Category: Customer Data Platform

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.

Terminus Acquires Zylotech

Terminus acquired Boston-based B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP) Zylotech and immediately launched the rebranded Terminus CDP as part of its ABM Platform. 

Terminus CDP will be led by Matt Belkin, who has “25 years of experience in building and scaling data and technology companies.”  Belkin joined Terminus last year when it acquired Sales Intelligence vendor GrowFlare.

Zylotech CTO Abhi Yadav will be Terminus’ Head of Platform Development.  Yadav is also a Guest Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.

The deal is Terminus’ fifth acquisition, backing up Gartner’s SalesTech Mayhem thesis that a handful of companies are quickly grabbing market share through strategic acquisitions and high levels of internal investment that fill missing capabilities.

Terminus’ acquisitions have focused on expanding the core capabilities of the company, not taking out competitors.  The other acquisitions were

Terminus Acquisition History

While CDPs are generally deployed to create a single view of the customer, David Raab, Founder of CDP Institute, commented that the Terminus CDP “will tie together the data silos that would otherwise result” from the acquisitions.

“CDP is becoming more widely adopted in B2B, as companies recognize their marketing automation and CRM systems are not enough to provide true data unification and sharing,” said Raab.  “By acquiring Zylotech, Terminus positions itself – and its clients – to take full advantage of the capabilities that a CDP provides.”

While data usage and spending are rapidly increasing, few marketers trust their data.  A 2017 Forrester survey found that only 12% of B2B marketers have high confidence in their data accuracy, and 84% identified data management as a top-five weakness.

“The key to a successful CDP is trust,” blogged Zylotech Director of Revenue Marketing Alex Bistran in August.  “Sales, marketing, and customer experience teams need to trust the data stored in their CDP to drive decisions, whether it’s deciding which accounts require immediate attention or which campaign messaging is most likely to resonate with a particular customer. By constantly refreshing data from your own customer interactions and combining it with validated, third-party B2B data to accurately reflect your contacts and accounts, a CDP provides a clean stream of actionable data that can be operationalized to flow through your marketing, sales, and customer service channels.  And, importantly, that can lead to a healthier revenue stream too.”

“B2B CRM data is painfully inaccurate and incomplete, and manual efforts to clean, deduplicate, and activate are slow and expensive.  This leads to poor conversion rates, an incomplete view of buying committees, and misleading ROI,” stated the firm.

“Bad data in equals bad data out. Period. We’re entering a marketing revolution – data really is the new oil, and Terminus is sitting on a gold mine. Under Matt’s leadership, Terminus CDP is poised to change the game for our customers. This level of data accuracy is critical for B2B GTM teams looking for a unified view into their customers. I’ve never been more excited about the future of marketing.”

Terminus CEO Tim Kopp

The Terminus CDP addresses the issues of bad data with auditing, cleansing, enrichment, and data management capabilities “backed by the industry’s largest global network of decision-makers and Buying Committees.”  Furthermore, Terminus CDP “dramatically” improves data accuracy, campaign effectiveness, and “wasted sales cycles.”

Buying Committee discovery is a novel UVP for a CDP but fits well within a broader ABM Platform umbrella. 

“We are in the golden age of marketing.  The breadth of technologies helping us create great experiences has never been so impressive.  But, what are all those customer experiences predicated on?  Data,” blogged Kopp.  “With Terminus CDP, our customers will have their most important account and contact data continuously cleansed and enriched. The result: our customers will be able to put their trust in their data, unleashing their go-to-market teams to accurately engage buying committees every time.”

Continued Kopp, “We’re entering a marketing revolution.  A time when sales and marketing teams don’t have to worry about data and can dedicate their energy to create phenomenal experiences that turn into pipeline.  I have never been more excited about the future of marketing.”

“Since our early days as an MIT spinout, Zylotech has been focused on delivering the data and intelligence go-to-market teams can trust and take action on,” said Yadav.  “Upon meeting Terminus, it was obvious that we shared a common vision. We are proud to join Terminus and this incredible team to jointly improve the accuracy of B2B data.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Kopp described it as a “big deal” that is a “really, really important acquisition.”  The Indianapolis Business Journal said that Zylotech was its largest deal to date.  The transaction was financed with funds from a $90 February venture round.

Enterprise clients include Google, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Dell, and Rimini Street.

