Author: Michael R. Levy

Michael R. Levy is the Principal of GZ Consulting, a market research and competitive intelligence consultancy which focuses on the information services industry. Services include market sizing, market research, competitive profiling, product strategy, licensing advice, competitor benchmarking, and sales enablement. Michael has twenty years of experience in the sales intelligence industry, having worked for OneSource (Product Marketing Manager) and InfoGroup (Manager of Strategy and Competition) before launching GZ Consulting in 2011. Michael is also the author of the "Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors." He also publishes a pair of weekly Market Insights Subscription newsletter covering B2B RevTech subjects such as Sales Intelligence, Data as a Service, Sales Engagement, Sales Enablement, ABX Platforms, and Conversational Sales & Marketing.

Drift the Latest RevTech Unicorn

Drift Founders Elias Torres and David Cancel.

Drift became the latest RevTech unicorn following a strategic equity investment by Vista Equity Partners.  The firm did not disclose the size of the investment nor its valuation, only that the valuation exceeded $1 billion.  Vista will hold a majority stake in Drift when the transaction closes in Q4.

“In partnership with Vista, Drift will continue to invest in its customers’ success while expanding its product leadership, scaling globally and bringing Conversational Commerce to more B2B businesses,” announced the firm.

Vista exclusively invests in enterprise software, data, and technology-enabled businesses.

Cancel told TechCrunch that Drift’s goal wasn’t to create a unicorn but that he and founder Elias Torres are proud to be examples for other Latino entrepreneurs:

“Drift is now part of the less than 1% of #latinx founded companies to ever achieve that milestone [$1B+ valuation].

Elias Torres ⚡️ and I believe we have a responsibility to pay it forward, to inspire other people, who are often marginalized and don’t believe they can break the glass ceiling to know that they too can do it. So today we want our #latinx community to know that together we have taken another step forward in our fight for an equitable future.”

Drift CEO David Cancel

Drift, which offers “conversational commerce for B2B,” has over 50,000 sales and marketing customer teams on its Conversational Sales platform.  Drift integrates chat, email, video, and artificial intelligence to power conversations on the website and with sales reps.

75% of its customers were described as mid-market enterprise clients by Cancel.  Customers include ServiceNow, Okta, Grubhub, Mindbody, Adobe, Ellie May, and Snowflake.

“Over the next decade messaging will continue to eat the world and that in order to survive and compete, enterprise businesses will need to flip the traditional model, remove friction, and put customers first. The businesses that win will be the ones that make it simpler for customers to buy from them…

Our bet is that conversations will transform the entire B2B revenue function, and with a partner like Vista, who has helped to transform and grow companies like Marketo and Wrike in recent years, we are excited for what’s next.”

Drift CEO David Cancel

Drift continues on its hypergrowth path, growing ARR 70% in 2020 with a similar growth trajectory this year. However, the company is not yet profitable as it is focused on growth. 

“Our purpose as a company remains simple and consistent: Build a platform that makes it simpler for customers to buy from you. We have an opportunity to bring learnings from the B2C buyer experience to the enterprise and introduce Conversational Commerce as a new B2B category,” said Drift CEO David Cancel.  “Given its extensive experience investing in next-generation SaaS companies, we believe Vista is the best partner to help Drift – and our customers – further these efforts.  I am excited to work with Vista’s team of investors, operators, and technologists who will help us fulfill our ambitious vision and lead the Conversational Commerce category for decades to come.”

Cancel has his eye on taking the company public, with Vista providing a “clear path” to an IPO.

“As a next-generation SaaS company with a strong leadership team, differentiated platform, and passionate customer base, Drift is uniquely qualified and well-positioned to define and lead this new market of Conversational Commerce,” said Monti Saroya, co-head of the Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista. “It is a privilege to partner with talented founders like David and Elias, and we look forward to supporting them and the entire Drift team to help advance their vision to remove the friction from business buying, and in turn, create tremendous value for customers as Drift’s hypergrowth continues to accelerate.”

