed round “to help mid-market B2B companies improve how they identify and communicate with potential buyers.” The firm, which competes against Intercom, Terminus Chat, and Drift, calls itself a “human-first chatbot.”

Insent said that it isn’t “just building a chatbot that generates leads, but a collaborative platform that is going to help marketers create, nurture qualified opportunities, and shorten sales cycles.”

The goal is to remove “digital walls” between buyers and sellers by replacing web forms and follow-ups “with instant live conversations on websites” that schedule meetings and deliver “personalized content recommendations based on engagement history.”

Insent describes itself as an “integration first platform,” with MAPs, CRMs, and ABM Platforms “to help sales teams talk to engaged prospects while they’re on the website.”

According to Insent Digital Marketer Aatharsha Jey, “integrations should be planned and carried out in a way that does not ask people to change their behaviors in order to adopt a new tool.”

“By guiding their buyers at the right time and proactively alerting your salespeople, Insent generates new revenue opportunities and accelerates existing ones,” said CEO Arjun Pillai.

Emergent Ventures led the round with participation from BAM Ventures, TechStars, Arka Venture Labs, Arali Ventures, and Bizable founder Aaron Bird.  Funds will be deployed to expand its chatbot integrations and add engineering, sales, and marketing headcount.  Another area of development is improving its visitor data intelligence to improve personalization.

“We believe the B2B sales process currently has unnecessary friction for both buyers and sellers,” said Anupam Rastogi, Partner at Emergent Ventures.  “As an increasing proportion of sales is digitally intermediated and more leads are generated online, we believe Insent has a tremendous opportunity to help both buyers and sellers do their work more effectively and connect seamlessly.”

Initially, the pandemic slowed Instent’s growth as marketing teams reduced budgets and delayed decisions, but chatbots are high on the list of MarTech digital acquisition solutions.  Since May, revenue has quadrupled.

Aaron Bird, former VP at Adobe and CEO of Bizable, remarked that marketing had undergone two major paradigm shifts over the past few years, the rise of ABM and a focus on the buyer experience at the heart of the sales process; however, “companies are yet to start adapting to this paradigm. Insent is a key piece of the puzzle to help them do so.”

Insent stress-tested various platforms before settling on MongoDB and AWS.  Pillai contends that the platform gives them a five-year or six-year window before rearchitecting.  The platform was designed with an account-based, versus lead-based, architecture that ties leads to accounts for account-based orchestration.

“So, the architecture is obviously manually decided.  But as far as the scaling is concerned, it is all automated,” said Pillai. “There are enough database services that will enable us to run automated services of scaling up and scaling down … to make sure that when you are sleeping if a customer connects a 10 million [record] database, the system scales up.”

Insent is using 6Sense for visitor identification. “We go and task 6Sense through an API,” said Pillai. “We take that data, and we do further processing of that data.  All of this happens in microseconds.  Basically, the moment somebody lands on the website, boom, the API call comes back with the data based on that website, company visitor.”

Insent was founded in 2018 and has forty employees in the US, Canada, and India.

Leadspace Closes on Series D

Customer Data Platform vendor Leadspace closed on a $46 million Series D led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).  It has now raised $107 million since being founded in 2011.  The firm also announced Alex Yoder as its new CEO as the firm ended a dispute with their former CEO Doug Bewsher.

Leadspace features include company and professional profiles, data hygiene and enrichment, web forms, reports and analytics, TAM and ICP analysis, and account engagement.  Leadspace also performs lead prioritization and identifies similar companies.  Unlike many CDPs, Leadspace is a pure B2B platform.

The funds will be used for meeting growing demand, expanding its headcount, and resolving litigation.  The firm currently has 100 employees in the US and Israel.  The 40 employees in Israel are technology-focused, and the US contingent manages business leadership.

“A major part of our post-investment vision is to grow our team in Israel,” said CTO Amnon Mishor.

Leadspace also announced that Doug Bewsher was stepping down as CEO and being replaced by Alex Yoder.  According to VentureBeat, there was a falling out between Bewsher, JVP, and the Leadspace board about the company’s direction.  Bewsher was looking to sell the firm, while the Board and JVP wanted to continue growing it, resulting in a lawsuit between two JVP partners and Bewsher.

“I’m glad to say that the lawsuit is behind us.  The former CEO agreed to leave.  A situation arose in which the CEO and some of the investors, particularly Arrowroot Capital were interested in selling the company, while JVP, other board members, and I saw potential in our figures to build up a large company.  We had made a technological leap and didn’t want to sell. There was a conflict among the board members and negotiations between the various investors over whether to sell or not, with the lawsuit being part of that.  Eventually, everyone reached an understanding,” said Mishor.

