ReferenceUSA, the library and government sales division of Infogroup, is partnering with Plunkett Research to sell their industry almanacs. Plunkett offers three dozen almanacs including fast-growing sectors such as Green Technology; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine; and Nanotechnology. Plunkett reports are written for the “general reader to readily access and understand the most vital trends, technologies and companies creating change within given industries—even if the reader has no current expertise in that industry.”
Jack Plunkett, CEO of Plunkett Research, said, “We’re excited to team up with the terrific people at ReferenceUSA. Their deep relationships with librarians and understanding of libraries’ unique needs make them the ideal group to spread the word about the Plunkett Research Online industry reference platform. At the same time, ReferenceUSA and Plunkett Research products are perfectly complementary–libraries that subscribe to both will be able to harness the full power of our deep data analyses.”
Plunkett almanacs cover both US companies and industries. They are available as online subscriptions, eBooks, and printed subscriptions. Plunkett helps close a gap in the ReferenceUSA product line. Infogroup provides a deep set of US and Canadian company and consumer files along with new companies, new households, family trees, and prospect list building. The partnership helps ReferenceUSA compete against Mergent Online which provides a company and industry research service in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet.
Subscription users can download custom industry reports as PDFs. Tables, company lists, and association lists may be downloaded to Excel.
Plunkett Online Subscription Pricing
View only subscription pricing begins at $1,295 for a single seat with downloading available for $1,995. Printed almanacs and ebooks are priced at $380.
Human-verified contact vendor DealSignal added Bombora intent to its B2B marketing data service. The combined solution offers intent-based leads with verified emails and direct dials “so that marketing and sales teams can reach out to ideal buyers directly and drive more conversions.” DealSignal applies Bombora intent data to an Ideal Buyers Profile. Users will be able to identify net-new, surging accounts with accompanying contacts and buying teams.
“We’re
excited to partner with Bombora to help marketing and sales teams finally
answer the most elusive question: Who is out there actively looking for what we
sell and how can we reach them before our competitors,” said DealSignal CEO,
Rob Weedn. ”The integration of Bombora intent data and DealSignal’s
verified contact and account data means that revenue-driving teams can now see
which companies are actively in-market, plus get complete, accurate contact
data for ideal buyers at those companies, so they can reach out and convert
that intent into a purchase.”
Selecting Bombora Intent Topics
Marketers
begin by defining their target buyer personas on the DealSignal platform and
then select up to 50 Bombora intent topics. DealSignal identifies
accounts that match buyer profiles along with surging intent and delivers a set
of accounts with contacts and firmographics. By tying together intent,
firmographics, and human-verified contacts, DealSignal delivers a set of leads
that are more likely to close than with traditional firmographic prospecting.
“Intent-based leads help B2B marketers uncover accounts that are actively in-market — even if they’re not already on their target account/ABM lists. We then deliver complete, enriched and verified contact and account data that helps marketing & sales teams reach out to prospective target buyers with highly personalized messages, to help them convert more intent into a purchase,” said Weedn.
Third-party Intent data from Bombora and The Big Willow has suffered from poor actionability as intent scores lack context and clear next steps. Several vendors have begun to address this issue by combining intent with company and contact intelligence, turning an intent number into an ABM lead. DealSignal ties together Ideal Buyers, Personas, Bombora Intent Data, and Human-verified contacts to indicate which ABM targets are in market and who should be contacted.
DiscoverOrg redesigned its OppAlerts service to identify companies with surging interest in key topics, rank companies by purchase intent, route high-intent prospects to sales reps, and synch intent data with Salesforce for key topics.
InsideView added the Bombora intent file into their Apex ICP / TAM service to help identify ABM accounts which are currently searching on key topics.
By converting intent signals into leads or opportunities, firms are beginning to translate billions of weekly datapoints (thousands of intent topics across millions of companies) into actionable intelligence for sales and marketing teams.
In December, Aberdeen acquired The Big Willow to deliver Intent Qualified Opportunities which combined third-party intent with technographics, firmographics, content, and research.
