Engage’s generative AI models help personalize customer engagement efforts while streamlining email composition.
Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong unveiled Gong Engage, its entry into the Sales Engagement space. SEPs have been adding Conversational Sales tools for several years, so Gong adding SEP functionality should not be surprising. After all, Gong began as a conversational sales solution before widening its scope to Revenue Intelligence. Also, one of Gong’s top rivals, Chorus, is owned by ZoomInfo, which has been building ZoomInfo Engage for several years.
“Gong Engage serves as a single solution to streamline sales engagement for revenue teams by delivering AI-based sales guidance from the first touchpoint with a prospect to deal close,” wrote the firm. “Engage helps teams create and accelerate pipeline by delivering increased productivity with AI-driven automation and guidance, high-quality outreach to engage entire accounts, and a single sales engagement solution to streamline revenue workflows. Gong’s proprietary AI delivers three times more accuracy than off-the-shelf AI models.”
Engage supports core SEP features, including a web-based dialer, workflows, and email templates. It also sports generative AI models for deal prioritization and extracting call highlights, action items, and outcomes. AI features include:
Call Spotlight, Gong’s generative AI functionality that composes call briefs, account highlights, and action items from sales conversations
Automated call outcomes and email response classification that automatically categorizes calls and emails and syncs these insights with the CRM
Assisted writing, which helps reps personalize their outreach based on persona
“Engage’s contextual, account-based approach for prospecting and selling exceeds the limitations of traditional lead-based tools that encourage mass outreach with little targeting. Instead, it delivers a complete understanding of an account, including all touchpoints, relevant CRM information, and conversational history,” stated Gong.
Gong emphasized that it didn’t jump on the generative AI bandwagon following the breakout success of ChatGPT but has been working to integrate generative tools into its platform for over a year. Furthermore, its focus on sales-focused NLP offers it a leg up on vendors marketing generic ChatGPT tools or lacking years of AI expertise and product development.
“Gong launched in 2016 to harness the power of AI to rid customer-facing people of their day-to-day drudgery. We have been working with LLMs for over a year and see it as a major breakthrough. But highly accurate, domain-specific AI that delivers a deep understanding of what’s going on within a sales organization and the next steps needed to win deals is more elusive,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov. “AI is the core of Gong’s platform, and our new models exemplify the sales-driven advancements we’re bringing to market to help our customers transform their teams and accelerate revenue growth.”
Along with conversational sales expertise, Gong offers Smart Trackers, a set of AI-based customized signals. Launched last year, Smart Trackers help revenue teams “identify deal risks and opportunities, understand the effectiveness of strategic initiatives, replicate best practices, and get ahead of emerging market needs.”
Gong Recommended Contacts
Engage’s Recommended Contacts feature analyzes historical deal data to recommend contacts for outreach. It feeds contact data from LeadIQ, Cognism, and Apollo based on target personas. Recommended contacts may be added to flows (cadences), or sales reps can reach out via email, phone, or LinkedIn.
Engage also displays buying signals from over 120 Gong Collective integrations “to help teams stay on top of their pipeline, no matter where signals are coming from.”
Along with consolidating conversational sales, sales engagement, and revenue intelligence in a common platform, Engage supports partnerships that include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Chili Piper, and Calendly.
Engage workflow and dashboard features include Pipeline Views for viewing key tasks and insights across open opportunities, an Analytics Dashboard for sales management, and team collaboration tools for sharing and assigning tasks across teams.
“Gong changed how revenue teams build pipeline with our customer-centric AI – now we’re changing how they engage with customers at every stage,” said Bendov. “We have leveraged our market-leading AI technology as the foundation for Gong Engage, which sets the entire revenue team up for success. Engage is the only solution that harnesses customer interactions at scale to drive high-quality engagement and ultimately, grow revenue.”
Rhetorik began as a European technographics vendor but now focuses on broader company and contact intelligence.
B2B Data vendor Rhetorik announced Neuron360, its “AI-enhanced data platform designed to extend and enrich clients’ data-driven solutions, marketing strategies, and talent initiatives.” AI capabilities include language translation, data normalization, and contact-level lead targeting.
