Month: November 2022

Demandbase CRM Connectors

Demandbase sales and marketing engagement data can be visually displayed in Dynamics 365.

Demandbase unveiled a pair of CRM connectors for HubSpot and MSD 365.  The bi-directional, native integrations allow Demandbase One to push data into the CRMs for automated workflows, Lead-to-Account mapping, tracking, and responding to engagement activity.  Syncing is performed nightly.

“This release creates a unified interface that empowers revenue operations, sales, and marketing teams to grow predictable pipeline and close larger deals,” blogged Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier.  “The integrations enable a variety of rich workflows for customers to enhance their analytics, derive valuable insights, target more efficiently, and build reporting that aligns with their own CRM data set and their GTM needs.”

Demandbase launched the unified first and third-party view in its Salesforce connector this summer and has now expanded it to two other leading CRMs.

Demandbase offers a set of Calculated Fields that includes intent, engagement, and predictive scores that are synced and displayed in CRMs.

Demandbase feeds intent and engagement data, firmographics, technographics, and Demandbase Calculated Fields into CRMs.  With this data, operations can create CRM custom sales views, reports, and dashboards that display website activity, intent, and heatmaps.  Sales reps can view both sales intelligence and engagement data from a unified view. 

Furthermore, CRM data is available for list building and filtering in Demandbase One.  Users can define selectors, set up orchestration, create Demandbase campaigns, visualize and apply Demandbase intent and predictive scores, analyze journeys, and build reports.  Furthermore, “accurate account identification, combined with their CRM data, also means better predictive models, marketing and sales alerts, personalization opportunities, and more.”

For example, past opportunity data from the CRMs are now available to Demandbase pipeline predict and qualification scoring models to assist with account prioritization.  Demandbase also helps, “align messaging to each stage” of the buyer’s journey and assists with list building and campaign execution.

Conversely, Demandbase is syncing its insights (e.g., intent data, web traffic, most engaged contacts) with the CRM, helping reps prioritize accounts and prepare for account interactions.  Insights include Demandbase’s configurable data, such as its scores and engagement minutes that populate custom fields.

Demandbase brought firmographic, contact, and technographics databases in-house following the May 2021 acquisitions of InsideView (firmographics, contacts, and event triggers) and DemandMatrix (technographics).  Intent data includes first and third-party intelligence such as Surging Intent, Demandbase Keyword Intent, Campaign Responses, and Web Page Visits.

Revenue Operations can also select intent data from Bombora and G2, which are processed through the ABX platform’s predictive models.

“Both of these integrations improve orchestration, delivering greater sales and marketing alignment and a friction-free experience,” stated Demandbase.

“These integrations ensure our customers who use Dynamics 365 and HubSpot CRM realize the full value of the Demandbase platform.  Pairing Demandbase natively with the CRM allows our customers to orchestrate a seamless go-to-market motion with full alignment between marketing and sales.  We’re providing the full power of our Account Intelligence in these connected systems and saving sales and marketing teams time by providing them actionable insights wherever they want to consume them.  The result is better performance with less manual effort at every stage of the customer journey.”

Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw

Demandbase is not done with the connectors.  It plans to add additional functionality to the CRMs, including “new sales-focused experiences, additional capabilities in the Demandbase app in Dynamics, enhanced Lead-To-Account functionality, and the ability to automate and scale account-based / people-based plays directly from your activities.”

Demandbase supports both HubSpot CRM and Marketing Automation platforms.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q4 Release

LinkedIn Sales Navigator unveiled its Q4 release this month with new account and relationship intelligence lists, improvements to buyer intent, refined searching, expanded revenue and technology data, and a more streamlined ability to upload a sales rep’s book of business.

The new My Current Accounts homepage prompt lets sales reps load their book of business as a CSV list matched against LinkedIn company profiles.  In addition, LinkedIn offers a quick field mapper to ensure the CSV is properly ingested and matched to the correct LinkedIn company profiles.

