Category: Marketing Technology

TechTarget: Priority Engine for Healthcare

Priority Engine for Healthcare offers topical intent for 400K registered healthcare administrators, IT professionals, and clinicians.

TechTarget, a leader in second-party technology intent data sets for sales and marketing, expanded the scope of its Priority Engine service to support the US healthcare sector.  The new Priority Engine for Healthcare service provides prospect-level intent gathered from Xtelligent Healthcare Media, its August 2021 acquisition.

“Being able to provide our customers with 1st-party intent data on the largest healthcare technology and information audience on the web is a true game changer in our industry,” said Sean Brooks, Co-Founder of Xtelligent Healthcare Media.  “Sales and marketing teams will now have direct access to entire healthcare buying teams, including Clinicians, Line of Business, and IT Decision-Makers, to find more opportunities and accelerate technology deals.”

Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.

Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies.  TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered.  Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”

The service is available for ten segments:

  1. Analytics
  2. Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR)
  3. Healthcare Security & Compliance
  4. Health IT Infrastructure
  5. Life Sciences
  6. Patient Engagement
  7. Payer
  8. Pharma
  9. Revenue Cycle Management
  10. Telehealth

Intent data is gathered from 14 B2B healthcare media properties.  HealthTech sites include EHR Intelligence, Health IT Security, and Health IT Analytics.  Clinical research and medical sites include LifeSciences Intelligence, PharmaNews Intelligence, and HealthPayer Intelligence.  Over 400 healthcare topics are covered, with roughly half focused on Healthcare Tech.

Priority Engine for Healthcare also offers visitor intelligence and content view tracking.  Healthcare intent data from BrightTALK, TechTarget’s digital webinar and event platform, is also included.

Xtelligent, also based in Boston, has a similar content model to TechTarget.  When acquired last year, it had over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites, but lacked a platform for enabling its contacts and intent datasets. 

Xtelligent content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market.  Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.

The new intent topics identify HealthTech content consumption at the account and prospect levels, gathered from TechTarget’s 150 enterprise and health technology websites.

“By expanding the amount of permission-based, relevant 1st-party purchase intent data our customers have access to and delivering a full suite of marketing, sales, and go-to-market services to engage real buyers, we help companies of all sizes achieve better results at scale in this market,” said Michael Cotoia, CEO, TechTarget.  “As a leader in coverage of B2B enterprise tech for more than 20 years – combined with working very closely with our almost 3,000 customers – TechTarget has unique visibility into the buying dynamics across every major sector of the market.  Our experience positions us well to bring our model to adjacent vertical markets with similar attributes to enterprise B2B tech – long/complex-sales cycles, large purchases, multiple members of the buying team, and a strong need for 1st party data to enable marketers and sellers – just as we have done in healthcare.”

Priority Engine for Healthcare Prospect Insights

Company Links: TechTarget | Xtelligent | Priority Engine

Nektar.AI Exits Stealth Mode

Nektar.AI supports automated activity capture and CRM sync across the full customer lifecycle.

After two years in stealth mode, Revenue Operations solution provider Nektar.AI was unveiled earlier this month.  Nektar looks to solve the “CRM data leakage” problem whereby critical lead, contact, and opportunity data is omitted or decays.  For example, Nektar recognizes meeting attendees missing from the CRM and automatically creates contact records that include email, direct dial phone, title, and buying committee role.  Out-of-date or missing data negatively impacts both the sales process and operational functions such as analytics, automated recommendations, and pipeline forecasting.

Nektar offers a no-code platform that applies natural-language processing against email, calendar, chat, and social touchpoints, capturing revenue activity data across the full customer lifecycle and syncing it with the CRM.  Automated activity capture improves rep productivity, allowing sales professionals to focus on selling instead of data entry and updating.

