Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong released Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake. The new solution delivers conversational insights captured from the Gong Conversational Sales platform to business intelligence tools. Insights capture activities, calls, and emails.
“Business leaders are under pressure to make the right strategic decisions that will help their companies thrive, especially in this challenging climate. But they often rely on manual data like CRM or field or customer surveys, which are subjective and go stale quickly,” said Gong CRO Ryan Longfield. “By teaming with Snowflake to bring this rich data and understanding from Gong directly into the broader set of insights, we are making it easier for leaders to improve their [go-to-market] strategy, productivity, and execution, all based on data that’s rooted in customer interactions.”
Gong rep productivity.
Historically, it has been challenging to determine which initiatives drive deals forward and increase the likelihood of winning a contract. As a result, sales reps have had few incentives to enter detailed activity and results information into CRMs. Furthermore, activity and engagement data have been stove-piped in different platforms or not captured digitally. Thus, only 54% of GTM leaders report having clear, real-time visibility into deal progression (April 2022 Harvard Business Review study sponsored by Gong).
Gong has automated the delivery of its sales insights to Snowflake, making it “easier for senior business leaders to have a view into revenue intelligence insights along with other key business metrics as they evaluate strategic decisions.” Joint customers can set up a no-code Gong Insights instance with data flowing automatically to their existing BI tool for dashboard and report development. Pre-built reports are also provided.
“Having access to the right data is critical to ensuring strategic decisions can be made that lead to growth,” said Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan. “By building on Snowflake, Gong is able to securely and seamlessly integrate its data into the rest of a company’s dataset, giving executives a clearer picture of the information they need to run their business.”
Use cases include churn risk factor analysis, most at-risk accounts, and identifying under and over-resourced accounts.
Gong Insights, Powered by Snowflake is generally available.
Gong Insights is also available as a CRM Enrichment process that syncs Gong data with the Salesforce Data Cloud or HubSpot. Finally, Gong Insights is displayed as an Initiatives Board within the Revenue Intelligence platform. The Dashboard “gives teams visibility into team adoption, as well as the ability to understand how initiatives resonate with their target market and correlate to business impact.”
IT Sales & Marketing Intelligence vendor TechTarget enhanced its intent capabilities with Confirmed Projects, a set of verified projects obtained via direct interviews with a buying team member. Confirmed Projects are planned for the next twelve months and include purchase requirements, challenges, desired outcomes, location, timeframe, and the vendor short-list.
Confirmed Projects are available through TechTarget’s Priority EngineSales Intelligence service. Project contact data are triple verified (email, phone, and employment) along with the contacts’ role in the purchase process.
“Confirmed Projects include specific insights on the technical and business purchase considerations in-market accounts are looking to address — intelligence that will dramatically increase seller efficiency and productivity because they now know where and how to concentrate their efforts to get in on real deals,” stated the firm.
Priority Engine’s enhanced territory filtering helps sales reps home in on their best opportunities.
“Thousands of B2B sellers use Priority Engine every day to fuel their outbound efforts by discovering new active buyers in their territories plus prospect-level intent that helps them break through,” said CPO Andrew Briney. “The integration of Confirmed Projects into Priority Engine gives them a unique ability to attack and revive stalled mid-funnel opportunities with precise, actionable details on verified purchase plans.”
The value proposition of Priority Engine with Confirmed Projects
Karlsruhe-based Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot rebranded as Dealfront this week. Dealfront is the combination of Echobot and visitor intelligence vendor Leedfeeder which merged last year. The rebrand coincides with the merger of the two companies on a common platform.
Dealfront content includes 30 million European companies, nearly 90 million contacts, 33 event triggers, and visitor intelligence. Dealfront sources company intelligence from national registries, company news, and corporate websites. Company content includes news, business events, corporate linkages, and registered financials.
Dealfront offers five products:
Target: ICP-based targeting spanning 30 million European companies and nearly 90 million contacts.
Connect: Sales Intelligence platform with company and contact profiles, build-a-list functionality, and Send to CRM.
Datacare: DaaS data cleansing and enrichment services. Datacare supports Bi-directional integrations with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. Dealfront also supports Zapier integrations and Slack notifications.
Web Visitors: GDPR-compliant website visitor tracking that maps page-visit activity to customers and prospects.
Promote: New Programmatic display functionality that supports targeted campaigns and IP-based retargeting of website visitors.
