Category: Marketing Technology

Slintel Series A

Intent-powered Sales Intelligence vendor Slintel closed on a $20 million round A led by GGV, with participation from Accel, Sequoia, and Stellaris.  The Bengaluru-based company is looking to expand its presence in the US market and strengthen its product.  Slintel, with 100 employees, plans to double its headcount by the end of the year.

The company still has cash from its $4.2 million November seed round but felt it prudent to proceed with an A round earlier than planned.

“We had enough cash in the bank, but investors came to us, and we got a pretty good valuation compared to the previous round, so we decided to take it and use that money to go faster,” said CEO Deepak Anchala.

Revenue grew 5X last year and was on pace to grow 3X before the Series A.  Anchala contends that the growth rate will accelerate with the additional capital.  “With the funding, we’re actually looking at much bigger numbers. We’re looking at 5x in our revenue this year and also trying for 4x revenue next year.”

“Slintel has one of the best go-to-market engines that we’ve seen in any startup, and the consistency with which the team has been able to deliver on their growth targets is commendable.  We’re looking at a company that’s changing the marketing and sales intelligence sphere as we know it, and we couldn’t be happier to be a part of their board,” said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel.

Anchala told TechCrunch that since the round closed six weeks ago, the firm increased its investment in product and marketing.  The advertising budget was increased, with the firm looking to generate prospects via SEO, free tools on the company website, and events.

“The next big wave in the enterprise space is (the) use of AI to rethink processes, and all AI at its core requires data.  I am, therefore, bullish on the entire data stack, including data which is either proprietary or inferred data that is not easy to replicate. Slintel is in the second category. Their ability to predict strong prospects is a relatively unique capability, and it is very easy to sell due to a direct correlation to (the) top line for their customers.”

Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners

The Slintel platform delivers technographic and company insights, buying propensity scores, contacts, and lead enrichment.  Slintel identifies thematic intent signals (i.e., sales triggers) such as upcoming contract renewals, companies that show signs of buying their products online, or companies that use their competitors’ products.  Slintel captures hard to detect signals from the web, combines this with other third-party intent signals from its partners, and surfaces these insights via integrations with Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Slack and Chrome. 

“Our customers no longer waste precious time and effort reaching out to and targeting the wrong prospects,” blogged Anchala.  “They are able to accurately determine who their high-intent buyers are, whether a target account is already using their competitor’s product / service, when the renewal date for a prospect’s current solution is coming up, or the budget restrictions that they have.  All this and more, even before scheduling a discovery call with them.”

Slintel “mines buyer insights,” said Anchala.  “We understand where the buyers are in their journey, what their pain points are, what products they use, what they need, and when they need it. So we understand all of this to create a 360-degree view of the buyer that you provide these insights to sales and marketing teams to help them sell better.”

Technology intent is based upon digital footprint tracking that analyzes when new technologies have been adopted or dropped.  Technographics span 25,000 technologies across fifteen million companies and are updated weekly.  AI models project when contracts come up for renewal, which technologies are likely to be purchased next, and when they will move forward with the purchase.

Thematic intent is based on keyword analysis that suggests company pain points.  Slintel “analyzes how many times companies have been talking about a certain keyword [and] how frequently and recently they have been emitting this pain point.”

Propensity-to-buy scores are derived from over twenty-five variables, including contract renewal dates, technology adoption/churn, keyword Intent, budgetary spending, and hiring trends.

“We have taken a contrarian approach by focusing on the buyer funnel, which is an inverse of the sales funnel,” said Anchala.  “We analyze buyer journeys and buying patterns of companies to capture early signals of buyer intent.”

“While most other data intelligence platforms provide insights based on search patterns, Slintel’s proprietary algorithm provides prospect recommendations based on technographics-powered buying intent,” states the firm.  “Using Slintel, you can predict who’s about to purchase your product and market or sell your product to prospects even before they move on to the research phase of their buying journey.”

Slintel has employees across ten cities in India and the US, with plans to remain a remote-first organization.

