Outreach announced that it is selling the Sales Hacker community back to its founder Max Altschuler and the GTMfund. Outreach acquired the site five years ago, and Altschuler served as the company’s CMO for several years.
Altschuler noted that sales has changed significantly over the past few years and is no longer a standalone function but part of a much expansive view of the customer relationship and go-to-market processes. Thus, the vision of Sales Hacker is being expanded to encompass the broader set of customer-facing teams.
Recognizing this change, Sales Hacker will be rebranded as GTMnow and operate as an extension of the GTMfund. The broader vision will encompass sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and product.
“Sales Hacker had an amazing, decade-long run, but sales is no longer siloed, and we saw an opportunity to transform it into something geared toward the broader GTM space,” Altschuler explained to GZ Consulting.
GTMnow is live with a broader coverage scope than Sales Hacker.
The new GTMnow website launched yesterday. The site offers a weekly newsletter, podcast, videos, and articles.
“Sales Hacker has been such a great vehicle, a great platform, for educating sellers at scale,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina. “Sales [reps] learn from other salespeople. Sales is such an art that you always can learn a tip or trick or a move from other sales folks that are deploying this in their own shops.”
“We’ll be sharing the playbooks from our experienced GTM leaders as well as the experiments we’re conducting across our 100+ portfolio companies so that you can run them too,” posted Altschuler on LinkedIn. “We’ll stay focused on producing super high-quality content showcasing the ongoing innovation happening industry-wide.”
GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund “focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world.” Its LP network of over 350 VP and C-level revenue leaders come from leading SaaS companies, including DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, and Zoom.
“This network acts as 350+ scouts as well as an expert network for conducting due diligence on companies. Our unique value add gives us access to the deal,” states GTMfund. “We help startups with distribution. With a network of proven go-to-market leaders, startups should never have to go at it alone again. We find the best companies and support them with revenue-generating playbooks, top-tier candidates, and all-around GTM support.”
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: Advanced Attributes. Advanced Attributes delivers a comparative analysis of department size and strength, technology spend, and a blended measure of department-level sophistication.
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.”
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.”
B2B content syndication vendor NetLine launched INTENTIVE, their buyer-level intent platform at last week’s Forrester event in Austin. INTENTIVE offers “real-time insights into truly ‘who’ is actively expressing intent within a B2B account.”
INTENTIVE is similar to TechTarget’s Priority Engine but broader in focus. Whereas Priority Engine’s intent data is focused on enterprise and health tech, INTENTIVE supports a wider range of 247 industries, including pharma, aviation, manufacturing, and enterprise technology, etc.
“By design, TechTarget is highly focused on supporting the needs of B2B marketers and is targeting technology decision makers. They expanded to healthcare, but that’s about it,” noted Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting. “We view our platform as persona-agnostic and diversified” due to the broader scope and depth and breadth of NetLine’s audiences which now also includes Informa media properties and events.
Fortino described TechTarget Priority Engine as a “phenomenal product” but geared toward a more select audience of technology buyers. As such, Priority Engine is “Apple-esque,” while INTENTIVE is the “Android alternative in the marketplace.”
NetLine’s intent data is all “first-party-sourced data” and not cookie-based. Furthermore, it is transparent and includes professional bios, job types, job levels, locations, and engagement activity.
By surfacing individual activity data, NetLine is going beyond “black box metrics.”
INTENTIVE provides buyer-level activity data within accounts. Both online (e.g., webinars attended) and offline (e.g., conference sessions attended) activities are displayed with weights applied based on activity type.
Fortino also emphasized that INTENTIVE is both persona and industry-diversified, so not limited to IT Buyers.
INTENTIVE’s buyer-level intent activity spans 11,000 topics. Intent data is captured from millions of first-party content registrations, 285 distinct event activity types, and 329,000 keywords.
“With nearly 15k+ pieces of content on the platform, a given customer’s assets usually account for 0.03% of all content. For years, our clients gladly worked with us to source first-party leads that specifically engaged with their own content,” blogged NetLine Content Marketing Manager Jonathan Steiert. “The reality, however, is that 99% of their ICP were engaging with content on our platform—they just weren’t engaging with their content. They were missing nearly all of their buyer’s journey.”