“Intent data has been trapped in marketing tools as just another score,” said Aberdeen CEO Marc Osofsky, Aberdeen’s CEO. “Aberdeen Intent for Salesforce delivers what sales wants – accounts looking to buy that are fed directly into Salesforce for sales to engage and increase pipeline.”
I profiled SalesIntel and its human-verified contacts last summer but failed to cover a series of announcements from them over the past nine months (they were covered in my newsletter, but didn’t make it into my blog).
SalesIntel continues its database build out with company intelligence alongside their database of nearly three million high-quality US contacts. Each of these contacts is reverified each quarter, providing a smaller, but significantly higher quality email and direct dial dataset than other vendors. The exception is DealSignal which is performing overnight data validation so also delivering recently verified contacts.
Along with high-quality contacts, SalesIntel added company profiles which provide contact context. Company profiles are accessed by performing a company name search and clicking on the company name in the resulting contact list. The new profiles contain the following sections:
Company logo and name
Executive Intel — the names and titles of the top-level executives at the firm. Users can click on the executives to view their details.
Firmographic data from Owler
HQ info
Industry & Sector info
Tech Intel — vendors and product deployed at the company
Contact Intel — a grid containing the number of executives available within SalesIntel by job function and level. Clicking on a number takes the user to a list of contacts for the company at that function and level. Users can also obtain filtered lists by clicking on the totals by job function or level.
The most recent enhancement is the incorporation of Owler firmographics into their database. SalesIntel users can also view Owler’s real-time news alerts for their prospects including IPOs, Funding, and Acquisition news.
“Owler helps sales teams work faster and smarter. We provide accurate and up-to-date information about companies and their top competitors, as well as deliver real-time actionable insights about the companies that matter to your pipeline.”
Tim Harsch, CEO of Owler
SalesLoft released sales engagement connectors for Outreach and SalesLoft late last year. Duplicate checking is performed. Records are tagged and assigned to SalesLoft cadences and Outreach sequences.
A HubSpot connecter was also released. The integration allows users to select contact owners and assign exported contacts to a workflow. Duplicate record checking is supported.
New targeting features include US metro areas and technographic searching. Users can screen by product, vendor, or category. The technographics file was licensed from HG Insights (FKA HG Data).
Category searching may be performed by keyword or navigating a technology category tree. Technographic searching is a component of the company module.
SalesIntel Technographic Screening
Contacts are sold in annual plans with contact records beginning at a dollar per record.
SalesIntel was launched last summer. Ramnani said his firm is receiving “very positive feedback from the market.”
I am pleased to announce that the first in a series of sales and marketing intelligence profiles is available through this website and my partners at Tenbound. These reports are written to assist with the purchasing decision. InsideView is the first purchasing profile to be completed, but additional reports for D&B Hoovers, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and DiscoverOrg are planned for release.
InsideView Buyer’s Guide
Buyer's Profile of InsideView Sales and Marketing Intelligence (Single License)
$349.00
InsideView, based in San Francisco, provides a set of sales and marketing tools for browsers, CRMs, Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs), and mobile devices. Key tools support sales research and account monitoring, list building, sales connections (“six degrees”), CRM viewing and hygiene, company and contact enrichment, web form enrichment, Ideal Customer Profiling (ICP), Total Addressable Market (TAM) sizing, and marketing automation hygiene.
InsideView targets technology, finance, corporate/consulting services, manufacturing, commercial real estate, etc.
Firms of all sizes license InsideView solutions.
Report Coverage
This 22-page report covers the following topics:
Company Overview
Content
Content Coverage Numbers
Product Screenshots
Functionality
Sales Products
InsideView for Sales
InsideView for CRM
InsideView Append (Lightning Data)
InsideView Mobile
Marketing Products
InsideView Enrich
InsideView Refresh
InsideView Target
Analytics Products
InsideView Apex
Other Products
InsideView Open API
Expert and Data Services
Recent Enhancements
Futures
Unique Features
Strengths
Weaknesses
Competitors by Category
Pricing
Resources
GZ Consulting / Tenbound reports are independently written and not sponsored by any of the profiled vendors.
UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions recognized significant growth in the technology sector in 2018, with tech sector revenue up 255% in 2018. Artesian attributed the growth to the “vast return on investment that can be achieved by leveraging millions of data points to create new relationships, establish credibility, address individual pain points and wider market challenges, and create new opportunities.”
The Artesian
social selling platform provides users with a rich set of sales triggers
combined with company intelligence.
“Technology
companies are increasingly investing much of their valuable brain power into
crafting long-term, powerful relationships from the start of the customer
journey,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “By harnessing technologies such as
Artesian they’re uncovering opportunities to act in more contextually aware,
empathetic and personalised ways and in turn are seizing opportunities to
differentiate in an entirely different way, rather than focusing on features,
benefits and brand reputation alone.”
Yates continued
describing Artesian’s value proposition to technology sales reps:
“Harnessing the most valuable company information, market data and customer insights means Artesian’s technology customers can build innovative propositions for their products and services, prioritising ideas based on solving actual business challenges in each customer segment they serve. The sheer pace of change in the technology sector, including new entrant disruption, means enterprise providers can quickly fall behind if they’re not able establish deep, value-based relationships, especially when they may not be able to react as quickly within product development as their smaller competitors. Artesian’s growth in the sector highlights a shift in focus towards customer experience and value-based selling. Our technology customers are great examples of how to stay relevant and grow, even in a challenging political and economic environment.”
Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates
Artesian’s technology customers include Oracle, Amazon Web Services, SAP, BT, Infinity Tracking, and Canon.
Artesian Solutions has also shown strength selling to British banks and insurance companies. Another 2019 object is the infusion of artificial intelligence into financial services onboarding and compliance tools. The firm has 30,000 users located in the United Kingdom and United States.
Technographics vendor HG Data officially rebranded as HG Insights, rolling out a new name, logo, and website. The rebrand coincides with the launch of their new HG Insights platform. They have retained HG (Holy Grail, not mercury) and shifted from being a data company to an insights company, moving up the knowledge pyramid.
Customers are asking them to “help us isolate on tech
insights farther down the funnel,” said VP of Product and Marketing Kineon
Walker.
Outsell places information value along a five-level pyramid with raw data in the base and smart data (“normalized and standardized, categorized, linked, and indexed”) at level two. HG Data resided at level two with a highly regarded dataset of product / vendor data that was broadly licensed to sales intelligence vendors, customer data platforms, and predictive analytics companies. While a pure data licensing strategy can provide initial funds for a startup, it quickly caps the growth of the organization as much of the potential value add resides in licensor tools and insights, not the smart data. Thus, to continue growing, HG Data began developing customer-facing workflow tools (Outsell’s level three) a few years ago and expanded its content value with the September acquisition of London-based Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.
The Pivotal
IQ acquisition provided HG Data with an “opportunity to redefine what
technographics means and what technographics is” said Walker at the time.
HG Insights is emphasizing ABM targeting and strategic account intelligence:
“HG Insights helps you ignite opportunity. Opportunity that helps your business accelerate growth by providing you with an unprecedented view of the global markets, industries, and companies you sell to. Intelligence that empowers your business to generate more revenue from your Account Based Marketing programs by scoring your accounts and leads to pinpoint the best prospects. Insights that enable you to increase deal sizes by identifying the company profiles with the highest revenue potential. Insights that help you build better account strategy plans so that your sales team can increase win rates and shorten sales cycles. HG Insights delivers strategic account intelligence that allows your business to remove subjectivity from sales territory management and ensure that your team is focused on the best prospects in every market. Insights you can use to gain market share and outperform your competition. Insights you can trust.”
“We wanted to elevate the look and feel of what has become an
extremely sophisticated company,” said Walker. “No one has the quality
technographics that we have, which include the most accurate technology spend
data available in the market. The new on-demand capabilities of our HG
Insights Platform are unmatched by any competitor. Our unique ability to
work proactively with customers to deliver the Holy Grail of business insights
is reflected in our new name, and we’re excited to see our new HG Insights
Platform drive growth for businesses around the world.”