Slintel has been growing headcount rapidly over the past two years (Source: LinkedIn).

Slintel also announced that Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, joined their Board of Directors.

“With the global pandemic completely changing the way companies operate, B2B transactions have gone more digital than ever before,” stated Tung.  “Inside sales teams are closing high-value, multi-million-dollar deals while working remotely, and products like Slintel are enabling companies to do this by helping them reimagine their entire sales process for today’s environment.”

Drift Announces Fastlane Webform / Chatbot Hybrid

Revenue Acceleration vendor Drift rolled out a pair of sales enablement tools to facilitate rapid qualification and lead routing: Fastlane lead forms and Sales Seat intent and engagement alerts.

Drift Fastlane transitions a webform into an immediate chat for high-scoring visitors.

Fastlane combines traditional lead forms with chatbots to create “conversational forms.”  Prospects fill out a lead form with contact information enriched, scored, and routed to the Drift chatbot for high-scoring leads.  Thus, high-scoring prospects immediately move to sales rep conversations from the website.

Low scoring leads are passed to nurture or “other automated activations.”

“As a result, sellers can focus on high-converting buyers while routing lower-priority leads to nurture campaigns or other automated activations,” wrote Drift.  “The net outcome results in more qualified sales pipeline, an efficient workflow for sales reps, and overall revenue acceleration for the organization.”

If the buyers are too busy to speak immediately, they can schedule a meeting through the chatbot. Likewise, if the rep isn’t available for chat, the bot can schedule a meeting after collecting additional prospect intelligence.

It may seem odd that a firm that is a #noforms proponent would choose to begin offering forms, but not all marketers are ready to eliminate forms. 

“For most marketers, it’s the number one source of leads that they drive for their sales team.  And if they didn’t have that, sales teams would be on the hook to create nearly all of their own pipeline – which is very inefficient.  So we realized we had to do more.  We have to support our customers in every way that they work. From the inbound motion that relies on forms to the outbound motion for customers who can’t rely on marketing alone to hit their numbers.”

CEO David Cancel

There are also scenarios where a form makes more sense than a bot.  Registering for a webinar works better as a form than a bot as it is transparent about the requisite data entry.  Likewise, enabling forms with optional bots increases their flexibility and value.

Continue to Part II which discusses Sales Seat and the importance of rapid sales responses for inbound leads.

Qualified Series B

Qualified closed on a $51M Series B which raised total funding to $68M (Source: Crunchbase).

Conversational Marketing Platform Qualified closed on a $51 million Series B round.  Salesforce Ventures led the round, with existing partners Redpoint Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners also joining.  Qualified has received $68 million in total funding.  It is “the only conversational sales and marketing platform purpose-built for Salesforce Sales Cloud,” stated the firm.

Qualified’s Salesforce roots “go deep.”  Along with the Salesforce Ventures funding, Salesforce CMO Sarah Franklin joined Qualified as a board observer, and former Salesforce SVP Dan Darcy joined as their Chief Customer Officer.  Multiple execs are former Salesforce employees including CEO Kraig Swensrud who worked on the development of Chatter and served as the firm’s CMO.

“Qualified represents an entirely new way for B2B companies to engage buyers,” said Bill Patterson, Salesforce EVP of CRM Applications.  “When marketing and inbound sales teams use this solution with Sales Cloud…they see a notable impact on pipeline. We are thrilled about our growing partnership with Qualified and their success within the Salesforce ecosystem.”

Qualified will deploy the funds to “fuel product innovation;” build out key functions including engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success; and more than double its headcount before the end of the year.

“Conversational sales and marketing is no longer a ‘nice to have.’ It’s mission critical for fast-growing businesses, and table stakes for modern buyers.  The world’s top CMOs and demand gen leaders are turning to Qualified as a new way to meet with their most important buyers the moment they arrive on the website.  There’s no better partner than Salesforce Ventures to help us accelerate Qualified’s growth and bring this solution to Salesforce customers around the world.”

