Month: July 2023

Data Axle Audience360

Marketing and Business Intelligence vendor Data Axle unveiled Audience360, its suite of data management capabilities that consist of front-end data capture, data management, and data distribution.  Enterprise data is ingested via APIs or FTP and then processed through a suite of cleansing, standardization, enrichment, identity resolution, and deduplication modules.

Data Axle offers US and Canadian business, consumer, and B2C linked datasets for enrichment and identity resolution.  Data Axle also announced significant improvements to its reference databases.  That announcement will be covered in tomorrow’s post.

Audience360 supports multi-source data ingestion, data management, and data distribution.

Once cleansed and enriched, data can be sent to a broad set of enterprise platforms, including:

  • CDP: Tealium, ActionIQ
  • CRM: Salesforce, MSD 365, Sales Genie (Data Axle’s Sales Intelligence service that provides a set of SFA capabilities)
  • MAP: Adobe (Marketo), Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua)
  • Cloud: AWS, Snowflake, Google Cloud, Azure
  • DMP: LiveRamp, Lotame, TradeDesk, Oracle Data Cloud, and half a dozen other programmatic platforms.  Data Axle supports nearly one billion hashed emails to assist with targeting.
  • BI platforms: Adobe, HCL Unica, Alterian

“A lot of people struggle with the rigidity of some of the tools that are out there,” explained Data Axle SVP of Client Technology Solutions Sal Pecoraro.  “People think that when they buy a marketing cloud platform, it does all the data hygiene work.”

Audience360 lets data analysts and operations teams “design data capture, data management processing, and distribution into the system that they need,” continued Pecoraro.  It doesn’t matter whether the platforms are on-premise or hosted in the marketing cloud or S3 buckets on Amazon.

Pecoraro emphasized data security with encryption both in transport and at rest.  “If they need to anonymize data, we can match IDs, etc.  So, if there are security concerns about exporting their data to us, we can handle that through encryption and anonymization.”

He also positioned the solution as more flexible, quick to implement, and less expensive than other solutions, with a strong ROI.  Platform flexibility is “the most important thing, with support that goes beyond CDPs.  Furthermore, alternative platforms are expensive, ”large investments.”  This “rigidity” and high cost make it difficult to define a strong ROI and use case.

Conversely, “ours is much less expensive, quicker to stand up, more flexible to have those components that you need added.  You can add or remove things over time.  It’s not a black box or rigid solution that you can adjust as your business changes.  But I think flexibility [and] speed to market is some of our core value.”

And because the platform is service-based, companies don’t need to worry about training, upgrading the platform, or managing bug patches.  “We take requirements, we do configurations, we build automations, and we plug in on data receipt and export.”

Due to the system’s flexibility, pricing is bespoke based on volume, processes, and integrations.  Pricing is generated by the requirements gathering team, and implementation is passed to a design and implementation team.  Later, ownership is managed by a post-implementation support team. 

Audience360 offers an “iterative process” that lets clients add or remove processes, data sources, and integrations.

As Data Axle offers three datasets, a broad set of linkages are supported, including households, corporate families, business/consumer, and employment.

Audience360 is generally available. 

Clients include multiple healthcare companies and a large telco.  The service also supports retailers, financial services, and travel/leisure.

Continue to part II which covers Data Axle’s expanded US data coverage.

SalesTech Landscape

Vendor Neutral posted its 2023 SalesTech Landscape.

Vendor Neutral published Nicolas De Kouchkovsky’s seventh annual SalesTech Landscape.  When viewed online, a magnifying glass helps the viewer focus on specific categories.  The eyechart now contains over 1,000 tools across fifty categories.

New categories include “Extended Reality (XR), Email Deliverability, Product-Led Sales Platform (i.e., PLG CRM), and Ecosystem & Co-Selling Management to enable the emerging ‘nearbound’ sales motion.

Unfortunately, the SalesTech Landscape is not available for licensing or as a downloadable list.

“Sales engagement is the first category that came out of modern SalesTech stacks,” remarked De Kouchkovsky.  “When it emerged, it provoked a gold rush, stimulating the birth of a myriad of email solution providers.  Fast forward to today, multichannel — email, voice, including growingly LinkedIn and messaging — is the norm.  It forced the landscape to settle: some vendors have graduated into true multichannel engagement platforms, some have pivoted out of the space, and the rest are offering the function as a commodity.”

Traditionally, sales engagement platforms have focused on outbound prospecting.  It’s time to reset: inbound matters,” continued De Kouchkovsky.  “In a world where buyers are researching on their own, engaging them when they land on your website constitutes a unique opportunity.”