CEO Bastian Karweg argued that Dealfront, a European-based company, offers multiple advantages over North American-based sales intelligence and B2B Data companies. Dealfront differentiators include local market knowledge, European data hosting, and GDPR-compliant data gathered from company websites and local registries. Furthermore, Dealfront is transparent in its data sourcing and does not engage in community data mining or email scraping.
Dealfront offers native language sales and support, with offices in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Spain. Dealfront has grown to 330 employees that speak a dozen native languages, providing its clients with a “distributed, diverse salesforce across Europe.”
To emphasize its European bona fides, it adopted the blue and yellow colors of the EU flag and the tagline, “The way to win deals in Europe.”
“You just can’t do business in Europe the way you do business in the US. You don’t do business in France the way you do business in Germany,” remarked Dealfront CEO Bastian Karweg. “You don’t even do business in Berlin the way you do business in Bavaria. Dealfront delivers localized data, applications, and familiarity with European standards, culture, languages, and practices to give your sales and marketing team the advantage of feeling and acting at home in any European country or region – no matter where your business is based.”
The Dealfront platform supports four stages – Discover, Qualify, Convert, and Optimize – in a flywheel feedback loop that gains momentum as the platform refines each client’s ICP. “This flywheel effect turns static ICPs into dynamic, self-optimizing, and real-time customer profiles that always improve in accuracy and reflect reality. The result is more leads that end in sales, transforming businesses into a self-propelled revenue engine,” explained the firm.
“Our platform of data and applications shows you the best way to engage your ICPs in a localized way that’s effective in whatever country you’re in, in whatever region you’re targeting,” says Dealfront CPO Pekka Koskinen. “Because we’re on the inside and speak the language, we’re working with higher-quality live intelligence on your ideal buyers. Nothing gets lost in translation, nothing gets misunderstood, and nothing is outdated. Our platform, along with our teams on the ground in each location, empowers you to convert leads to deals.”
Last year, Great Hill Partners invested €180 million to merge Echobot and Leadfeeder and set aside €50 million to fund future strategic acquisitions for Dealfront. Clients include Hertz, Siemens, Eventbrite, and Pipedrive.
6sense Revenue AI for Sales helps prioritize account activity.
6sense released Revenue AI for Sales, its account prioritization platform that identifies in-market accounts and recommends contacts in an “anonymous world.” The service assists reps with prioritization, research, multi-threading, and personalization.
“Information overload is killing sellers’ productivity. In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, we need to give sellers the tools they need to reach new heights. This means giving sellers sales technology that helps them spend more time selling and less time on unproductive activities,” said CEO Jason Zintak. “We’ve already transformed marketing teams by revealing and targeting accounts and engaging anonymous buyers. Now we’re giving sales teams a massive upgrade from their legacy database vendors. This puts 6sense in a new category where we can innovate and lead, just like we have with others like predictive analytics and ABM. Early momentum from customers making the move to a better selling experience demonstrates the potential for impact.”
The Persona Map identifies engagement activity by role and level.
Revenue AI for Sales illuminates the “Dark Funnel,” where 97% of B2B research is conducted anonymously. 6sense ties new buyer intent signals with account and contact intelligence. Recommended Actions prioritize engagement and suggest which contacts to acquire and reach out to. 6sense offers first-party (visitor), second-party (G2 and TrustRadius), and third-party (Bombora) intent signals. It supports both topic and keyword intent alongside buying stage.
A Persona Map provides a visual map of the buying team, helping promote multi-threading and suggesting unknown buying team members. The map includes contact details, activities, and talking points.
People and company pages highlight company hierarchies, job insights, technographics, and psychographics. Contacts and accounts can be sent to CRMs, pushed to SEPs for engagement, and contacted via email, phone, or LinkedIn.
6sense insights are supported by a Chrome extension, allowing reps to prospect on the open web and identify potential buyers.
Prioritization Dashboards highlight in-market accounts and insights. 6sense also alerts reps to important account activity, recommended actions, and new buyer intent signals via email and Slack.
“Challenges exist on multiple fronts today as sellers have to navigate through a constant barrage of information and noise, plummeting productivity and increasing frustration,” said CTO Viral Bajaria. “With our AI-driven solution, sales teams will be able to focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – while our technology takes care of the rest. 6sense Revenue AI for Sales uses the power of AI, big data, and intelligence to give sellers confidence in their ability to close more deals and be the trusted advisor their customers want and need.”