Neuron360 “unifies and integrates” its B2B intelligence, which spans 200 million company profiles, 800 million professional people profiles, and 60 million verified and compliant contact records (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, UK DMA). Rhetorik also supports international technographics at both the enterprise and worksite levels.
The Professional profiles contain over eighty data fields, including career history, skills, job titles (translated, normalized, and standardized), experiences, and education. Verified contacts doubles the field count to 160 fields and includes validated email, job title, job function, switchboard and direct phone numbers, employer, and business location.
“The process of taking a profile and converting it to a verified and compliance contact involves a number of steps, including applying our proprietary, AI-driven ‘still in position’ and ‘still in business’ tests, validation tests for job title, company, email, and other details, and the sending of ‘fair processing’ notices,” explained CRO Kevin Savage to GZ Consulting.
While approximately one in four verified contact is a technology title, “the vast majority of the contacts, no matter which functional department they sit in, are technology decision-makers, influencers or users – all of whom have a role in the tech buying process these days,” continued Savage.
Contact information is translated, normalized, and standardized for 46 languages across 164 countries.
Savage emphasized that the “60M contacts are not really the main part of the announcement. The news is that we now have these datasets all in one place, and we have 800M profiles that can be converted into verified and compliant contacts on request.”
Company profiles include over 150 data fields. Along with standard firmographics, Neuron360 includes social handles, location-level sizing data, and location-level technographics. Neuron360 company coverage is global, with 70 million EMEA, 50 million North American, 45 million APAC, and 30 million LATAM profiles.
“With Neuron360, we have combined the power of advanced AI tools with extensive data coverage, empowering our clients to harness the full potential of their data initiatives and fuel their marketing, sales, and talent initiatives with confidence,” said Rhetorik CEO Meredith Amdur. “Neuron360 brings all the global B2B data needs together in one place with precision, quality, freshness, and breadth. Our exacting data buyers can choose from a comprehensive suite of data APIs, firehose feeds, online portals, and batch delivery.”
Neuron360 includes a query builder with counts and summarized firmographics presented in both tabular and visual formats. The query builder also displays the search query in multiple languages, including Python, Node.js, Ruby, Php http v1, and C. Developers can then copy / paste the query into Postman or other API platforms.
Additional tools include usage tracking and a status page for checking platform uptime. Documentation includes a data dictionary, schema, field population counts, internal and external values, and summary data (e.g., counts by country, revenue range, etc.)
B2B content syndication vendor NetLine launched INTENTIVE, their buyer-level intent platform at last week’s Forrester event in Austin. INTENTIVE offers “real-time insights into truly ‘who’ is actively expressing intent within a B2B account.”
INTENTIVE is similar to TechTarget’s Priority Engine but broader in focus. Whereas Priority Engine’s intent data is focused on enterprise and health tech, INTENTIVE supports a wider range of 247 industries, including pharma, aviation, manufacturing, and enterprise technology, etc.
“By design, TechTarget is highly focused on supporting the needs of B2B marketers and is targeting technology decision makers. They expanded to healthcare, but that’s about it,” noted Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting. “We view our platform as persona-agnostic and diversified” due to the broader scope and depth and breadth of NetLine’s audiences which now also includes Informa media properties and events.
Fortino described TechTarget Priority Engine as a “phenomenal product” but geared toward a more select audience of technology buyers. As such, Priority Engine is “Apple-esque,” while INTENTIVE is the “Android alternative in the marketplace.”
NetLine’s intent data is all “first-party-sourced data” and not cookie-based. Furthermore, it is transparent and includes professional bios, job types, job levels, locations, and engagement activity.
By surfacing individual activity data, NetLine is going beyond “black box metrics.”
INTENTIVE provides buyer-level activity data within accounts. Both online (e.g., webinars attended) and offline (e.g., conference sessions attended) activities are displayed with weights applied based on activity type.
Fortino also emphasized that INTENTIVE is both persona and industry-diversified, so not limited to IT Buyers.
INTENTIVE’s buyer-level intent activity spans 11,000 topics. Intent data is captured from millions of first-party content registrations, 285 distinct event activity types, and 329,000 keywords.