Boston-based Drift slowed its employment growth rate with the advent of the pandemic but accelerated its hiring in 2021, with an increase of 151 employees since December. In addition, the sales team has grown 33% over the past six months to 136. 

Drift accelerated its headcount growth in 2021 after slowing it at the advent of the pandemic (Source: LinkedIn)

The company appears to have started a consulting organization, growing from 2 to 18 consultants over the past year.  In August, the firm hired Ryan Slinkard as their VP of Professional Services.

RevTech is a field with several minority immigrant founders of unicorns. I have recently also covered Manny Medina (Outreach CEO; Ecuador; $4.4 billion Valuation) and Tope Awotona (Calendly; Nigeria; $3B+ Valuation). Awotona was recently named a board member of SalesLoft, another RevTech unicorn.

Vainu Workflow Triggers

European Sales and Marketing Intelligence vendor Vainu released Workflow Triggers for target account monitoring.  Workflows leverage recent enhancements to the company’s firmographics, user interface, and CRM integrations.

Workflows are available for Salesforce, Dynamics 365 Online, HubSpot, and PipeDrive and support Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, and Task records.

Workflows setup requires four steps:

  1. Select the target group for tracking
  2. Define the filter options such as signal events (e.g., funding, new hires, M&A), data changes (e.g., revenue, employees, address), or new companies in the target group.  Over 70 triggers events are available.  Data changes may be triggered by any licensed data field.
  3. Choose the destination (CRM, Slack, email, or webhook).
  4. Set context including the number and frequency of triggers, additional information, and notes.  “For example, if you’re monitoring accounts to launch account-based marketing campaigns, you can update a data field in your CRM object with custom text saying ‘ABM campaign Q3/2021’,” wrote Head of Marketing Aamer Hasu.

Sales Operations can map data fields with custom text, providing context to data updates and workflows.

Workflow Triggers identify “any significant changes in real-time and use them to trigger workflows across your business systems,” said Hasu. “They’re perfect for nudging prospects over the line and discovering sales opportunities you never knew existed.”

Vainu data covers Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, France (beta), and the United Kingdom (beta).  Users may license one or multiple countries.

One gap in the offering is the lack of support for Sales Engagement Platforms (SEP) such as SalesLoft and Outreach.  SEP functionality is a logical extension to Workflow Triggers. While SEPs are less established in Europe than in North America, both companies have opened EMEA sales and support offices in London.

Vainu is offering fourteen-day free trials to the service.  Email as a trigger destination is available for all users, but CRM integrations are sold separately.

SalesLoft Hits $100M ARR (Part III)

Continued from [Part I] [Part II]

CEO Kyle Porter launched SalesLoft nearly ten years ago and the SEP Cadence product (its flagship) in late 2014.  To recharge and reflect, he took a sabbatical earlier this summer to his family’s tangerine grove.

“One of my biggest conclusions was that I’m given this thing another ten years. So I’m committed to running this business and outlasting and out-executing and out-innovating others in the market.

Another one of those conclusions was [that] we don’t really compare ourselves to the competition. We focus entirely on our customers’ needs, and delivering them the best digital sales combination and workspaces that ever existed…I see all of these companies as different than SalesLoft. We’re very unique. We’re unique in the way that we show care for our customers and each other. We’re unique in the way we innovate and bring new ideas to market and trailblaze the path for digital sales. We’re unique in how we combine these multiple different new, impactful digital solutions into one workspace for our customers.”

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter (GZ Consulting Interview 8/20/21)

Porter is “exploring multiple options” to remain an independent business and continue growing SalesLoft’s market presence.  Doing so entails getting “better and better over time at serving our customers [and] at innovating in the marketplace.”

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter

The firm is also preparing for a future IPO.  “We’re going down the road to build a public business prior to being a public business,” commented Porter.  “And so we’re putting that governance in place [and] those financial controls in place.  You see the independent board member being added. We’ve got an opportunity to continue that with an audit committee chair and another independent board member.”