Account Lists provide several benefits to sales reps.  Sales Navigator users can

  • Target in-market accounts based on LinkedIn Buyer Intent
  • Review real-time alerts around sales triggers such as funding events, leadership changes, and headcount growth/decline
  • Streamline search and prospecting efforts by spotlighting specific saved searches based a user’s book of business

“Yes, it’s great on its own,” blogged LinkedIn Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray.  “But it reaches a whole new level of capability when you can manage your entire book of business in Sales Navigator – insights surfaced via features like Buyer Intent are more actionable, searching becomes more powerful, and it’s that much easier to stay on top of what’s happening at your most important accounts.”

LinkedIn already aggregated Buyer Intent scores spanning 180 different intent signals, and it added four isolated visible Buyer Intent activities as part of an early beta in Q3.  LinkedIn plans to release additional Buyer Intent activities in future releases.  These specific activities are displayed with the associated account.  Furthermore, when the intent activity is public-facing, the individual completing the activity is also presented to the sales rep.

The four isolated Buyer Intent activities are

  1. Who’s followed a company
  2. Who’s visited your profile
  3. Who’s a new connection to yourself
  4. Who’s filled out a lead gen form
Reps can view LinkedIn buyer intent against their account list and then target accounts with high intent levels.

LinkedIn contends that its intent insights differ from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence.  Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account.  Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”

Sales Navigator said that it will offer a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement.”

Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.

Current Account Lists and Buyer Intent are available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.

Buyer Activities capture account and contact-level intent.

LinkedIn did not expand the Buyer Intent categories in Q4 but added two new features: Filtering for Buyer Activities and new Buyer Intent account hover cards.  On Account Pages, sales reps can filter for activities by time range and level of decision-making ability.

Reps can also hover over accounts on Alerts, Lists, and Lead Pages to better evaluate an opportunity and refine account messaging.  The hover popup displays the level of buyer interest, recent news, and decision-makers changes “so sellers can easily double check any account’s level of intent as the work through Sales Navigator, without disrupting the current workflow.”

Hover cards provide account intelligence without disrupting research flow.

The New Executives at Saved Accounts List is an auto-generated list based on the saved accounts list.  The list identifies VP and CxO executives hired by tracked accounts.  While the executive view restricts the report to top-level executives, it doesn’t yet support filtering by function, a valuable report extension.

I’ve long extolled the value of identifying new executives at companies.  Fortunately, sales intelligence solutions are doing a better job of leveraging executive change insights in their products:

  • D&B Hoovers supports exec change alerts and triggers by job function.
  • ZoomInfo offers executive tracking of champions to new companies along with backfill contact recommendations at their old employer.
  • LinkedIn identifies new execs at saved accounts.

“We’ve found a lot of success internally being able to see when a new executive comes in,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions Head of Product Marketing Neil Khare explained to GZ Consulting during a briefing.  “They’re generally more willing to think about new vendors or have a mandate to change things up a little bit.  It’s a great time to capitalize on it, and we find that we’ve had some success internally on it, so we wanted to bring this up externally as well.”

LinkedIn also released a Recently Accepted Connections and InMails List highlighting individuals who responded to connection requests or InMails over the past thirty days.

The lists are available online from the list tab or via a weekly email digest.

“These are people that you are going to want to follow up with,” stated Khare.

Users can access two updated filters when building lists: Technology Used and Revenue.  Both filters have been improved with new data licensing agreements from undisclosed data partners. 

Accounts may be filtered by preset revenue ranges (vs. discrete values determined by the end-user).  All revenue data is in US Dollars.

To improve regional screening, users can paste a set of postal codes.

LinkedIn Sales Insights, LinkedIn’s DaaS enrichment service for sales ops, also benefited from expanded revenue data sourced from LinkedIn members, third-party vendors, and AI models.  95% of Fortune 500 and 75% of publicly traded companies display discrete revenue data.  More broadly, 60% of companies have at least a modeled revenue range.

To improve the Sales Insights workflow, LSI added exclusion filters for companies and personas, helping Sales Operations “focus on industries and geographies that are relevant to your business.”

LinkedIn Sales Insights now offers exclusion criteria to improve reporting filters.

People.AI Integrates with Zoom IQ

People.AI announced a partnership with Zoom Video Communications to deliver its sales engagement intelligence alongside Zoom’s conversational intelligence within Zoom IQ for Sales.  People.AI buyer role and engagement insights will be combined with Zoom’s conversational sales intelligence.  The joint solution also supports cross-channel engagement data, post-call summaries, and contact creation and enrichment.

