Month: April 2023

LeadDelta: Seed Round & Product Profile

The LeadDelta Network Manager provides a light CRM view for managing LinkedIn contacts.

LeadDelta, which offers a Sales Engagement platform focused on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, closed on an $800,000 pre-seed round.  LeadDelta has been self-funded since its 2021 founding.

LeadDelta focuses on managing the social capital entrepreneurs and sales reps capture in Sales Navigator. 

LeadDelta began as a “simple app” for tagging LinkedIn connections but now offers a broader app used by over 11,000 individuals and teams.  Features include a dashboard, sidebar (Chrome Extension), and Smart Inbox that help users manage their network.

The Smart Inbox lets users pin, star, and tag LinkedIn messages.  It also supports LinkedIn message filtering, a connection sidebar for viewing notes and tags while chatting, messaging templates, and a unified inbox for LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.  Users can message up to 25 contacts at a time.

The network manager syncs and updates contacts in a “lightweight CRM view.”  Users can search and sort contacts, create custom tables and views, follow/unfollow in bulk, and filter contacts.  The network manager also displays signals such as when connections were made and the last text.

The LeadDelta Dashboard analyzes the user’s LinkedIn network.

The Dashboard helps users view and manage key connection attributes, tags, and notes.

LinkedIn has not been careful about partnering with vendors that pull data from its platform; however, LeadDelta has managed to avoid conflict with LinkedIn by focusing on enhancing the LinkedIn experience and not mining it for contact intelligence.

“It has been a journey of really trying to be the good guys on Linkedin and really making sure that Linkedin likes what we do because we complement the community.  We enhance the community.

What we say is ‘You own your data.  This is your data.’ This is also how we are a legitimate Linkedin business.  You have the permissions, and you say what you want, but then you can choose to whom to give.  If you want to give your contacts to your company or not, and which contacts, and what context?  This is your digital Rolodex, and for the first time, you can monetize it.  You can come to your new employer and say, look at my app.”

CEO Vedran Rasic

LeadDelta has been growing “steadily 20% month-over-month,” helping them “complete the fundraising from really reputable angels around the globe,” continued Rasic.

The firm will soon be launching LeadDelta Workspaces to “revolutionize how teams sell, hire, fundraise, and market their products and services. For the first time, teams can utilize their combined social capital,” said LeadDelta.

Workspaces support pooled connections across teams, notes, and tagging.

LeadDelta will simplify sales and support selling from both traditional and non-traditional sales roles.  Rasic sees LeadDelta as akin to Figma, which simplified design and took market share from Adobe. 

“Figma came and said, Everybody is a designer, and we can all collaborate.  We can all add notes [and] comments.  We can all engage.  This is the same thing.  This is what we want to do for sales for relationships,” analogized Rasic.  “Imagine a recruiter being able to help a salesperson close a deal or a salesperson, in reverse, being able to help recruit or score that next hire.”

Historically, individuals could only manage 150 relationships at a time, but that number is expanding due to social networks and AI, helping with fundraising, selling, marketing, and hiring.  LeadDelta’s goal is to create “one integrated, cross-referenced professional network” that improves the odds of success as users collaborate cross-functionally.

The network will expand further as additional individuals participate and data is integrated from other platforms such as HubSpot and Gmail.

LeadDelta targets SMBs with annual invoices between $5K and $50K.  Many of their prospects have deployed HubSpot; thus, HubSpot CRM connectivity is a popular request that will soon be implemented in the platform.

Along with HubSpot, LeadDelta is looking to add CSV uploads to capture second-degree connections.

Rasic noted that at many tech organizations, the executive team is well-connected but too busy to leverage its connections for the organization.  LeadDelta helps address this issue.

“As a person who fostered numerous for-profit and non-profit enterprises through stewarding community efforts, it wasn’t until LeadDelta that I got the first smart and dedicated application for targeted network outreach,” stated lead investor Tijo Bajic.  “This is not only an idea I believe in.  It powers how I interact daily as a professional.  I’m proud to be the first investor and the angel syndicate lead.”

LeadDelta is priced at $29 per user per month or $19.33 when billed annually.  In addition, the firm is offering grandfathered pricing to its early clients.

