Month: February 2021

Exceed.AI Seed Round for AI Lead Conversions

AI Lead Conversion start-up Exceed.AI closed on a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital and West Fountain Global Fund.  Also participating were Alex Pinchev, former President of Red Hat, and Gur Shomron, the chairman of Israel’s WalkMe.  Funds will be deployed to expand into new markets and onboard additional marketing clients.

Exceed.AI pulls lead information from Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, Salesforce, and SugarCRM to assist with conversations.  Features include an AI chatbot, SMS chatbot, email response bot, CRM synchronization, and an automated meeting scheduler.  Exceed also offers rules-based lead qualification and the ability to respond to questions.  Exception handling features include out-of-office follow up and no-show follow up.

“Some of our clients have seen up to a 39.5% increase in qualified leads for the same marketing efforts they already undertake without additional headcount,” said CEO Ilan Kasan. “Our strength lies in our multi-channel approach.  We reach audiences where crucial conversations occur when marketing teams are qualifying their leads.”

Exceed research found that out of office follow up results in a fifty percent lift in lead qualification.  They recommend a “short, cheery” welcome back email two days after the lead returns to the office before resuming the previous drip campaign.

“In a perfect world, every lead gets engaged by a human, but human follow-up isn’t scalable, and sales reps give up on leads too quickly,” said the firm. “So the majority of your leads are left untouched and sales opportunities are missed.”

Exceed noted that 44% of reps give up after one or two touches, leaving many leads to go fallow.  Bots will continue the touches, waiting for engagement.

“Robots are very good at speed, working at scale, they never get tired, they never complain, they’re persistent and they can process huge amounts of information,” Kasan explained to Entrepreneur. “Humans are good at relationships, feeling empathy. They’re very good at understanding nuance in complex situations.  Everything the robots are good at, humans hate doing and actually are not that good at doing.  And everything that humans know to do, robots don’t know to do.  This in essence is a partnership whereby the robot will automate all the manual repetitive tasks so the humans can focus on doing what they know to do best, which is closing deals, having conversations and having relationships.”

Sales reps should focus on tasks that require “critical thinking and evaluation,” blogged Head of Marketing, Billy Attar.  Conversely, “all tasks that can be handled by automation should be automated.”

“As a Sales Manager, you need to maximize the time your reps spend on tasks that require real human insight – the insight only they are qualified to give, ultimately representing the value they bring to the company.  Those human insights include researching prospects and evaluating each leads’ needs, interests and objections, answering their asked and unstated questions… all the things that Sales Reps and SDRs are supposed to do.”

Exceed.AI Head of Marketing Billy Attar

Exceed.AI lists Demandbase, SugarCRM, Hearst, The YMCA, and Universal Robots as clients.  Exceed.AI is located in Israel and Sunnyvale, CA.

Monthly pricing starts at $1,500 for 20,000 leads and unlimited use cases (campaigns).

HG Insights Market Intelligence for SOM Analysis

Last month, HG Insights launched its Market Intelligence service that supports technographic market research. The analytics service supports sales, marketing, and strategy teams at B2B vendors, letting them develop account plans, segment markets, evaluate market entry, and size opportunities.

Product and strategy teams can analyze market trends, size market opportunities, and assess competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.  They can also use it to identify the Service Obtainable Market (SOM), which is the market segment size a firm can capture with its solution. As HG Insights notes in the following graphic, the SOM is a narrower definition of market potential than TAM (Total Addressable Market) and SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market).

For example, many entrenched vendors in the North American Sales Intelligence space have robust solutions and established market share.  Looking to displace LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoominfo, D&B Hoovers, and InsideView in the most mature Sales Intelligence segment would be difficult.  However, a SOM analysis would indicate that the UK is the second most mature market and that continental Europe is beginning to take off.  Thus, a product manager might focus on European content and multi-lingual capabilities (e.g., UX, event tagging, free form text translation).  Likewise, they might select niche markets such as financial services with strong compliance requirements or choose to develop functionally differentiated services (e.g., GrowFlare focused on psychographics and ICPs before being acquired by Terminus late last year).

