Crowd-based Company Research vendor Owler added contacts to its Owler Max Sales Intelligence service. Owler was launched in 2011 by Jim Fowler after he sold contacts database Jigsaw (renamed Data.com but now decommissioned) to Salesforce. Both databases employed a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to collecting data, but Owler offered only the CEO name and executive change news alerts. Broader contact details for its 15 million company profiles were not available until now.
Owler grew into a respected database for competitive tracking, funding data, and news alerts but avoided contact data. As it increasingly positioned itself as a sales tool, it needed to address its lack of contacts.
Contact Data, which is only being added to its top-end Max edition, includes direct phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles for 150 million North American professionals. Along with firmographics, users can filter contacts by Job Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Location.
Contact data is available via Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chrome.
‘We are very excited to introduce Contact Data into our Owler Max tool. This is a powerful way to get in touch with potential customers and partners,” stated CEO Tim Harsch. “Our goal has always been to make it easier for companies to grow and succeed, and this new addition to our platform will help our users do just that.”
Contacts may be filtered by Name, Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Current Location.
Factiva, a news and company intelligence service from Dow Jones, announced that it has reimagined its product experience with a “modern, intuitive, and easy-to-use design” that “streamlines knowledge gathering and consumption.”
Factiva has long competed against LexisNexis in the news space for journalists and business professionals. It delivers content from over 200 countries in 32 languages, along with company profiles. At one point, it competed in the sales intelligence space against OneSource, LexisNexis, and Hoover’s but stepped away from that segment about a decade ago.
New features include personalized and trending news modules, enhanced natural language search capabilities, and tailored content recommendations to “support strategic, data-driven business decisions.” The new UX is designed to simplify research and is mobile-first.
“News-derived data is a critical source of business intelligence for any professional, providing an unparalleled view of the past and present and windows into the future,” said Traci Mabrey, general manager of Factiva at Dow Jones. “At a time when the threat of misinformation and disinformation is ever-present, every level of the organization needs easy access to high-quality, trustworthy news to guide their daily decisions. This is what led us to the strategic redesign of Factiva.”
New features include:
A fresh and modern interface that’s accessible to users with all levels of experience.
Faster, free-text-based search optimized for ease, speed, and content discovery.
Responsive, mobile-first design that adapts to any device, ensuring the same powerful functionality anytime, anywhere.
Personalized results tailored to the topics, industries, and companies that are most relevant to each user.
As millennials and Generation Z move into management, they seek “instant access to a personalized view of fact-checked content from multiple sources and publications.” Furthermore, their information tools must be convenient.
“The role of knowledge management has rapidly evolved—people expect an experience like that of their favorite app, while still requiring trusted, premium information,” said Mabrey. “Our goal is to be the leading news and business search engine for the decision makers of today and tomorrow. With Factiva, the next generation of leaders can leverage high-quality, trusted news to cut through the noise, and surface business-critical information.”
Databook account insights are displayed in Salesforce Account and Opportunity records.
Sales Intelligence vendor Databook unveiled a Salesforce connector that helps “sales teams translate financial data and business insights into sales strategy and execution.” The AppExchange solution provides access to “personalized, real-world insights and recommendations” concerning which accounts are in-market, whom to contact, and how to message their offerings.
Databook employs AI and NLP to generate account and solution-specific insights “with the same level of relevancy and value provided by professional consulting firms.” Custom content supports “account planning, executive preparation, value architecture, ABM, and customer presentations.”
Insights include
Databook Score (propensity-to-buy scoring)
Recommended use cases
Financial case for change
Strategic priorities
Management intent
Buying cycle history and trends
Investor sentiments
Databook Risks & Opportunities insights
Account insights highlight customer priorities and pain points, helping reps hone messaging and identify risks and opportunities. Databook insights are displayed in account and opportunity tabs and include strategic insights, recommendations, and “downloadable executive decks and point-of-views that align to corporate priorities, market conditions, fiscal year timing, and financial case for change.” Databook also notifies reps about key account changes.
Opportunity recommendations include tips/steps such as “select an economic buyer for this opportunity,” “review management changes at <account>,” “read <account>’s latest earnings transcript.”