The LeadDelta Sidebar (Chrome connection).

RingCentral: RingSense for Sales Launched

RingSense for Sales transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes meetings.

Cloud Communications vendor RingCentral entered the Conversational Sales space with RingSense for Sales.  The new service employs generative AI to summarize meetings and calls.  Initially, RingSense supports the sales function, but RingCentral plans to extend the service to other roles, including support and marketing.

“We’re going to be helping businesses make their voice, their meetings, their email interactions more intelligent, so they can automatically uncover new, actionable insights that help reduce errors, overhead, and improve performance,” said RingCentral COO Mo Katibeh. “I think of it as a force multiplier for every single employee.”

RingSense for Sales analyzes customer interactions with sales reps and surfaces insights and performance metrics.  These insights are also delivered to sales managers to assist with training and mentoring.

“Today marks an important step forward in our journey.  Generative AI is a game-changing technology that will fundamentally transform communications and collaboration.  Natural language, and voice in particular, has always been a universal interface for information, intent, and emotion that has been largely untapped,” said RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis. “Now with RingSense, we have the opportunity to inject cutting-edge AI across the entire RingCentral portfolio and make communications a powerful resource for businesses to unlock new potential and quickly extract meaningful information and insights.”

RingSense for Sales supports:

  • Automated follow-ups to drive productivity: RingSense’s AI gathers interaction summaries, notes, and follow-ups.  It then syncs them with the CRM.
  • AI-generated summary scoring: Interaction-level scoring and reporting call out which conversations should be prioritized by managers, helping them identify coaching opportunities.
  • Integrations with 3rd party apps: RingSense for Sales integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and call and video meeting providers.
  • Ability to track keywords and phrases (trackers): Sales admins can set RingSense to track keywords and phrases such as competitor names, objections, trends, or product features.  RingSense can also focus on relevant concepts instead of just keywords and calls out positive and negative deal signals.

“Over the last few years, RingCentral has developed a rich set of AI models that delivers conversational speech analysis and emotional sentiment recognition to the RingCentral platform,” explained the firm.  “Last year, RingCentral rolled out numerous AI-powered video meetings capabilities and was first to market with Advanced Meeting Insights and Summaries, which uses AI to enable a user to quickly catch up on a missed meeting or use the tool for automated note taking.”

RingSense for Sales captures topics, summarizes calls, and assists with deal coaching.

RingCentral also rolled out a set of AI APIs for accessing RingCentral transcriptions, summarizations, sentiment analysis, and interaction analysis for voice, video, and chat.  These APIs will be available to their 85,000 registered developers and 350 third-party applications.  RingSense, like RingCentral, is an open platform.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is the fuel that will fundamentally transform how we think about digital transformation today.  The era of deploying enterprise AI in isolation while wrestling with outcome uncertainty is over,” said Aragon Research CEO Jim Lundy.  “RingCentral has created an enterprise-grade AI with a results-based design.  Last year, they embedded this unique AI into their MVP platform to help make employees more productive.  Now, with RingSense, they’ve taken it to a whole new level by focusing on bespoke use cases the industry truly needs.”

RingCentral has long partnered with incumbent Conversational Sales vendors such as Gong, Chorus, Wingman (Clari), ExecVision (Mediafly), and Outreach.  Many of these vendors have been offering conversational sales tools for three to five years.  In addressing their delayed entry into Conversational Sales, Senior Product Marketing Manager Keith Renison listed the following advantages of the RingSense offering:

  • RingSense is easy to purchase, deploy, and configure.  Get ready for faster time-to-value without the expensive startup, platform fees, and model retraining costs.
  • AI-generated summaries, topics, and follow-ups are automatic.  This accelerates the disposition of customer interactions creating huge efficiency gains.
  • Out-of-the-box “trackers” with higher quality pattern matching.  Trackers can be customized or created from scratch.  Tune your system to what you’re listening for and make adjustments along the way.  AI does the rest.
  • AI-generated summary scoring at the top level helps find the important conversations without sifting through conversations manually.  
  • RingSense is built by a trusted leader in cloud communications. 