“With nearly 15k+ pieces of content on the platform, a given customer’s assets usually account for 0.03% of all content. For years, our clients gladly worked with us to source first-party leads that specifically engaged with their own content,” blogged NetLine Content Marketing Manager Jonathan Steiert. “The reality, however, is that 99% of their ICP were engaging with content on our platform—they just weren’t engaging with their content. They were missing nearly all of their buyer’s journey.”
NetLine was acquired by Informa in late 2021, so it benefits from Informa’s content and event registration data across 100 million event activities. Event Intent is gathered from over 500 annual B2B events hosted by Informa.
“We were acquired not because of what we were doing at the time but based on the vision of filling out a buyer-level intent platform on top of all of the various content consumption signals that we’re processing every single day of the year,” explained Fortino. “By being part of Informa, we were able to aggregate not only all of the content consumption and buyer behaviors occurring through all of the NetLine powered content experiences, but also all of the Informa properties and all of the Informa offline events.”
When Informa met with NetLine before acquiring it, “Informa was sitting on a massive amount of event-specific intent data that was looking for a mechanism and impetus to action that data into a subscription-oriented product.”
Fortino sees two high-level categories of intent vendors (he omits second-party review sites): Vendors such as Bombora that provide third-party intent based on page views and firms with a broad set of B2B content that drive buyer-level intent. Firms such as TechTarget and Foundry provide “some transparency into what individuals are doing on the sites that they own and operate.” The transparency gives users “a bit more granularity into downloading a white paper, webinar, and so on.”
Fortino argues that NetLine’s advantage is the scope of activity generated across Informa, NetLine, Industry Dive (34 B2B publications and newsletters), and events. Activities go beyond page views.
“There’s everything from…submitting a demo request to expressing an interest in learning more about a given topic, to taking a course and being certified, to the most extreme: going to an event and sitting in countless sessions and being scanned each time you’re going into one of those sessions. All of these 285 things are visualized inside the product as well. So, you can know that this person downloaded a toolkit that helps them predictably model X or they’ve registered for this event.”
Thus, NetLine is marrying online, offline, and customer-content-based intent data.
The signal intensity of some activities is much greater than that of others. “While pageviews can be brief, attending a conference is a very robust form of intent…Compare that to a group of people, let’s say it’s a CEO, a CTO, a director of DevOps, are flying to Vegas for four days to attend the Black Hat conference,” argued Fortino. “They’re sitting in six and a half hours of material each day for three days about malware [and] other enterprise security topics.” The difference in signal intensity is “night and day,” continued Fortino. “Those three people spent maybe 30 grand for three days going to that event.”
Furthermore, “We are looking at the seniority of the person taking those activities. We’re looking at the types of activities that they are actually doing,” including how those activities map to buyer journey stages.
Conversely, if the user is anonymous, “we’re actually disinterested in scoring that information and playing up the value of that information,” argued Fortino. Pageview-based intent is interesting but not actionable for sales reps. “If you’re telling me someone at SAP is trending for these three topics, I don’t even know where to begin.”
INTENTIVE’s real-time dashboard consolidates activity at both the buyer and account-level. Additional insights include buyer trends and confirmed projects, “a buyer-first view of professionals who have confirmed they have an active pain point, identified challenges, and shared their timeline to invest.”
Daily Buyer-Level Intent email alert
Other features include customizable email notifications, a native Salesforce app, and real-time buyer and account scores.
“Prior to today, there has been significant buzz about intent,” argued NetLine CEO Robert Alvin. “But the majority of existing intent-based products relied solely upon company IP recognition and webpage visits which doesn’t tell you “Who” is intending to do what. With INTENTIVE, NetLine has changed the meaning and raised the bar when it comes to intent. Marketers now have access to deeper buyer-level insights allowing them to accelerate the sales process from their marketing endeavors.”
Furthermore, Alvin noted that buyer-level insights eliminate hours of guesswork and accelerate prospecting, messaging, and understanding a prospect’s timeline.
Most intent solutions deliver account-level intent but lack buyer-level insights. They identify accounts (or accounts and locations), but do not usually indicate the individual behind the activity. Furthermore, other intent solutions capture their intent from one primary touch point – Pageviews.
