Clearbit announced the general availability of its Data Activation Platform.  The new service helps B2B marketing teams “focus on creating demand, capturing intent, and optimizing their pipeline.”

The Data Activation Platform addresses the “business imperative for companies to have real-time intelligence about their target market, ideal customers, and engaged prospects.”  It then applies this intelligence across all stages of the customer’s journey.

The Data Activation Platform offers Clearbit customers a user interface for many of the features that were previously only supported as APIs.

“Data activation is specifically around the next step of how we’re helping companies put data to work,” explained CRO Kevin Tate to GZ Consulting.  “We started with the data.  How do you collect data and make it available so that companies can be smart as they engage your customers in the market?  And then, over the last three years, four years, what we’ve gotten to see is how these very fast-growing companies and their growth engineering teams and go-to-market teams have put our data to work in all these different customer touchpoints.  Until this Data Activation Platform, the way they put that data to work was through APIs and integrations that they stitch together.”

Clearbit observed how its data was used for website personalization, advertising campaigns (Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube), webforms, lead scoring, routing, etc.  Clearbit then identified several customer needs: a user interface for “putting the data to work,” audience segmentation and activation, audience expansion (similar accounts or contacts by persona), data enrichment, and Reveal visitor intelligence.

“We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the most innovative B2B growth teams in the world, and they’ve taught us that it’s not just about having good data.  It’s about activating that data to improve your funnel from top to bottom,” said Ross Moser, CEO of Clearbit.  “The ability to apply real-time intelligence to each step of the customer journey – and optimize experiences in real-time – is what’s driving success for Clearbit’s customers.”

The Data Activation Platform leverages Clearbit’s heritage as a data company.  Its database spans 44 million companies with over 100 firmographic and demographic attributes.  Clearbit also maintains data on 350 million contacts.  Marketers can target audiences, enrich their CRMs and MAPs, and personalize their website and customer experience apps.  Capabilities include

• Clearbit Reveal visitor intelligence for tying anonymous users to firms and detecting website visitor intent
• Ideal Customer Profiling and best-fit prospect recommendations
• Audience management and segmentation based on data ingested from a company’s CRM, MAP, or CDP.  Alerts may be triggered to activate audiences across systems.
• Real-time enrichment for short webforms.
• Real-time integrations and APIs

Audiences can be targeted in multiple ways.  For example, marketers can deploy audiences on Facebook and Google:

• Prospect Audiences target employees across the complete ICP, including account expansion to new prospects outside the CRM.  Targeting may be filtered by role and seniority, providing persona-level targeting across the ICP.
• Contact Audiences that sync all matches to a contacts audience for retargeting on Facebook and Google
• Site Visitor Audiences that retarget web visitors when they match on Facebook and Google.

Data syncing includes “Audience inclusion attributes” or “smart attributes” that are calculated, such as a Boolean ICP or current customer flags that can be pushed downstream to Salesforce and other platforms.  The refreshed value is automatically pushed to downstream systems if the calculation is modified.  Smart attributes are updated every fifteen minutes.

Clearbit partners include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Segment, Drift, Intercom, Chili Piper, Slack, Zapier, Qualified, and Clari.  Personalization partners that leverage Clearbit Reveal include Uberflip, Optimizely, and Mutiny.

Clearbit is coming off a “big, big growth year” but does not disclose any sizing or growth details.  LinkedIn lists it with 177 employees, up 90% over the past year.  Business Development and Sales grew at a 150% pace. While Clearbit originally targeted B2B Internet service companies, it is gaining traction in financial services, retail services, and investments, businesses that are “looking for data, to power their intelligence, their go-to-market motions,” said Tate.