Despite the leadership issues and a failed 2018 merger with Radius, Leadspace has grown its market presence.  It doubled its customer base over the past two years and grew revenue 151% between 2016 and 2019, placing the firm at 2,681 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list.

Yoder is bullish on Leadspace, forecasting 70% growth this year, double that of the market.  Growth is being driven by the need to find and engage contacts at companies as the pandemic precludes face-to-face meetings.

Yoder has led several B2B and SaaS companies over the past two decades, including WebTrends, Ebiquity, and Trueffect.  According to the press release, Yoder has “built strong teams and implemented transformational strategies, running businesses that spanned $20 million to $150 million in revenue.”

JVP Executive Chairman Erel Margalit was named the Board Chairman.

“We typically invest in early-stage companies, but we only double down in category leaders and companies that can reach $100 million in ARR,” said Margalit.

“We believe that Alex Yoder can take the business to the next level as Leadspace becomes the single source of truth for B2B data,” said Margalit. “Leadspace – through its revolutionary AI platform – is changing the way enterprises manage their internal and external customer data.  In the coming years, enterprise CDP will be established as a new category, using AI to obtain the true identity, title, and roles of companies and individuals, creating true added value for clients.”

Competitors include D&B Lattice, 6Sense, Zylotech, and ABM Platforms.  Yoder contends that Leadspace’s strength in in analyzing unstructured social and behavioral data.

“Creating a source of truth for B2B is a very complex problem.  Companies are complex — sales cycles and engagement can be sporadic, involve multiple stakeholders, and can last months or even years,” said Mishor. “There are multiple data and intelligence point solutions that address small parts of the fundamental data issue.  No other solution is taking the holistic approach of being the connective layer between raw data and engagement channels for B2B like Leadspace.”

Leadspace clients include Microsoft, Salesforce, American Express, Intel, HPE, and Zoom.

Cloud Computing Growth

Synergy Research Group sized the Q4 enterprise spend on cloud services at $37 billion, up 35% year-over-year.  The full-year spend was $129 billion.  Microsoft Azure continued its growth, reaching a 20% market share, second only to AWS in the low 30s.  Azure has doubled its market share over the past four years.  AWS posted $12.7 billion in Q4 revenue.  Google Cloud has a 9% market share but remains a money loser.  Except for Alibaba, at 6%, the smaller cloud providers continue to lose market share.

Azure grew 50% year-over-year, while AWS grew 28%.

“We believe Azure’s cloud momentum is still in its early days of playing out within the company’s massive installed base, and the Office 365 transition for both consumer/enterprise is providing growth tailwinds over the next few years,” said Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives.

“Based on our conversations with CIOs, CISOs, and IT product managers globally over the last month, we believe cloud-driven architecture IT growth in 2021 could surpass that of 2020 as more enterprises rip the band-aid off on digital transformations.”

Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives

AWS CEO Andy Jassy will succeed CEO Jeff Bezos at Amazon in Q3.  AWS generates half of Amazon’s profits but generates only ten percent of revenues.  Bezos will assume the role of Executive Chairman.

Zoominfo Targeted Audiences (Part II)

Zoominfo launched their new Targeted Audiences service to support programmatic advertising against their universe of B2B account and contact data. [Part I]

ZoomInfo employs signature-block mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and email verification to build and maintain their Data Cloud.  They also recently acquired EverString to augment their firmographic depth and field fill rates for 95 million companies.  Targeting against the Zoominfo Data Cloud offers “campaigns with unmatched precision and enhanced performance.”

“Digital agencies and marketers typically face challenges in collecting high-quality, complete B2B audience data,” contrasted ZoomInfo. “Most widely available contact information for companies and their employees is either inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, which means many digital agencies and marketers deliver their messages to the wrong people altogether.”

“What’s common knowledge to those in the industry — but not to a bright-eyed data guy like me — is that advertising audiences aren’t engineered to be precise.  Quite the opposite, actually: This space is all about volume and audience expansion through inferences, and modeled data has taken over.”

ZoomInfo SVP of Innovation and Data R&D Derek Smith

Marketers can also build custom audiences from over three hundred demographic and firmographic selects, including funding data, benefits data (licensed from GlassDoor), event participation, banking variables, technographics, and Fortune 500/1000 flags.  Biographic variables include function, level, and title/keyword.

Targeting is most effective for the North American market because ZoomInfo is limited in the number of legally gathered and stored identifiers for EU citizens due to GDPR.