NetLine was acquired by Informa in late 2021, so it benefits from Informa’s content and event registration data across 100 million event activities. Event Intent is gathered from over 500 annual B2B events hosted by Informa.
“We were acquired not because of what we were doing at the time but based on the vision of filling out a buyer-level intent platform on top of all of the various content consumption signals that we’re processing every single day of the year,” explained Fortino. “By being part of Informa, we were able to aggregate not only all of the content consumption and buyer behaviors occurring through all of the NetLine powered content experiences, but also all of the Informa properties and all of the Informa offline events.”
When Informa met with NetLine before acquiring it, “Informa was sitting on a massive amount of event-specific intent data that was looking for a mechanism and impetus to action that data into a subscription-oriented product.”
Fortino sees two high-level categories of intent vendors (he omits second-party review sites): Vendors such as Bombora that provide third-party intent based on page views and firms with a broad set of B2B content that drive buyer-level intent. Firms such as TechTarget and Foundry provide “some transparency into what individuals are doing on the sites that they own and operate.” The transparency gives users “a bit more granularity into downloading a white paper, webinar, and so on.”
Fortino argues that NetLine’s advantage is the scope of activity generated across Informa, NetLine, Industry Dive (34 B2B publications and newsletters), and events. Activities go beyond page views.
“There’s everything from…submitting a demo request to expressing an interest in learning more about a given topic, to taking a course and being certified, to the most extreme: going to an event and sitting in countless sessions and being scanned each time you’re going into one of those sessions. All of these 285 things are visualized inside the product as well. So, you can know that this person downloaded a toolkit that helps them predictably model X or they’ve registered for this event.”
Thus, NetLine is marrying online, offline, and customer-content-based intent data.
The signal intensity of some activities is much greater than that of others. “While pageviews can be brief, attending a conference is a very robust form of intent…Compare that to a group of people, let’s say it’s a CEO, a CTO, a director of DevOps, are flying to Vegas for four days to attend the Black Hat conference,” argued Fortino. “They’re sitting in six and a half hours of material each day for three days about malware [and] other enterprise security topics.” The difference in signal intensity is “night and day,” continued Fortino. “Those three people spent maybe 30 grand for three days going to that event.”
Furthermore, “We are looking at the seniority of the person taking those activities. We’re looking at the types of activities that they are actually doing,” including how those activities map to buyer journey stages.
Conversely, if the user is anonymous, “we’re actually disinterested in scoring that information and playing up the value of that information,” argued Fortino. Pageview-based intent is interesting but not actionable for sales reps. “If you’re telling me someone at SAP is trending for these three topics, I don’t even know where to begin.”
INTENTIVE’s real-time dashboard consolidates activity at both the buyer and account-level. Additional insights include buyer trends and confirmed projects, “a buyer-first view of professionals who have confirmed they have an active pain point, identified challenges, and shared their timeline to invest.”
Daily Buyer-Level Intent email alert
Other features include customizable email notifications, a native Salesforce app, and real-time buyer and account scores.
“Prior to today, there has been significant buzz about intent,” argued NetLine CEO Robert Alvin. “But the majority of existing intent-based products relied solely upon company IP recognition and webpage visits which doesn’t tell you “Who” is intending to do what. With INTENTIVE, NetLine has changed the meaning and raised the bar when it comes to intent. Marketers now have access to deeper buyer-level insights allowing them to accelerate the sales process from their marketing endeavors.”
Furthermore, Alvin noted that buyer-level insights eliminate hours of guesswork and accelerate prospecting, messaging, and understanding a prospect’s timeline.
Most intent solutions deliver account-level intent but lack buyer-level insights. They identify accounts (or accounts and locations), but do not usually indicate the individual behind the activity. Furthermore, other intent solutions capture their intent from one primary touch point – Pageviews.
“The basis for 99.9% of all intent data on the market comes directly from pageviews. Sans INTENTIVE, these solutions curate these data sets based upon this behavior, which lasts seconds, if not milliseconds, long,” expounded Steiert. “These pageviews are then referenced against historical baselines at the IP address and company domain. Effectively, every single existing intent vendor (thanks in large part to Bombora’s mostly commodified status sets) offers the same level of insights as their competitors.”