“The basis for 99.9% of all intent data on the market comes directly from pageviews. Sans INTENTIVE, these solutions curate these data sets based upon this behavior, which lasts seconds, if not milliseconds, long,” expounded Steiert. “These pageviews are then referenced against historical baselines at the IP address and company domain. Effectively, every single existing intent vendor (thanks in large part to Bombora’s mostly commodified status sets) offers the same level of insights as their competitors.”
INTENTIVE provides a wider array of business intent at the buyer-level.
However, NetLine offers a broader array of buying activity that includes analyst reports, demo requests, disclosed areas of interest, event attendance, and confirmed projects.
“The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, said Heinz Marketing President Matt Heinz. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
The baseline INTENTIVE license includes three explorers, corresponding to three targeted intent categories with up to 25 topics per explorer. Explorers can have multiple audiences for segmentation (e.g., size, industry, geography) and email notification.
Keywords are tied to topics, but free-form keyword selects won’t be available until the V2 release.
Account and buyer Intent Trendlines and activity are available as soon as an explorer is defined.
The Explorer Dashboard displays buyer and account trendlines, accounts with buyer activity, and buyer-confirmed projects. The dashboard is displayed immediately after defining an explorer and uniquely loads historical intent data for immediate review and actioning.
Fortino noted that other intent platforms typically take 45-60 days to curate data for optimal use.
Confirmed Projects were initially sold as NetLine Intent Discovery, but that product was transitioned to a core feature within INTENTIVE.
NetLine collects first-party project data as readers register for and consume content. NetLine “intercepts those users, asks them a very short survey about their pain points, their urgency to address those pain points, challenges that they have, and most importantly, the timeline to invest in correcting those things.”
Account Activity details include confirmed projects, activity type, engaged buyers, and trending topics.
The Account Activity dashboard is filterable by function, level, and firmographics. Users may drill down to any account to see who is displaying intent and the nature of their activity. Saved filters can be set as daily email alerts.
Users can drill down from Accounts to Buyers or the reverse.
While buyer-level intelligence is provided, NetLine does not display PII beyond customer content interactions. Fortino noted that sales teams already have other vendors for contact data (e.g., ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, Clearbit), but they are not providing buyer-level intent.
“This just comes back to permission data use. I know a lot of vendors love to throw in this idea of recommended contacts where they’re really just using ZoomInfo data,” explained Fortino. “We may do that, but honestly, it’s a bit disinteresting again because it’s just commoditized data sets that everyone has access to.”
Fortino’s near-term focus is building connectors with other platforms. At launch, Salesforce is natively supported, but others will soon follow.
There is currently a waitlist for INTENTIVE access. NetLine is offering a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is similar to existing account-level intent providers but obviously delivers buyer-level insights. The license includes three explorers, unlimited seats, and the Salesforce app.
Fortino argued that the unlimited seats are a “strong differentiator when you’re evaluating existing solutions,” particularly at enterprise accounts with many users.
Sales Enablement vendor Showpad announced PitchAI, its response to the problem of overloaded managers that lack the time to consistently provide timely feedback and coaching around sales pitches.
“Delivering the perfect sales pitch is one of the most challenging sales skills to master—both for inside and field sellers. A sales pitch must be confident, impactful, and quick,” stated the firm. “It should grab a buyer’s attention, capture trust, and leave a curiosity gap. A great pitch doesn’t happen by accident—it takes practice, preparation, and feedback. Yet, sales managers and enablement teams aren’t always able to provide the thoughtful and attentive evaluations and feedback reps need to develop their pitch.”
According to a 2018 Gartner Leadership survey, only 42% of sales managers feel equipped to develop their staff. Furthermore, “sellers feel the shortcomings of managers as well. Just 38% of sellers report their manager helps them develop the skills they need for their role today, while only 34% report their manager helps them develop the skills they need for the future.”
PitchAI employs AI to record and analyze sales pitches, providing consistent, on-demand coaching. Feedback is instant, allowing the rep to iterate, refine, and build confidence.
Furthermore, PitchAI analyzes the seller’s “credibility, sincerity, and knowledge through non-verbal communication” and coaches reps on improving their messaging and presentation. Each pitch is benchmarked against top sellers across the industry “to provide context to PitchAI’s rating and performance scores.”