“I’d love this to be a public business,” continued Porter.  “And if that’s what’s right for the company, that’s what will happen.”

Porter is also proud of his ownership structure, saying that SalesLoft has the “cleanest cap table” and fewest investors amongst companies in the space that have reached scale.  The presence of Jason Green of Emergence Capital and Jeff Horing of Insight Capital also gives him confidence.  Porter views them as “invest and hold” partners.  Both serve on SalesLoft’s Board.

Porter has a great deal of respect for ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck, whom he met at Dreamforce in 2013.  “It’s amazing to see what they’ve done. He’s an inspiration and role model for us, definitely a different business with data at the core.  We no longer do data.  And they’ve moved into the application space. But this is a giant market, and [in] some of the areas they play, we’ve got more experience and capabilities and history and lessons learned and edge case analysis that we’ve been through. And in some of the areas, primarily the data side, he’s got more experience and capabilities. So, we’re excited to see what they’re doing. I love reading his quarterly reports and learning what’s on his mind.  He and I stay in touch regularly. It’s a joy to be in the category with people you love and respect.”

Porter would like to return to live conferences but expects to initially host “smaller, more intimate settings” such as a fifty-person CRM summit or a sales operations leader event.  Later on, Porter looks forward to hosting large events again, such as their 2,000-person Atlanta Rainmaker conference held in 2019.

Last month’s InStereo acquisition is going “incredibly well.”  The acquisition of one of its service partners brought SalesLoft “capabilities to serve our most critical enterprise customers.”  The purchase was prompted by feedback from their joint customers who told Porter “how amazing” the InStereo team was in delivering “critical experiences to help them push the boundaries of modern revenue.” 

Furthermore, “there were just such good relationships” between the companies that it allowed everybody to “hit the ground running once the transaction closed. SalesLoft employment has grown 50% since the beginning of the pandemic and now stands at 615 headcount.

RelPro – IBISWorld Partnership

Sales Intelligence vendor RelPro announced a partnership with well-regarded industry research vendor IBISWorld to deliver an integrated solution for commercial banks.  The joint offering, delivered via the RelPro platform, assists with meeting preparation, due diligence, and industry research.  Ten commercial banks have already deployed the integrated solution, including three of the top five.

RelPro serves business development and relationship management professionals in Financial Services (banking, insurance, wealth management, private equity) and Professional Services (legal, and advisory).  RelPro users are often industry generalists who serve SMBs across many industries.  IBISWorld provides broad industry research across sectors along with economic and environmental changes.

RelPro is a traditional sales intelligence service with company and executive content sourced from seventeen partners.  Data partners include ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, BoardEx, GuideStar, Crunchbase, and HG Insights.  RelPro users build prospecting lists, perform account planning, identify additional contacts at key accounts, and, with the IBISWorld partnership, research industries based upon each company’s industry codes.

IBISWorld industry intelligence is linked by industry codes to company profiles in RelPro.

“RelPro has always been a client-driven solution, focused on the needs of business development and relationship management professionals in financial services and professional services, so when our clients asked us to integrate with a new intelligence source we listened!” said RelPro CEO Martin Wise, “The value of industry insights has been so evident as our users have pivoted and navigated through the shifting economic landscape, preparing for meetings with prospects and clients.  We are thrilled to be partnering with IBISWorld and delivering our combined capabilities to mutual clients.”

RelPro said that the partnered solution is consistent with its mission “to deliver valuable insights and time-saving efficiencies to business development and relationship management professionals” across banking and professional services.

The partnership began a year ago when a top five commercial bank requested an integrated solution.  The firms polished the integration over the past year, with the announcement synced to the April launch of My IBISWorld for Banking.

My IBISWorld for Banking includes tailored industry tools, data, and analysis to support banking professionals throughout the entire credit process.  Expanded content includes enhanced financial ratios, localized statistics “to understand concentration and major market data,” role-based views, risk snapshots that highlight industry risks and trends, and targeted meeting prep questions.