RingSense is not industry specific but can be leveraged broadly across industries for analyzing digitized sales calls and meetings, said Chief Innovation Officer Kira Makagon. 

RingCentral, which has built a customer base of five million customers over the past two decades, can deploy RingSense to “empower person-to-person communications.”  RingSense helps “make sense” and “find patterns in these interactions.”

Due to the large breadth of business conversations hosted on its digital platforms, RingCentral is “in a unique position to make sense of all of the wealth of information that is flowing through our platform,” said Shmunis.  “By applying these ultra-modern AI techniques, we can really empower users of our system to make better sense as to what is happening in their own employee bases, whether it be sales agents, customer service agents, and, in certain cases, even just knowledge workers who are communicating and interacting with the outside World.”

Shmunis emphasized that RingSense is a platform with RingSense for Sales as the first offering.  As an open platform, partners can build verticalized solutions.  Shmunis suggested applications in legal, finance, and healthcare.  Open RingSense APIs are already available.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, argued that businesses suffer from poor data quality in their CRMs, with reps often limiting the information they key into Salesforce to “Met with customer.”  Thus, AI’s most significant initial impact will be improving “data discipline” in organizations.   The initial benefit of AI will be as an “input mechanism.”

“So, when I do a call with you, an AI can listen to it, summarize the meaning, put it in [the] CRM [and] update the record.  You have contact center agents.  You can do that with salespeople and customer success,” argued Kerravala.  “You could actually use AI to create a better dataset and so, in theory, good AI leads to better AI.”

Kerravala sees AI improving the pre- and post-meeting experience due to its ability to create, manage, and refine meeting data.  “Most of the vendors do a pretty good job mid-meeting.  We have virtual backgrounds, transcription, and translation capabilities.  But what happens when the meeting is over?  Help me get the meeting minutes out to people and help me prep for meetings.  That’s where I see this stuff having a pretty big impact.”

RingSense is available in three packages based on function: Observer for Marketers helps them track customer and competitive trends, Coach supports managers, and Professional provides the full complement of deal intelligence and CRM synchronization.  RingCentral did not provide any pricing details.

RingSense seats may be allocated by role with Professional supporting the full complement of deal intelligence and CRM synchronization.

Next Quarter Adds Bombora Intent

Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients.  Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering.  Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”

Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce.  Churn risk is also assessed.

Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.

Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.

Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales.  Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.

“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm.  “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers.  Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”

Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.

“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah.  “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent.  Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”

Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021.  It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.

Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.

Pricing starts at $100 per user per month.  Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.

Shea Named Mediafly Co-CEO

Mediafly Co-CEO Mary Shea

Mary Shea was named co-CEO of Mediafly, where she will join Carson Conant in managing the Revenue Enablement company.  Shea joins with a solid RevTech pedigree.  She was a Principal Analyst at Forrester and Chief Evangelist at Outreach.  Shea first met Conant as a newly minted Forrester Principal Analyst in 2015 and later served as a company advisor.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Mary join us as co-CEO.  I’ve known Mary for over a decade and have benefited immensely from her deep knowledge of the revenue enablement landscape, her prescience in identifying the next big trend, and her vision for the future of B2B buying and selling,” said Conant.  “Mary brings deep empathy for the day-to-day challenges sellers face and a forward-leaning sensibility for the brand experience B2B companies need to create for buyers.  She will be a force multiplier for the Mediafly team and our customers.”

Shea argued that the RevTech unicorns “amassed large financial war chests” that helped them develop market recognition but that Mediafly and Boathouse Capital took a slower “Midwest approach” that relied more on individual investors than institutional funds.

“While this non-traditional route likely cost Mediafly some market recognition, today this ‘Midwest’ approach appears wise,” argued Shea.  “Fast-forward to the past 6-10 months.  As competitors and adjacents hunkered down and paused innovation to slow ‘burn’ to avoid ‘down rounds,’ Carson and the Mediafly team quietly acquired and integrated five companies — revenue intelligence provider InsightSquared, conversation intelligence providers ExecVision and Sonero, the enablement workflow solution, UserIQ, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.”

These acquisitions brought together underfunded assets with “great and complementary tech and talent” but which “lacked robust distribution channels,” argued Shea.