PitchAI evaluates reps across four dimensions:
Speed: How fast or slow the pitch delivery is and whether it’s understandable.
Body language: How trustworthy, friendly, and approachable the seller appears.
Silences: How and when to add or remove pauses.
Happiness: How enthusiastic the pitch comes across overall.
Tips are industry and language-specific. Showpad noted that “long silences make for a bad pitch in German, but a good one in Portuguese.”
PitchAI banner messaging includes advice on what adjustments to make.
Winn.AI captures real-time playbook insights and maps them to over twenty methodologies.
Israeli playbook vendor Winn.AI now offers a self-service registration that allows sales reps to trial the Generative AI service for a month at no charge. Winn describes itself as an “AI-driven no-typing CRM that aims to empower the next generation of sales teams.” It joins calls and offers real-time tracking, capturing, and CRM updating features for Salesforce and HubSpot.
Winn supports over twenty sales methodologies and is tuned to automatically capture playbook insights as they are organically discussed with the sales rep. Out-of-the-box methodologies include MEDDIC, MEDDPIC, Spin Selling, BANT, and Challenger. Additionally, playbooks are available for discovery calls, demos, and negotiations and may be customized.
Salesforce “State of Sales” report. Salesforce surveyed 7,700 sales reps in August & September 2022.
CEO Eldad Postan-Koren emphasized the administrative burden faced by sales reps, citing a 2023 Salesforce report that claims only 28% of sales rep time is spent selling. 72% of sales rep time is consumed by record keeping, CRM updating, virtual meetings, email follow-ups, data entry, and lead management. Winn.AI promises to claw back one-third of the 8.8% of rep time spent manually entering information. Furthermore, reps have long limited their data entry to the bare minimum, so Winn.AI will capture significantly more detail.
Other tasks, such as prioritizing leads/opportunities, researching prospects, and preparation and planning, also benefit from automated data harvesting and synchronization, helping reduce time on such tasks and improving their quality.
“Interfering with salespersons in our daily conduct is not good. Adding another system for them to enter and changing the way they are used to working is a negative type of interference,” argued Postan-Koren. “This is the main reason I built Winn.AI as an augmentation of other existing systems. This will effectively disrupt the sales force where disruption is needed and welcomed.”
Winn.AI automatically joins conversational platforms such as Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet and supports time warnings, attendee lists, and post-call meeting summaries. Editable summaries are displayed as soon as the call ends, adding them to the standard call workflow but removing most data entry. Salespeople can also send a personalized recap email to call participants. This review-and-notification process is generally completed within four minutes of each call’s conclusion.
The Winn-AI post-call meeting summary pops up on call completion and supports editing and matching against CRM records.
As playbook details are captured in real-time, reps can see which topics have been discussed and which ones remain open, helping ensure richer discussions. Following the call, reps are presented with a call summary, next steps, and playbook insights. Once reviewed, the information is synced with the appropriate CRM records.
Postan-Koren explained that Winn.AI employs NLU (Natural Language Understanding), which goes beyond NLP (Natural Language Processing).
“Understanding is not processing because I can ask you, ‘Michael, how many employees are you?’ And your answer will be 20 employees. But I can also ask you, ‘Mike, do you have 20 employees?’ And your answer will be yes. Or I can ask you ‘How many employees?’ and your answer will be 20. So here are three different ways to ask the same question to get the same answer, and the computer won’t understand it. Understanding context is the secret sauce here.”
What also differentiates Winn.AI is the combination of playbooks with real-time call coaching, data capture, and CRM syncing, allowing reps to be more present during calls. These elements are supported across many products, but I have not seen a company combine them into a single offering.
“The system is a personal assistant for the salespeople and relieves the burdensome administrative work of taking notes, having a list of answers, and entering information into the CRM,” stated Postan-Koren. “ It does so all at a level of detail that does not exist in other tools on the market, so much so that in real-time, it can exactly match a specific topic of conversation to the relevant field in the CRM. Also, the system knows how to follow the topics of the conversation in real-time, check the full coverage of the conversation’s agenda, and give instructions that will help improve performance. This is a new category in the SalesTech world, and Winn.AI aims to lead this category.”
The firm is not targeting specific verticals as it believes it has a compelling cross-industry solution that supports digital sales, customer success, and service departments.