Qualified CEO Kraig Swensrud

Qualified addresses a “multi-billion problem for enterprise marketing and sales teams,” their inability to identify qualified buyers and message to them while they are on the website.  Thus, the $6 billion spent driving buyers to company websites is poorly converted into sales pipelines.

“In enterprise sales, speed matters: Waiting even five minutes after a lead leaves a website decreases the chances of making contact by 10x,” wrote the firm.  “However, it takes salespeople 38 hours on average to respond to qualified leads.  Studies show that 78% of B2B customers buy from the company that responds to them first.”

Qualified offers real-time visitor intelligence and routing based upon Salesforce.  Visitors may interact with chatbots or talk to reps via chat, voice, and screen sharing.  The service promises 99.9% uptime, GDPR compliance, SOC2 compliance, and Salesforce ISV certification.

“The conversational model is simply a better way to connect with new customers.  Buyers love the real-time engagement, sellers love the instant connections, and marketers have the confidence that every dollar spent on demand generation is maximized,” said Board Member Scott Beechuk.  “The multi-billion-dollar market for Salesforce automation software is going to adopt this new model, and Qualified is perfectly positioned to capture that demand.  If your company uses Salesforce, Qualified will be a multiplier on your sales and marketing investment.”

Qualified saves conversations to Salesforce, including a complete visual recording of the timeline, chat transcript, and screen recording.

Last year, Qualified grew revenue by 800% and posted a 175% customer revenue retention rate.  New customers include Adobe, Matterport, Poly, Sodexo, SurveyMonkey, Talend, Tech Data, and VMware.

According to LinkedIn, Qualified grew its headcount by 92% last year.

Conversational Marketing is hot, but the market is shifting from standalone chat to chat as a front-end to ABX Platforms. ZoomInfo acquired Insent last week and rebranded it ZoomInfo Chat, Drift expanded its product vision into Revenue Acceleration with additional channels, and Terminus acquired Ramble and integrated it into its ABX Platform.

Qualified Conversational Marketing Dashboard.

ZoomInfo Acquires Conversational Marketing Service Insent

ZoomInfo announced that it acquired Conversational Marketing firm Insent.AI this morning.  The new offering was immediately rebranded as ZoomInfo Chat.  Insent, ZoomInfo’s latest post-IPO tuck-in, follows acquisitions of Everstring (firmographics) and Clickagy (intent data) in late 2020.  In total, ZoomInfo (FKA DiscoverOrg) has acquired eight companies over the past four years.

CEO Henry Schuck focuses on acquiring complementary data assets that become significantly more valuable when combined with ZoomInfo’s data assets and are then cross-sold by its sales teams.

Last month Schuck told Yahoo! Finance:

“It [the size of the company] doesn’t really matter because the way that we evaluate M&A is, we look for opportunities where, number one, our data makes a big impact from a competitive differentiation perspective. And number two, which goes to the valuation piece, because we are seeing incredibly high valuations on M&A targets today.

But on that piece, we’re always looking to see, hey, if we buy this company and we integrate it into ZoomInfo, and we have all of our sellers selling that product or service and it’s integrated and it’s gotten better with the data asset that we have, how fast can we grow the business? It’s always much faster than that business is going to grow on its own.

And so, when we’re doing the analysis on what to buy and what to build, the buy equation has a lot to do with how much faster we can grow the business. And so while a valuation today might feel like a lot, when we look at what we’re going to be able to do with that asset over the next year and two years, we look for those assets to be accretive in the short term. And it really becomes a go-to-market exercise for us.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck, Yahoo! Finance interview, May 4, 2021

Conversational Marketing is a rapidly emerging segment that provides value across the revenue team.  Insent, which will be powered by ZoomInfo’s WebSights visitor identification and its global database, performs real-time routing of conversations to sales reps.  Low-scoring prospects are managed by the chatbot, with high-scoring visitors routed to the appropriate sales reps.  Insent, which competes against Intercom, Terminus, and Drift, calls itself a “human-first chatbot.”