“Recently, we’ve seen a shift towards banking professionals working more closely with other functions, creating cross-department synergies in this newly-remote world.  We’ve also seen a great need for hyper-local data so banks can better serve small businesses during these unprecedented times. My IBISWorld for Banking fosters this cross-departmental work and helps banks support their customers.”

Carmen McKinney, Chief Operations Officer and Head of Customer Success at IBISWorld

“Being a part of our clients’ workflows has been a continuous goal for us at IBISWorld,” said Jason Falkowitz, SVP, IBISWorld Industry Research Division.  “From the launch of our My IBISWorld for Banking platform and our robust API offering to our new partnership with RelPro, we are committed to offering world-class industry information in client-led formats. Combining IBISWorld’s industry intelligence with RelPro’s focus on targeting companies and decision-makers, mutual clients will be best positioned to win and retain commercial relationships.”

IBISWorld content is delivered within the RelPro solution, with single sign-on supported.  The partners initially focused on their set of joint customers with contracts written on separate paper.  There is no surcharge for the cross-product authorization and functionality.

RelPro company profile screen showing links to IBISWorld Research on primary NAICS / SIC Codes.

Last year, RelPro released a similar solution with Vertical IQ.  Both Vertical IQ and IBISWorld provide industry profiles and economic data, with Vertical IQs content written in plain English for cross-industry generalists, while IBISWorld offers a more formal format.

“RelPro now integrates with the two leading independent sources of industry research,” Wise told GZ Consulting.  “It is for clients to decide which of these two solutions best meets their needs, and RelPro can deliver an integrated and time-saving user experience to either / both sources. This new partnership announcement is consistent with RelPro’s mission to deliver valuable insights and time-saving efficiencies to business development and relationship management professionals in banking and other financial and professional services sectors.” RelPro revenues (bookings) grew 40% in 2020, and the company expects that growth in 2021 will be at least that much

SalesLoft Hits $100M ARR (Part II)

(Continued from Part I) SalesLoft also announced that Calendly’s founder and CEO Tope Awotona joined SalesLoft’s Board of Directors.  Both RevTech firms are based in Atlanta.  Porter and Awotona met seven years ago at Atlanta Tech Village.

“It was clear from day one [that] he was an incredible leader who had a clear vision harnessed around delivering delightful customer experiences,” posted Porter on LinkedIn.  “Most of us know the success of Calendly and have learned of Tope‘s fascinating story.  We’re stoked to partner together and grow from his strategic wisdom, leadership learnings, and product-focused excellence.  Our ultimate goal together is helping our current and future customers deliver revenue excellence at scale.”

Salesloft Calendaring Functionality

Porter and Awotona discussed potential conflicts of interest, but those concerns were laid aside.  While SalesLoft has calendaring features similar to Calendly, SalesLoft maintains an open architecture and partner ecosystem with Calendly as a partner.

Porter echoed a recent Gartner observation that SalesTech is in a period of “mayhem” where customers are looking to consolidate their revenue platforms to simplify workflows and operations.  Porter sees SalesLoft as being at the vanguard of this preference for broad, open platforms.

“There’s been massive trends towards digital selling that have taken place,” said Porter.  “And then there’s another trend that we’ve seen emerge, which is companies have been using so many different revenue tools, but they really want to consolidate on a very few that they love, and that’s where SalesLoft comes in.”

Continue to Part III which discusses Porter’s long-term plans for SalesLoft.

SalesLoft Hits $100M ARR

Sales Engagement Platform SalesLoft announced that it hit the $100 million ARR mark, following 50% growth over the past year.  Since announcing its unicorn valuation in January ($1.1 billion), the firm has grown revenue by nearly 40%.  Last quarter, it “far exceeded its financial plan.”

It took roughly nine quarters to double their ARR.

SalesLoft ranked 1210 on the Inc. 5000 2021 list.  SalesLoft revenue grew 401% over the past three years, a 71% CAGR.

