Category: Sales Intelligence

Global Database

Global Database Build a List supports expanded growth, ownership, and industry variables.

UK-based Sales Intelligence vendor Global Database continues to expand its content and functionality.  Recent platform enhancements include expanded prospecting variables, industry coding, and list enrichment.

New screening variables include

  • Annual Growth: Turnover, Headcount, EBITDA, Net Profit, Liabilities, and Exports
  • Ownership: Parents, Number of subsidiaries, Foreign parent, Number of shareholders
  • Industry: European and North American industry codes, Industry Keywords

International SIC and NACE codes are available across the full company universe.  Global Database also implemented an NLP tool that crawls company websites and identifies keywords and business descriptions.  This descriptive content is then mapped to over 100,000 industry keywords.

“The SIC code is outdated when it comes to new industry verticals, such as Big Data or E-commerce, and if you are looking for such companies by SIC Code, they will be classified as: 63990 – Other information service activities n.e.c., explained CEO Nicolae Buldumac to GZ Consulting.

Global Database now supports company and contact list enrichment for Salesforce and MS Dynamics.  Users upload a list that is matched against its reference database and enriched with over 80 variables and match score confidence.  Matching employs registration numbers, corporate names, domains, phone, postal codes, etc. 

Global Database also provides an interactive report with match rates and segmentation.  Enrichment analytics include match rates, list averages, company status distribution, turnover distribution, top five companies, and pie charts for employment, years in business, and industry.  A location map is also displayed.

Other data tools include CRM maintenance, APIs, and web forms with auto-population.

The Global Database universe now spans 130 million companies and 118 million contacts:

Global Database Counts as of October 2021.

Most of its data is from trade registries, publicly available sources, an in-house data research team, and a few data vendor partnerships.  Direct emails are available for 17 million contacts and mobile numbers for 1.6 million.  If a contact does not have an email or phone number, Global Database integrates with two data vendors, where this information is requested via API in real-time.

Global Database continues to expand its universe of credit reports, with instant Business Credit Reports now available for 350 million companies.  If a country does not support instant reports, customers may request a new investigation from on-the-ground resources.  These reports are delivered within five to seven business days.

Credit reports are priced between £19 and £80, with the UK and Irish reports at the low end.  Most continental European credit reports are priced between £35 and £40.  North American reports are also priced at £40.

Global Database Employee tab.

Cognism a Future Fifty Company in UK

UK Sales Intelligence vendor Cognism was named to Tech Nation’s Future Fifty 2021 list.  CEO James Isilay called the past year “a year of incredible transformation” for Cognism as it grew revenue by 90% and closed in on $20 million ARR. 2021 is the second consecutive year that Cognism made the exclusive Future Fifty list.

Cognism was also named one of the top 15 UK Startups by LinkedIn.  The firm continued hiring through the pandemic, with LinkedIn listing 277 employees in the UK, US, and Europe.  Cognism has been rapidly building out its sales team, growing it 165% over the past year to 90 headcount.  Its support team grew 58% over the past year to 40 CSMs.  Cognism also doubled its product management and IT teams.

London-based Cognism grew its headcount 63% over the past year and 115% over the past two. It’s ARR is nearing $20M.

Cognism plans to retain a flexible working environment and recruit talent outside of its primary office locations.  LinkedIn lists 23 positions in London, Boston, New York, Germany, Croatia, and South Africa.

On Monday, Cognism announced Diamond Data, “a new standard in B2B data quality.”  It emphasized that its contacts are accurate, compliant, and phone-verified.  Mobile numbers are phone-verified and checked against global do not call (DNC) lists. Cognism contacts are GDPR and CCPA compliant.

Cognism promises to “minimise inefficiencies due to inaccurate job titles and incorrect / misdialed numbers and create a leaner, faster sales process.”  Cognism offers revenue teams “unrestricted access to prospect data” available through its platform and via CRM and SEP connectors.

A new Diamonds-on-Demand request feature supports on-demand phone verification.  Users simply click on a Diamond Verify button to initiation validation.  A diamond appears on headshots of verified contacts.

“As a company we are constantly researching and identifying new opportunities and partnerships to ensure our platform delivers the best possible results for the highly competitive B2B market landscape. Diamond Data is just that – the best you can get. It is always evolving, and we want to assure our clients that they can target their prospects in confidence, leaving the compliance and data accuracy to us.”