“Marketers spend enormous amounts of time, money, and effort to drive traffic to their websites, but only convert less than two percent of visitors into leads – an incredible inefficiency for teams,” said Schuck.  “The acquisition of Insent will combine chat with ZoomInfo’s dynamic IP-to-company graph and insights.  Marketers will be able to instantly identify previously anonymous companies that are on their websites, route prospects to the right account owners, and arm them with ZoomInfo’s key intelligence about their buyers. As a result, they’ll initiate real-time conversations that can yield significant conversions.”

Insent also looks for website triggers such as page visits and scroll locations when launching the chatbot.

“As visitors engage in personalized conversations with a chatbot, the nature of the interaction can further inform and qualify visitors for a seamless transition to a live chat with a sales representative,” blogged Schuck.  This interactive intelligence will be combined with firmographics and other account and contact intelligence related to the prospect.  These insights then “trigger automated sales and marketing workflows, plays, and alerts to create informed, serendipitous, personalized engagement.”

The Insent chatbot supports inline meeting scheduling and additional information gathering for the rep.  ZoomInfo will also support automated follow-up workflows and conversations.

Chatbots have an advantage over traditional web forms.  Not only do they capture and enrich information, but they can engage with prospects when “your brand is top of mind” and selectively pass high-scoring visitors immediately to sales reps.  If the sales rep is not available, the chatbot can schedule a call and collect additional intelligence for the meeting.

“And that opportunity extends beyond the lifetime of that visit,” added Schuck.  “Leveraging the visit as a trigger event, ZoomInfo can expand the audience at an account by identifying other likely members of the buying committee and activating outreach to those professionals following a website visit by one or a number of their peers.”

Insent supports integrations with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Slack, MS Teams, and Zendesk (customer support).

Real-time integrations between platforms and the chat engine, combined with real-time reference data are key to this deal.  “Without tightly integrated, highly accurate data and timely insights, these systems are merely empty repositories that lack the intelligence to surface, prioritize, and trigger effective, personalized engagement at scale,” blogged Shuck.  “At ZoomInfo, we are actively executing against our vision to build a go-to-market platform that combines our best-in-class data and insights with a tightly integrated engagement layer that activates those insights as they surface. Our system facilitates real-time connection with buyers in their time of need, alerts sales teams to meaningful activity, and feeds engagement activity data back into the system for better future profiling and targeting.”

ZoomInfo Chat will be displayed alongside ZoomInfo WebSights Visitor Intelligence, company overviews, ZoomInfo Scoops, intent topics, technographics, buying committees, and insights.

“ZoomInfo is a trusted leader in go-to-market intelligence and orchestration that enterprises rely on to help them identify and close their ideal customers,” said Insent CEO Arjun Pillai.  “ZoomInfo and Insent will help shape the future of chat by allowing teams to have data-centric, intelligent conversations that can expedite sales cycles.”

Insent isn’t “just building a chatbot that generates leads, but a collaborative platform that is going to help marketers create, nurture qualified opportunities, and shorten sales cycles,” said the firm earlier this year.

The goal is to remove “digital walls” between buyers and sellers by replacing web forms and follow-ups “with instant live conversations on websites” that schedule meetings and deliver “personalized content recommendations based on engagement history.”

Insent describes itself as an “integration first platform,” with MAPs, CRMs, and ABM Platforms “to help sales teams talk to engaged prospects while they’re on the website.”

According to Insent Digital Marketer Aatharsha Jey, “integrations should be planned and carried out in a way that does not ask people to change their behaviors in order to adopt a new tool.”

“By guiding their buyers at the right time and proactively alerting your salespeople, Insent generates new revenue opportunities and accelerates existing ones,” said Pillai.

Initially, the pandemic slowed Instent’s growth as marketing teams reduced budgets and delayed decisions, but chatbots are high on the list of MarTech digital acquisition solutions.  Between May 2020 and January 2021, Insent revenue quadrupled.