D&B Rev.Up ABX Launched (Part II)

D&B Rev.Up ABX supports four channels supported by Dun & Bradstreet’s Lattice CDP and Data Cloud.  Users may license one or multiple packages or an advanced package that supports all of the channels.

Continuation from yesterday’s blog.

With D&B Lattice at its core, Rev.Up ABX supports AI-driven models for defining ideal buyers and their individual and account-level buying journeys.  Marketers define the goals, segmentation, criteria, and historical period for the model (e.g., four quarters of historical records), and Lattice builds and scores across the segment.  These models assist with building targeted audiences of buyers ready to engage across various stages of their journey.

Once a model is built, marketers can create and activate campaigns across channels.  For example, an awareness campaign can be activated across paid social, Google ads, and Google search for either accounts or contacts.  Lattice manages scheduled audience updates so that marketers do not need to manually update the activated segment.

Likewise, lower scoring leads triggered by website visits can be nurtured in Marketo, while higher scoring visitors are routed to Outreach as sequences or tasks.

Company-level analytics show the engagement journey across stages, contacts engaged, engagement activity, pages visited, firmographics, intent signals, and SDR alerts.

The D&B Lattice Model Builder score and rates contacts by estimated lift

The suite is GDPR and CCPA compliant with opt-in/opt-out flags shared across activation channels.

D&B Rev.Up is supported by the D&B Data Cloud, which includes

  • 420 million global companies and 37 million corporate linkages
  • 220 million global contacts, of which 54 million are C-level.
  • Digital identities spanning over 4 billion IP addresses, 22 million URLs, and over 500M devices ids.
  • 17 million technology products used by 13 million companies.
  • 3,500 intent topics spanning 14 billion digital signals.
  • Third-party alternative data sets with pre-assigned D-U-N-S numbers to ensure proper matching.

Firmographics and Technographics are available for all offerings, with intent data available for all but the Web edition in the default package (it is available in the advanced).

Rev.Up ABX is data agnostic, allowing revenue operations teams to deploy third-party licensed data sets such as G2.

Rev.Up ABX supports lookalike modeling, while the other products support three lead scoring and three account scoring models.  Lookalike contacts may be sent to D&B Lattice, D&B Hoovers, or MAPs.

The D&B Rev.Up ABX Dashboard

Continue to Part III for a discussion of the Folloze partnership and product pricing.

D&B Rev.Up ABX Launched

Dun & Bradstreet launched D&B Rev.Up, a new RevTech product line that brings together first and third-party data in “an open and agnostic platform that aligns teams, data, and technology to deliver relevant and engaging buyer experiences for target accounts.”  The datasets are unified via D&B Lattice, the CDP Dun & Bradstreet acquired in 2019.

The first offering is D&B Rev.Up ABX, which supports “first- and third-party data, activation capabilities and measurement, on top of its industry-leading customer data platform (CDP), giving sales and marketing teams a singular view of an account from targeting to revenue.”

“As sales and marketing leaders move to shared revenue responsibility, it becomes important to gain a common view of the customer throughout the buying lifecycle,” said Dun & Bradstreet CMO Stacy Greiner.  “We designed D&B Rev.Up ABX to simplify marketing and sales workflows by providing data, targeting, activation, and measurement in one platform, using an open architecture that allows teams to complement and capitalize on existing investments.”

D&B Rev.Up ABX aligns teams, data, and technology.

The new ABM service supports a channel-agnostic, “360-degree view” of accounts, contacts, campaigns, and sales plays.  Four ABX channels are supported:

  1. D&B Rev.Up ABX for Ads deploys paid media campaigns across demand-side platforms (DSPs) and social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, theTradeDesk, Google Video & Display360, Verizon Media, Xandr, and MediaMath.  ABX for ads is available as either a managed service or a self-serve option.  The managed services option supports media, data, execution, and analytics.

    Revenue teams can target by role, firmographics, technographics, and intent data.  They can then engage audiences via programmatic advertising, paid search, and social media.
  2. D&B Rev.Up ABX for Web supports visitor intelligence, tying visitor activity to accounts across both offices and homes.  The service also pre-populates shortened forms, personalize websites, and deploys a tracking pixel to tie engagement back to D-U-N-S Numbers. 