De Kouchkovsky noted that inbound is more than chatbot and messaging.  It also includes voice (call distribution and callback) and direct scheduling.

He also observed that prospecting (and broader sales intelligence) remains segregated from sales engagement.  He cited two exceptions, Apollo and ZoomInfo Engage, but I would add Cognism to this list.

De Kouchkovsky argued that sales reps are overwhelmed with data entry and juggle multiple apps with more complex workflows.  He called out several emerging solutions beyond Sales Engagement Platforms for addressing these problems: Collaboration and email plug-ins, Sales Workplace systems (e.g., Dooly, Scratchpad) that “overlay existing systems to offer sellers a streamlined experience to update systems,” and workflow automation tools that manage “the back-end synchronization between the various apps of the stack.”

De Kouchkovsky is tracking Digital Sales Rooms with Mutual Action Plans to address growing buying committees.

“Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) are not new but now play a more strategic role in sharing content with all the stakeholders and helping better ‘read’ deal dynamics through content consumption, remarked De Kouchkovsky.  “Mutual Action Plans began as shared to-do spreadsheets.  They are becoming another mini-category, used not just by customer success teams but also to drive the initial sale through to onboarding.”

The Landscape is also seeing a blossoming of AI assistants that offer recommendations and guidance.  This category grew 2X over the past year.

ZoomInfo Joins Databricks Marketplace

ZoomInfo announced another data cloud partnership, this time with Databricks.  ZoomInfo now delivers its B2B intelligence via the Databricks Marketplace, including over 100 million company profiles, 260 million contacts, technographics, and intent data.

“This partnership brings together a pair of billion-dollar industry leaders,” said Databricks President Andy Kofoid.  “Our customers will love having secure, easy access to ZoomInfo’s industry-leading data in the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, and they’ll be able to harness the power of this data to fuel their AI and machine learning processes.  With the latest insights fueling their advanced analytics, our customers can quickly accelerate their revenue growth.”

Databricks enables ZoomInfo B2B intelligence for data engineering, data science, analytics, and business intelligence teams.  The open marketplace, powered by Delta Sharing, allows teams to exchange data assets and automate data updates.  Customers can either license pre-built Data Cubes or work with ZoomInfo’s data services team to design custom Data Cubes.

Delta Sharing is an “open standard for secure sharing of data assets without proprietary platform dependencies, complicated ETL, or expensive replication.”

Off-the-shelf Data Cubes include:

  • Company Data Cube: Firmographic Data purpose-built for Sales & Marketing with over 200 data attributes.  Updated Quarterly.
  • Company Data Cube Add-on: Technographic Data
  • Company Data Cube Add-on: Advanced Attributes.  Advanced Attributes delivers a comparative analysis of department size and strength, technology spend, and a blended measure of department-level sophistication.
  • Hierarchy: Corporate hierarchy linkage data, updated quarterly, contain 55 fields, including ultimate parent, domestic parent, immediate parent, subsidiary, headquarter, individual location, and franchise data.
  • Intent Data Cube: Over 4,000+ standard intent topics for data modeling, scoring, analysis, and other advanced data initiatives.
  • Contact Data Cube: Contact Data, updated monthly.
  • Contact Data Cube Add-on: Job History

“With unlimited access to ZoomInfo data delivered directly to your existing systems of work, you can build a reliable go-to-market data foundation to analyze, predict, and engage with the right accounts to drive revenue,” wrote ZoomInfo.  “By actualizing your total addressable market, pinpointing your ideal customer profile, increasing segmentation accuracy, predicting look-alikes, sharing go-to-market insights, and more, ZoomInfo Data Cubes provide holistic account intelligence for your go-to-market motions.

ZoomInfo is now a certified data provider on the Databricks platform, allowing prospective customers to trial ZoomInfo DaaS.

Other ZoomInfo cloud partners include Snowflake, AWS, and Google Cloud.

“Seamless access to ZoomInfo data helps teams fuel accelerated growth for their GTM teams by unlocking and centralizing insights at scale,” said ZoomInfo Product Management VP Sneh Kakileti. “These insights can power advanced technology applications, such as generative AI-based processes — which are only as good as the data they have access to.  This partnership will help data-centric organizations solve some of their toughest go-to-market problems and win faster.”

Vidyard Rooms

Vidyard Rooms Invitation and Security Levels

Vidyard formally launched its Vidyard Rooms digital sales room (DSR) to beta.  Vidyard Rooms are available at no charge for both free and subscription clients.  However, Vidyard plans to introduce paid DSR plans in the future.