Earlier this year, Insent was using 6Sense for visitor identification. “We go and task 6Sense through an API,” said Pillai in February. “We take that data, and we do further processing of that data.  All of this happens in microseconds.  Basically, the moment somebody lands on the website, boom, the API call comes back with the data based on that website, company visitor.”

Insent stress-tested various platforms before settling on MongoDB and AWS.  Pillai contends that the platform gives them a five-year or six-year window before rearchitecting.  The platform was designed with an account-based, versus lead-based, architecture that ties leads to accounts for account-based orchestration.

The new ZoomInfo Chat offering will be available to new and existing customers in Q3.  Deal terms were not disclosed. The acquisition was deemed not to have a material impact on the firm’s 2021 financials.

Pillai will be joining ZoomInfo as the SVP of Strategic Growth.

GZ Consulting offers a detailed analysis of ZoomInfo which includes a one-hour Q&A session. Contact Michael Levy for licensing.

People.AI Acquires Hero and Releases Sales Solution for Salesforce

Revenue Operations and Sales Intelligence vendor People.AI acquired Hero Research, a Salesforce productivity app that simplifies CRM access.  The Hero service was immediately re-branded as PeopleGlass.  People.AI also announced a new Salesforce experience for sales reps and managers.

PeopleGlass is designed as an “interaction layer” to reduce the overhead and complexity of maintaining Salesforce content.  Glass refers to the “single pane of glass” metaphor often used for CRM cross-record reporting, a core feature of PeopleGlass.  People.AI argues that CRMs have become complex, full-stack solutions covering many use cases but are cumbersome due to their functional breadth.

“We believe that current CRM solutions are inadequate. Modern businesses are complex and full-stack solutions (platforms that offer many services) reflect the complexity of the many use cases that they need to cover as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Many CRMs today offer the whole gamut, addressing needs from pre-sales, post-sales, support, marketing, etc.,” argues People.AI.  “Furthermore, these companies are focused on selling large deals into small groups of decision makers who rarely interact with the products they purchase. It’s no wonder why many users feel they’ve been ignored by the people building the products they spend huge portions of their lives in.

In the meantime, most people have experience with iPhones, Gmail, and other great products. This only increases the frustration with legacy CRM tools.

PeopleGlass aims to solve this problem by focusing solely on the end user and leveraging learnings from the best modern consumer software.”

People.AI, “Why We Started People Glass”

PeopleGlass supports custom sheets, forms, hotkeys, a command-line interface, and a “clean and versatile workspace to eliminate the pain points of using CRMs.”  PeopleGlass may be launched in the browser or added as a Chrome extension.

Custom Sheets provide a spreadsheet view across Salesforce records that supports filters, bulk record updates, searching, and inline updates.  Thus, reps can quickly update opportunity records before pipeline review meetings and then review the spreadsheet with managers.  Records are immediately updated in Salesforce.

PeopleGlass Opportunity viewing and updates

Users can create personal views or modify any of the included templates.  Adding columns, resizing columns, and moving columns are straightforward actions.  Users can also quickly view any record as a form or view the record in Salesforce.

PeopleGlass Forms provide custom layouts for creating and updating account, contact, leads, opportunities, notes or tasks.  Admins can set default fields for records.

A set of hotkeys expedite data entry, allowing users to quickly create records, log calls, and search records. PeopleGlass provides a customizable home page for displaying metrics, sharing and copying sheets or forms with colleagues.

Part II, which discusses the Hero Research acquisition and their Salesforce solution, continues here.

D&B Rev.Up ABX Integrated with Folloze

Continuing my discussion of the launch of D&B Rev.Up ABX.

Dun & Bradstreet also announced that the Folloze B2B personalized marketing platform is fully integrated into D&B Rev.Up ABX.  Folloze is available in both standard and advanced editions.