    Because users select the company name from a type-ahead, drop-down list of names and addresses, the user only needs to enter a partial company name.  Dun & Bradstreet then enriches the record with firmographics, linkage, and D-U-N-S numbers.  According to Andrew Berg in Dun & Bradstreet Analyst Relations, the “waterfall matching technology” combines IP, cookie, and API matching logic.  The API type-ahead drop-down matching is completed in under 200 milliseconds after the first two characters are entered into the company name field on a form.
  3. D&B Rev.Up ABX for Sales builds lists for sales teams, rates opportunities, and activates sales plays with connectors to SalesTech solutions.  ABX for Sales supports predictive analytics, propensity modeling, sales plays, sales recommendations, and buyer propensity tracking.  SDRs may engage customers and prospects via Outreach sequences.  SalesLoft support is planned for later this year.

    Sales Engagement sequences can be driven by first and third-party intent, marketing engagement data from MAPs, and Folloze engagement.
  4. D&B Rev.Up for Email builds targets audiences and activates email campaigns via Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot (June GA), and Pardot (June GA).  Functionality includes campaign building, opt-in/opt-out support, and engagement analytics.

Analytics partners include Google Analytics, Optimizely, Adobe Target, and Adobe Analytics.  Other partners include Outreach and Salesforce.

“Teams aren’t trapped in a single, enclosed platform like other tech on the market.  D&B Rev.Up ABX integrates and works with their existing Martech and SalesTech so that they can activate in one channel, many, or all of them in a consistent and orchestrated way. They gain the power of the Data Cloud and our CDP, while also being able to use tools they already have,” blogged Greiner.  “This openness and flexibility helps teams to work efficiently and means they can maximize previous investments and use dollars wisely.  You can choose the full power of D&B Rev.Up ABX, or use it just in one channel – ads, email, web, sales plays – and then scale up to achieve a coordinated conversation with buyers everywhere they’re likely to engage.”

Part II discusses Rev.Up ABX modeling.

Leadspace – ZoomInfo Partnership

Leadspace and ZoomInfo inked a strategic partnership to distribute ZoomInfo data through the Leadspace Customer Data Platform.  The platform-level integration lets customers activate ZoomInfo data and intelligence from within Leadspace.  The Leadspace CDP is a data-agnostic platform that supports predictive scoring, ICP analytics, look-a-like modeling, intent signaling, and custom buyer personas and scores.

The partnership is Generally Available to joint customers.

Leadspace also offers robust data hygiene and enrichment based upon the Reachforce platform it acquired several years ago.  Other tools include web forms, marketing automation and SFDC enrichment, and custom audiences for programmatic marketing.

“We talk to many B2B companies that work with ZoomInfo and see tremendous value in their intelligence solutions,” said Leadspace CTO Amnon Mishor. “We’ve partnered with ZoomInfo on some strategic clients and proven the added benefits of the Leadspace platform in being able to unify other data and intelligence with the ZoomInfo data, then activate it across channels. It’s really the best of all worlds for our customers.”

While both companies have strong matching capabilities, Leadspace is performing real-time matching between the two platforms.  Initially, the partnership supports company and contact enrichment, but additional datasets such as technographics and intent are planned.

“Every B2B enterprise can benefit from the new Leadspace and ZoomInfo integration,” said ZoomInfo CRO Chris Hays. “We believe making our data available through a leading customer data platform (CDP) for unification and activation is the new frontier for B2B sales and marketing, and it’s a great way for customers to see even greater return on their investment in data.”

Both companies have performed well during the pandemic.  ZoomInfo IPO’d in June and has had several strong quarters since going public, growing revenue 62% last year.

Leadspace closed on a $46 million Series D earlier this month.  It doubled its customer base over the past two years and grew revenue 151% between 2016 and 2019, placing the firm at 2,681 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list.

Leadspace Closes on Series D

Customer Data Platform vendor Leadspace closed on a $46 million Series D led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).  It has now raised $107 million since being founded in 2011.  The firm also announced Alex Yoder as its new CEO as the firm ended a dispute with their former CEO Doug Bewsher.

Leadspace features include company and professional profiles, data hygiene and enrichment, web forms, reports and analytics, TAM and ICP analysis, and account engagement.  Leadspace also performs lead prioritization and identifies similar companies.  Unlike many CDPs, Leadspace is a pure B2B platform.

The funds will be used for meeting growing demand, expanding its headcount, and resolving litigation.  The firm currently has 100 employees in the US and Israel.  The 40 employees in Israel are technology-focused, and the US contingent manages business leadership.