6sense maintained its momentum last year, growing revenue by 70%. The company attributed its ongoing growth to its “strategic focus on new product introductions, market expansion, and ecosystem growth.”
New product introductions included the October release of Conversational Email. The module, which leverages Generative AI, intent, and pre-intent data, dramatically enhances productivity when sending marketing and sales emails and fielding responses. Conversational email composes “relevant and hyper-personalized emails to qualify and convert leads at scale.” 6sense claims its customers enjoy a 50 percent reduction in deal-cycle time, a 150% increase in average deal size, and $900K of new pipeline activity in four weeks.
“The results of the past year’s performance are a major achievement that demonstrates how the team’s hard work has paid off,” said Brian Ascher, Partner at Venrock. “As 6sense continues executing against commitments and the product roadmap, we expect to see this upward trend maintain its momentum. This is what the larger investor community loves to see, and we are proud of the 6sense team delivering these results.”
Other enhancements include ongoing investment in the Slintel database and the release of 6sense Pipeline Intelligence based on Fortella. Both Slintel and Fortella were acquired in H2 2021.
“6sense offers billions of data points of market-leading account and contact data along with best-in-class curated data, enhancing a customer’s own first-party data sources and tech stacks to deliver powerful B2B go-to-market strategies, insights, and orchestrations,” claimed the firm.
6sense continued to grow its partner ecosystem with new integrations, including HubSpot, Microsoft, and Integrate. In addition, its integrations with Dynamics and HubSpot CRM support prescriptive sales dashboards and buyer insights.
“Throughout the past year, we’ve built upon our growth in meaningful ways and continue to provide our customers with tangible value that impacts their bottom line,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “Using our own platform is essential to our success and puts us in a unique position where 6sense Revenue AI is a competitive advantage – both in our own category and where our customers compete. Looking across our customer base, we see revenue generation is 120% more effective when using 6sense, their deal size doubles, and win rate increases 4X.”
The firm has expanded internationally over the past year with an increasing presence in EMEA and APAC. The London office grew to 45 full-time employees, and APAC has over 400 employees in India and Singapore.
The new Relationship Explorer surfaces “hidden allies” and best paths into accounts, helping sales reps avoid cold outreach and “spam cannon techniques.”
“Instead of a blanket approach where you target everyone at an account, you can laser in on the people who are most likely to take a meeting with you based on their persona and what connection they have to you,” explained LinkedIn Senior Director of Product Mitali Pattnaik. “You can also use it to multi-thread deeper into accounts by finding the next-best person to reach out to. This creates a more efficient experience for buyers and sellers alike.”
Sales Navigator has long supported introductions and TeamLink (colleague) suggestions, but it has never fully leveraged the value of its economic graph for warm communications. The Economic Graph supports 900-million-member profiles across 61 million companies, along with current and prior employment, educational background, posts, etc.
Sales Navigator has a second advantage: its profiles are maintained by its members, ensuring that profiles are kept up to date and contain rich data around education, interests, skills, employment history, etc.
“Teams have relied so heavily on cold outreach largely because they’re leveraging sales intelligence tools that are limited in showing how to get a foot in the door of an account. These tools are chock-full of stale data: everything from incorrect contact info to the wrong person in the wrong role. With reliance on tools full of stale data, reps end up spamming all potential prospects with a spray-and-pray strategy, leading to an abysmal 1-2% response rate,” argued Pattnaik. “Looking forward, sellers are going to need to be smarter and reach out with a more personalized approach.”
Relationship Explorer recommends prospects at an account, leveraging the interactions and trends across its professional network “to provide sellers with optimal paths to connect with their target personas at their target accounts.” As a result, Relationship Explorer saves time prospecting, cross-selling, and upselling at accounts, helping reps find the best contacts at target accounts.
The feature offers up to eight “of the most relevant individuals” based on their target persona and relevant, actionable insights (called spotlights by LinkedIn) based on interactions between members and organizations. Spotlights highlight both biographic and dynamic information, including recent job changes, LinkedIn postings, and past customers. As such, they provide timely reasons to reach out and content to include in their outreach.
Relationship Explorer suggests the best contact at an account based on the user-defined persona.
Relationship Explorer is available in all Sales Navigator editions. However, while it displays a dozen spotlights, not all are available in each edition. For example, Past Customer spotlights are only available in the Advanced Plus edition.