“Without a SOM containing detailed information about competitor product installations, you’d have no way of knowing this and might decide to go to market in a region saturated by competition you have very little likelihood of displacing. Alternatively, what if you were looking at different regions or countries and wanted to identify which situations represented the best growth opportunities for your business. Again, knowing the estimated market size in revenue isn’t going to help you much. But what if you knew what companies had budgeted to spend on your category of product by region, entity, or industry?”

HG Insights VP of Global Sales Scott Smyth

“Business leaders need more than high-level market reports to make successful go-to-market decisions,” said HG Insights EVP of Product Rana Kanaan. “With our actionable market intelligence offering, we are giving our customers the ability to customize their market views by the attributes they care about most and operationalize intelligence for their revenue teams.  This allows them to allocate resources more effectively, prioritize the right product initiatives, and give their sales and marketing teams the account details they need to pursue the best opportunities.”

Scott Smyth is offering a master class on TAM/SAM/SOM on February 24th. Here is the information:

HG Insights Market Intelligence

HG Insights continues its evolution from a technographics licensor to a full-service direct source of technology market intelligence.  Two weeks ago, they launched Market Intelligence, a market analytics service for marketing, product management, and strategy groups.  Market Intelligence delivers “actionable insights [that] business leaders need to understand their markets in-depth, make better business decisions, and go-to-market (GTM) with confidence.”

Market Intelligence insights are derived from their global verified technology installation data, including which products have been installed, tech stack spend by category, and contract terms. “This trio of data sets powers detailed, customizable views of the entire installed technology ecosystem,” wrote the firm.

The IT Spend and tech install data are broken into different categories, helping sales teams determine which verticals are likely to have both budgets and an intention to purchase.  Revenue teams can drill into market segments to understand the “size, shape, and structure” of target markets.

Likewise, marketing can use install and spend intelligence to better segment and target their outreach.  Information can be analyzed by IT category, industry, region, and other relevant attributes.  Better targeting allows firms to focus their marketing spend and attention on the right prospects and feed marketing qualified leads to sales.

Revenue teams can deploy Market Insights for territory optimization, account targeting based on propensity to purchase, and account-based messaging.

HG Insights contrasted Market Intelligence with traditional technology research vendors that provide “static, top-down analyst reports that are not customizable at the account level.”  According to HG Insights, technology analyst reports lack the account intelligence that revenue teams require to engage with customers and prospects effectively.

“HG Insights Market Intelligence platform addresses these challenges by providing you with the bottom-up account intelligence you need to understand your markets in-depth and make better business decisions,” contrasted HG Insights Marketing Communications Manager David Guerra.  Using our Market Intelligence platform, you can now instantly analyze the true size of your markets globally by technology installation, IT spend and budget, and a number of other factors.”

Users can also compare the market size of various markets such as countries by vertical to determine growth opportunities.  Other features include vendor penetration rates by industry, purchasing and spend data for target accounts, and segmentation based upon ICP criteria.

“The HG Insights Market Intelligence platform gives you all the information you need to understand your markets, remove subjectivity from planning, and go to market with confidence,” stated Guerra.

A few weeks ago, HG Insights closed on an equity round with Riverwood Capital.  HG Insights completed a successful 2020, reaching its highest annual recurring revenue (ARR) and profitability.  Employment rose 30% last year, and revenue grew over 35%.

“Customers continue to reaffirm that HG Insights’ data’s breadth, depth, and coverage accuracy has become an indispensable asset for critical decision making at every level of a technology company,” commented Riverwood Principal Ramesh Venugopal who joined HG Insights’ Board.  “HG Insights provides unique, data-driven knowledge giving decision-makers confidence that they are making the right choices.”

Part II covers how Product and Strategy teams can employ Market Intelligence for determining the Service Obtainable Market (SOM) for technology offerings.