“A major part of our post-investment vision is to grow our team in Israel,” said CTO Amnon Mishor.

Leadspace also announced that Doug Bewsher was stepping down as CEO and being replaced by Alex Yoder.  According to VentureBeat, there was a falling out between Bewsher, JVP, and the Leadspace board about the company’s direction.  Bewsher was looking to sell the firm, while the Board and JVP wanted to continue growing it, resulting in a lawsuit between two JVP partners and Bewsher.

“I’m glad to say that the lawsuit is behind us.  The former CEO agreed to leave.  A situation arose in which the CEO and some of the investors, particularly Arrowroot Capital were interested in selling the company, while JVP, other board members, and I saw potential in our figures to build up a large company.  We had made a technological leap and didn’t want to sell. There was a conflict among the board members and negotiations between the various investors over whether to sell or not, with the lawsuit being part of that.  Eventually, everyone reached an understanding,” said Mishor.

Despite the leadership issues and a failed 2018 merger with Radius, Leadspace has grown its market presence.  It doubled its customer base over the past two years and grew revenue 151% between 2016 and 2019, placing the firm at 2,681 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list.

Yoder is bullish on Leadspace, forecasting 70% growth this year, double that of the market.  Growth is being driven by the need to find and engage contacts at companies as the pandemic precludes face-to-face meetings.

Yoder has led several B2B and SaaS companies over the past two decades, including WebTrends, Ebiquity, and Trueffect.  According to the press release, Yoder has “built strong teams and implemented transformational strategies, running businesses that spanned $20 million to $150 million in revenue.”

JVP Executive Chairman Erel Margalit was named the Board Chairman.

“We typically invest in early-stage companies, but we only double down in category leaders and companies that can reach $100 million in ARR,” said Margalit.

“We believe that Alex Yoder can take the business to the next level as Leadspace becomes the single source of truth for B2B data,” said Margalit. “Leadspace – through its revolutionary AI platform – is changing the way enterprises manage their internal and external customer data.  In the coming years, enterprise CDP will be established as a new category, using AI to obtain the true identity, title, and roles of companies and individuals, creating true added value for clients.”

Competitors include D&B Lattice, 6Sense, Zylotech, and ABM Platforms.  Yoder contends that Leadspace’s strength in in analyzing unstructured social and behavioral data.

“Creating a source of truth for B2B is a very complex problem.  Companies are complex — sales cycles and engagement can be sporadic, involve multiple stakeholders, and can last months or even years,” said Mishor. “There are multiple data and intelligence point solutions that address small parts of the fundamental data issue.  No other solution is taking the holistic approach of being the connective layer between raw data and engagement channels for B2B like Leadspace.”

Leadspace clients include Microsoft, Salesforce, American Express, Intel, HPE, and Zoom.

MSD 365 Customer Insights Partnerships

Microsoft rolled out a set of enhancements to its Customer Insights CDP earlier this month, including a set of technology and data partnerships. I covered the functional enhancements yesterday.

“Organizations can automatically augment profiles with survey responses to truly uncover sentiment and drive detailed segmentation of customers, empowering agile actions that build brand loyalty and driving detailed understanding of customers,” said James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Applications.  “Furthermore, organizations can enrich customer profiles with proprietary audience intelligence on brand affinity and user interests or by using third-party enrichments such as Experian and Leadspace.”

Leadspace supports B2B firmographic enrichment use cases, including industry codes, discrete and ranged sizing variables, geocodes, social media links, URLs, and standardized addresses.  Leadspace plans to include more advanced account-level insights such as company hierarchy and site-level details, as well as lead and intent scores, in future releases.  Firmographic updates may be processed daily or weekly with company matching performed by Leadspace.

The Leadspace data license is written on Leadspace paper and based upon the number of records under management.  Volume discounts apply.  When additional content sets are available, tiered pricing will be employed.

“We’ve been really honored to collaborate closely with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights team as their first B2B data enrichment partner and excited about the value it’ll bring our joint customers who want a single source of truth to fuel their sales and marketing efforts.  This offering goes a long way to helping them improve their ability to segment, prioritize, and personalize engagement across the customer lifecycle.”