INTENTIVE provides a wider array of business intent at the buyer-level.
However, NetLine offers a broader array of buying activity that includes analyst reports, demo requests, disclosed areas of interest, event attendance, and confirmed projects.
“The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, said Heinz Marketing President Matt Heinz. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
The baseline INTENTIVE license includes three explorers, corresponding to three targeted intent categories with up to 25 topics per explorer. Explorers can have multiple audiences for segmentation (e.g., size, industry, geography) and email notification.
Keywords are tied to topics, but free-form keyword selects won’t be available until the V2 release.
Account and buyer Intent Trendlines and activity are available as soon as an explorer is defined.
The Explorer Dashboard displays buyer and account trendlines, accounts with buyer activity, and buyer-confirmed projects. The dashboard is displayed immediately after defining an explorer and uniquely loads historical intent data for immediate review and actioning.
Fortino noted that other intent platforms typically take 45-60 days to curate data for optimal use.
Confirmed Projects were initially sold as NetLine Intent Discovery, but that product was transitioned to a core feature within INTENTIVE.
NetLine collects first-party project data as readers register for and consume content. NetLine “intercepts those users, asks them a very short survey about their pain points, their urgency to address those pain points, challenges that they have, and most importantly, the timeline to invest in correcting those things.”
Account Activity details include confirmed projects, activity type, engaged buyers, and trending topics.
The Account Activity dashboard is filterable by function, level, and firmographics. Users may drill down to any account to see who is displaying intent and the nature of their activity. Saved filters can be set as daily email alerts.
Users can drill down from Accounts to Buyers or the reverse.
While buyer-level intelligence is provided, NetLine does not display PII beyond customer content interactions. Fortino noted that sales teams already have other vendors for contact data (e.g., ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, Clearbit), but they are not providing buyer-level intent.
“This just comes back to permission data use. I know a lot of vendors love to throw in this idea of recommended contacts where they’re really just using ZoomInfo data,” explained Fortino. “We may do that, but honestly, it’s a bit disinteresting again because it’s just commoditized data sets that everyone has access to.”
Fortino’s near-term focus is building connectors with other platforms. At launch, Salesforce is natively supported, but others will soon follow.
There is currently a waitlist for INTENTIVE access. NetLine is offering a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is similar to existing account-level intent providers but obviously delivers buyer-level insights. The license includes three explorers, unlimited seats, and the Salesforce app.
Fortino argued that the unlimited seats are a “strong differentiator when you’re evaluating existing solutions,” particularly at enterprise accounts with many users.
team.blue subsidiary Leadinfo acquired Intent-based Sales Engagement Platform Leadcamp. Leadcamp expands the Leadinfo value proposition from web visitor tracking to broader lead engagement. Leadcamp, based in Ghent, Belgium, captures email, web, meeting, and content engagement and employs AI to identify “high-intent active prospects.”
“We always want to offer our customers new products to make them more effective in their chosen markets,” said team.blue Group CEO Claudio Corbetta. “This acquisition is a great example of investing in a fast-growing business to advance our expertise and product range in the lead generation space.”
The Leadcamp Heat Score measures multi-channel engagement providing both a composite score and engagement by channels. Additionally, AI-powered notifications let reps be “proactive and timely” in their follow-ups, “avoiding missed opportunities” and increasing the odds of closing each deal.
Heat Scores also act as customizable triggers for reminders and alerts, streamlining the buying journey. Triggers include form submissions, multiple website visits within a prescribed period, Heat Score thresholds, and calls made. Leadcamp claims that trigger automation speeds up the buying process three-fold.
Email functionality includes sales email tracking, link monitoring, engagement analysis, and a content library. Sales teams also have access to sequences (cadences), templates, and volume throttling.
“We are excited about the acquisition of Leadcamp and the addition of their expertise in targeted marketing campaigns and automation tools to our platform,” commented Leadinfo Founder Han Kleppe. “This acquisition will enable us to better support our customers in finding new customers and to put their lead generation on autopilot.”
Leadinfo claims to be the market leader in Benelux and the most prominent international provider in the D-A-CH region. It consolidated its position in the Netherlands over the past eighteen months with the acquisitions of Leadexpress (December 2021) and LeadElephant (January 2022).