Vidyard Rooms support personalized videos, tailored demonstrations, recorded meetings, documents, and proposals.  Users can comment on and tag content.  Sellers are notified when new buyers join the room and when content is consumed.

“At Vidyard, we are always looking for ways to help sellers and go-to-market teams create more productive relationships with their buyers,” said COO Jonathan Lister.  “With Vidyard Rooms, we are doing just that – empowering sales professionals to build personal relationships at scale and educate key stakeholders in a way that is timely, convenient, and collaborative.”

Vidyard described it as the first “video-first DSR,” but I’m not sure that video-first provides a significant value add as all DSRs support video (and many include chat).  There are three primary values of DSRs:

  1. Collaboration
  2. Expedited deal onboarding and journey stage transition (i.e., looping in the legal department or handing off from an account manager to a customer success manager).
  3. Engagement metrics. 

There is also a latent opportunity for building out the demand unit, but vendors have not focused on that.  None of these requires a video-first platform but building out the demand unit and engagement metrics call for the DSR to be native to an SEP, ABX platform, or Revenue Intelligence platform that ingests multi-channel signals.  Furthermore, Vidyard is integrated with most of the major vendors in these categories.

As such, Vidyard Rooms are likely to be used primarily by SMBs and in enterprise sales segments that have deployed asynchronous video but not cutting-edge RevTech platforms.

“Demand for Digital Sales Rooms is up 325% year-over-year as post-pandemic digitalization and a shift towards efficient growth put pressure on sales teams to transform the way they work with buyers,” said GTM Partners Chief Analyst Bryan Brown.  “With its unique video-first approach, Vidyard Rooms is a compelling new solution in this emerging market that aims to make digital sales rooms more personal, engaging, and helpful to buyers.”

Vidyard Rooms act as a centralized hub for sharing deal artifacts with stakeholders.

RevSure $6M Seed Round Expansion

RevSure, which describes itself as a Pipeline Readiness solution, closed on an additional $6 million in seed funding, bringing its total seed funding to $10 million.  The round was led by Neotribe Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, with participation from Operator Collective and Correlation Ventures.  Neotribe Partner Alex Salazar, the former founder and CEO of Stormpath (acquired by Okta), joined RevSure’s board.

RevSure helps go-to-market teams “share a single source of truth” concerning the health of their pipeline.  It also automates reporting tasks and offers recommendations for converting leads into qualified sales opportunities.  RevSure helps marketers determine revenue leakage and where to concentrate their spend.

RevSure offers insights into demand generation effectiveness and efficiency, helping prioritize leads and opportunities.  AI recommendations call out which leads to prioritize and how to optimize campaigns.  Users can drill down into campaigns or filter by title, industry, segment, and channel. 

RevSure already supports Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.

“The question that is top of mind for every marketing leader right now is: ‘Am I meeting my pipeline generation goals, and if not, what should I do about it?’ What sets RevSure apart is the unique combination of data normalization and predictive AI that allows CMOs and their teams to answer those questions faster than ever using a simple, action-oriented user interface,” said Haley Daiber Brannan, Investing Partner at Operator Collective.  “It’s working, and the growing customer love RevSure has earned in such a short time speaks for itself.”

The additional funds will help advance RevSure’s “mission of advancing the effectiveness of pipeline generation for B2B companies, with additional investments in product, engineering, and AI technology and resources.  RevSure will also invest in customer acquisition and “doubling down on the company’s go-to-market strategy.”

Demand Generation Effectiveness Drilldown.

RevSure focuses on the top and middle of the funnel with recommendations and prioritization tools instead of the bottom, which looks more at forecasting.  “We are in the lead-to-opportunity journey,” explained RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra to GZ Consulting.  “We don’t go into the forecast.”

“Pipeline health needs to be on every go-to-market leader’s, CEO’s, and Board’s agenda – it’s the missing link in driving predictable & profitable revenue growth, which is critical in the current economic climate. Adding AI-based predictive insights into pipeline effectiveness and health will allow companies to focus on predictability for outcomes, acceleration to revenue and effectiveness or quality and efficiency.”

RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra

RevSure officially launched at SaaStr in September 2022. “RevSure uncovers what’s happening in the marketing and sales funnel so companies know exactly what’s working, how much leakage is occurring, and where to focus resources to win more deals,” said Neotribe Ventures Partner Alex Salazar.  “We’re thrilled to be leading the expansion of RevSure’s seed round as their ability to accurately predict pipeline value from all the leads marketing generates is creating an opportunity for them to become the de facto system of engagement for demand gen teams.”

D&B.AI Labs

Dun & Bradstreet announced the launch of D&B.AI Labs to lead the co-development of AI solutions that apply Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) against its proprietary data and analytics.