The combined solution will provide “greater visibility into buyer engagements, enabling go-to-market teams to access previously buried insights,” said the firms.  “Sellers will have the ability to engage the right people in the right accounts, resulting in pipeline predictability and revenue.”

Revenue teams will enjoy greater pipeline visibility, helping de-risk deals and drive revenue growth.  During calls, a side panel will provide an “unparalleled understanding of ‘who is who’ within accounts and opportunities, empowering your sales teams to strategically plot next steps with the right people and personas to grow pipeline, drive larger deals, shorten sales cycles, and improve win rate.”

“Zoom has been a customer of ours since 2017 and a business we’ve always admired,” said Thomas Wyatt, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at People.ai. “Our joint customers will soon be able to leverage Zoom’s world-class conversation intelligence solution enriched by buyer and relationship intelligence that only People.ai can provide.”

During Zoom Calls, People.AI displays Stakeholder Insights that include contact information, engagement levels, and connection overviews.

Zoom IQ for Sales was launched in April and provides a host of standard conversational sales capabilities, including sentiment analysis, engagement scores, talk-listen ratios, the longest monologue, filler word frequency, a snippets library, and competitor and feature mentions.  Furthermore, it includes a few differentiators:

  • Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
  • Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
  • Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.

Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision.  General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.

Zoom IQ for Sales is available for Zoom and Zoom Phone.  It is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange.  Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.

Resources

TechTarget Much Better Positioned to Withstand Recession than in 2008

Technology Sales and Marketing Services vendor TechTarget ($TTGT) believes it is in a much stronger marketplace and revenue position than in 2008, the last recession not caused by a pandemic. It has shifted away from economically sensitive brand revenues to a “robust product suite, which allows us to address the evolving needs of our customers.”  As a result, brand revenues have declined from 30% of total revenue to 10% since 2009.

TechTarget is fundamentally much stronger than in 2008.  It has trebled its revenue over the past fourteen years and doubled its Adjusted EBITDA margin.  In 2009, the firm had virtually no long-term contracts; now, 42% of revenue is associated with longer-term contracts.  Other positive signs: TechTarget has grown its customer base from 1,000 to 3,200 customers and is much less reliant on legacy global customers, reducing its revenue share from 32% to 20%.  Furthermore, its largest customers have shifted from hardware to cloud and software vendors with subscription customers.  Whereas its top customers in 2009 suffered revenue downturns, its current customer base is more likely to struggle to grow revenue than to suffer declining revenue.

“The modernization of the sales and marketing organization is a strong and durable trend.  It is hard to compete in today’s IT market without a data-driven go-to-market strategy,” argued CEO Michael Cotoia on TechTarget’s Q3 earnings call earlier this month.  “As the leading provider of first-party purchase intent data in the enterprise IT market, we will continue to benefit from this trend.”

Priority Engine

Priority Engine, its subscription sales intelligence platform, grew revenues by 15% last quarter.  TechTarget will continue to invest in Priority Engine after doubling the number of engineers working on the product in 2022.

In 2023, Priority Engine will further bolster its Salesforce integration with “bi-directional data flow, campaign orchestration from within Priority Engine, additional program impact reporting, market insights to inform marketing and sales outreach, and alert-driven account and prospect intelligence for our sales users.”

Priority Engine also plans to ingest Salesforce data for analytics dashboards around ROI, open pipeline, and won/lost opportunities.   The dashboards will answer the question, “how do we set up our sales reps within our customers’ environment to make the most appropriate and relevant follow-up?”

“We also want to make sure that we are working with our customers to provide more insights across their total campaign with TechTarget, both on the sales side and on the marketing side.  So, what you’re doing with their lead generation and demand gen, their content, their branding, the visitors on their website to really bring that end-to-end view into Priority Engine to help fuel and help modernize…both sales and marketing.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

The firm sees significant opportunity for growth in TechTarget’s sales-specific module, which is still in the early adoption phase as it was rolled out less than a year ago.