Leadspace CTO Amnon Mishor

Experian supports consumer data enrichment spanning lifestyle segmentation, demographics, purchasing habits, brand preferences, life-event triggers, and mobile location data.  

Microsoft also rolled out a set of new Customer Insights integrations that “drive meaningful actions across the customer journey.”  Customer Insights is vendor-agnostic, “from ingesting data from any source to activating insights on multiple destinations.”  New partners include AutopilotHQ, Bing ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, and SendGrid (Twilio).

Phillips emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to data privacy and security “by enabling organizations to better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions from Microsoft Information Protection.”  Organization can “configure policies to classify, label, and protect data based on its sensitivity.”

Customer Insights pricing begins at $1,500 per tenant per month for up to 100,000 profiles.

MSD 365 Customer Insights Enhancements

Microsoft has begun beta testing a set of enhancements to its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights CDP.  The upgrades focus on extending CDP capabilities into deeper insights and AI capabilities.  The new functionality will GA during the first half of 2021.

Engagement Insights, currently in preview, provides cross-channel analytics that assess customer behavior and intent across the web, mobile, connected devices, and other touchpoints.  Engagement Insights combines behavioral analytics with transactional, demographic, survey, and other data sets “to create interactive and rich insights that help drive the next best actions and personalized experiences.”

Engagement Insights begins with standard analytics around web site visitors, pages viewed, and visit duration.  A custom report builder lets marketers “curate the exact views to answer the business questions at hand.”  Funnel reports track customer journeys, identify gaps and opportunities, and inform next best actions.

“Engagement Insights is about directly funneling web, mobile and connected product data back into Customer Insights to help continue to enrich that understanding of the customer in order to better serve them.

James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Applications.

Insights are deployed across the customer lifecycle and assist with personalizing offers, including presenting new product or services that better match customer needs.

“As everything’s gone digital, the need to deeply understand your customer and to increase the efficacy of those engagements has really been heightened through this pandemic,” said Phillips.

AI enhancements focus on better customer predictions.  The AI functionality employs Azure Synapse Analytics and includes a set of pre-built templates for predicting customer churn, automating product recommendations, and evaluating customer lifetime value.  The templates help marketers gather customer insights without requiring data science or IT professional support.

A new integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice captures customer sentiment and feedback.

According to Phillips, Customer Insights is the “fastest-growing application in the Dynamics 365 portfolio.”

Part II covers Customer Insights partnerships.

Openprise Agile CDP

B2B data hygiene vendor Openprise announced the availability of Openprise Agile CDP, the “first and only B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP) built on a data orchestration platform.”  As a data orchestration platform, Openprise offers a single customer view combined with no-code business rules, third-party data, and business process automation.

Openprise emphasizes the advantage of being a data orchestration platform with a B2B CDP.  “Because it’s built on the Openprise Data Orchestration Platform, Openprise Agile CDP includes all the capabilities Openprise has developed over the years to improve data quality in tools like Salesforce and Marketo—including lead routing, account scoring, and attribution—advanced features not typically found in traditional CDPs.”

Openprise supports data unification, data enrichment, normalization, deduplication, lead-to-account matching, and lead-to-contact conversion.  Analytical tools include advanced segmentation, lead and account scoring, ABM activity analysis, campaign attribution, lead routing, and account assignment.

“One of the biggest challenges marketers face is making sure their systems of record deliver accurate, high-quality data to drive marketing initiatives.   A CDP solution that automates all the critical business processes required to make the data work gives marketers high confidence in the accuracy and quality of the data they manage.”

Julian Archer, VP, Principal Analyst in the Marketing Operations Research Service at SiriusDecisions

Openprise claims it can be up and running within ninety-days, much faster than its competitors.  Firms can build custom apps with automated business processes, package them as an API, and create web-based UIs and Chrome extensions for end-users.  Openprise no-code app use cases include advanced segmentation, attribution, upsell, and cross-sell.

The Openprise data marketplace supports data enrichment from leading B2B and B2C vendors, including Zoominfo, Dun & Bradstreet, InsideView, Sales Genie (Infogroup), Cognism, Bombora, KickFire, Synthio, Oceanos (TechTarget), Acxiom, Bing, and Google Places.  Once enriched, data is normalized based upon customer-defined and Openprise taxonomic rules.  Normalization ensures that key values such as addresses, industry codes, job functions, and job levels follow a standard set of rules and taxonomic codes.