German Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot released version 2.0 of its TARGET prospecting service with a refreshed UI, improved data quality, and AI tools for ICP and segmentation analysis.
“If you want to digitize your sales processes and save a lot of time, money, and nerves, you can’t ignore Echobot,” said CEO Bastian Karweg. “TARGET 2.0 inspires the everyday sales life of our customers – the new version is fast, intuitive to use, and simply fun.”
Echobot has set its product vision based on the “first principles of data” delivered through its service. “For data to be useful, it has to be high quality, connected, and fully compliant,” said Karweg.
The first step was unifying their database across regions and datatype and removing data silos within the platform. Echobot implemented a “unified, nested data index” that improved query times up to ten-fold and allowed for enhanced switching between company and contact results.
Users no longer need to build company and contact lists separately. Instead, build-a-list results are displayed as tabs, allowing users to analyze both company and contact results without requiring them to rekey their query.
Echobot also implemented a new Email Validation Engine (EVA) that “eliminates stale records” and implements mail server and pattern checking to improve data quality. The EVA reduces bounce rates by up to thirty percent.
Echobot licensed company records directly from trade registers and implemented a “True Compliance” process.
“For your outreach to be truly GDPR compliant, you not only need a Legitimate Interest but also be mindful of the preferences of the people you are trying to contact,” stated Karweg. “Using Echobot, each contact record comes with a public source URL so you can be 100% confident when a prospect asks you, ‘Hey, where did you get my data from?’”
Echobot implemented AI to assist users, building a subject taxonomy that covers over 100,000 topics and industry keywords. TARGET 2.0 sports a keyword type-ahead tool that “guides you towards the right queries and also intelligently suggests alternative keywords or job titles you also might want to include in your search.”
The firm’s new segmentation analysis is their “most advanced AI” that builds a company vector model for clustered analysis of highly similar companies from uploaded files. The clusters identify similar companies for downloading to the desktop or uploading to the CRM. Thus, users can upload their Ideal Customer Profile and expand it with similar companies. The ICP is also used to score prospects and sort them by priority.
“Echobot uses a new company vector model for the first time in addition to rigid industry codes. The technology is based on machine learning and makes it possible to select companies in a fine-grained manner according to thousands of specialist areas. The assignment takes place automatically on the basis of text content that is associated with the respective company. This means that if you are looking for industries, Echobot now offers an immense wealth of detail and can thus easily find even high-precision target groups. With the help of so-called cross joins, filters of different data areas can be combined with each other in real-time. This completely eliminates the time-consuming storage of interim results.”
Echobot Press Release (Translated from German)
TARGET 2.0 supports a broad set of screening variables:
- Industry – Industry codes or keywords.
- Keyword
- Contacts – Department, Level, Title
- Trigger Events
- Location – Region and Radius
- Company Size
- Financials
- Technographics – Software and Systems
- Firmographics
- Data Completeness
Their instant access to data allows for complete data visibility without slowing down users with credits to display contact details. In addition, the contract includes a minimum of 10,000 monthly record uploads or downloads with a FLAT-RATE Guarantee that provides an additional 5,000 monthly data records after consuming the EXPORT quota. The guarantee ensures budgeting stability while providing export flexibility should the marketing department consume their entire download quota mid-year.
Echobot pricing starts at €999 per month for up to three users. This price is introductory and will increase for new customers in 2022.
Echobot supports four countries – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the UK – and two languages – German and English. The Echobot roadmap includes “intelligent” email alerts, “helpful” trigger events, and “smart” campaign management. Additional languages and countries are also in development.