“Sales teams depend on their CRM data to gain insights into team productivity, pipeline insights, and revenue forecasting.  Despite a CRM being an important system of record for modern go-to-market teams, it still grapples with the problem of poor user adoption and missing data.  As per estimates, 40-50% of sales activity data remains missing from a CRM, while 27% of the data that’s available in a CRM decays every month.  This leads to major data and productivity leakage,” stated the firm.

Furthermore, deals are becoming increasingly complex, with larger buying committees and sales teams communicating across an expanding array of sales channels.  While most of these conversations are now digital, they take place across disparate platforms and channels, resulting in data fragmentation.  Nektar’s mission is to collect this fragmented intelligence and feed it into the CRM, making it available to the revenue team without requiring sales resources to key this intelligence.

“There are a lot of reporting and analytics solutions out there.  Other solutions have been investing primarily in the downstream problem with respect to visibility and analytics, an important problem to solve.  But the core problem actually starts upstream, which is where activities are taking place and where data is being generated.  A lot of that data doesn’t make its way into CRM, which actually results in downstream problems.  If there’s poor data in, you will have poor insights available,” explained CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya to GZ Consulting.

“We found our product-market fit when we found that more than 50% of critical revenue activity data is not going into CRM,” continued Vijayvergiya.  “This data leak results in productivity leaks, and that results in revenue leaks.”

Furthermore, as firms make staffing cuts, “they’re trying to do more with less” and losing implicit knowledge that never made its way into the CRM.  Nektar allows companies to recover much of this lost activity and contact intelligence, boosting a firm’s ability to manage revenue operations during a recession.

“There are tools like Gong and Clari and some other forecasting solutions which provide good insights,” expanded Vijayvergiya on Nektar’s value proposition.  But these systems are not resolving the data leakage problem. 

Nektar claims 95% accuracy in its data capture and syncing processes.  The service can go live in ninety minutes and begins providing time to value in three days as it gathers both historical data missing from the CRM and populates it with ongoing activity capture. 

Nektar operates in the background, collecting and syncing data.  Thus, there are no training sessions or additional UIs to learn.  Sales reps do not need to toggle to other platforms, and their data entry work is significantly reduced.

“Nektar plugs the CRM data leakage without a user lifting their finger.  We basically eliminate the need for user adoption and give all the time back to salespeople to go and sell while relieving their administrative burden,” said Vijayvergiya.

While there have been third-party solutions to populate and enrich account and contact data records for over a decade (e.g., Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo), these vendors were blind to the demand unit unless a sales rep entered all members.  Nektar is complementary to third-party DaaS providers, Revenue Intelligence vendors (e.g., Clari, Revenue Grid), Conversational Sales (e.g., Gong, Chorus), and business intelligence vendors (e.g., Tableau).

“We are aware that some of these solutions have their own activity capture system, but most of their activity capture solutions work in silos for certain sets of users who adopt their solution,” continued Vijayvergiya.  “Users are not adopting the solution, or data loss happens anyway.   A solution which we replace, more often than not, is Salesforce Einstein Activity Capture.”

Nektar supports email and domain exclusion lists to prevent mining confidential information (e.g., legal, investor relations, partner development).

Nektar is generally available as a native Salesforce solution, with HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics on the roadmap.  In addition, all of its system integrations are native, providing higher quality and performance.

Nektar.AI closed a $6 million seed round last summer, raising its total funding to $8.1 million.  The round was led by B Capital Group, with Nexus Venture Partners, 3One4 Capital, and angel investors also joining.

Nektar has not disclosed pricing, but it is per user per month with SaaS-based pricing billed quarterly or annually.

Nektar is a fully remote company with 32 employees across seven countries with plans to hit fifty employees by the end of this year.  Although emerging from stealth, it already supports over 1,500 users. 

Nektar’s goal through year-end is to focus on its go-to-market strategy and North American hiring.