Personas help users identify their target audience by function, seniority level, geography, and current job title. They are available on the Homepage, Search, Relationship Explorer, and Account pages.
Users can define up to five personas which act as templates for homing in on ideal prospects.
Persona definitions on the homepage.
Pattnaik suggested several use cases for personas:
Creating highly targeted Personas matching target customer profiles.
Leveraging Personas in Search, Homepage, or Account Pages to identify the most relevant opportunities.
Identifying warm paths and decision-makers at targeted accounts with Relationship Explorer.
Using insights from Account Pages, including Persona growth, to prioritize accounts composed of leads matching Personas.
Persona functionality is available to all users.
Over the past few releases, Sales Navigator has built buyer intent into its service. Its latest intent-based feature is Product Category Buyer Intent, which identifies buyers searching for products in their category.
Product Intent Categories
Previous Sales Navigator intent was based upon research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category but may not know a vendor or its offerings. The two types of intent data can be compared to understand the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
“Categories are created with AI by combining related keywords into one central category, which is then tied to products using publicly facing product descriptions. For example, “fintech” and “financial tech” are individual keywords, which the AI model can combine into a single category,” explained Pattnaik. “Intent is then connected using buyer’s members’ profile as well as recent buying activities on LinkedIn.com to help sellers find the buyers who are likely looking for a solution like theirs.”
LinkedIn is rolling out several new Buyer Activities that will be displayed on Account Pages and the Buyer Intent Account Dashboard. Additional intent categories are rolling out over the next quarter:
LinkedIn Ad Engagement: Clicks and view activity data. Both of these data points are private, so sellers will only be able to see the general profile of the buyer.
InMail Acceptance for a colleague: Displays the public identity of individuals who have accepted InMails from other sellers on the same contract.
Company LinkedIn page visits: Clicks on the company page. Page visits are a private activity, so the buyer is anonymous.
LinkedIn profile visits to colleagues and leadership: A new activity that shows sellers when a potential buyer visits the profile of a colleague on the same contract or company leadership. This is also a private activity.
Buyer Intent is available in the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions of Sales Navigator.
Users can now search against any account list or use an account list as a suppression list. Other new search filters include:
Past Customer (Advanced Plus only)
Past Colleague
Executive TeamLink – leverages the networks of a company’s executives (Advanced and Advanced Plus only).
Viewed Your Profile
Product Category Buyer Intent
LinkedIn also enhanced its Sales Insights (LSI) service with the improved matching of companies to CRM accounts and Adjustable Growth Time ranges.
LinkedIn admitted that its previous LSI matching logic may have been inaccurate as it only matched against a few standard CRM fields. LSI now supports CRM custom ingestion that improves match rates with customer-defined match fields. There is also an option to force matches based on LinkedIn Ids or URLs.
LinkedIn Sales Insights Field Mapping
Adjustable Growth Time Ranges can be set to 3, 6, 12, and 24-month increments.
Scandinavian Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu released a new platform for its Swedish and Finnish databases. The new platform includes expanded datasets, CRM connectors, usage-based pricing, and an updated UX.
Customers can migrate to the new platform or stay on the old one near-term. However, future development will only be made for the new one.
The new platform offers a “simplified and unified” UX to “better represent what we offer clients: Actionable and reliable business data,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang. Changes include a simplified prospecting module for Norway and Sweden and updated profile displays.
The platform includes a new filter architecture that will allow Vainu to “develop new filters in the UI faster as our databases expand with new data sets without compromising the platform’s speed or usability.”
Users can now define custom table layouts for reports which are reflected in the product and when downloading tables. Users control which fields to display and their order. In addition, Vainu added a JSON download format.
Vainu’s updated Build a List UX.
As the new platform pricing is usage-based, it includes a usage dashboard that tracks records downloaded and CRM account records matched.
While the old platform supported 400 financial variables, they were “incoherent and unmaintained fields, with duplicates, poor documentation, and poor naming.” The new standardized financials display “100 carefully picked financial terms,” and financials are segmented for improved display and navigation.
Along with field display, the reports include definitions, making it easier to understand KPIs and how fields are calculated and rolled up.
To help with customer outreach, Vainu added 26,000 GDPR-compliant, human-verified contacts for Finland and Sweden. Contact records include title, phone number, email, and LinkedIn handle. Contacts were collected for firms with at least 10M€ (Finland) or 100MSEK (Sweden) in turnover.