TechTarget does not break out the number of customers licensing Priority Engine or the Priority Engine sales module.  However, CFO Daniel Noreck said that the module is “growing nicely but still a small base.”

More broadly, the firm has 3,200 customers, but there are over 18,000 global technology companies with at least $50 million in annual revenue, providing plenty of market opportunity. 

“We believe most of those companies are good candidates for the Priority Engine sales module,” stated Cotoia.  “While we expect that our rollout to those customers will be slowed by macroeconomic weakness in the short term, we think the long-term opportunity is enormous.”

Content to Close

TechTarget’s fastest-growing service is Content Enablement which powers its Content to Close strategy.  In conjunction with its customers, TechTarget produced content “to fuel their marketing and sales outreach.”  The service is aligned with the growing focus on self-service research among younger purchasing and business professionals.

“Most technology companies’ current go-to-market strategy is very sales rep heavy. We believe this approach is going to need to transform in the coming years to adjust to the changing buyer dynamics.  The companies that win business will have a comprehensive content strategy to effectively influence buyers before their sales reps get involved.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

The acquisitions of Enterprise Strategy Group (“ESG”) and BrightTALK have “uniquely positioned” TechTarget to support growing self-service requirements.  Content Enablement via these subsidiaries will continue to be an “aggressive” investment area.

TechTarget also believes it has a market advantage due to its opted-in, privacy-compliant intent data sets gathered from its B2B media websites and BrightTALK.  Cotoia argues that customer sensitivity to privacy issues and growing government regulations will offer an ongoing competitive advantage for its intent data from permission-based audiences owned and operated by TechTarget.  This advantage “will become even more apparent when Google eliminates third-party cookies.”

TechTarget will continue to look for acquisitions like BrightTALK and ESG that expand the firm’s product capabilities.  It is also interested in acquiring vertical media companies like Xtelligent Healthcare that expand the firm’s TAM into verticals that share similar attributes as Enterprise IT: significant purchase price, complex buying process, long lead times, and large buyer teams.

Healthcare Intent

TechTarget recently integrated XTelligent Healthcare intent into Priority Engine, creating a sales intelligence solution for HealthTech and Healthcare.

Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.

Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies.  TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered.  Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”

To demonstrate confidence in the company, TechTarget began a new stock buyback program to repurchase up to $200 million in common stock and convertible debt over the next two years.

Chili Piper Distro for Salesforce

Calendaring vendor Chili Piper released its Distro app for Salesforce, providing revenue teams with automated lead routing and assignment.  Automated lead assignment improves speed to lead and bypasses spreadsheets, APEX code, and manual routing.  Marketing Qualified Leads can be distributed to sales reps when leads hit score thresholds or following events such as webinar attendance or downloading gated content.

Lead assignment details are synced with Salesforce, and users are notified via Slack or email.  In addition, a broad set of Salesforce record types are supported, including leads, contacts, accounts, cases, and opportunities.

Features include lead-to-account mapping, rule and trigger-based assignments, round-robin distribution, meeting reminders, and automated rescheduling.  The Distro Log provides a detailed breakdown of triggers, actions, and routes.

“Now more than ever, it’s crucial that high-growth companies optimize for efficiency in their marketing and sales processes without sacrificing on customer experience,” said Co-CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe.  “With Distro, revenue teams can effectively cover all of their routing and assignment needs while accelerating speed to lead.”

Chili Piper claims that it doubles top-of-the-funnel conversion rates.

A March 2011 article in The Harvard Business Review (“The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”) argued that speed to lead is critical for inbound leads.  Last year, XANT replicated the study las year and found that 57.1% of first call attempts took place after a week or more, and only 0.1% of inbound leads were responded to within five minutes.  However, firms that responded within those first five minutes had an 8X conversion rate versus later returned calls. 

A Lead Connect study found that 78% of companies that respond first to a demo request end up winning the deal.  Thus, firms that act immediately by returning a call or scheduling a meeting have a clear market advantage over firms with scheduling/call-back friction.

Chili Piper conducted a study earlier this year and found that 28.1% of demo requests submitted via chatbots or webforms to tech firms received no response after a week, and only 45% of requests were responded to within one hour.

Chili Piper studied response rates across technology firms.  Demo requests were placed via chatbots and web forms.