Nektar activity tracking at the account level

Data capture as an AI tool is becoming increasingly important. It probably isn’t a standalone offering but an underlying capability for populating the CRM with harvested digital intelligence, monitoring buyer engagement, and building out the buying committee. As such, it is core to both CRM data enrichment and revenue intelligence.

I have seen a series of data capture announcements from vendors of all sizes: big (Microsoft Viva Sales), medium (People.AI, Introhive), and small (e.g., Nektar, Winn.AI). I also covered People.AI and Winn.AI this week.

ZoomInfo Expands its Technographics

ZoomInfo, which began as a technology sales intelligence service, has expanded its technographic intelligence to more than 30 million global companies.  The technographic dataset now spans 300 million company/tech pairings, whether that is a technology, platform, or programming language.

The firm, which has recently focused on sales and marketing enablement technology (e.g., Conversational Sales, Chatbots, Sales Engagement, Recruitment/HR) and Operations, has been quietly expanding its content coverage with announcements concerning company coverage and technographics in the past few weeks.

“Knowing which technologies your prospects use before you even pick up the phone gives sellers a tremendous head start,” said Kirti Patel, Senior Director of Engineering at ZoomInfo.  “With today’s economic headwinds, sales teams are looking for every opportunity to increase efficiency, and having access to a prospect’s tech stack can transform your go-to-market engine.”

ZoomInfo’s technographics intelligence is derived from over twenty data sources, including company websites, job postings, and customer testimonials.  Its taxonomy covers over 30,000 technologies.

ZoomInfo claims that nearly 90% of its active tech-to-company pairings have been updated within the past three months.

Technographics assists with prospecting, lead and account scoring, look-a-like modeling, and market analysis (e.g., Technology Market Share, ICP, and TAM).  It is also common for firms to target customers of partners for complementary pitches and competitors for takeaways. ZoomInfo supports alerting when technologies are added or dropped from prospects’ tech stacks.  In addition, its Workflow module automates sales and marketing outreach.

ZoomInfo provided a pair of ZoomInfo SalesOS screenshots to GZ Consulting with functional descriptions concerning their technographics capabilities:

Technographic Alerts: “Customers can subscribe to individual technologies to get alerts on what companies are Adding/Dropping/Discovering that technology. For Adds, we know the company recently began using that technology, whereas, for Discoveries, we believe the company has been using the technology for a while, but our systems are just discovering it for the first time.”
Company Specific Profile: “This image is just one technology that ZoomInfo uses. It shows the date of the last time we have seen evidence that ZoomInfo uses machine learning technology. We can only view one technology category at a time on a company’s profile. You’ll see to the left of the image all of the technology categories that we have ZoomInfo technologies for.  You can hover over each to get the date of the last evidence.”

ZoomInfo Hits 100M Company Profiles

ZoomInfo continues to build out its company database, tripling its coverage over the past year.  Its most recent content additions are small firms not found on the Internet.  The firm was able to treble its company coverage after acquiring Everstring in late 2020. The expanded coverage improves a core data asset the firm deploys across its four cloud services.

“Now ZoomInfo customers have broader visibility into their total addressable market.  Teams using SalesOS can build more targeted company lists based on characteristics of their ideal customers, driving more accurate segmentation,” stated the firm.  “Users of ZoomInfo’s OperationsOS product will experience increased match rates and can build out more robust and accurate company hierarchies.  MarketingOS users will be able to reach wider audiences through their campaigns and identify more traffic visiting their websites.  And customers of TalentOS will be able to find more qualified candidates in a challenging hiring environment.”

ZoomInfo offers a corporate family tree display that allows users to expand/collapse nodes and drill down to subsidiaries.

Data was sourced from state registries, business registry filings, and licensed data.  ZoomInfo also addressed a long-standing gap in its coverage with 35 million “non-headquarter company locations” (e.g., branches).  Branches are crucial for accurately sizing markets, routing leads, and performing lead-to-account mapping.  For example, if an inbound branch lead, particularly one with a different name than its parent, is not mapped to the parent HQ, it is likely to be misrouted or ignored.