Scandinavian Business ID connectors are available for Salesforce, MSD 365, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. Global Domain-based connectors support Salesforce and HubSpot.
Bang noted that some customers and prospects had found Vainu to be a “significant financial commitment.” The new usage-based pricing model “helps alleviate this worry” as it “lowers the barrier to entry for trying out data.”
SMB Pricing for one of the Nordic country databases begins at 4,200€ per annum with a 750€ onboarding fee. The Team level supports one user and includes data updates and workflow triggers for 1,000 accounts. The Business edition is similar but supports 8,000 updated accounts with triggers for 9,900€.
The Global Business database, which is domain-based, supports up to 10,000 company exports or enrichments and provides full access to the global database. The Global Database is priced at 12,000€, with each band of 10,000 additional enrichments priced at 1,000€.
Vainu has shifted to a usage-based pricing model that monitors the number of downloaded and enriched records.
Databook account insights are displayed in Salesforce Account and Opportunity records.
Sales Intelligence vendor Databook unveiled a Salesforce connector that helps “sales teams translate financial data and business insights into sales strategy and execution.” The AppExchange solution provides access to “personalized, real-world insights and recommendations” concerning which accounts are in-market, whom to contact, and how to message their offerings.
Databook employs AI and NLP to generate account and solution-specific insights “with the same level of relevancy and value provided by professional consulting firms.” Custom content supports “account planning, executive preparation, value architecture, ABM, and customer presentations.”
Insights include
Databook Score (propensity-to-buy scoring)
Recommended use cases
Financial case for change
Strategic priorities
Management intent
Buying cycle history and trends
Investor sentiments
Databook Risks & Opportunities insights
Account insights highlight customer priorities and pain points, helping reps hone messaging and identify risks and opportunities. Databook insights are displayed in account and opportunity tabs and include strategic insights, recommendations, and “downloadable executive decks and point-of-views that align to corporate priorities, market conditions, fiscal year timing, and financial case for change.” Databook also notifies reps about key account changes.
Opportunity recommendations include tips/steps such as “select an economic buyer for this opportunity,” “review management changes at <account>,” “read <account>’s latest earnings transcript.”
Sales reps can download a set of overviews and tools, including executive point-of-view decks, sales presentations, executive briefings, company profiles, and an account worksheet offering a step-by-step account strategy.
Sales reps can link from the CRM dashboard to Databook to identify deal expansion opportunities. Databook highlights use cases deployed at similar companies that may be relevant. Use cases are highlighted with “relevant proof of success and value-driven vision for the future to create the strongest possible pitch that resonates with executive buyers.”
Databook presents financial and business data sourced from over a dozen vendors.
During the beta period, early adopters increased company research by 157% when accessing Databook insights from both the web and Salesforce vs. simply conducting research via the browser. The firm claims that sales teams using Databook average 3X more pipeline, 2.5X larger deals, and 1.5X faster cycle times.
“Now, more than ever, sales reps need to hone strategic acumen to drive executive relationships and effective sales execution,” said Databook CEO Anand Shah. “Databook’s new CRM application combines essential external context about a company’s business objectives, financials, and budget cycles with the internal account and opportunity information within Sales Cloud to create a new level of intelligence and customer understanding. Now any rep can have an executive-level conversation aimed directly at the business problem they solve in order to repeatedly grow and close deals.”
Databook closed on a $50 million Series B in March led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by DFJ Growth, Threshold, Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Haystack.
Owler maintains lists of companies that have been synced with HubSpot.
Company Intelligence vendor Owler unveiled a pair of integrations with HubSpot and Microsoft Teams. Both offerings are available through its Owler Max subscription product for sales reps.
Owler supports competitive and sales intelligence, with data gathered from web mining and crowdsourcing. Along with standard firmographics, it offers M&A intelligence, funding profiles, company news alerts, and twenty-three sales triggers.
Owler Max is their sales intelligence edition with CRM syncing, email alerts, and prospecting. Reps control which of the twenty-three alert categories are relevant, including new triggers based on revenue and employee count changes.
Company prospecting selects include industry, location, company status, revenue, employee counts, funding history, and competitors. Owler profiles 15 million global companies, with the option to push companies and lists to the CRM. Company data is passed bi-directionally, while news can be used to create HubSpot Tasks or display alerts via email, HubSpot, or Slack.
News and company profile links are embedded within HubSpot Tasks.