Sales reps can download a set of overviews and tools, including executive point-of-view decks, sales presentations, executive briefings, company profiles, and an account worksheet offering a step-by-step account strategy.
Sales reps can link from the CRM dashboard to Databook to identify deal expansion opportunities. Databook highlights use cases deployed at similar companies that may be relevant. Use cases are highlighted with “relevant proof of success and value-driven vision for the future to create the strongest possible pitch that resonates with executive buyers.”
Databook presents financial and business data sourced from over a dozen vendors.
During the beta period, early adopters increased company research by 157% when accessing Databook insights from both the web and Salesforce vs. simply conducting research via the browser. The firm claims that sales teams using Databook average 3X more pipeline, 2.5X larger deals, and 1.5X faster cycle times.
“Now, more than ever, sales reps need to hone strategic acumen to drive executive relationships and effective sales execution,” said Databook CEO Anand Shah. “Databook’s new CRM application combines essential external context about a company’s business objectives, financials, and budget cycles with the internal account and opportunity information within Sales Cloud to create a new level of intelligence and customer understanding. Now any rep can have an executive-level conversation aimed directly at the business problem they solve in order to repeatedly grow and close deals.”
Databook closed on a $50 million Series B in March led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by DFJ Growth, Threshold, Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Haystack.
Owler maintains lists of companies that have been synced with HubSpot.
Company Intelligence vendor Owler unveiled a pair of integrations with HubSpot and Microsoft Teams. Both offerings are available through its Owler Max subscription product for sales reps.
Owler supports competitive and sales intelligence, with data gathered from web mining and crowdsourcing. Along with standard firmographics, it offers M&A intelligence, funding profiles, company news alerts, and twenty-three sales triggers.
Owler Max is their sales intelligence edition with CRM syncing, email alerts, and prospecting. Reps control which of the twenty-three alert categories are relevant, including new triggers based on revenue and employee count changes.
Company prospecting selects include industry, location, company status, revenue, employee counts, funding history, and competitors. Owler profiles 15 million global companies, with the option to push companies and lists to the CRM. Company data is passed bi-directionally, while news can be used to create HubSpot Tasks or display alerts via email, HubSpot, or Slack.
News and company profile links are embedded within HubSpot Tasks.
“Owler Max provides sales teams with resources they need to do their jobs the best they possibly can,” said Owler CEO Tim Harsch. “Our new integrations and data insights offer sales teams key improvements to organization, workflow, and research efficiency. Sales professionals can leverage data better, drive desired results quicker, and grow the capacity of collaboration in the remote work era.”
Owler syncs data every six hours and can match and upload 1,000 records per minute.
The Teams integration was launched back in August. Owler Max users will see their MS Teams instance in the Owler Max dashboard. They then click connect, name the connection, and syncing commences for all followed companies. Team members can then read, collaborate, or share company intelligence via Teams or email, with alerts automatically posted to Teams channels. Alerts may be aggregated from all lists or customized. Users can also control which of its nearly two dozen event categories should be shared so that only relevant topics are posted.
“Owler Max’s new offerings put sales teams on a straight path to winning. To unlock their full potential, sales teams need efficient access to personalized data and tools for seamless workflow. By providing this scaffolding, Owler Max gives sales professionals an immediate competitive edge.”
Owler CEO Tim Harsch
Owler Max is priced at $600 per annum with a minimum of five seats. Owler Max also supports a Salesforce connector.
On Nathan Latka’s podcast, Godard Abel, CEO of G2, said that he expects to hit $100 million ARR before the end of the year. G2, which raised $157M at a $1.1B valuation in June 2021 (Series D), grew at 40% over the past year. At the time of its Series D, its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was $55 million.
G2 maintains a product/vendor taxonomy for its review site, with vendors identifying their product categories. “If you’re a software vendor, you want it to be right on G2,” said Abel. That way, its seven million monthly visitors can properly discover a vendor’s offerings.
Along with categorizing vendors, G2 editors determine the key features for each product category and let customers rate these capabilities.