Leadinfo supports over 3,000 customers in Benelux, D-A-CH, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. Customers include Lavazza, Quis Machinery, Channable, and Creditsafe.
Leadinfo was named a 2022 Fast 50 technology growth leader by Deloitte, placing 8th in the Dutch market.
Mary Shea was named co-CEO of Mediafly, where she will join Carson Conant in managing the Revenue Enablement company. Shea joins with a solid RevTech pedigree. She was a Principal Analyst at Forrester and Chief Evangelist at Outreach. Shea first met Conant as a newly minted Forrester Principal Analyst in 2015 and later served as a company advisor.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Mary join us as co-CEO. I’ve known Mary for over a decade and have benefited immensely from her deep knowledge of the revenue enablement landscape, her prescience in identifying the next big trend, and her vision for the future of B2B buying and selling,” said Conant. “Mary brings deep empathy for the day-to-day challenges sellers face and a forward-leaning sensibility for the brand experience B2B companies need to create for buyers. She will be a force multiplier for the Mediafly team and our customers.”
Shea argued that the RevTech unicorns “amassed large financial war chests” that helped them develop market recognition but that Mediafly and Boathouse Capital took a slower “Midwest approach” that relied more on individual investors than institutional funds.
“While this non-traditional route likely cost Mediafly some market recognition, today this ‘Midwest’ approach appears wise,” argued Shea. “Fast-forward to the past 6-10 months. As competitors and adjacents hunkered down and paused innovation to slow ‘burn’ to avoid ‘down rounds,’ Carson and the Mediafly team quietly acquired and integrated five companies — revenue intelligence provider InsightSquared, conversation intelligence providers ExecVision and Sonero, the enablement workflow solution, UserIQ, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.”
These acquisitions brought together underfunded assets with “great and complementary tech and talent” but which “lacked robust distribution channels,” argued Shea.
While Mediafly emphasized its contrarian approach, it is not immune to the layoff bug. It confirmed layoffs last Friday, attributing them to post-acquisition efficiencies, not the current tech slowdown.
“Today, the pendulum swings in the other direction as we made the difficult decision to let go of a number of talented individuals to achieve the efficiency desired after an intense year of acquisitions and integrations,” posted Conant on LinkedIn. “With these actions, Mediafly will be in a strong position as a uniquely profitable, revenue enablement company.”
Conant listed three organizational goals: “an unwavering commitment” to its customers, product innovation and category leadership, and profitability and operational excellence. Mediafly did not indicate the scope of the layoffs.
Mediafly offers a set of modules that can be purchased as standalone solutions or as part of an integrated suite. Functionality includes enterprise content management, revenue and conversation intelligence, value realization, coaching, deal management, and forecasting. To supplement this functionality, it developed a partnership ecosystem spanning seventy-five solutions across the RevTech space.
Mediafly has acquired six RevTech companies to build out its platform quickly. In 2022, it acquired and integrated revenue intelligence platform InsightSquared, conversation intelligence provider ExecVision, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.
Mediafly noted that customers are increasingly consolidating their tech stack with Mediafly while reducing their technology spend by thirty percent or more and enjoying “improved revenue team performance.”
Customers include PepsiCo, Nestle, Databricks, Honeywell, Sealed Air, Zscaler, and TransUnion.
“I’ve watched Mediafly for many years and always thought of the company as a hidden gem. Mediafly has grown organically and through acquisitions and has quietly compiled the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market — everything B2B teams need to successfully navigate today’s complex buying journey,” said Shea. “With this push towards a unified revenue enablement platform, it’s now time for Mediafly to step out of the background and help more B2B organizations create confident sellers who can deliver efficient predictable growth. I’m hitting the ground running — if you’re looking to improve seller effectiveness, buyer engagement, or consolidate your tech stack, take a fresh look at Mediafly.”
Shea announced the following goals over the next few months:
Expand and deepen the value we deliver to customers.
Partner with more large global brands.
Rebrand and rename our company.
Create provocative and actionable thought leadership.
Innovate through organic and inorganic product development.
Shea sees the RevTech industry at a “critical and exciting crossroads which includes the rise of digital buying and selling, sweeping generational shifts, rapid technological advancement, the proliferation of tools focused on efficiency, and market and tool consolidation.”