“Owler Max provides sales teams with resources they need to do their jobs the best they possibly can,” said Owler CEO Tim Harsch. “Our new integrations and data insights offer sales teams key improvements to organization, workflow, and research efficiency. Sales professionals can leverage data better, drive desired results quicker, and grow the capacity of collaboration in the remote work era.”
Owler syncs data every six hours and can match and upload 1,000 records per minute.
The Teams integration was launched back in August. Owler Max users will see their MS Teams instance in the Owler Max dashboard. They then click connect, name the connection, and syncing commences for all followed companies. Team members can then read, collaborate, or share company intelligence via Teams or email, with alerts automatically posted to Teams channels. Alerts may be aggregated from all lists or customized. Users can also control which of its nearly two dozen event categories should be shared so that only relevant topics are posted.
“Owler Max’s new offerings put sales teams on a straight path to winning. To unlock their full potential, sales teams need efficient access to personalized data and tools for seamless workflow. By providing this scaffolding, Owler Max gives sales professionals an immediate competitive edge.”
Owler CEO Tim Harsch
Owler Max is priced at $600 per annum with a minimum of five seats. Owler Max also supports a Salesforce connector.
Demandbase sales and marketing engagement data can be visually displayed in Dynamics 365.
Demandbase unveiled a pair of CRM connectors for HubSpot and MSD 365. The bi-directional, native integrations allow Demandbase One to push data into the CRMs for automated workflows, Lead-to-Account mapping, tracking, and responding to engagement activity. Syncing is performed nightly.
“This release creates a unified interface that empowers revenue operations, sales, and marketing teams to grow predictable pipeline and close larger deals,” blogged Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier. “The integrations enable a variety of rich workflows for customers to enhance their analytics, derive valuable insights, target more efficiently, and build reporting that aligns with their own CRM data set and their GTM needs.”
Demandbase launched the unified first and third-party view in its Salesforce connector this summer and has now expanded it to two other leading CRMs.
Demandbase offers a set of Calculated Fields that includes intent, engagement, and predictive scores that are synced and displayed in CRMs.
Demandbase feeds intent and engagement data, firmographics, technographics, and Demandbase Calculated Fields into CRMs. With this data, operations can create CRM custom sales views, reports, and dashboards that display website activity, intent, and heatmaps. Sales reps can view both sales intelligence and engagement data from a unified view.
Furthermore, CRM data is available for list building and filtering in Demandbase One. Users can define selectors, set up orchestration, create Demandbase campaigns, visualize and apply Demandbase intent and predictive scores, analyze journeys, and build reports. Furthermore, “accurate account identification, combined with their CRM data, also means better predictive models, marketing and sales alerts, personalization opportunities, and more.”
For example, past opportunity data from the CRMs are now available to Demandbase pipeline predict and qualification scoring models to assist with account prioritization. Demandbase also helps, “align messaging to each stage” of the buyer’s journey and assists with list building and campaign execution.
Conversely, Demandbase is syncing its insights (e.g., intent data, web traffic, most engaged contacts) with the CRM, helping reps prioritize accounts and prepare for account interactions. Insights include Demandbase’s configurable data, such as its scores and engagement minutes that populate custom fields.
Demandbase brought firmographic, contact, and technographics databases in-house following the May 2021 acquisitions of InsideView (firmographics, contacts, and event triggers) and DemandMatrix (technographics). Intent data includes first and third-party intelligence such as Surging Intent, Demandbase Keyword Intent, Campaign Responses, 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.
“Both of these integrations improve orchestration, delivering greater sales and marketing alignment and a friction-free experience,” stated Demandbase.
“These integrations ensure our customers who use Dynamics 365 and HubSpot CRM realize the full value of the Demandbase platform. Pairing Demandbase natively with the CRM allows our customers to orchestrate a seamless go-to-market motion with full alignment between marketing and sales. We’re providing the full power of our Account Intelligence in these connected systems and saving sales and marketing teams time by providing them actionable insights wherever they want to consume them. The result is better performance with less manual effort at every stage of the customer journey.”
Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw
Demandbase is not done with the connectors. It plans to add additional functionality to the CRMs, including “new sales-focused experiences, additional capabilities in the Demandbase app in Dynamics, enhanced Lead-To-Account functionality, and the ability to automate and scale account-based / people-based plays directly from your activities.”