While Mediafly emphasized its contrarian approach, it is not immune to the layoff bug. It confirmed layoffs last Friday, attributing them to post-acquisition efficiencies, not the current tech slowdown.

“Today, the pendulum swings in the other direction as we made the difficult decision to let go of a number of talented individuals to achieve the efficiency desired after an intense year of acquisitions and integrations,” posted Conant on LinkedIn.  “With these actions, Mediafly will be in a strong position as a uniquely profitable, revenue enablement company.”

Conant listed three organizational goals: “an unwavering commitment” to its customers, product innovation and category leadership, and profitability and operational excellence. Mediafly did not indicate the scope of the layoffs.

Mediafly offers a set of modules that can be purchased as standalone solutions or as part of an integrated suite.  Functionality includes enterprise content management, revenue and conversation intelligence, value realization, coaching, deal management, and forecasting.  To supplement this functionality, it developed a partnership ecosystem spanning seventy-five solutions across the RevTech space.

Mediafly has acquired six RevTech companies to build out its platform quickly.  In 2022, it acquired and integrated revenue intelligence platform InsightSquared, conversation intelligence provider ExecVision, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.

Mediafly noted that customers are increasingly consolidating their tech stack with Mediafly while reducing their technology spend by thirty percent or more and enjoying “improved revenue team performance.”

Customers include PepsiCo, Nestle, Databricks, Honeywell, Sealed Air, Zscaler, and TransUnion.

“I’ve watched Mediafly for many years and always thought of the company as a hidden gem.  Mediafly has grown organically and through acquisitions and has quietly compiled the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market — everything B2B teams need to successfully navigate today’s complex buying journey,” said Shea.  “With this push towards a unified revenue enablement platform, it’s now time for Mediafly to step out of the background and help more B2B organizations create confident sellers who can deliver efficient predictable growth.  I’m hitting the ground running — if you’re looking to improve seller effectiveness, buyer engagement, or consolidate your tech stack, take a fresh look at Mediafly.”

Shea announced the following goals over the next few months:

  • Expand and deepen the value we deliver to customers.
  • Partner with more large global brands.
  • Rebrand and rename our company.
  • Create provocative and actionable thought leadership.
  • Innovate through organic and inorganic product development.

Shea sees the RevTech industry at a “critical and exciting crossroads which includes the rise of digital buying and selling, sweeping generational shifts, rapid technological advancement, the proliferation of tools focused on efficiency, and market and tool consolidation.”

To compete in this dynamic environment, Mediafly “will continue to build onto our platform, integrating each new asset through a modern and scalable data architecture, complete with a revenue business intelligence layer.”  As a result, Mediafly’s Revenue360 solution will become “the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market.”

Revenue Grid Spring Release

Revenue Grid’s New Revenue Leaks Funnel visualizes lost opportunities across the funnel.

Revenue Intelligence vendor Revenue Grid announced its Spring 2023 release, with a new Revenue Leaks Funnel headlining the announcement.  Other features include Forecast Evolution Reports, Signals Builder enhancements, sequence management enhancements, and custom calendaring fields.

The Revenue Leaks Funnel is available as a Salesforce-native, out-of-the-box report that helps revenue teams “magically spot invisible revenue leaks, understand where they occur during the selected period, and measure the magnitude of the leaks happening across the pipeline.”

The Revenue Leaks Funnel displays how opportunities progress between stages with the average stage time.  Slipped deals can be spotted and brought back on track.  Leaks are called out by stage, helping management identify where deals are being lost and address stage-related issues.  Revenue Ops and managers can view funnel dynamics for the previous week, month, quarter, or year.

A new Forecast Evolution Report compares different fiscal periods and tracks forecast changes.    Changes over the past week are displayed, with viewing at the team or rep level.  In addition, users can “see the patterns across the forecast categories over time and detect any trends in revenue leakage.”