The D&B Data Cloud personalizes Folloze for landing pages from both inbound and outbound prospects. D&B customer profile data supports campaigns executed on display, email, or via sales outreach.

With Folloze, Rev.Up ABX customers can create and launch “data-powered, personalized omnichannel experiences across the entire buyer journey.”  Folloze captures first and third-party account and individual behavior analytics which are fed back to the CDP.  Folloze can also orchestrate targeted campaign activities across sales, account development, and channels.

The Folloze Buyer Experience Platform

“B2B buying and selling has changed forever,” said Eric Bauer, Chief Growth Officer at Folloze.  “Today’s digital-first buyers want to be treated as partners – not campaign targets.  As such, creating the engaging account-based experiences across the entire buyer journey represents the new table stakes for every marketing team.  Our alliance with Dun & Bradstreet makes it easy for marketing and revenue teams to retool and quickly deliver dynamic contextual experiences across a wide range of digital touchpoints.”

Companies that deployed Rev.Up ABX include Thomson-Reuters, Schneider, Citrix, Rackspace Technology, and Sierra Wireless.

D&B Rev.Up ABX is GA across all five modules (the four channels plus the Advanced edition that combines the four).  The Folloze integration will GA in June.

D&B Rev.Up ABX pricing starts at $30,000. This fee includes the ability to acquire data from the Data Cloud and the embedded CDP (D&B Lattice) along with a single channel to activate a campaign such as email, sales, or web. Other Standard features include visitor intelligence, lead form enrichment, a seat of D&B Hoover’s, Salesforce and MAP import connectors, Salesforce Buyer Insights (10 seats), the Outreach connector (10 seats), analytics, and programmatic audience building.

The Advanced edition applies to clients looking to license at least three modules.  It supports broad data ingestion, social activation, paid search, and real-time visitor intelligence feeds to content management systems, along with all four channels.

D&B Rev.Up ABX 90 Second Demo (YouTube)

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.

RollWorks Journey Stages

ABM Platform RollWorks announced Journey Stages.  The new feature “gives B2B marketing and sales teams deeper insight into the impact of go-to-market activities on account progression.”

Journey Stages determines the stage of the buying journey and activates stage-specific, multi-channel campaigns based upon this intelligence.  Journey Stages helps revenue teams “uncover insights about account journeys, measure account progression and regression, and understand key drivers and trends for any velocity changes between stages.”

Journey Stages lets sales and marketing professionals target and orchestrate multi-channel account-based campaigns based upon the journey phase.  Journey Stages tracks account progression based upon custom definitions across the full customer lifecycle.

RollWorks Journey Stages Account Progression.

“For example, if a bulk of your accounts are ‘unaware,’ you may prioritize brand programs over lower funnel plays,” blogged RollWorks Lead Product Manager Mark Miller.  ”If you see that a bulk of your accounts are ‘aware,’ you’ll likely focus on pulling them down the funnel with different offers. Essentially, you’ll have the information you need to toggle certain programs and budgets on and off at the ready.”

“We’re eager to bring this robust set of identification and measurement features to market,” said Justin Cooperman, VP of Product at RollWorks. “With Journey Stages and additional journey functionality shortly to come, RollWorks gives marketers a new layer of end-to-end insights to help them better understand the impact of their Account-Based campaigns, enabling finer tuning of their ABM programs for pipeline progression and revenue growth.”

Journey Stages is currently in beta, with GA scheduled for Summer 2021.

Flash: Demandbase Acquires InsideView and DemandMatrix

ABX Platform vendor Demandbase acquired InsideView and DemandMatrix, providing it with an established and well-regarded Sales Intelligence platform, company and contact data, technographics, and data hygiene capabilities.  The acquisitions follow on last year’s acquisition of ABM Platform Engagio, which was unified with Demandbase as part of the Q4 Demandbase One platform release.

“It’s a feeling of expansion, born of learning so much from our customers, and born of the digital transformation that has happened in the last year,” said Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol.  “This is an intentional step for us beyond being solely an ABM leader and into broader B2B go-to-market. That’s important because ABM is just a part of the go-to-market challenges that B2B companies face.”