Demandbase supports both HubSpot CRM and Marketing Automation platforms.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator unveiled its Q4 release this month with new account and relationship intelligence lists, improvements to buyer intent, refined searching, expanded revenue and technology data, and a more streamlined ability to upload a sales rep’s book of business.
The new My Current Accounts homepage prompt lets sales reps load their book of business as a CSV list matched against LinkedIn company profiles. In addition, LinkedIn offers a quick field mapper to ensure the CSV is properly ingested and matched to the correct LinkedIn company profiles.
Account Lists provide several benefits to sales reps. Sales Navigator users can
Review real-time alerts around sales triggers such as funding events, leadership changes, and headcount growth/decline
Streamline search and prospecting efforts by spotlighting specific saved searches based a user’s book of business
“Yes, it’s great on its own,” blogged LinkedIn Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray. “But it reaches a whole new level of capability when you can manage your entire book of business in Sales Navigator – insights surfaced via features like Buyer Intent are more actionable, searching becomes more powerful, and it’s that much easier to stay on top of what’s happening at your most important accounts.”
LinkedIn already aggregated Buyer Intent scores spanning 180 different intent signals, and it added four isolated visible Buyer Intent activities as part of an early beta in Q3. LinkedIn plans to release additional Buyer Intent activities in future releases. These specific activities are displayed with the associated account. Furthermore, when the intent activity is public-facing, the individual completing the activity is also presented to the sales rep.
The four isolated Buyer Intent activities are
Who’s followed a company
Who’s visited your profile
Who’s a new connection to yourself
Who’s filled out a lead gen form
Reps can view LinkedIn buyer intent against their account list and then target accounts with high intent levels.
LinkedIn contends that its intent insights differ from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence. Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account. Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”
Sales Navigator said that it will offer a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement.”
Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.
Current Account Lists and Buyer Intent are available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.
Buyer Activities capture account and contact-level intent.
LinkedIn did not expand the Buyer Intent categories in Q4 but added two new features: Filtering for Buyer Activities and new Buyer Intent account hover cards. On Account Pages, sales reps can filter for activities by time range and level of decision-making ability.
Reps can also hover over accounts on Alerts, Lists, and Lead Pages to better evaluate an opportunity and refine account messaging. The hover popup displays the level of buyer interest, recent news, and decision-makers changes “so sellers can easily double check any account’s level of intent as the work through Sales Navigator, without disrupting the current workflow.”
Hover cards provide account intelligence without disrupting research flow.
The New Executives at Saved Accounts List is an auto-generated list based on the saved accounts list. The list identifies VP and CxO executives hired by tracked accounts. While the executive view restricts the report to top-level executives, it doesn’t yet support filtering by function, a valuable report extension.
I’ve long extolled the value of identifying new executives at companies. Fortunately, sales intelligence solutions are doing a better job of leveraging executive change insights in their products:
D&B Hoovers supports exec change alerts and triggers by job function.
ZoomInfo offers executive tracking of champions to new companies along with backfill contact recommendations at their old employer.
LinkedIn identifies new execs at saved accounts.
“We’ve found a lot of success internally being able to see when a new executive comes in,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions Head of Product Marketing Neil Khare explained to GZ Consulting during a briefing. “They’re generally more willing to think about new vendors or have a mandate to change things up a little bit. It’s a great time to capitalize on it, and we find that we’ve had some success internally on it, so we wanted to bring this up externally as well.”
LinkedIn also released a Recently Accepted Connections and InMails List highlighting individuals who responded to connection requests or InMails over the past thirty days.
The lists are available online from the list tab or via a weekly email digest.
“These are people that you are going to want to follow up with,” stated Khare.
Users can access two updated filters when building lists: Technology Used and Revenue. Both filters have been improved with new data licensing agreements from undisclosed data partners.
Accounts may be filtered by preset revenue ranges (vs. discrete values determined by the end-user). All revenue data is in US Dollars.
To improve regional screening, users can paste a set of postal codes.
LinkedIn Sales Insights, LinkedIn’s DaaS enrichment service for sales ops, also benefited from expanded revenue data sourced from LinkedIn members, third-party vendors, and AI models. 95% of Fortune 500 and 75% of publicly traded companies display discrete revenue data. More broadly, 60% of companies have at least a modeled revenue range.
To improve the Sales Insights workflow, LSI added exclusion filters for companies and personas, helping Sales Operations “focus on industries and geographies that are relevant to your business.”
LinkedIn Sales Insights now offers exclusion criteria to improve reporting filters.