The Signals Builder defines custom signals of specific types and assigns them to specific recipients.  Revenue Grid provided the following examples:

  • Custom Recipient: Account Executive assigns webinar leads to BDR (custom recipient) who has to process them first and add leads to the specific post-event sequence.
  • Sales Leader: An opportunity was created with a value exceeding $50,000.
  • Sales Manager: An opportunity is less than 15 days away from the close date and is at the “Proposal Price Quote.”
  • Sales Representative: A Lead was created more than 30 days ago but has not been contacted yet.

A new sequence-related productivity report helps sales managers monitor sales rep action items (e.g., replies, to-do lists, notifications) and coordinate their performance.  Managers can view and compare activity across their sales team.

Other sequence enhancements include searching and adding prospects to sequences from Salesforce, sequence pausing, and adding a prospect owner as a step owner in a sequence. Operations teams can add custom fields to booking confirmation forms, including text fields, labels, and checkboxes.  Forms automatically fill in the email and name on Book Me confirmation pages for recurring events.

Clari RevGPT

Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari announced Automatic Call Summaries to its Wingman Conversational Sales module.  The new RevGPT functionality, powered by ChatGPT, supports call summaries, next steps, and suggested actions in Slack in a conversational format.  Users can view the call or send follow-up emails from Slack.

Wingman already offers real-time cues and battle cards for overcoming objections during calls.  Furthermore, it alerts managers to “high-impact coaching moments that define deal outcomes, like pricing hurdles, competitor mentions, and more.”

“Are you going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  That’s the single most important question in business — and today’s introduction of RevGPT represents a quantum leap forward in helping companies get revenue answers.  By training generative AI to harness the industry-leading store of conversational intelligence and historical revenue data contained in RevDB, we’re giving revenue teams the ability to identify sources of revenue leak and take corrective action at scale and with extraordinary speed.  RevGPT will quickly become the indispensable guidance system that empowers every revenue-impacting employee to achieve more.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari’s database of revenue under management, RevGPT will enjoy a feedback loop that continuously improves Clari’s recommendations.  This “flywheel effect” will offer “better answers, better actions, better outcomes, and faster time to revenue.”  Future functionality includes “recommended prompts for every revenue-critical team — sales, revenue operations, customer success, marketing, finance, and leadership — enabling even greater productivity gains and revenue outcomes.”

RevGPT will soon recommend and automatically assist with follow-up actions, including drafting emails, scheduling meetings, updating CRM systems, and revising forecasts.

Wingman supports the following integrations:

  • Syncs with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive
  • Records, transcribes, analyzes/summarizes Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet
  • Alerts via Slack and Teams.  Alerts and guidance are also displayed in its desktop app.

“This is just the beginning of Clari’s RevGPT generative AI capabilities that are purpose-built to run revenue,” said the firm.  “And we’re not stopping here.  Soon you’ll be able to ask RevGPT to compose an email follow-up for you with just one click.”

Clari promises to address “revenue leaks,” including the difficulty of “combing through mountains of data buried in legacy systems — CRM software, spreadsheets, BI tools — to find, analyze, and take action on the information that can help them in revenue-critical moments.”  By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari reduces “time to answers and action,” resulting in greater revenue precision and reduced time performing revenue-based search and analysis.

Last year, Clari identified $26 billion in annual revenue leakage across its 550 customers.  Overall, the Boston Consulting Group estimates companies suffer $2 trillion in annual revenue leaks due to missed revenue capture, sales waste, and lost enterprise value.

Clari is offering thirty-day free trials to RevGPT, “ChatGPT’s cousin with a quota,” to revenue leaders.  The functionality is live.

Wingman pricing and packaging

Wingman offers three packages: Growth ($60/user/month), Accelerator ($90/user/month), and Enterprise (starting at $110/user/month), with the firm planning on including RevGPT in the Accelerator and Enterprise editions.

Clari acquired Wingman and its conversational sales capabilities last June.

Resources:

Qualified GPT

Vendors are quickly moving to integrate generative AI into their offerings.  This week, Qualified and Clari announced ChatGPT functionality.  Qualified GPT, which the firm describes as “Generative AI for the Pipeline Cloud,” helps B2B vendors “harness the power of AI and engage and convert their website visitors at scale.”  The firm views ChatGPT as a “new platform on top of which we will build the next version of Qualified.”