The number of G2 listings grew 48% over the last year. Its fifty-person research team collaborates with its “community of vendors” to maintain vendor and product profiles.
G2 also licenses its taxonomy to partners and investors. For example, ServiceNow licenses the G2 taxonomy for its ITS Management tool for categorizing apps. Abel also noted that around fifty of the “World’s leading SaaS investors” have licensed G2 data to help understand the SaaS competitive landscape and adjacent markets.
G2 has additional revenue streams. It offers second-party opted-in intent data and a G2 Track service for tracking SaaS expenses.
Nathan Latka interviews SaaS CEOs and posts them to his podcast. This data is then loaded into his database of SaaS metrics. As he regularly reinterviews executives, there is often historical ARR and employment data. The database is a freemium service with limited free data.
Dun & Bradstreet continues to expand the content it publishes in D&B Hoovers. Recent enhancements include building out its companies, contacts, and technographics.
D&B Hoovers profiles nearly 250 million unique, active companies and over twenty million corporate linkages, including branch-level links. New fields include Site Sales, Global Sales, Site Employees, and Global Employees.
Contact coverage also continues to grow, hitting 290 million. In addition, email and direct-dial fill rates have significantly improved, both growing 9X since Q1 2021. As a result, D&B Hoovers now provides 40 million emails and 20 million direct dials.
Build-a-List now supports a Contact Accuracy Score when prospecting for contacts, letting reps “select the email accuracy that’s right for each outreach, lending flexibility for both precision and volume.” For example, for general campaigns, marketers would select emails with the highest levels of deliverability; still, reps may select lower-scoring contacts when reaching out to their target persona within their ICP.
Other recent enhancements include website content searching, a UI refresh with responsive design, and support for fifteen European and Asian languages.
D&B Hoover’s now provides a broader set of sizing variables for companies and locations.
D&B Hoover’s also expanded its technographics, with company coverage extended by 359% since Q1 2021. In addition, Dun & Bradstreet grew its technology vendor coverage by 54% and its tracked technology products by 5.3 million.
Along with a deep set of companies and contact profiles, D&B Hoover’s offers public company financials, US SEC filings, UK Companies House filings and DASH reports, European registered company financials, analyst reports, industry market research and overviews, corporate family trees, competitors, company news, intent data, and event triggers.
Continuing my coverage of the new Artesian Connect platform [Part I].
Metro Bank, an early customer, deployed Connect for customer onboarding and back-book screening, complementing their Artesian Engage deployment:
“We started working with Artesian to explore ways we could introduce greater efficiency to the customer onboarding journey. We loved the idea of being able to aggregate data from a number of different sources and map our risk appetite to Artesian’s rules framework to flag issues immediately. The result meant we could deliver a process which in some cases was 94% quicker than our existing process.”
Ronan Heeran, Financial Crime Risk & Control Manager at Metro Bank
QBE, an early insurance adopter, employed Connect for underwriting and COVID-risk checks, delivering consistent decisioning across its 200 underwriters. According to QBE Director of Underwriting David Jones, Connect’s configurability let QBE be “proactive, rather than reactive, to changes in data for client assessment.”
Along with a rich set of news event monitoring and triggers, Artesian provides a broad set of Experian UK data, including financials, Companies House images, Gazette filings, Directors and Shareholders, Mortgages and County Court Judgements, Family Trees, and Ultimate Beneficiaries. Artesian recently added Irish datasets from Experian. They also offer US and Canadian profiles from a highly credible provider.
Clients can access Artesian Premium Data in Connect or opt to retain preferred vendors. Connect also provides API connectors for Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, Equifax, Refinitiv, LDC, and Graydon, with more data integrations planned. Many financial services clients opt to feed their legacy PEP (politically exposed persons) and sanctions list vendors into Connect.
Connect supports a business rules-engine, development toolkit, and scripting engine. Users can either work with Artesian’s technical consultants to define models or build their own decisioning and customer support tools. Artesian employs a “3-D” solution process: Discover, Design, Demonstrate. The 3-D process, combined with the Connect platform, allows Artesian to build complex business requirements in days or weeks, significantly faster than third-party developers.