Every ZoomInfo company record contains revenue, headcount, and industry mappings (NAICS and US SIC87).

ZoomInfo also continues to build out its contact database, reaching 220 million active contacts, with 150 million emails, 65 million direct dials, and 50 million mobile numbers.

“Our enhanced data pipeline brings together the best of both worlds: access to more companies and the assurance that this new information is accurate,” said Kirti Patel, Senior Director of Data Engineering at ZoomInfo.  “This key expansion of our data allows our customers to access a vast market opportunity, especially among small businesses that are often harder to reach.”

In other news, ZoomInfo has grown its Shoreditch (London) sales team to over 100 reps.  Two years ago, all European sales were managed by a six-person team out of the US eastern time zone that began placing calls to Europe at 3 AM.

ZoomInfo also announced expanded technographics for targeting prospects that deploy competitive or complementary offerings.

Matchbook AI Funding

Matchbook AI, which offers External Data and Data Hygiene solutions to enterprise clients, has announced a $3 million seed extension.  It previously received $1.7 million in seed and friends and family funding.

Matchbook was founded in 2018 but operated as a garage project for a couple of years before being incorporated.  CEO Rushabh Mehta had the idea for the Matchbook Data Hub while an industry evangelist and initially built the solution with Dun & Bradstreet data.  The Data Hub provides a configurable, hierarchical matching service that matches and enriches records with a single API call.  Both batch and real-time matching are supported, with cascading and waterfall matching processes.  In addition, a rules engine allows customers to construct bespoke data cleansing and filtering rules specific to various business units and use cases.  The Data Hub will be powered by Snowflake.

The system can use other identifiers such as domains or emails if the account cannot be matched by name and address.  In addition, the system manages deduplication and prevents creating duplicate records when onboarding accounts. The solution can also support more complex matching scenarios to allow for verification checks and multi-attribute matching.

“I can immediately see if I already have an existing relationship with that account,” Mehta explained to GZ Consulting.  “Just because I keyed in the name incorrectly or a previous account had a different address for that same company, I should still be able to identify and say, ‘Hey, no, it’s the same company to the same account.’”

The Data Hub also manages information for enterprise clients with multiple CRMs, helping “provide that visibility across CRMs, across ERPs, or CRM and ERP.”  Thus, Matchbook can identify whether “there is already an existing relationship within the organization with that particular entity” through third-party identification.  Furthermore, matching identifies parent-sub relationships tied together by D-U-N-S numbers.

According to Mehta, customers want controlled updates to their CRM or ERP, not real-time updates.  They also want to control which fields are updated with the data hub keeping “everything mastered in one place” with the intelligence accessible to the organization.

Matchbook AI’s data partners and supported platforms

Along with Dun & Bradstreet’s data sets (e.g., companies, contacts, hierarchies, beneficial ownership, D-U-N-S identifiers, technographics, competitors, company news, and credit and supplier risk profiles), Matchbook AI provides third-party reference data from ZoomInfo, Demandbase, Moody’s, Experian, Melissa, and Google.  The service also includes sanctions and terrorist watchlist data for compliance use cases.

The Data Hub operates as a centralized external data repository for maintaining data quality and standardizing data across platforms, including Salesforce, Snowflake, SAP, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Certa, and Reltio.  The Data Hub supports a broad set of processes and departments, with sales, marketing, finance, IT, logistics, compliance, legal, and supplier management use cases. It also plays a critical role in MDM use cases through integrations with Reltio and others.

Matchbook claims implementations between two days and two months, significantly faster than its competitors.  Furthermore, as a DaaS solution, it is 90% less expensive than in-house solutions.  It also claims a 75% savings on expenses related to maintaining a data stewardship team due to “improved data quality and automated management.”