When launched four years ago, Qualified focused on predictive modeling and Predictive AI to identify buying intent signals, particularly those generated from website data.

“At Qualified, our core philosophy has always been to provide the most powerful approach to pipeline generation using a combination of people, data, and automation,” said CEO Kraig Swensrud.  “With the rapid advancements in Generative AI, we will be able to provide even more robust automation to our customers, allowing them to scale their efforts, focus on their highest priority tasks, and ultimately crush their pipeline and revenue targets.”

Qualified GPT supports generative text apps that automate engagement prompting, copywriting, messaging, and chatbots.  Initial features include:

  • Auto Pounce: Automatically sends engagement prompts (or “greetings”) that serve as conversation starters for website visitors that fall within a firm’s ICP.
  • Auto Correct: Qualified GPT corrects misspellings, fixes grammar errors, and proofreads responses, “helping your sales reps deliver speedy, professional responses.”
  • Auto Tune: Enhances rep dialogue while chatting “to sound more eloquent when speaking to potential buyers, helping every rep strike just the right tone with their important customers.”
  • Auto Expand: Reps can enter a few words or bullet points, and Qualified GPT will craft professional messages.
  • Auto Suggest: AI-powered recommended conversation responses that keep reps on message and speed up response times.
  • Auto Translate: Translates messages, displaying both questions and answers in the customer and sales rep’s language.
  • Auto Personalize: Changes or recommends website text “based on visitor data to drive the highest engagement and conversion.”
  • Auto Summarize: Summarizes conversations and website behavior, providing sales reps with a “succinct read out of Account activity to date.”

Qualified GPT will be rolled out as a “limited release to a subset of Pipeline Cloud customers this spring.”

Continue to Clari RevGPT, Powered by ChatGPT

Echobot Rebrands as Dealfront

Karlsruhe-based Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot rebranded as Dealfront this week.  Dealfront is the combination of Echobot and visitor intelligence vendor Leedfeeder which merged last year.  The rebrand coincides with the merger of the two companies on a common platform. 

Dealfront content includes 30 million European companies, nearly 90 million contacts, 33 event triggers, and visitor intelligence.  Dealfront sources company intelligence from national registries, company news, and corporate websites.  Company content includes news, business events, corporate linkages, and registered financials.

Dealfront offers five products:

  • Target: ICP-based targeting spanning 30 million European companies and nearly 90 million contacts.
  • Connect: Sales Intelligence platform with company and contact profiles, build-a-list functionality, and Send to CRM.
  • Datacare: DaaS data cleansing and enrichment services.  Datacare supports Bi-directional integrations with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. 
    Dealfront also supports Zapier integrations and Slack notifications.
  • Web Visitors: GDPR-compliant website visitor tracking that maps page-visit activity to customers and prospects.
  • Promote: New Programmatic display functionality that supports targeted campaigns and IP-based retargeting of website visitors.

CEO Bastian Karweg argued that Dealfront, a European-based company, offers multiple advantages over North American-based sales intelligence and B2B Data companies.  Dealfront differentiators include local market knowledge, European data hosting, and GDPR-compliant data gathered from company websites and local registries.  Furthermore, Dealfront is transparent in its data sourcing and does not engage in community data mining or email scraping.

Dealfront offers native language sales and support, with offices in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Spain.  Dealfront has grown to 330 employees that speak a dozen native languages, providing its clients with a “distributed, diverse salesforce across Europe.”

To emphasize its European bona fides, it adopted the blue and yellow colors of the EU flag and the tagline, “The way to win deals in Europe.”

“You just can’t do business in Europe the way you do business in the US.  You don’t do business in France the way you do business in Germany,” remarked Dealfront CEO Bastian Karweg.  “You don’t even do business in Berlin the way you do business in Bavaria.  Dealfront delivers localized data, applications, and familiarity with European standards, culture, languages, and practices to give your sales and marketing team the advantage of feeling and acting at home in any European country or region – no matter where your business is based.”