“Our product is unlike any other for two reasons. First, we’ve amassed a treasure trove of emails, phone numbers, and titles. Second, we’ve architected our company data to let you identify companies with a level of granularity that significantly eclipses the competition,” said Derek Smith, SVP of Innovation and Data R&D. “Was this always intentional? Of course not.  But unbeknownst to me, our data became tailor-made for advertising activation as a result of other projects at ZoomInfo.”

As a new offering, Targeted Audiences should be viewed as a solution for building precise B2B audiences and activating them via LiveRamp.  With nearly 100 million targetable professionals, 500 million identifiers, and 300+ selects, ZoomInfo can build very focused audiences.  However, there are some gaps.  Targeted Audiences does not offer any campaign analytics, creative management, social marketing, retargeting functionality, or intent-based targeting.

“Targeted Audiences allows marketers to build strategic campaigns based on contact and company information and creates new levels of granularity in B2B audience data that have never before existed on the market,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck.

Targeted Audiences is a standalone offering.  Marketers and agencies can test out the service on a few audiences before signing a volume contract.  The fifty off-the-shelf audiences are priced at $1 CPM ($1 for 1,000 advertising exposures).  Custom Audiences begin at $2.75 CPM, but the price falls with volume commitments.

Zoominfo Targeted Audiences

ZoomInfo moved deeper into the marketing and advertising space with the launch of Targeted Audiences.  The newly unveiled B2B data service “gives digital agencies and marketers the ability to target their ideal customers with unprecedented accuracy.”  Targeted Audiences are built from the ZoomInfo Data Cloud, which includes 500 million emails and phone numbers for nearly 100 million professional contacts.

ZoomInfo was in the advertising space in its early years but spun off its Bizo platform in 2008.  At the time, CEO Yonatan Stern said, “We realized our business information index allowed marketers to deliver targeted online ads at a level never before seen.”  

Since then, ZoomInfo has acquired a deeper set of contacts and richer firmographics, technographics, funding data, benefits plans, and event data, supporting superior targeting precision.

Unfortunately, Bizo was acquired by LinkedIn in 2014 for $175 million but folded 18 months later when LinkedIn balked at the integration cost.  

Targeted Audiences should be viewed as a new market entry for the firm, but one that supported a $175 million opportunity back in 2014.  The October acquisition of Clickagy fueled this market entry as Clickagy intent data is deployed programmatically via data marketplaces.

“With the team at Clickagy now on the ZoomInfo team, our familiarity with the advertising space accelerated from 0 to 60 mph almost overnight.  The combination of our massive Data Cloud with a select few experts in advertising data allowed us to quickly discover the path to making our data actionable,” blogged Derek Smith, SVP of Innovation and Data R&D.

ZoomInfo launched the programmatic service with over fifty pre-packaged audiences “built on advanced demographic and firmographic data.”  ZoomInfo offered several examples outside of their core technology and business services customer base:

  • Educational institutions can target individual contributors and managers employed by firms with tuition reimbursement.
  • Optometrists can market to employees of companies with vision plans.
  • Luxury brands can reach out to C-level execs at firms with more than one hundred employees.
  • Financial advisory firms can target director-level employees of firms that recently went public.

ZoomInfo is passing audience identifiers to the LiveRamp data connectivity platform.  LiveRamp maps identifiers to channels, screens, and devices for media activation.  Additional partner platforms will be brought online in the coming weeks.

Continue to Part II.

Zoominfo: Talk Data to Me

Zoominfo launched a podcast series called Talk Data to Me and posted its first two shows: Mike Volpe of Lola discusses surviving the pandemic as a business travel startup, and Debbie Tang of Bridge Partners examines the increase in Diversity and Inclusion hiring at Fortune 500 companies.  The series is hosted by Sam Balter, ZoomInfo’s Director of Editorial and Thought Leadership, and Stephanie Tonneson, ZoomInfo’s Audio Producer and Marketing Coordinator

“Talk Data to Me brings data to life, so to speak,” said Balter. “Data, especially in B2B, can be complex and challenging, but we make it accessible by talking with leaders who can share the stories behind the digits. During the conversations, our assumptions are challenged, our biases are confronted, and, at times, our interpretations are conflicting. This messy process of theory, research, and revision is how we arrive at insights. This is what it means when someone wants to talk data.”

Other B2B Data vendors with podcasts include

RingLead also offers a set of interviews (Talk Data to Me) that include an archive of video snippets where the vendors answer questions about themselves. If you filter for “Meet the Vendors,” you will find a dozen interviews around their partners in the DataExchange.