“Everything we’re doing is coming back to, ‘how do we empower our customers to deliver their customers with an amazing sales experience?'”

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter

SalesLoft, which opened an EMEA office in April 2019, has grown revenue 125% in the European market over the trailing twelve months.  It plans to increase its European staff by 120% over the next year and open a German data center.

Its top markets in EMEA are the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany.

SalesLoft benefited from being the first SEP with a European office.  While the revenue team can create content in any language, the UI remains English only.  Their NLP is English only, but Porter anticipates supporting additional languages for conversational intelligence “in a very short time.”

SalesLoft is also enjoying strong growth in APAC even though it lacks a physical presence in the region.

“While we don’t have physical locations in Asia, we have many customers there and in Australia,” Porter told GZ Consulting.  “We have many customers that are US-based businesses with operations there. So we’re global in our customer base and usage of the application, but we don’t have feet on the street in the Asian or Australian market yet.”

The pandemic has driven demand into new segments as companies are looking to establish new communications channels with the loss of trade shows and face-to-face meetings.  Customer growth has been “across the board.”  SalesLoft has “really expanded to Main Street” as firms realized they needed to adopt a “digital sales motion.”

The pandemic “brought about some, incredible businesses that traditionally took a little bit longer to buy Sales Engagement,” explained Porter.  “We’ve got companies like 3M and Liberty Mutual and McGraw Hill and S&P and carpet manufacturers. It’s moved outside of tech to manufacturers, health care, financial services, [and] a number of different professional services. That’s been one of the great lessons learned post-pandemic.”

“As companies have pivoted to a full digital selling motion, SalesLoft has become a mission-critical partner and platform,” wrote the firm.  “Only SalesLoft combines the three most critical products in digital selling – Cadence for managing multi-channel communications, Conversations for recording and analyzing meetings, and Deals for managing opportunities and pipeline.”

Continue to Part II which discusses the addition of Calendly CEO Tope Antowana to SalesLoft’s board.

Kyle Porter on Leadership as Service

There is no lack of companies and their CEOs that go through the motions of woke capitalism, turning it into performative theater to satisfy customers, partners, and investors. Only over time do you see which firms are sincere in their efforts at stakeholder capitalism and which ones view such positions as a way to goose profits and burnish their image.

BP was a perfect example of greenwashing until they befouled the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve known Kyle Porter, CEO of Sales Engagement Platform SalesLoft, for about nine years. I was impressed when he mothballed his first product because it wasn’t aligned with his belief in sales authenticity. It was a gutsy move. While he didn’t burn his boats (i.e., immediately remove the product from the market), he stopped selling the service and phased out the product while fulfilling current contracts.

Early on he set out five principals for his company. He has discussed them at user conferences and posts them on SalesLoft’s company page:

So when Kyle announced that SalesLoft was internalizing the cost of its carbon footprint by paying for carbon offsets, I asked him about it. He framed the discussion as part of a broader social mission:

“From the beginning, this has been a mission-led business. I didn’t found a company because I wanted to make money in sales, I founded a company because I knew that a business would be the greatest vehicle that I could create to make an impact on the world. And that starts with our customers and changing their lives. It extends to our employees and providing them with a place where they can learn more, grow more, do more, find fulfillment, and serve others. And that extends to our ecosystem and the places that we serve.

If I’ve got influence and capabilities, why not yield those to make the world a better place at the same time…

Einstein said the purpose of life is to serve. I believe that a leader’s role is to serve, and I believe that I’ve been entrusted with a unique story, with capabilities, with resources, with a great business. And it’s my job to be a steward of that and use it to make the world a better place.

So when you look out, you see that we emit 35 billion metric tons of carbon, and SalesLoft is emitting carbon, as well, through our server ecosystem, through our travel, through our office space HVAC. We have an opportunity to take it seriously, and we have an opportunity to have a net-zero impact on the world, then we’re going to take that.