The Dealfront platform supports four stages – Discover, Qualify, Convert, and Optimize – in a flywheel feedback loop that gains momentum as the platform refines each client’s ICP.  “This flywheel effect turns static ICPs into dynamic, self-optimizing, and real-time customer profiles that always improve in accuracy and reflect reality.  The result is more leads that end in sales, transforming businesses into a self-propelled revenue engine,” explained the firm.

“Our platform of data and applications shows you the best way to engage your ICPs in a localized way that’s effective in whatever country you’re in, in whatever region you’re targeting,” says Dealfront CPO Pekka Koskinen.  “Because we’re on the inside and speak the language, we’re working with higher-quality live intelligence on your ideal buyers.  Nothing gets lost in translation, nothing gets misunderstood, and nothing is outdated.  Our platform, along with our teams on the ground in each location, empowers you to convert leads to deals.”

Last year, Great Hill Partners invested €180 million to merge Echobot and Leadfeeder and set aside €50 million to fund future strategic acquisitions for Dealfront.  Clients include Hertz, Siemens, Eventbrite, and Pipedrive.

Anteriad Acquires BNZSA

My plan yesterday was to deal with the sale of my house (open house Sunday with contract offers yesterday), but I couldn’t fully focus on that as important announcements were coming from Europe: B2B full-funnel marketing vendor Anteriad bought Demand Generation vendor BNZSA.  Separately, Sales Intelligence and B2B data vendor Echobot, which merged with Visitor Intelligence platform Leadfeeder last year, rebranded as Dealfront and launched its new platform.

Both BNZSA and Dealfront emphasize the diversity of the European market and their ability to meet market needs across national boundaries with localized support and GDPR compliance.

BNZSA, a Madrid-based demand generation firm, has been on a tear the last few years, growing several hundred percent per annum through H1 2022 (H2 growth data was not announced).  BNZSA provides Anteriad with a solid foundation for global marketing and GDPR-compliant data.  In addition, it offers B2B demand generation services to over fifty multinational clients, including Oracle, SAP, Acer, Dell, and Fujitsu.

BNZSA’s team offers local market expertise and campaign support in 26 languages.

“The combination of Anteriad and BNZSA provides an industry-leading offering of B2B demand generation products and services to clients across the globe,” stated Anteriad.  “The acquisition of BNZSA will enable Anteriad to expand its international data coverage by integrating BNZSA’s unique GDPR-compliant data.  Bringing together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services will provide differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”

MeritB2B rebranded as Anteriad in April 2021 after a series of acquisitions that expanded the company’s scope.  It previously acquired several MarTech firms, including intent-data vendor True Influence (Nov 2021), ABM MarTech and Audience vendor 180byTwo (Nov 2020), and B2B data vendor Compass Marketing (Jan 2020).

“Anteriad is a company that’s ahead of its time and ahead of the market.  Our positioning directly reflects our focus on being uniquely able to provide our customers the solutions they need to get ahead and take the lead,” said Anteriad CEO Rob Sanchez in 2021.

Anteriad had strong growth last year, with a 15% increase in US new customer wins and 30% globally through Mid-September.  The firm enjoys loyal customers with an average retention rate of eight years.  Furthermore, multi-service clients generate more than 60% of revenue, “showing the value of a full-funnel partner versus point solutions.”

The BNZSA acquisition “brings together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services,” providing multinational customers a “differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”

“BNZSA, powered by Anteriad,” will act as Anteriad’s international and EMEA headquarters.  BNZSA adds three hundred employees who specialize in ABM and multi-touch campaigns.  BNZSA supports programmatic display based on its firmographic, technographic, and intent datasets.  Its customers can build integrated multi-channel marketing programs that leverage BNZSA’s EMEA-based, multi-lingual contact center.  As leads are generated, BNZSA staff offers a “Warm Handover” process which ensures that leads are appropriately transitioned to sales teams.

Anteriad CPO Ken Lordy described the acquisition to GZ Consulting as a “highly complementary combination of data and technology assets with full-funnel campaign management.”  Consequently, the combined firms “now serve the full funnel demand generation needs of all our marketing clients at a truly global scale.”

Continued Lordy, “BNZSA’s services include native language speaking BDRs at one of the largest call centers in EMEA, ensuring an individualized approach and understanding of each market’s distinct local customs.”