BoardEx Diversity Network

Interlocks research platform BoardEx added Board Diversity variables that track membership in ethnicity association networks.  The system tracks “champions, allies, and advocates of specific ethnicities in leadership roles.  It comprises multiple networks of associations representing a specific ethnicity – referred to as ethnicity association networks.”  Seventeen thousand execs are tracked, along with execs that have received awards from association members.

BoardEx covers two million companies and 1.5 million executives, with data maintained by 350 editors.

“Our clients are seeking ways to help their own clients improve ethnic and other forms of diversity within their own organizations and report on their progress with this change,” says BoardEx CEO Cameron Ireland.  “The new network helps you connect with members of over 2,600 ethnicity associations that actively champion ethnic diversity.  It also surfaces people who have received awards recognizing their contribution to ethnic diversity in business from publicly available information.”

Along with collecting the Board Diversity data, BoardEx will be working with clients and partners to

  1. Champion the efforts of diversity associations to help raise awareness for groups who are historically underrepresented.
  2. Enhance the ability of companies to discover and connect with talented leaders of different ethnic, racial and functional backgrounds to build leadership teams, C-suites, and boards that reflect their customers and wider society.
  3. Empower professionals to analyze diversity trends within workplaces in order to create transparency and accountability around different diversity attributes.

The new selects are available to all clients.

BoardEx is owned by Euromoney which has assembled a set of complementary services in its People Intelligence business:  WealthEngine, BoardEx, and Wealth-X.  WealthEngine provides wealth and lifestyle insights on 300 million Americans and 122 million households. Wealth-X profiles the global wealthy.

Following the December acquisition of WealthEngine, Euromoney stated that “the Group now has full coverage across the wealth intelligence value chain, which is a growing information-services market.”

Deepfake Sales Videos: The Worst Idea I’ve Seen in a Long Time

Katie Martell, a marketing thought leader and former CMO, reported that she was pitched a deepfake video service that clones faces and voices so that sales reps can “create 1000s of personalized videos in the time it takes to make one.”  Of course, the whole idea of these being personalized is ridiculous.  Here is how they describe themselves (I have chosen not to publicize the vendor’s name):

“So basically it creates a clone of your face and voice (also known as a deepfake). Allowing you to create 1000s of personalized videos in the time it takes to make one. Which is amazing to see how far technology has come.

The idea is that video is the by far the most personal way of communicating digitally. Putting a face to the 100s of faceless emails we receive each day can be really powerful for improving engagement. As you can imagine this is huge for sales and marketing teams (and newsletters 😄).”

Deepfakes discussed on NOVA (April 2, 2019)

I don’t normally editorialize in my newsletter, but this is a terrible idea.  For B2B companies and sales reps, authenticity and honesty are necessary for long-term success.  We already know that sales engagement works best when there is a level of personalization matched with authenticity.  Spamming the market with fake videos will quickly undermine your credibility.  Reps have had success posting short videos with whiteboards that say “hello, <insert first name here>.” They are intended to have low production values but indicate that the rep has invested some time into a quick, personalized message.  The point is that they are authentic.  SalesLoft data has shown that emails with short videos receive significantly higher clickthrough rates.

One of the variables that investors look at is LTV/CAC.  Deception will quickly reduce a firm’s Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), but once it is discovered, their Lifetime Value (LTV) will plummet, and their CAC will explode.  It is the sales engagement equivalent of junk food. It will give your company a short-burst of energy but destroy your brand health.

The asynchronous video companies (e.g., Vidyard, Hippo Video, Videolicious) have had great success supporting sales.  Their business models would be put at risk by such technology.  Instead of videos being a harbinger of authenticity and indicators that the rep has invested time creating a short video, they would become emblems of deception.  Likewise, Sales Engagement, MAP, and ABM Platform vendors should refuse to partner with any firms employing deepfakes as they have the potential to undermine ABM communications.

In the end, deepfake marketing will be recognized as SPAM and result in a rapidly dropping email deliverability score.  It would be a pyrrhic victory.

Trust is critical for sales reps.  Reps that deploy trickery will undermine their ability to sell long-term.  They should avoid such deceptions like the plague.  None of the deepfake vendor’s customers agreed to be named, an early indicator that trialers of deepfake technology are concerned about brand damage.

And more broadly, we are already having trouble agreeing on objective truth as social media provide custom feeds and recommendations that conform to our existing biases.  There have always been problems with how photos and videos were cut or manipulated (e.g., slowing down the video to give a drunken appearance, darkening images of black public figures).  Still, deepfakes create false narratives backed by realistic-looking videos that put words in people’s mouths.  It is a new form of slander and factual distortion that will continue to undermine trust in the media, government, and social institutions.