Artesian has trademarked the term “Know-How Equation,” which describes their method of capturing “collective expertise” to “transform efficiency, efficacy, and consistency of frontline and middle office teams.” The equation is represented as
The Know-How Equation captures a company’s knowledge about its customers, business, and market in the Artesian rules-engine. Artesian then processes structured and unstructured data to display “impactful insights and risk intelligence needed to deliver the ultimate in business acumen.”
“Artesian Connect can deliver transformational results in client acquisition, client onboarding, risk and compliance monitoring, and relationship management. With Connect, modern frontline banking teams can rapidly merge disparate data sources, create bespoke rules for risk selection utilising rich firmographic data and, most importantly, deliver insight from unstructured data that paints a much deeper picture for client assessment.”
Artesian CEO Andrew Yates
Artesian has also updated its Engage homepage to provide a custom briefing book to clients. Features include dynamic Connect calculations, advanced engagement signals, historical screening, and account followers. Customers can opt for either a data-first view or a news-first view.
Like many of its peers, Artesian Solutions has thrived during the pandemic. Their mobile push notifications have had high usage during WFH, and financial services firms have increased platform utilization due to economic dislocation and CBILS checks. According to Yates, renewals remain strong, with gross retention in the 90s and net retention around 110%.
The firm has long been profitable, with a 9X LTV/CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost). Furthermore, customers have been integrating the Artesian platform into their workflows, with 65% of new business coming from platform-leveraged transactions.
Artesian Solutions formally launched the Artesian Connect platform aimed at transforming frontline execution and effectiveness. The platform supersedes ARCH, which was built on the same architecture as Connect. The expanded platform now supports advanced sales engagement, customer onboarding, Insurance and credit underwriting, and relationship management.
Connect is Generally Available.
Artesian Connect includes a bespoke rules-processing engine that captures client know-how, including business rules, sales preferences, prospecting criteria, and onboarding checks. Connect supports both Artesian’s Premium Data feeds and customer-licensed third-party data integrations.
By combining first and third-party datasets with business rules and existing policies, the customer engagement process can be streamlined and standardized across large teams. Some of Artesian’s customers have thousands of users, so the ability to improve efficiency without impacting the customer experience is critical to successful implementations.
As rules and policies have been codified, employees do not need to review as much company intelligence. Instead, decision-making is reduced to the core information. Supported processes include sales engagement, onboarding KYC/AML, insurance policy underwriting, and business-specific steps and requirements.
Artesian Connect delivers an improved customer experience, reduced employee onboarding time, and standardized processes and rules across all team members, which is particularly important when engagement priorities and regulations change, as they did in March.
CEO Andrew Yates emphasized that Artesian’s focus is not only on data but on rules and the ability to expedite decision-making based on scores and flagged items. A new feature, engagement signals, go beyond traditional trigger events and look at multiple recent events before offering next best action recommendations.
Connect supports four modes:
Quick Tasks such as pre-screening customers or performing a CBILS (UK SME COVID business loan) check
Tracking Companies and alerting on events, opportunities, credit changes, filings, etc. As alerts are based on company-specific rules and policies, they have greater precision than general notifications.
Multi-linked Analyses that evaluate multiple recent events and determine whether a more in-depth analysis of a prospect or loan is required
Other Application Calls based on customer criteria
Platform apps can be delivered via the desktop, mobile device, or a broker management system, with output such as custom proposals delivered as Word Documents or PDFs.
“Artesian Connect is pioneering a new era in modern data and insight-driven Relationship-Banking – helping commercial teams leverage their extensive know-how and by combining this with the latest advances in data science, we can empower them to do what they do best at a scale and speed never seen before,” explained Yates.
UK-based Sales and Risk Intelligence vendor Global Database is launching company credit checks for nineteen countries. Credit data is gathered via APIs from leading regional European providers of company and credit data.
The new reports include credit scores and limits; payments and inquiries; mortgages, charges, and county court judgments; directors and shareholders; group structures; trading addresses; five-year financials; key performance indicators and ratios; credit score and limit histories; company identifiers (e.g. registration numbers, tax ids, tradestyles), year incorporated; auditor; and document filings.