The service is priced between $59 and $89 per user per month, with volume discounts available.
Winn.AI exited stealth mode last fall and now has a team of thirty. It has begun hiring in the Bay area. Postan-Koren noted that its $17 million September seed round provides it with a financial runway through the end of next year, allowing it to focus on go-to-market instead of hustling for funding in a weak VC market.
Winn.AI was named one of the “Top Israeli Startups To Watch in 2023.” The firm placed 16th on the list by Startup Stash.
Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence brings together first and third-party intelligence.
ABX PlatformDemandbase announced a Smarter Sales Intelligence solution that combines Demandbase Sales Intelligence with additional tools, data, and prescriptive insights. UX enhancements include prescriptive dashboards with personalized account and contact recommendations.
The firm had a little fun with its press release, publishing a semi-tongue twister headline, “Demandbase Saves Stressed Sellers by Simplifying Sales with Smarter Sales Intelligence.” But wait! There’s More! Demandbase also released a 90-second infomercial touting their Sales Intelligence solution that “consolidates sales intelligence tools in both first and third-party data, and all in one place. It’s like having a superpower for smarter selling! Get easy access to insights, best-in-class predictive models, and contact recommendations integrated within your existing tools.”
Many of the UX changes were based on customer feedback, with the critical account information at the top. Content includes the journey stage, top intent keywords, people, predictive scores, and firmographics.
“The idea is that we’re bringing all the information that sellers care about and then presenting it on one screen so that they don’t have to go places to find it,” explained Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier to GZ Consulting. “It’s a unification of the data.”
Sellers “don’t enjoy the research aspect” of account-based selling, continued Breier. “They just want to be doing outreach.” Therefore, Demandbase is “meeting the sales reps “wherever there’s spending time, whether that is their browser, CRM, or SEP.”
The Prescriptive Sales Dashboard provides a “unified and prioritized view of a seller’s territory/account list.”
Prescriptive Sales Dashboards proactively inform sellers where they should direct their attention, when they should reach out, and what they should say. Both accounts and contacts are recommended, with suggestions specific to each rep’s territory. The Dashboard calls out the top accounts and contacts for outreach based on activity and intent; that is, which leads have the highest probability of converting into opportunities.
The Sales Dashboard offers multiple filters, identifying accounts that:
“I should reach out this week.”
“have been in the news recently.”
“are most engaged.”
“have the highest intent.”
“have a high likelihood to become an opportunity.”
And contacts that
“I should reach out this week.”
“Are not in my CRM.”
“Are part of the buying group and from Top Accounts.”
“Are former buyers.”
“Are trending on my website.”
High engagement lists are likely to be compelling for reps. In many cases, they will be aware of the engagement as they are directly involved. Still, there will also be situations where they are unaware of the engagement (e.g., Customer Success set up a trial at the account or individuals attended a webinar or responded to a marketing campaign) and missing an opportunity for outreach.
Recommendations are not black-boxed but include engagement data and known contacts in the buying group. If a rep disagrees with a recommendation, a feedback button helps train the model.
“One of the biggest risks when you’re trying to get adoption from the sales persona on something like this, is losing their trust,” explained Breier. “We want to give some context and qualify the recommendation that we’re making.”
Demandbase also identifies and recommends contacts for outreach, even if they aren’t currently in the CRM. Along with names and titles, Demandbase feeds emails, mobile phones, technographics, intent signals, and persona-based messaging. New fields include Demandbase’s predictive scores:
Pipeline Predict Score: How likely an account will become a pipeline opportunity.
Qualification Score: Likelihood an account will ever become a customer, regardless of where it is in the buyer journey.
Demandbase continues to build out its data coverage, with 83 million companies, 147 million contacts, 87 million emails, and 40 million direct dials. Much of its third-party content was integrated after they acquired InsideView and DemandMatrix two years ago.
Account Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).People Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).
Furthermore, Demandbase simplified its user interface to display the most important information about prospects and customers.
Demandbase announced a native Outreach integration with other SEPs in development. Streamlining Sales Intelligence and Sales Engagement allows reps to “focus on engaging with prospects and closing deals, rather than wasting time on manual tasks.” The I-frame integration supports core Demandbase Sales Intelligence functionality within Outreach workflows. For example, sales reps can research companies and contacts, build lists, and launch Outreach sequences inside of Outreach.