VP of Sales & Marketing Wesley Billingslea described a recent dinner with a Fortune 500 CIO who described Matchbook AI as “quite strategic and pervasive because we go across departments,” whereas “most MDM projects sit in the IT organization.”  This approach “empowers” teams across the organization with superior data and a plug-and-play solution.

Matchbook focuses on enterprise clients, with 59% of its customers in the Fortune 500.  It takes a land-and-expand approach that proves itself in one department or on one platform and then extends to others.  Contracts are usually written for a single year and then converted to multi-year contracts a year later.  The strategy has resulted in a 118% net retention rate and a projected ARR increase of 220% this year.

“As we gear up our sales and marketing efforts, we are confident that we will soon achieve $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Current ARR of $1.85 million,” said Mehta.  “Data should be trusted, enriched, and always ready.  I feel very confident in our approach as we take these next steps and help companies understand their data DNA in this age of intelligent business.”

Matchbook claims an impressive LTV/CAC ratio greater than 12, an important indicator of stickiness, value, and an efficient go-to-market approach.

Mehta noted that it is just entering a large market with a rapidly expanding TAM.  According to MarketsandMarkets, data cleansing and global master data management were an $11.3 billion market in 2020, growing to $27.9 billion by 2025 (19.8% CAGR).

“Our value proposition to an MDM implementation can mean the difference between success and failure,” said Mehta.

Pricing is based on a records-under-management model, providing a predictable budget line to companies.  Implementations range from 50,000 to 100 million records. Matchbook has grown to 51 employees in the Americas and Asia.  The bulk of its R&D is conducted in Asia.

RollWorks Journey Events and Sales Insights for HubSpot

ABX Platform RollWorks launched Journey Events for HubSpot, a consolidated account-level view of the customer buying journey.  The service helps B2B teams understand which activities are helping move customers through the decision process and which activities are sub-optimal and should be adjusted.

“Due to its ability to surface every marketing and sales activity driving an account’s progression, Journey Events for HubSpot also provides sales teams a comprehensive look (both immediately and over time) at how an account is moving—what is working and what is helping to drive the account progression, including seeing every action alongside an account spike,” stated the firm.  “This helps sellers plan and personalize outreach by identifying the optimal time to contact an account and tailor messaging based on the last action that may have had an effect.”

Journey Events pulls engagement, intent, and stage data from HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, RollWorks, and G2.

RollWorks Journey Events was announced last fall and is now available inside HubSpot.

RollWorks gathers time-stamped events such as meetings booked, opportunities generated, and SDR emails.  It then matches activity history against intent, engagement, and journey stage data.  As a result, sales and marketing professionals can visualize account progression against activity history to determine the efficacy of various activities. 

“At a critical time when marketers across the board are being asked to do more with far less, RollWorks Journey Events for HubSpot stands out for its ability to help all go-to-market teams be more efficient with their ABM strategies.  Being able to see each and every marketing and sales activity that’s driving account progression is huge.  With that, for example, you won’t send irrelevant messages in an email or waste money sending a gift to an account if it isn’t ready.  Instead, your organization can focus on what’s working and foster a common language between sales and marketing.”

Jodi Cerretani, RollWorks’ Head of Demand Generation

RollWorks has established HubSpot as a key partner and invested significantly in HubSpot connectors.  In June, it launched Sales Insights for HubSpot, which employs data science to provide a “360-degree view of accounts throughout the buying journey, helping B2B marketers and sales teams to eliminate the guesswork and create more timely and efficient sales outreach.”

It also has enjoyed significant success with its RollWorks ABM HubSpot App, which passed 500 installs in April, 150% above its nearest platform competitor.  The integration enables teams “to identify high-fit, high-intent accounts and buyers, reach them efficiently, and measure impact.”

“RollWorks is laser-focused on engagement quality innovation, and we are incredibly proud of our acceleration and momentum within the HubSpot ecosystem,” stated Justin Cooperman, VP of Product Management.  “With Journey Events for HubSpot, we’ve raised the bar on relevance and personalization between seller and prospect.”