US data includes UCC (liens), bankruptcies, and payment histories.
Coverage currently spans
Americas: The United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil
Europe: The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Benelux, Ireland, and the Nordics
Asia: Japan, Thailand, Vietnam
Credit reports are available for all registered companies in the supported countries. What’s more, coverage will grow rapidly with plans to support 120 countries by the end of the year with “instantly available credit reports.”
“By the end of Q1, we will have a credit report for every single country, including offline reports in areas where company information is much more difficult to get. Essentially, a client will make a fresh investigation request, and our partners will collect this information from on the ground sources.”
Global Database Managing Director Nicolae Buldumac
“We now offer a unified solution to our customers where they can identify their customers, get contact information for key executives, and run due diligence checks on new suppliers,” wrote Buldumac.
Buldumac emphasized that the Global Database platform supports multiple global departments. “All this information is available in one single license, and this will save cost for many companies, as very often you need to pay a license for sales and marketing solution and another license for compliance. Also, not many companies offer such information globally, and this is where we have a USP.”
During Q3, Global Database onboarded Amazon, Vodafone, WeWork, Dyson, and the Italian Trade Agency. Global Database’s business has increased during the pandemic as firms look for more clients, require tools for assessing business risk, and source digital sales and marketing solutions in the absence of event marketing.
The credit risk solution will be offered both as a bundle with the existing sales and marketing platform and as a standalone product. Pricing will depend on volume and countries, with discounts available for bundled subscriptions.
Global Database has sales and support offices in the UK and Moldova.
Over the past few years, ZoomInfo has been rapidly building its go-to-market intelligence through acquisitions and capital investment. Initially, ZoomInfo (then called DiscoverOrg) rolled up competitors iProfile and RainKing, but in February 2019, they acquired ZoomInfo, a leading global contact information source. The firm also managed two tuck-ins last year: NeverBounce email validation and Komiko Inbox AI.
After going public in June, ZoomInfo acquired intent data service Clickagy in October before acquiring Everstring.
ZoomInfo is exceptionally strong across many of the core B2B data categories, including
Global contacts (e.g. emails, direct dials, phone numbers, bios, social links, job function, and job level)
Technographics (e.g. vendors, products, projects, IT professionals)
Intent data (1st Party IP-matching and the recently acquired Clickagy real-time intent signals)
However, ZoomInfo has lagged behind other vendors in firmographics and linkage. The Everstring acquisition plugs this gap across core firmographics, SMBs, and company linkages, putting the firm in a stronger sales intelligence, digital marketing, and B2B DaaS position. The expanded company universe will significantly improve ZoomInfo’s match rates for batch, real-time, and continuous data enrichment.
In a multinational telecom provider test, the match rate doubled to 98% due to three factors: M/L-powered matching, historical matching against outdated records, and record completeness.
“EverString’s machine learning powered entity resolution (aka matching) algorithms are designed to accept and process multiple identifying inputs from a customer’s file, such as phone number and address, alongside the company name and website, improving the likelihood of returning a matching record.”
ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck
Maintaining a historical file of inactive and out of date records provides significant value when batch processing enterprise records sitting in CRMs and MAPs. Much of this legacy data is bad, but without a reference file with historical data (e.g. inactive and closed companies, former addresses, FKAs), operations teams don’t know which records are defunct businesses.
Everstring has nearly 100% fill rates on core firmographic fields such as employee count, revenue, and industry codes. The expanded firmographics improve field fill rates, lead scoring, lead routing, and analytics (e.g. ICP, TAM, segmentation).
Nevertheless, ZoomInfo has a few remaining gaps around public company financials and filings (e.g. SEC, Companies House, UCC) that would hold them back at financial services companies and European firms. Everstring does ingest filing data (e.g. Secretary of State incorporations, UCC liens, 5500 ERISA filings with the Department of Labor, federal contract bids, OSHA, fleet data, UK Companies House) when building its business graph, but source data viewing is often required.