The Demandbase Sales Intelligence Watchlist displayed as an I-frame tab in Outreach.
Users will see common information, tools, and workflows presented in the same format as their CRM but in Outreach’s Account, Prospect, and Opportunity records. There is also a standalone tab in Outreach similar to the Demandbase standalone tab found in CRMs. This Custom Tab supports company and contact searching, prospect list building, connection management for warm introductions, customer and prospect news tracking, and custom buying trigger configuration.
“We’ve noticed that the order of preference as far as where sellers spend time actually starts with their SEP – So, Outreach. And if they have to, they’ll go to CRM,” observed Demandbase Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier. “When you look at Outreach users who have Demandbase and Outreach, they can spend all of their time within Outreach and never have to go to the Demandbase platform. They’re not missing out on any information… It’s just one less thing that they have to learn and one less barrier to access the Demandbase information.”
“Being a seller has never been easy, but the proliferation of data and tools has led to stressed-out sellers with lost productivity, lower quota attainment, and less revenue,” says Gabe Rogol, chief executive officer at Demandbase. “With our simplified and smarter Sales Intelligence solution, reps no longer need to waste precious time figuring out their next steps and executing them. Instead, they can close more deals and make more money. Think of our intelligence as a sales superpower, all within the tools sellers use every day.”
Demandbase Sales Intelligence is integrated with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach, Slack, and browsers. The Sales Engagement integration enables reps to add contacts to Outreach sequences and personalize the messaging.
“Integrating Demandbase’s Sales Intelligence directly within our platform will unlock new levels of value for sales teams looking to efficiently create and predictably close more pipeline,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina. “With this next-generation integration, sellers can more easily and quickly find and contact accounts, get data-focused insights, and unlock new levels of productivity — all while never leaving the Outreach Sales Execution Platform.”
Demandbase recently dropped the Cloud Designations for its products, emphasizing its unified functionality within the Demandbase One platform.
“We found that it kind of creates this illusion of complexity that we don’t feel serves it justice as far as the actual products you’re spending time in,” said Palmer. “They’re even more interconnected. Most of our customers are now buying three or more products. We’ve got bundles and packages of everything, so we’ve just moved away from that whole cloud nomenclature to just Demandbase One.”
A Hot Leads feature that provides SDRs with key engagement insights and the ability to take action on unknown leads will soon be available. Hot Leads will be displayed in the Prescriptive dashboards and identified by engagement activity, intent, recency, news/company/job changes, technographics, etc. Hot Leads will be GDPR and PII compliant.
In other news, Demandbase was named a Notable Provider in Forrester’s Account-Based Selling Technologies Landscape, Q2, 2023 report. Seventeen vendors were included in the report. Account-Based Sales vendors “improve visibility into the potential of each account; increase sales rep efficiency; and increase pipeline value (deal size), win rates, and forecast accuracy.”
“The landscape for B2B GTM teams continues to change at [a] breakneck pace. At Demandbase, we’re committed to shaping that market evolution to empower our customers to achieve their most audacious goals,” said Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw. “This year, we’ve placed a deep focus on making sellers’ jobs easier and more effective with AI-powered insights and seamless workflows, and we believe our inclusion in this report further validates that direction.”
LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago. As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers. New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.
LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality. However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”
LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.
Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities. Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).
The new Sales Navigator Account Hub.
The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities. It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.
“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis. “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data. Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”
The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:
Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence. Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub. Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them. Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent
Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1. Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category. The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.
Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole. The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.
“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.
At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts. Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.
“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare. “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals. Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies. With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities
New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages. These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).
Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:
Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
New connections to colleagues
LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website
“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment. If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance. If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix. “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”
Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”
Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.
Other Search enhancements include:
A simplified saved search UX
A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
Current job title and past job title filters
The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions. Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.
LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year. The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment. At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.
B2B DaaS vendor SalesIntel shifted away from credit-based data pricing to unlimited data access to its firmographics, technographics, contacts (including emails and direct dials), and news alert intelligence. Pricing is based on the number of users, with unlimited access to downloads, exports, and data enrichment.