RollWorks Sales Insights for HubSpot identifies spiking ad engagement and website visits.

Sales Insights identifies accounts with spiking engagement based on visitor intelligence and advertising views.  RollWorks flags accounts with Account Spikes compared to baseline activity and visualizes engagement within HubSpot.  As a result, revenue teams can prioritize marketing programs and sales outreach based on spiking engagement.

Sales Insights de-anonymizes existing HubSpot CRM contacts and automates sales alerts when engagement activity spikes.  It also identifies unassigned spiking accounts and notifies sales reps via email when there is spiking engagement.  Additionally, within the HubSpot Company Record, an account timeline displays activity across the website, ads, intent, CRM, marketing automation platform, etc.

Likewise, marketing can analyze which campaigns lead to engagement surges and tailor ABM campaigns accordingly.  They can also build nurture workflows for spiking accounts. “There’s a difference between ‘pipeline’ and ‘pipedream.’ I prefer the former,” said RollWorks VP of Sales Shawn Cook.  “When my sales teams know who and what content a prospect is engaging with, they can take on the role of trusted advisor and advance the conversations with the accounts that are likely to buy from us.  Sales needs to not only know what the content is but also why that piece of content was created.  This is where the alignment is magnified.”

Sales Insights for HubSpot is included as part of the $995 per month RollWorks Account Based Platform license.

Postal via RollWorks’ Sales Insights for HubSpot Connector

Offline Marketing Engagement Platform Postal.io announced an ABX platform partnership with RollWorks. The integration, which leverages RollWorks’ Sales Insights for HubSpot connector, adds direct mail, e-gifting, and branded swag delivery options to RollWorks omnichannel engagement.

“Postal’s offline engagement platform optimizes omnichannel campaigns at scale,” said Mike Stocker, VP of Partnerships at RollWorks. “Together, and through a HubSpot connection, RollWorks and Postal help marketers ensure that these sending and gifting campaigns are data-driven and result in better conversions.”

RollWorks customers can now send a Postal gift when an account is spiking or send a direct mail based on intent or journey stage progression. Marketing can also automate gift sending to key stakeholders when demand unit engagement thresholds are reached (e.g., impressions, ad clicks, page views, etc.)

“The increased demand of Offline Marketing Engagement is a testament to a change in the way companies are engaging with prospects, customers, and employees,” said Postal CEO Erik Kostelnik. “Through the power of Postal and RollWorks, when you can orchestrate digital ABM programs with offline, your programs no longer have to be siloed and episodic. They are systematic, which ultimately drives efficiency and better outcomes.”

RollWorks → HubSpot → Postal.io Workflow.

RollWorks has established HubSpot as a key partner and invested significantly in HubSpot connectors.  In June, it launched Sales Insights for HubSpot, which employs data science to provide a “360-degree view of accounts throughout the buying journey, helping B2B marketers and sales teams to eliminate the guesswork and create more timely and efficient sales outreach.”  Last month, RollWorks announced Journey Events for HubSpot.

RollWorks has enjoyed significant success with its RollWorks ABM HubSpot App, which passed 500 installs in April, 150%.  The integration enables teams “to identify high-fit, high-intent accounts and buyers, reach them efficiently, and measure impact.”

Continue to part II on RollWorks Journey Events and Sales Insights for HubSpot.

Lusha Salesforce Data Exchange

Lusha Enrichment Editor

Contacts database Lusha announced the general availability of its Salesforce Data Enrichment (SFDE) service.  The new service provides on-demand, periodic, or continuous data enrichment, ensuring that company and contact data remain accurate. 

An Enrichment Editor helps operations managers understand how many records need enrichment and the number of leads, contacts, and accounts recently added to Salesforce and available for enrichment.  The Salesforce admin can run an initial enrichment against the full database or target a subset of records for enrichment, with the Enrichment Editor supporting custom audiences for updates based upon multiple Salesforce field criteria.