“Over the last few years, Dun & Bradstreet has gone through a dramatic transformation driving a culture of innovation and making significant investments in technology, data, and analytics, including adding 64% more analytics solutions, evolving its scores and indices to leverage AI, LLM and ML capabilities,” claimed the firm.

A team of data scientists, data engineers, and solution specialists with expertise in AI, LLM, ML, and advanced business analytics staffs D&B.AI Labs.  Lab members will partner with clients to formulate solutions, build prototypes, and deploy solutions that leverage Dun & Bradstreet’s data and analytics.

“Powered by innovation and in support of the rapid changes across the business landscape, companies of all sizes need access to an environment where they can fuse our trusted datasets, responsibly apply AI, and tap into our expertise to quickly develop prototypes and solutions to advance their businesses.  We believe there is no company better than Dun & Bradstreet to accomplish this,” said Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour.  “D&B.AI Labs creates an environment for us to work side-by-side with our unparalleled client roster, including 93% of the Fortune 500, to understand their pain points and help them to swiftly design and deliver innovative solutions specific to their needs.”

Along with generative AI expertise, D&B.AI Labs offers expertise in Dun & Bradstreet’s ESG, linkage (e.g., family trees), Master Data Management, and sales and marketing solutions.  Dun & Bradstreet’s MDM solutions help connect data within organizations, cleanse and enrich records, and apply predictive analytics against customer datasets.

“In a world where LLMs are trained on mainly uncontrolled publicly available data from the web, the value of trusted datasets such as Dun & Bradstreet’s will increase significantly,” said Gary Kotovets, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Dun & Bradstreet.  “Our products and services are underpinned by validated, historical, and proprietary data, which allows us to deliver reliable and interpretable AI-created results that drive our clients’ most critical business decisions.”

Dun & Bradstreet also announced that its Sales Intelligence solution, D&B Hoover’s, is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.  D&B Hoover’s via the Google Cloud Marketplace allows for a “dollar-for-dollar drawdown against Google Cloud commitments.”

D&B Hoover’s supports company and contact prospecting, news alerting, deep company research (e.g., news, family tree linkages, European company financials, public company financials, competitors, peers, and industry market research), and CRM data enrichment.  Recently added insights include intent data sets from Dun & Bradstreet, Bombora, and corporate website visitor intelligence.

“The demand for trusted B2B data intelligence is ever-increasing.  D&B Hoovers continues to be a solution that organizations rely on to help boost sales productivity and strategic targeting to drive business growth,” said Karlos Palmer, SVP of Sales & Marketing Solutions Product.  “Having D&B Hoovers available on Google Cloud Marketplace makes it easy to use incredibly valuable data to build sales pipelines, and since we’ve migrated D&B Hoovers to Google Cloud, customers have already reported significant performance improvements.”

LeadGenius Campaign Plays, Rapid Enrich, & APAC Expansion

B2B Data and Intelligence vendor LeadGenius announced its expansion into the APAC region with “substantial” coverage of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India.  The firm also touts “emerging” coverage of China, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan.  Simultaneously, the firm announced its new LeadGenius Plays and Rapid Enrich offerings.

“By leveraging top-performing campaigns from exceptional marketers, we help businesses launch complex data requests in seconds,” said VP of Sales and Customer Success Zeb Couch.  “We are continuing to work with our clients around the world to build global B2B data aimed at increasing growth through custom signals and account insights.  With over 80% of B2B data undiscovered or underutilized, we want to give our clients every tool possible for targeting and differentiation.”

LeadGenius Plays simplifies custom data campaigns and look-a-like audiences based on non-standard data characteristics.  Plays also enriches files and appends missing fields.

LeadGenius employs artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), human intelligence, and curation when collecting its data.

LeadGenius Campaign Plays

LeadGenius also announced its Rapid Enrich real-time DaaS product this week, with coverage of enterprise, SMB, and global data.

“In the fast-paced world of B2B data, the need for a solution that offers agility, precision, and comprehensive insights was evident,” stated LeadGenius CEO Mark Godley.  “With the unveiling of Rapid Enrich, we are setting a new standard for data enrichment technology, enabling our clients to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.  We are thrilled to introduce Rapid Enrich as our latest innovation in providing agile, comprehensive, and industry-leading data solutions.  Our relentless pursuit of excellence and commitment to our clients’ success remains our guiding principles as we continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible in the B2B data sector.”

LeadGenius emphasized its data security and privacy management.  Rapid Enrich includes “contractual assurances of responsible data handling, coupled with transparent audit trails that enable businesses to maintain an unquestionable record of their data management activities.”