”SalesIntel’s unlimited everything plan removes the friction, frustration, and predatory pricing so many customers experience when working with other B2B data providers.” comments SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “We are proud to be a true partner to this industry by leading a pricing revolution that will help go-to-market teams build limitless pipeline.”
SalesIntel’s unlimited content includes:
300 million unique technology installs across 22 million accounts. Technographics span 18,000 technologies.
100 million email-verified contacts. Of these, over 17 million are maintained by SalesIntel editors and regularly reverified to maintain a 95% accuracy level.
B2B account news and alerts for 22 million companies organized into 32 categories.
Contracts include the RevDriver Chrome extension, Bombora intent data, and platform integrations (e.g., Salesforce, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, Marketo).
Licenses also include access to SalesIntel’s Research-on-Demand editors for finding new contacts or reverifying contact information. Research on Demand is subject to credits, but at 120 per seat, the cap is generous.
SalesIntel has simplified pricing based on the number of seats.
Under credit-based pricing models, “Marketing is worried about not having enough credits for campaigns, Sales is worried about not having enough credits to effectively prospect, and RevOps is worried that there won’t be enough credits to keep all this data clean.”
Removing credit-based pricing offers several benefits to customers:
Budgeting is simplified as the total cost of a SalesIntel contract is known when the contract is signed. RevTech teams do not need to create mid-year POs if credits are running low or additional marketing campaigns are planned.
RevOps does not need to allocate and monitor credits across multiple teams or reallocate a dwindling set of credits at the end of the year.
Marketing can run enrichment, including visitor enrichment, and updates as frequently as they’d like, limiting the impact of data decay on their account, contact, and lead data.
Marketing can regularly analyze and expand its ICP and test new verticals without worrying about credits.
Sales Reps can research and sync key contacts to their SEP or CRM without worrying about using up their allotted credits halfway through the year.
Furthermore, SalesIntel does not include any “data destroy” clauses, a legal issue that some incumbent vendors employ to increase the cost to defectors.
CMO James Lamberti explained to GZ Consulting that credit-based pricing “becomes a barrier to value for the customer,” with customers feeling “trapped” by usage limits. “We want people to begin to appreciate the full depth and breadth of our data and to leverage it in ways to make themselves more efficient.”
Ramnani argued that SalesIntel customers enjoy value via “three very simple steps:
We help them identify their ICP using the intelligence from our firmographic and technographic data.
Then, we apply the intelligence of news and intent data to see who from their ICP is in the market today.
Within those in-market companies, our customers enjoy direct conversations using mobile phones and direct dials.”
However, “context is everything.” Vendors that provide large contact sets without the context of an ICP, account news, and intent data (i.e., steps 1 and 2) are providing names and numbers but fostering inefficiency in their go-to-market. Targeting is more than simply finding many names. Revenue teams need to know whom to call, when to call, and what to say.
SalesIntel can offer unlimited data access because it owns all of its data except for Bombora’s intent file.
Historically, Sales Intelligence services offered seat-based pricing, and marketing data vendors provided volume-based pricing. When services began serving both departments, credit-based models were crafted on top of seat-based pricing, creating complex and frustrating pricing. SalesIntel is looking to return to simple pricing and “partner with the industry” based on “the value of our data and the quality of our software,” argued Lamberti.
Lamberti described the sweet spot for this model as the mid-market – firms between 40 and 50 employees and several hundred. These firms have some maturity in their marketing stack and go-to-market motion, with multiple BDRs and sellers.
However, “if you’re just a ten-person team with one seller and one BDR, we’ll certainly do business. We’re going to have a package for them. But the unlimited package is really so that we can go after the market where we really are a great fit, where we win.”
“Strategically, we know that this is the time to strike. We’re not VC-backed. This is where Manoj has got the right [employee-shareholder] strategy,” argued Lamberti. The firm is not subject to the financial pressure of outside equity investors or public markets. Thus, the new pricing is designed strategically “to gain share and grow our market footprint dramatically.” SalesIntel contracts are annual with multi-year discounts. Pricing starts at around $11,000, with additional seats priced at $1,200. Current customers that renew early can convert to the new pricing structure.