BNZSA identifies potential prospects for its customers, surrounds them with “messaging and brand awareness,” and collects engagement metrics that inform content development and enhance BNZSA’s prospect engagement.  BNZSA tracks interest and intent and maintains an ongoing dialogue with prospects.   Nurturing includes the period between contacting prospects and providing a ‘Warm Handover’ of leads to account executives.

“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange, and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” said Paul Briggs, BNZSA Director of Global Corporate Development in 2021.  “This ultimately boosts closed-won opportunities for our customers up to 300%.”

BNZSA digital services include SEO strategy, performance marketing/SEM, email marketing, content marketing, content syndication, marketing automation, and UX and CX design.

“BNZSA understands the individualized approach and distinct local customs of each market it serves,” said Anteriad.  “BNZSA’s nuance in culture across regions includes BDRs that speak over 26 native languages at one of the largest call centers in EMEA.”

The combined company offers “data, technology, and a differentiated high-touch client service model” that supports “rich B2B demand generation and ABM solutions and in-market customization at global scale.”

BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud maintains a “significant ownership stake in the combined business.” He will report directly to Sanchez.  Samhoud emphasized that both companies have a client obsession that “will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and technology, powered by people.”

“Anteriad means to ‘Get in Front’, and acquiring BNZSA delivers on that philosophy.  By expanding our global reach through this acquisition, Anteriad establishes itself as a true global leader in tech-enabled B2B marketing solutions.  BNZSA brings an extremely talented leadership team and a differentiated offering that is made even more valuable by their local presence in key markets around the world,” said Sanchez.  “Leadership at Anteriad and BNZSA are both invested in our people, our clients, and our growth.  With this solid foundation, we will accomplish remarkable things for our clients in the global B2B marketing community.”

Deal terms were not disclosed.

Tomorrow, I will cover the Dealfront rebrand.

Postal ABM

Postal ABM supports both programmatic and strategic ABM campaigns with triggered events and gifting.

Offline Engagement Platform Postal announced the general availability of Postal ABM, its offline engagement feature for one-to-many programmatic ABM campaigns.  The new capability helps marketers programmatically target and engage valued accounts and audiences in a one-to-many approach based on intent and CRM data to “personalize content at scale.”  Marketers can also execute Strategic ABM campaigns that target high-priority ABM accounts.

Postal ABM is “designed to make it easy to programmatically target and engage key accounts and audiences with offline campaigns,” Postal VP of Marketing Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh explained to GZ Consulting.  “It’s designed for marketers running enterprise playbooks who need to scale offline engagement across their go-to-market strategy.”

Postal ABM supports built-in engagement and ROI dashboards that help sales and marketing teams “make informed decisions during the campaign and throughout the lifecycle of target accounts,” blogged Postal Product Marketing Manager Amy Schwartz.

The new Postal Engage feature triggers items and experiences to a group of contacts based on ABM signals in Salesforce.  Marketers can set budgets and timelines for campaigns and track campaign success (e.g., accounts engaged, revenue generated) in Postal and Salesforce.  Postal syncs its Account Engagement data with Salesforce for “better target discovery and ROI tracking.”

Postal also supports integrating physical touchpoints for virtual events.  Postal claims an 80% attendance rate by automating offline marketing activities after events.  For example, gifts can be sent to virtual event attendees, tradeshow badge swipers, or free trial participants.  Postal also proposed sending a congratulations gift when champions change jobs.

In other news, Postal also announced that it partnered with ZoomInfo to support GTM Plays.  Use cases include turning an abandoned chat follow-up into a booked meeting, welcoming a prospect back from OOO, congratulating a champion or decision maker on a promotion, and strategic prospecting campaigns. 

“In today’s digital economy, it can be easy to forget the importance of offline and physical sales strategies…think back to in-person experiences such as steak dinners and golf outings with prospects,” blogged Postal Content Marketing Manager Rich Pusateri.  “That was the standard practice.  Now, in the world of remote selling, using custom branded kits or personalized gifts with handwritten notes in tandem with digital engagement is a proven way to make a positive impact on your bottom line.”

The Physical Mail GTM Play from ZoomInfo.

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