The Salesforce admin performs the initial field mapping during the integration setup.  Custom fields are supported, and the admin can choose whether to override existing values during enrichment.  Lusha recommends that admins create special fields, such as Lusha Email, to avoid overwriting current field values.

SFDE is an Enterprise add-on and is subject to an access fee.  Analyst Relations Manager Alina Sharon-Green warned GZ Consulting that “extensive usage may require the purchase of additional data credits.”  As a launch promotion, enterprise customers will receive SFDE for free through the end of the year.

Lusha already supports Send to Salesforce functionality but does not provide I-frame support or “stare and compare” updates within AppExchange records.

“Companies spend huge amounts of resources building CRMs of both current and prospective leads but suffer from the speed the data becomes outdated and irrelevant,” said CEO Yoni Tserruya. “B2B sales organizations rely on their CRM to identify the right prospects – so when this data is incomplete or inaccurate, their time is wasted, and opportunities are lost.  With our new SFDE solution, sales teams are given direct access to Lusha’s extensive database of accurate contact and company information to automatically enrich their existing data and gain new insights on their prospects to scale business results.”

Lusha has grown its database to 100 global million contacts, which includes 60 million emails and 50 million direct-dial phones.  All contact records are processed through a seven-step verification process.  Lusha also profiles 15 million global companies. Lusha continued its rapid pace of growth, doubling its paid user base in H1, “with significant growth in Enterprise users,” stated Sharon-Green.

Demandbase Unified CRM View

ABX Platform Demandbase announced that it is the first sales intelligence and account engagement platform to integrate both services jointly into CRM.  Demandbase offers a single view that combines first-party and behavioral data from the Demandbase ABX cloud and third-party datasets (firmographics, technographics, contact data, and news & social insights) from the Demandbase Sales Intelligence Cloud.

“Doing so gives B2B sellers access to all the information they need to spot and close larger deals faster,” stated the firm.  “This first of its kind application guides sales teams to know where and when to engage with the right accounts and decision-makers, leading to higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and bigger deals — boosting CRM adoption in the process.”

Demandbase brought firmographic, contact, and technographics databases in-house following the May 2021 acquisitions of InsideView and DemandMatrix.  Intent data includes first and third-party intelligence, including Surging Intent, Demandbase Keyword Intent, Campaign Response, and Web Page Visits.

Revenue Operations can also select intent data from Bombora and G2, which are processed through the ABX platform’s predictive models.

The Demandbase Timeline provides current and historical intent data.

The Demandbase platform also supports activity timelines, product and competitor intent datasets, and persona-based engagement heatmaps, helping revenue teams assess account potential and determine where accounts stand in the buyer’s journey.

Heatmaps may be viewed by engagement, people, or journeys.  Both preset and custom options are available.  In addition, users can drill down to details by clicking on a row or column header.

The SFDC Heatmap is presented at the Account level with Engagement Minutes (Demandbase’s contact engagement model) displayed within the heatmap matrix.

Sales users can utilize this heatmap to find champions at an org via the highest engagement and understand with which roles they need to communicate.

The Demandbase Heatmap is available with both preset and customizable views.

The platform also supports long-running InsideView for Salesforce functionality, including

  • Company and contact profiles
  • Prospect list building for companies and contacts
  • Contact searching at accounts
  • A news viewer that combines company news, social posts, and blogs
  • Corporate family trees
  • Add to CRM with duplicate checking
  • CRM “stare and compare” updates

According to Demandbase, the unified UI lets customers “consolidate their tech stack, replacing ABM, sales intelligence, advertising, and other vendors with Demandbase One, the Smarter Go-To-Market solution.”