The new services are packaged as an ABM Suite consisting of four clouds: ABX, Advertising, Sales Intelligence, and Data.  Customers will have the flexibility to order various elements of the suite, selecting the clouds and services that fit their needs.

“Our focus has been on building the most complete ABM solution (we call it ABX, because it’s not just marketing),” said Rogol, “and that was the impetus behind acquiring Engagio, putting a lot of the top of funnel and lower funnel stuff together.  That will still be important.”

While some may view this as Demandbase growing beyond ABX, it is an opportunity for them to complete the ABX vision.  I have long been critical of Demandbase’s limited framing of ABM within the marketing department.  While they acquired Spiderbook, a small sales intelligence vendor, a few years ago, it withered on the vine and is no longer mentioned by the firm.  InsideView provides them with an opportunity to realize ABX as a complete customer lifecycle solution.  There are still missing elements such as sales engagement tools and chatbots, but they are now working on a much wider canvas.

Demandbase is in a sprint to establish the ABX platform space against vendors such as Terminus, 6Sense, and Dun & Bradstreet.  It has been using the ABM three-letter acronym for a dozen years and was a lonely voice extolling ABM for half of that time, arguing for a shift from demand generation marketing to account-based strategies.  Earlier this year, it shifted from ABM to ABX (Account Based Experience), which places a greater emphasis on long-term relationships with customers and the broader revenue team (sales, marketing, customer success).

“We’re proud to join forces with these two great companies. Our vision is bold. We are transforming how B2B companies go to market, helping them deliver great experiences at every stage of the account journey. This requires great data — and we now have the premium B2B data and intelligence solutions to help companies identify, understand, and engage their customers and prospects. With this move, Demandbase moves from being ‘just’ a leader in account-based programs to being the definitive leader in B2B go-to-market…

These new offerings let us work even more flexibly with our customers. Customers can mix and match to focus on the areas most important for them, whether that’s data embedded to their existing systems, or advertising, or sales intelligence, or a full account-based transformation. We are moving aggressively to deliver on this mission, and no company will move faster than us to achieve it.”

Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol

Acquiring InsideView and DemandMatrix strengthens its position in both marketing and sales.  Furthermore, InsideView’s sales triggers provide Demandbase customers with a rich set of talking points for account managers and customer success teams, letting them know if there are executive changes, M&A events, new partnerships, etc.

Demandbase One added the Sales Intelligence and Data Clouds with this week’s acquisitions.

Demandbase, which offers an ABX Cloud and an Advertising Cloud, now supports a Data Cloud and Sales Intelligence Cloud.  The Sales Intelligence Cloud is based upon InsideView and supports:

  • Prospect Finder – A traditional list-building feature for company and contact data.  Along with firmographic and biographic data, the InsideView prospect finder includes connection variables (Who Know Who “six degrees”), sales triggers (17 + custom variables), data availability (e.g., LinkedIn Connections, Email), and suppression lists.
  • Browser Extension – A Chrome extension for quick lookup and prospecting.  The extension displays InsideView company and contact profiles from LinkedIn, company websites, and CRMs.  Records may be sent to the CRM or Sales Engagement Platforms.
  • News and Social Insights – InsideView publishes daily email alerts based upon their sales triggers.  As these are event-based, most company noise (e.g., stock price fluctuations, scores for teams playing at branded stadia) is removed and duplicates suppressed.  They also support inline social media viewing for Facebook, Twitter, and Company Blogs.  Inline viewing helps account managers and customer success teams stay abreast of key accounts.  It also assists marketing and CI professionals in monitoring key partners and competitors.
  • Corporate Hierarchies – Family trees assist with lead-to-account mapping, selling deeper into an organization, and ensuring that leads are accurately scored and routed.