The HG Insights platform covers two million global company
locations with technographics and spending models. Technographic
intelligence spans 10,000 products across 4,500 vendors.
“We’ve always been an inventive company that finds new ways to help customers stay a step ahead. After seeing so many customers use our technology intelligence to make important strategic decisions, we knew it was time to define our company around the unique insights we deliver. Our new HG Insights Platform gives us an incredible opportunity to showcase our depth and expertise to new audiences with a fresh new image.”
Elizabeth Cholawsky, HG Insights CEO
HG Insights enterprise clients include Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AWS, Cisco, Tata, Workday and Red Hat. Data partners include DataFox (Oracle), TechTarget, Lattice Engines, and Dun & Bradstreet.
InsideView users will be able to validate Direct Dial Phones for contacts.
InsideView is adding Direct Dials to its Sales product. The lack of direct dials is a long-standing gap in its service as competitors have provided these numbers for several years. InsideView for CRM supports uploading and syncing of direct dials.
The new field is currently in beta. InsideView expects to have around two million direct dials in its service by the end of this quarter and is targeting ten million by the end of the year. The majority of the direct dials will be for US execs and mid-level managers.
InsideView currently provides 32 million global contacts with 15 million emails. The contacts span 14 million companies.
InsideView also announced Salesforce encryption support for adding and updating Account, Contact, and Lead records. The firm provided the following caveat, “If you are using deterministic encryption, InsideView will attempt to find existing duplicates as part of the ‘Update CRM” data sync/export. If you are using probabilistic encryption, InsideView won’t be able to query Salesforce for potential duplicates in Salesforce, but your users can still use the “Update CRM” feature.
The Drift SNAP partnership provides LinkedIn intelligence to sales reps as they chat with prospects on the Drift platform.
As part of their Q1 2019 release, LinkedIn rolled out a set of new SNAP (Sales Navigator Application Platform) partners including Altify, Drift, G2 Crowd, and Mixmax.
The Drift partnership allows sales reps to “continue website conversations” after a prospect drops off of a Drift chat: “sometimes people leave your conversation abruptly – it happens. But as an SDR, that’s a potential meeting walking out the door. So what do you do? Well now you can send a connection request or follow up message with InMail right from within Drift.”
The Drift
integration also displays contact and company intelligence including shared
connections while a sales rep is chatting with a prospect visiting her website
(see image on right).
“Gone are
the days of toggling back and forth between LinkedIn and your ongoing sales
conversation,” said Drift Product Marketer Daniel Murphy. “Say goodbye to
awkward lags in conversations. Prospects will never again have to wait for a
response while SDRs search LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Salesforce to determine
if they’re a good fit. Now they can research a prospect’s company, see
mutual connections, and grab other insights and conversation starters – all in
real-time.”
G2 Crowd
gathers intent data from 24 million technology searchers. Intent data is
collected from G2 profile and category views along with competitor comparisons.
Sales reps are notified when followed accounts are researching on G2
based on contact connections, sales preferences, search histories, and profile
interactions.
“People don’t buy today as a result of cold calls and emails. The power is in the hands of the buyers doing more research than ever before. As sales teams, we need to focus on accepting the modern buyer journey and connecting to the right buyers at the right time. We’ve always been aligned with LinkedIn on this vision, and this integration helps us make it a reality.”
G2 Chief Revenue Officer Matt Gorniak
The Mixmax
SNAP integration supports InMail and Connection requests and profile views from
Gmail.
Altify’s
org-chart software now displays insights and helps users identify key buyers
across an organization.
Sales Navigator insights and functionality are displayed alongside Altify’s Relationship Maps.
LinkedIn
also noted that it will be available within the Salesforce Winter 2019 release.
Salesforce admins can install the application from the Lightning Setup
Console instead of the AppExchange.