“The beauty of this unified sales UI is that all the data a salesperson needs is readily accessible, right in the CRM where they’re already working.  It’s revolutionary for sales teams,” said Demandbase CRO Allison Metcalfe.  “No more toggling between systems or wasting time in generic outreach that doesn’t drive sales.  Instead, they’ll have deeper insights and greater visibility into prospective deals, gaining knowledge about what buyers are doing around the web, what they engage with, who to contact (and how), and what the most relevant messaging is.  The actionability, productivity, and efficacy of such functionality is practically limitless.”

In other news, Demandbase was named to the Fast Company “100 Best Workplaces for Innovators.” The magazine noted that Demandbase reinvests 20% of its revenue in R&D.

HG Insights Platform 2.0

The Opportunity Generator assembles targeted lists based on fitness and intent.

Market Intelligence vendor HG Insights released version 2.0 of its platform to deliver the “actionable insights” technology vendors need to better “understand their markets in-depth, make decisions, and Go-To-Market (GTM) with precision and confidence.”  Platform 2.0 supports technographics, install data, spend data, twelve million company profiles, contract intelligence, and intent signals for nine million global companies.

“The HG Insights Platform goes beyond simple high-level market reports to provide business leaders with actionable insights to make successful Go-To-Market decisions,” said Robert Fox, CTO of HG Insights.  “Customers are already using HG Insights to allocate resources more effectively, prioritize the right product initiatives, and give their sales and marketing teams the account details they need to pursue the best opportunities—and now we are building on these capabilities with Platform 2.0.  I am excited at the speed of innovation the new platform launch unlocks as HG Insights maintains itself as the market leader of technology intelligence.”

HG Platform 2.0 supports modules for company profiling, marketing intelligence, contextual intent, and opportunity generation.

Platform 2.0 offers self-serviceable intent insights where marketers identify accounts with the highest current propensity to buy based on market signals.  Intent Insights begins by matching each vendor’s Ideal Customer Profile and intent topics to define a set of target accounts.  Account scoring then ranks the target accounts based on a combination of intent signals and market fit (firmographics and technographics).

Marketers can then employ IT spend intelligence to prioritize accounts by budgets, construct equitable sales territories, and analyze market spending trends.

The platform is supported by a “ground up” architectural refresh that improves HG Insights’ ability to scale up its data and insights delivery.  In Q4, the firm plans to release a new API and native Salesforce integration served by the new platform.

Other platform features include improved account scoring, saved search lists, account match logic enhancements, self-serve customer reporting, and UX enhancements.

Install data enhancements include company hierarchy mapping and “new trending features that capture intensity trending over time.”

“These improvements give a more dynamic experience to our technology install data and can answer a broader variety of questions about product usage,” said Darcy Moss, Director of Product Marketing.  “Data coverage and precision have improved—you are now able to profile installs at a global, country, and city/state level.  Intensity Trending and Momentum deliver an improved understanding of technology usage.”

HG Insights, which began as a technographics vendor, now supports modules for opportunity generation, market intelligence, account profiling, and contextual intent.  The Market Intelligence module, released in early 2021, helps marketing and strategy analysts size markets by IT spend, tech installs, firmographics, geography, company size, etc.  It also lets them:

  • Analyze vendor penetration and identify threats, trends, and opportunities
  • Allocate resources and territories more efficiently
  • Identify untapped market potential with whitespace analysis

Contextual Intent, an add-on service, combines technology install data and buyer intent signals “to create a new scoring and filtering experience for laser-focused company targeting.”  HG Insights processes two billion weekly intent signals spanning over 120 million verified tech installs.  Its technology taxonomy support over 14,000 products, solutions, and services.

Contextual intent helps identify prospects researching or evaluating a product that is

  • Not detected in a current install
  • In a category where HG Insights has detected the installation of another product from the same vendor
  • A potential displacement of a competitor’s offering

HG Insights expanded its IT spend and intelligence insights when it acquired Intricately back in March.  Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings.  Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure.  Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.

Intent Activity identifies the signal strength, signal location, and buyer’s journey stage.