Fortunately, we were able to find a great partner [Green Places] who helps us offset our carbon footprint, and commits us to operating in an energy efficient way.

We stand for something. We act on it. It’s one of the many things that we want to do as a business.”

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter (Interview: Michael Levy 8/20/21)

Now, I’m hoping that Green Places keeps Kyle’s feet to the fire on his promise to be carbon neutral. Simply paying for offsets should only be the first step in meeting environmental objectives. The real progress happens when a company works with its employees, vendors, and partners to reduce their carbon emissions. I have no doubt that Kyle is sincere, but even those with the best of intentions need to be advised on next steps and best practices. Just as SalesLoft provides Guided Selling and Next Best Actions to sales professionals, advisory services such as Green Places need to provide Guided Leadership and Next Best Actions to C-level execs.

The SalesTech space is fortunate to have some mensches at the helm (Kyle Porter, Henry Shuck at ZoomInfo, Manny Medina at Outreach, Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn [retired]). Sales has often been a highly competitive, self-serving profession (“coffee is for closers”). Having executives with a stakeholder perspective that preach and implement authenticity, privacy, diversity, collaboration, career development, and environmentalism positions their companies against the stereotypes of the sales profession and helps advance the profession.

ZoomInfo Sales Efficiency and LTV/CAC Ratios

ZoomInfo has been talking about its LTV/CAC (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio for a few years and is now boasting about its sales efficiency ratio.  For every dollar the firm invests in Sales and Marketing, it is growing $1.50 to $2.00 in revenue with even better results on the retention business side.  These values are well above the SaaS industry average and indicate that the firm should increase its revenue operations investment.

“On the new business side, we aim for somewhere between one and a half to two X return for every dollar that we spend on a customer. And then on the retention and growth or account management side, we look for a six to eight X return for every dollar that we spend there. It’s a super-efficient go-to-market motion.  Most software businesses, you put a dollar in, you get like 70 cents out in the first year.  We’re putting a dollar in and getting one and a half to two X out.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

Schuck described their go-to-market efficiency as one of their “big strategic levers” when acquiring firms with less mature go-to-market motions.  ”So when we find companies that don’t have a very sophisticated go-to-market motion, that aren’t truly optimized in the way that they get clients, they’re not doing one and a half to two X efficiency or a 15 X LTV to CAC.  Those are great fits for us.” 

ZoomInfo has a track record of improving sales efficiency, helping unlock value in acquired assets where the go-to-market motions are aligned.  “In our big acquisitions – RainKing, ZoomInfo, and, most recently, Chorus.AI — we really felt like we could leverage the go-to-market motion to accelerate growth within those companies. That’s a key piece.”

When DiscoverOrg acquired RainKing, which had a $40 million ARR, he was convinced that DiscoverOrg could treble their EBITDA to $30 million and accelerate their top-line growth within six months.  Within one year of acquiring RainKing, DiscoverOrg’s market valuation grew from roughly $600 million to $2 billion.

One of the inherent advantages of SalesTech is you don’t have to teach sales reps the value and use cases of your product.  This shortens ZoomInfo’s ramp time for new reps from several quarters to four months.  “it makes it way easier for you to be able to sell to your counterpart on the other end of the line.  It’s a big difference for us,” said Schuck. 

ZoomInfo heavily hires sales reps directly out of college or soon after and trains them as SDRs, responding to inbound leads and performing outbound prospecting.  “In nine months, we start promoting them into the account executive role.  So we got value out of them in that ramp time. Then four months after they’ve gone into the account executive role, they’re fully ramped. Thirteen months from when you’ve never sold something until you’re an account executive at one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the country, that’s a really fun promotion to see.”

And because ZoomInfo is hiring sales reps to sell sales and marketing solutions, Schuck does not consider complicated or technical product categories for acquisition.  Instead, he looks for solutions that broadly meet the needs of his 20,000 customers and which are easy to understand.  Chorus.AI, the Conversation Intelligence vendor that ZoomInfo acquired last month, fits the bill: “We use it, all of our sellers use it. It’s really simple to understand, ‘Hey, we’re going to record and transcribe all your calls, and then you can go do instant coaching on the key moments in those calls’,” remarked Schuck.