“In the past, marketers at leading organizations such as HubSpot and Vendasta have preached five minutes to two hours as the sweet spot for follow-up.  We, however, disagree,” blogged Chili Piper Content Marketing Manager Kelli Diffenderfer.  “In this day and age, responses should be instant.  And there’s absolutely no reason they can’t be.  If you’re not responding immediately, you’re losing out on a significant amount of revenue.”

Automated lead distribution and routing allows prospects to go from buyer research to an inbound inquiry to a scheduled meeting with a few clicks on a landing page or the corporate website, bypassing the delays inherent to traditional lead routing.

Yet, eleven years after the HBR first published its research, inbound response rates remain slow, with 26.8% of tech firms taking one to twenty-four hours to respond and 28.1% failing to respond.

“Distro for Salesforce is a welcome addition to AppExchange, as they power digital transformation for customers by simplifying lead management, improving conversion rates, and accelerating speed to lead,” said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to connect customers with the right apps and experts for their business needs.”

Distro is priced at $20 per user per month.  Chili Piper does not offer any discounts.

Distro supports automated lead routing and distribution based on triggered events including Lead Score thresholds.

Additional information about Chili Piper is available on the GZ Consulting blog and the Chili Piper website.

Leadinfo Acquires WebProspector.de

Dutch lead generation vendor Leadinfo is acquiring WebProspector.de, a German visitor tracking company, with the deal closing on November 1.  Deal terms were not disclosed.

The acquisition expands Leadinfo’s presence in Germany.  It acquired Leading Reports in April and opened an office in Düsseldorf in July to improve its sales and support in German-speaking markets.

Leadinfo claims to be the market leader in Benelux and the most prominent international provider in the D-A-CH region.  It consolidated its position in the Netherlands over the past year with the acquisitions of Leadexpress (December 2021) and LeadElephant (January 2022). 

Leadinfo supports over 3,000 customers in Benelux, D-A-CH, Great Britain, and Scandinavia.  Customers include Lavazza, Quis Machinery, Channable, and Creditsafe.

Both Leadinfo and WebProspector.de have focused on their partner networks, with Leadinfo supporting over 1,100 partners.

WebProspector.de clients will migrate to the Leadinfo platform and benefit from a broader set of integrations.  Leadinfo supports over fifty platforms, including Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, and Salesloft.

CRM integrations are bi-directional, with Leadinfo performing duplicate checking against lead and account records.  When sending to CRM, companies may be added as Lead or Account record types.  Additionally, company profiles include deal and task information gathered from CRMs, and users can create new deals and tasks from Leadinfo.

team.blue visitor information displayed in the Leadinfo service.

The Leadinfo platform supports a visitor inbox, real-time lead alerts, web forms, visitor browsing recordings, and triggered workflows.  In addition, its programmatic functionality supports Google Ads and LinkedIn retargeting.

Liquid Content, its site personalization functionality, adjusts websites based on firmographics.  As a result, marketers can customize the text, video, content, and images presented to the visitor, allowing them to segment their website presentation.

Leads are enriched by IP address matching against a reference database of 220 million global businesses.  Firmographics are gathered from global registry filings and web crawling.   Firmographics include address, phone, year founded, industry codes (US SIC 87 and local codes), sizing data, company logos, social media links, business descriptions, etc.  Legal information includes the registration number, entity type, ultimate parent, group size, and employees in the group.  Business descriptions are generally available in the local language.  Other information includes a pinned Google map, page view information, Leadinfo’s lead score, and Leadinfo tags.

Leadinfo company profiles include a proprietary lead score based on visitor behavior.  However, lead scores do not yet adjust for firmographic fit; thus, a company may score high based on behavior but may not be a qualified lead.

Leadinfo displays HubSpot Deal and Task information. Sales reps can also create new tasks and deals from Leadinfo.

In July, Leadinfo was acquired by team.blue, a European cloud services provider with an office in fifteen European countries and Turkey.  CEO Han Kleppe and the rest of the management team continue to run Leadinfo as an independent subsidiary.

Leadinfo is growing rapidly and was recently named to Deloitte’s Fast 50 technology list for the Netherlands.