To compete in this dynamic environment, Mediafly “will continue to build onto our platform, integrating each new asset through a modern and scalable data architecture, complete with a revenue business intelligence layer.” As a result, Mediafly’s Revenue360 solution will become “the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market.”
Vendors are quickly moving to integrate generative AI into their offerings. This week, Qualified and Clari announced ChatGPT functionality. Qualified GPT, which the firm describes as “Generative AI for the Pipeline Cloud,” helps B2B vendors “harness the power of AI and engage and convert their website visitors at scale.” The firm views ChatGPT as a “new platform on top of which we will build the next version of Qualified.”
When launched four years ago, Qualified focused on predictive modeling and Predictive AI to identify buying intent signals, particularly those generated from website data.
“At Qualified, our core philosophy has always been to provide the most powerful approach to pipeline generation using a combination of people, data, and automation,” said CEO Kraig Swensrud. “With the rapid advancements in Generative AI, we will be able to provide even more robust automation to our customers, allowing them to scale their efforts, focus on their highest priority tasks, and ultimately crush their pipeline and revenue targets.”
Qualified GPT supports generative text apps that automate engagement prompting, copywriting, messaging, and chatbots. Initial features include:
Auto Pounce: Automatically sends engagement prompts (or “greetings”) that serve as conversation starters for website visitors that fall within a firm’s ICP.
Auto Correct: Qualified GPT corrects misspellings, fixes grammar errors, and proofreads responses, “helping your sales reps deliver speedy, professional responses.”
Auto Tune: Enhances rep dialogue while chatting “to sound more eloquent when speaking to potential buyers, helping every rep strike just the right tone with their important customers.”
Auto Expand: Reps can enter a few words or bullet points, and Qualified GPT will craft professional messages.
Auto Suggest: AI-powered recommended conversation responses that keep reps on message and speed up response times.
Auto Translate: Translates messages, displaying both questions and answers in the customer and sales rep’s language.
Auto Personalize: Changes or recommends website text “based on visitor data to drive the highest engagement and conversion.”
Auto Summarize: Summarizes conversations and website behavior, providing sales reps with a “succinct read out of Account activity to date.”
Qualified GPT will be rolled out as a “limited release to a subset of Pipeline Cloud customers this spring.”
Karlsruhe-based Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot rebranded as Dealfront this week. Dealfront is the combination of Echobot and visitor intelligence vendor Leedfeeder which merged last year. The rebrand coincides with the merger of the two companies on a common platform.
Dealfront content includes 30 million European companies, nearly 90 million contacts, 33 event triggers, and visitor intelligence. Dealfront sources company intelligence from national registries, company news, and corporate websites. Company content includes news, business events, corporate linkages, and registered financials.
Dealfront offers five products:
Target: ICP-based targeting spanning 30 million European companies and nearly 90 million contacts.
Connect: Sales Intelligence platform with company and contact profiles, build-a-list functionality, and Send to CRM.
Datacare: DaaS data cleansing and enrichment services. Datacare supports Bi-directional integrations with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. Dealfront also supports Zapier integrations and Slack notifications.
Web Visitors: GDPR-compliant website visitor tracking that maps page-visit activity to customers and prospects.
Promote: New Programmatic display functionality that supports targeted campaigns and IP-based retargeting of website visitors.
CEO Bastian Karweg argued that Dealfront, a European-based company, offers multiple advantages over North American-based sales intelligence and B2B Data companies. Dealfront differentiators include local market knowledge, European data hosting, and GDPR-compliant data gathered from company websites and local registries. Furthermore, Dealfront is transparent in its data sourcing and does not engage in community data mining or email scraping.
Dealfront offers native language sales and support, with offices in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Spain. Dealfront has grown to 330 employees that speak a dozen native languages, providing its clients with a “distributed, diverse salesforce across Europe.”
To emphasize its European bona fides, it adopted the blue and yellow colors of the EU flag and the tagline, “The way to win deals in Europe.”