One problem that
has long dogged sales intelligence vendors is ongoing training and product
exploration. To encourage exploration, Sales Navigator added a coaching
feature to extend product knowledge. Sales Navigator Coach is a new
dashboard that “suggests actions for customers to take and links to short
learning videos.” Actions are associated with core workflows. The
videos run thirty to forty seconds.
The new Sales Navigator Coach provides short videos and tips on key features.
Finally, GDPR opt-outs are being added to PointDrive presentations. PointDrive recipients will be able to revoke viewer tracking permission, effectively anonymizing their viewing data from sales reps.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out Custom Account and Lead Lists in Q4 and added List Sharing in Q1 2019.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator began rolling out its Q1 release two weeks ago. New features include custom list sharing, Sales Navigator Coach, list building exclusion filters, new Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) integrations, and an expanded set of technologies selects.
LinkedIn
Sales Solutions VP of Product Management Doug Camplejohn was most excited about
custom list sharing, noting that that “selling is a team sport.”
Team members
can share lists with other users on their contracts, share comments, and sort
by “Last Updated” date so sales reps can stay apprised of updated leads and
accounts. Sales Navigator notifies users when lists are being shared with
them. However, lists reside only in LinkedIn and are not downloadable.
“Now we’re taking lists up a notch by adding the ability for you to share these custom lists between your team members and have comments shared as well. Sales Development Reps can collaborate with Account Executives on their team and share progress on breaking into new accounts. Relationship Managers and Customer Success Representatives can collaborate around the health of their named accounts throughout the customer lifecycle. And Marketing can easily share lists from events with the teams following up on new leads. The possibilities are endless.”
Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management, LinkedIn Sales Solutions
LinkedIn has
long described Sales Navigator as a system of engagement that worked with
systems of record (CRM) and communication (email, social). Much of the
initial focus was on lead messaging and SNAP connectors, but the firm is now
placing a greater focus on teamwork. Shared lead lists are “the first
step in a broader strategy to enable collaboration across your selling teams,”
wrote the firm.
Lead lists were released in Q4 and quickly employed by users. 250,000 custom lists were created within the first six weeks of availability. A quarter of active users created custom lists post-launch.
Users can
also save Leads and Accounts to custom Lists from partner applications via
their broad set of SNAP partners.
LinkedIn
stated that “sharing increases visibility of and fosters collaboration for your
pipeline.” Custom lists help teams organize and plan for key leads and
accounts within lists: “Sharing allows them to collaborate with others as they
research, contact, and advance relationships with those Leads and Accounts.”
Users can
track team outreach to prospects, share leads with managers to discuss
strategy, segment by source, and customize follow-on activities.
Other screening enhancements include the expansion of technology selects to 30,000 technologies and the addition of seven categories of exclusion criteria for leads: company, geography, seniority level, title, function, industry and school. Account exclusions are provided for geography and industry. Camplejohn noted that exclusion filters were one of the top user requests.
Part II covers SNAP partners, SFDC Lightning Setup Console integration, and the new Sales Navigator Coach
The Mattermark Account I-Frame in the Salesforce AppExchange supports both company news and an account overview with over 80 fields. The service is reasonably priced at $49 / user / month.
Mattermark is back as an independent company after being acquired by FullContact in late 2017. Unfortunately, the acquisition announcement was mishandled with FullContact first saying the product was going away and later saying that it was still available.
The relaunched
Mattermark attracted back much of its early staff including its founders
Danielle and Kevin Morrill and Product Lead Paul Denya. The firm has a
“renewed focus on private deal intelligence.”
“This transition has been in the works for the past few months without disruption to services. You have our assurance that will continue to be the case.”
Eric Milliken
To support
the relaunch, Mattermark is adding headcount to their customer service,
engineering, and data teams “to redouble our commitment to customer
satisfaction and data excellence.”
Mattermark data coverage spans 4 million companies, company news, and funding data. Users can leverage public lists or build shared lists. Mattermark also supports an API, Salesforce integration, Chrome extension, Google Sheets, and lead and account enrichment.