The Chorus app for Zoom records, transcribes, indexes, and analyzes calls, providing insights to sales reps and sales managers. As reps no longer need to worry about notetaking, they can focus on the topics at hand and be more present during the meetings.

Terminus Chat Experiences

Terminus announced the immediate availability of its next-generation chat offering, Terminus Chat Experiences, which is native to its ABX platform.  Terminus claims that Terminus Chat Experiences drives a 700% increase in target account engagement and has already powered more than four million conversations.

Chat Experiences builds upon its 2020 acquisition of Ramble.  Built within the Terminus platform, Chat Experiences routes conversations to the appropriate rep “in seconds.”  Along the way, Terminus playbooks collect visitor data, trigger sales automation steps, and qualify inbound traffic in real-time.

Terminus Chat enhancements include new Chat views and dashboards, a new Chat engagement window, and a HubSpot for Chat integration.  Reps can monitor the website and reach out to visitors pro-actively, based upon their viewed content.

The chat builder supports both linear workflows and visual workflows.  Connectors support Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Outreach, SalesLoft, Calendly, and Google Analytics.

Other features include Chat from Anywhere one-click chat links from emails, display ads, social, and other channels; chat routing to the most appropriate available rep based upon Terminus reference data; meeting booking; and a mobile app for booking meetings and chatting when away from the desk.

“Terminus Chat Experiences has identified more than 3.7M target accounts for customers; that’s incredibly powerful,” said Justin McDonald, GM of Channel Applications for Terminus. “Combined with other channels like Ad Experiences and Email Experiences, Chat Experiences is truly a game-changer for modern marketers looking to engage target audiences at any stage of the funnel.  Being native to our platform creates a flywheel of first-party data and account matching that plays a massive role in conversion and revenue for customers.  Native chat is unmatched, and we’re proud to be the first and only ABM platform to make this possible.”

TechTarget Acquires Xtelligent Healthcare Media

On its earnings call last week, TechTarget announced its latest acquisition, Xtelligent Healthcare Media, a Boston-based firm with a similar content model to TechTarget.  It has over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites.  Content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market. Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.

“The healthcare IT market is one of the most important vertical technology markets and a natural adjacency for TechTarget to expand into. This acquisition checks all of the boxes for us.  Xtelligent has an original content model with a permission-based audience of registered members and a large amount of first-party purchase intent data.”

CEO Michael Cotoia in TechTarget’s Q2 2021 Letter to Shareholders

Similar to BrightTALK, Xtelligent did not have a solution for disseminating its intent data, but TechTarget will create new purchase intent segments and feed them into Priority Engine, expanding Priority Engine’s potential user base.

Xtelligent CEO, Sean Brooks, is a former TechTarget VP who founded Xtelligent a decade ago.  Brooks will continue to run the business.  Cotoia noted that Brooks built Xtelligent with a similar opted-in, permission-based audience model.

“We are very excited to join TechTarget and extend our combined audiences and offerings into new markets,” said Brooks. “TechTarget’s experience and success with first-party data, combined with their deep understanding of the B2B Media & Data space, will help us continue to grow and offer customers new opportunities to reach and engage highly targeted healthcare technology decision-makers.”

“[Healthcare] is a vertical that we’ve been keeping our eye on for a couple of years and the adjacent vertical where healthcare intersects with IT and infrastructure, security, hardware, and software, just made all the sense in the world to us. We believe it’s going to open the door to new customers [and] opportunities….We believe that we have an untapped revenue opportunity with Priority Engine and bringing our purchase intent data onto the Xtelligent community.”

TechTarget is eyeing other adjacent verticals, including FinTech and Asset Management, where BrightTALK has some penetration.

TechTarget paid $25 million in cash for Xtelligent, which includes an additional $5 million earn-out.