“You just can’t do business in Europe the way you do business in the US. You don’t do business in France the way you do business in Germany,” remarked Dealfront CEO Bastian Karweg. “You don’t even do business in Berlin the way you do business in Bavaria. Dealfront delivers localized data, applications, and familiarity with European standards, culture, languages, and practices to give your sales and marketing team the advantage of feeling and acting at home in any European country or region – no matter where your business is based.”
The Dealfront platform supports four stages – Discover, Qualify, Convert, and Optimize – in a flywheel feedback loop that gains momentum as the platform refines each client’s ICP. “This flywheel effect turns static ICPs into dynamic, self-optimizing, and real-time customer profiles that always improve in accuracy and reflect reality. The result is more leads that end in sales, transforming businesses into a self-propelled revenue engine,” explained the firm.
“Our platform of data and applications shows you the best way to engage your ICPs in a localized way that’s effective in whatever country you’re in, in whatever region you’re targeting,” says Dealfront CPO Pekka Koskinen. “Because we’re on the inside and speak the language, we’re working with higher-quality live intelligence on your ideal buyers. Nothing gets lost in translation, nothing gets misunderstood, and nothing is outdated. Our platform, along with our teams on the ground in each location, empowers you to convert leads to deals.”
Last year, Great Hill Partners invested €180 million to merge Echobot and Leadfeeder and set aside €50 million to fund future strategic acquisitions for Dealfront. Clients include Hertz, Siemens, Eventbrite, and Pipedrive.
My plan yesterday was to deal with the sale of my house (open house Sunday with contract offers yesterday), but I couldn’t fully focus on that as important announcements were coming from Europe: B2B full-funnel marketing vendor Anteriad bought Demand Generation vendor BNZSA. Separately, Sales Intelligence and B2B data vendor Echobot, which merged with Visitor Intelligence platform Leadfeeder last year, rebranded as Dealfront and launched its new platform.
Both BNZSA and Dealfront emphasize the diversity of the European market and their ability to meet market needs across national boundaries with localized support and GDPR compliance.
BNZSA, a Madrid-based demand generation firm, has been on a tear the last few years, growing several hundred percent per annum through H1 2022 (H2 growth data was not announced). BNZSA provides Anteriad with a solid foundation for global marketing and GDPR-compliant data. In addition, it offers B2B demand generation services to over fifty multinational clients, including Oracle, SAP, Acer, Dell, and Fujitsu.
BNZSA’s team offers local market expertise and campaign support in 26 languages.
“The combination of Anteriad and BNZSA provides an industry-leading offering of B2B demand generation products and services to clients across the globe,” stated Anteriad. “The acquisition of BNZSA will enable Anteriad to expand its international data coverage by integrating BNZSA’s unique GDPR-compliant data. Bringing together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services will provide differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
MeritB2B rebranded as Anteriad in April 2021 after a series of acquisitions that expanded the company’s scope. It previously acquired several MarTech firms, including intent-data vendor True Influence (Nov 2021), ABM MarTech and Audience vendor 180byTwo (Nov 2020), and B2B data vendor Compass Marketing (Jan 2020).
“Anteriad is a company that’s ahead of its time and ahead of the market. Our positioning directly reflects our focus on being uniquely able to provide our customers the solutions they need to get ahead and take the lead,” said Anteriad CEO Rob Sanchez in 2021.
Anteriad had strong growth last year, with a 15% increase in US new customer wins and 30% globally through Mid-September. The firm enjoys loyal customers with an average retention rate of eight years. Furthermore, multi-service clients generate more than 60% of revenue, “showing the value of a full-funnel partner versus point solutions.”
The BNZSA acquisition “brings together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services,” providing multinational customers a “differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
“BNZSA, powered by Anteriad,” will act as Anteriad’s international and EMEA headquarters. BNZSA adds three hundred employees who specialize in ABM and multi-touch campaigns. BNZSA supports programmatic display based on its firmographic, technographic, and intent datasets. Its customers can build integrated multi-channel marketing programs that leverage BNZSA’s EMEA-based, multi-lingual contact center. As leads are generated, BNZSA staff offers a “Warm Handover” process which ensures that leads are appropriately transitioned to sales teams.
Anteriad CPO Ken Lordy described the acquisition to GZ Consulting as a “highly complementary combination of data and technology assets with full-funnel campaign management.” Consequently, the combined firms “now serve the full funnel demand generation needs of all our marketing clients at a truly global scale.”