The Data Cloud consists of Demandbase, InsideView, and DemandMatrix assets.  InsideView contributes close to 100 million global contacts and 17 million companies.  DemandMatrix supports technographics (current tech stack, future technology needs, technology-based skill set trends, cloud consumption revenue, and IT Spend). 

Other Data Cloud services include Demandbase Account Identification, InsideView Apex (ICP Discovery and Expansion), InsideView Data Integrity hygiene tools, and the InsideView API.

“For the last 15 years, we’ve been focused on empowering our customers to experience rapid revenue growth through the power of data.  InsideView’s leadership in sales intelligence made it clear to us years ago that stronger ties between sales and marketing lead to more revenue—and data is the key. By joining forces with Demandbase, we’re combining our legacy and leadership in sales, and the industry’s freshest, most reliable data, with leading marketing technology. Our customers will be able to do more with data across more B2B revenue channels from sales, to advertising, to account-based campaigns. We’re taking the convergence of data and workflow to the next level.”

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti

InsideView was highly rated in The Forrester Wave B2B Marketing Data Providers Q2 2021 report, scoring a five (highest score) across 14 of Forrester’s 24 evaluation criteria.  Among the categories in which they excelled were data management, data coverage, and customer support.

Rogol emphasized the value of technographics for enterprise technology companies, saying that “for technology companies, the number one feature in a data science model is what technologies your prospect owns.”

“B2B data is complex, and customers consistently ask us for help with their data stack,” said DemandMatrix CEO Meetul Shah. “We started with further innovating technographic data to give customers valuable insights into their prospects and what other technologies they might buy. By now being part of the Demandbase Data Cloud, we’ll be able to provide customers access throughout the B2B data stack to help them realize their revenue goals.”

Both Milletti and Shah will continue running their respective businesses and join the Demandbase executive team as general managers.  The two subsidiaries will operate separately, but the firm will consolidate the data across the offerings.

Acquisition prices for the two firms were not disclosed.  The InsideView service lists its revenue at $30.5 million and 275 employees, which has remained stable over the past few years.  DemandMatrix is listed at $3.0 million in revenue with 90 employees.

InsideView’s self-profile (May 4, 2021)

“At Demandbase, our vision is bold. We are transforming how B2B companies go to market, helping them deliver great experiences at every stage of the account journey.  This requires great data,” said Demandbase.  “We now have the premium B2B data and intelligence solutions to help companies identify, understand, and engage their customers and prospects. With this move, Demandbase goes from being ‘just’ a leader in account-based programs to being the definitive leader in B2B go-to-market.”

InsideView and DemandMatrix customers benefit from the more extensive go-to-market capabilities of their parent.  The DemandMatrix suite helps customers:

  • Design and orchestrate their entire buyer’s journey across marketing and sales
  • Personalize their website experience, track account-level engagement, and attribute revenue
  • Deliver account-based display, native, and social media advertising that is brand safe for B2B
  • Target and segment their market

Rogol admitted that the integration work would not be easy.  “Obviously, we still have a lot of the execution work ahead. One thing to point out is that these are different types of acquisitions than Engagio. With Engagio, the goal was to get to the most comprehensive ABM platform. These are adjacent expansions, so they’re going to operate as standalone businesses pretty much.”

Barb Mosher Zinck of Diginomica was bullish on the transactions, calling it a “smart move” to consolidate the data from three companies under a single platform.  “It’s essentially a Customer Data Platform (CDP) without the CDP name (and some CDP capabilities), providing all the critical information sales and marketing need to find the right accounts and contacts within those accounts. The intelligence DemandMatrix brings on technology is key, as is the ability from InsideView to see when things are changing in a company.”

“I also like that Demandbase has broadened its offering from only account-based marketing to sales intelligence because the two groups are tightly aligned,” continued Mosher Zinck.  “These two solutions can operate separately but bringing them together under the same umbrella with access to the same data is key to ensuring a company-wide focus on customer experience.”

The following Market Flash published on May 4th to my newsletter subscribers. I also offer a detailed InsideView product review for purchase ($349).