Continued Lordy, “BNZSA’s services include native language speaking BDRs at one of the largest call centers in EMEA, ensuring an individualized approach and understanding of each market’s distinct local customs.”
BNZSA identifies potential prospects for its customers, surrounds them with “messaging and brand awareness,” and collects engagement metrics that inform content development and enhance BNZSA’s prospect engagement. BNZSA tracks interest and intent and maintains an ongoing dialogue with prospects. Nurturing includes the period between contacting prospects and providing a ‘Warm Handover’ of leads to account executives.
“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange, and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” said Paul Briggs, BNZSA Director of Global Corporate Development in 2021. “This ultimately boosts closed-won opportunities for our customers up to 300%.”
BNZSA digital services include SEO strategy, performance marketing/SEM, email marketing, content marketing, content syndication, marketing automation, and UX and CX design.
“BNZSA understands the individualized approach and distinct local customs of each market it serves,” said Anteriad. “BNZSA’s nuance in culture across regions includes BDRs that speak over 26 native languages at one of the largest call centers in EMEA.”
The combined company offers “data, technology, and a differentiated high-touch client service model” that supports “rich B2B demand generation and ABM solutions and in-market customization at global scale.”
BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud maintains a “significant ownership stake in the combined business.” He will report directly to Sanchez. Samhoud emphasized that both companies have a client obsession that “will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and technology, powered by people.”
“Anteriad means to ‘Get in Front’, and acquiring BNZSA delivers on that philosophy. By expanding our global reach through this acquisition, Anteriad establishes itself as a true global leader in tech-enabled B2B marketing solutions. BNZSA brings an extremely talented leadership team and a differentiated offering that is made even more valuable by their local presence in key markets around the world,” said Sanchez. “Leadership at Anteriad and BNZSA are both invested in our people, our clients, and our growth. With this solid foundation, we will accomplish remarkable things for our clients in the global B2B marketing community.”
Postal ABM supports both programmatic and strategic ABM campaigns with triggered events and gifting.
Offline Engagement Platform Postal announced the general availability of Postal ABM, its offline engagement feature for one-to-many programmatic ABM campaigns. The new capability helps marketers programmatically target and engage valued accounts and audiences in a one-to-many approach based on intent and CRM data to “personalize content at scale.” Marketers can also execute Strategic ABM campaigns that target high-priority ABM accounts.
Postal ABM is “designed to make it easy to programmatically target and engage key accounts and audiences with offline campaigns,” Postal VP of Marketing Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh explained to GZ Consulting. “It’s designed for marketers running enterprise playbooks who need to scale offline engagement across their go-to-market strategy.”
Postal ABM supports built-in engagement and ROI dashboards that help sales and marketing teams “make informed decisions during the campaign and throughout the lifecycle of target accounts,” blogged Postal Product Marketing Manager Amy Schwartz.
The new Postal Engage feature triggers items and experiences to a group of contacts based on ABM signals in Salesforce. Marketers can set budgets and timelines for campaigns and track campaign success (e.g., accounts engaged, revenue generated) in Postal and Salesforce. Postal syncs its Account Engagement data with Salesforce for “better target discovery and ROI tracking.”
Postal also supports integrating physical touchpoints for virtual events. Postal claims an 80% attendance rate by automating offline marketing activities after events. For example, gifts can be sent to virtual event attendees, tradeshow badge swipers, or free trial participants. Postal also proposed sending a congratulations gift when champions change jobs.
In other news, Postal also announced that it partnered with ZoomInfo to support GTM Plays. Use cases include turning an abandoned chat follow-up into a booked meeting, welcoming a prospect back from OOO, congratulating a champion or decision maker on a promotion, and strategic prospecting campaigns.
“In today’s digital economy, it can be easy to forget the importance of offline and physical sales strategies…think back to in-person experiences such as steak dinners and golf outings with prospects,” blogged Postal Content Marketing Manager Rich Pusateri. “That was the standard practice. Now, in the world of remote selling, using custom branded kits or personalized gifts with handwritten notes in tandem with digital engagement is a proven way to make a positive impact on your bottom line.”