Cognism CEO James Isilay

Diamond Data is immediately available.

Cognism is also delivering Bombora’s intent dataset for identifying in-market buyers and related contact information.  Intent data is available as a screening select and displayed as a build-a-list Heat Map.

Cognism’s new Diamond Data offering.

Finally, Cognism announced that industry veteran Phil Garlick joined their board.  Garlick served as the VP of Corporate Development at DiscoverOrg and President of OneSource Information Services.

Echobot TARGET 2.0

German Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot released version 2.0 of its TARGET prospecting service with a refreshed UI, improved data quality, and AI tools for ICP and segmentation analysis.

“If you want to digitize your sales processes and save a lot of time, money, and nerves, you can’t ignore Echobot,” said CEO Bastian Karweg.  “TARGET 2.0 inspires the everyday sales life of our customers – the new version is fast, intuitive to use, and simply fun.”

Echobot has set its product vision based on the “first principles of data” delivered through its service.  “For data to be useful, it has to be high quality, connected, and fully compliant,” said Karweg.

The first step was unifying their database across regions and datatype and removing data silos within the platform.  Echobot implemented a “unified, nested data index” that improved query times up to ten-fold and allowed for enhanced switching between company and contact results.

Users no longer need to build company and contact lists separately. Instead, build-a-list results are displayed as tabs, allowing users to analyze both company and contact results without requiring them to rekey their query.

Echobot also implemented a new Email Validation Engine (EVA) that “eliminates stale records” and implements mail server and pattern checking to improve data quality.  The EVA reduces bounce rates by up to thirty percent.

Echobot licensed company records directly from trade registers and implemented a “True Compliance” process.

“For your outreach to be truly GDPR compliant, you not only need a Legitimate Interest but also be mindful of the preferences of the people you are trying to contact,” stated Karweg.  “Using Echobot, each contact record comes with a public source URL so you can be 100% confident when a prospect asks you, ‘Hey, where did you get my data from?’”

Echobot Job Title Suggestions

Echobot implemented AI to assist users, building a subject taxonomy that covers over 100,000 topics and industry keywords.  TARGET 2.0 sports a keyword type-ahead tool that “guides you towards the right queries and also intelligently suggests alternative keywords or job titles you also might want to include in your search.”

The firm’s new segmentation analysis is their “most advanced AI” that builds a company vector model for clustered analysis of highly similar companies from uploaded files.  The clusters identify similar companies for downloading to the desktop or uploading to the CRM.  Thus, users can upload their Ideal Customer Profile and expand it with similar companies.  The ICP is also used to score prospects and sort them by priority.

“Echobot uses a new company vector model for the first time in addition to rigid industry codes. The technology is based on machine learning and makes it possible to select companies in a fine-grained manner according to thousands of specialist areas. The assignment takes place automatically on the basis of text content that is associated with the respective company. This means that if you are looking for industries, Echobot now offers an immense wealth of detail and can thus easily find even high-precision target groups. With the help of so-called cross joins, filters of different data areas can be combined with each other in real-time. This completely eliminates the time-consuming storage of interim results.”

Echobot Press Release (Translated from German)

TARGET 2.0 supports a broad set of screening variables:

  • Industry – Industry codes or keywords.
  • Keyword
  • Contacts – Department, Level, Title
  • Trigger Events
  • Location – Region and Radius
  • Company Size
  • Financials
  • Technographics – Software and Systems
  • Firmographics
  • Data Completeness

Their instant access to data allows for complete data visibility without slowing down users with credits to display contact details. In addition, the contract includes a minimum of 10,000 monthly record uploads or downloads with a FLAT-RATE Guarantee that provides an additional 5,000 monthly data records after consuming the EXPORT quota. The guarantee ensures budgeting stability while providing export flexibility should the marketing department consume their entire download quota mid-year.

Echobot pricing starts at €999 per month for up to three users.  This price is introductory and will increase for new customers in 2022.

Echobot supports four countries – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the UK – and two languages – German and English.  The Echobot roadmap includes “intelligent” email alerts, “helpful” trigger events, and “smart” campaign management.  Additional languages and countries are also in development.

ZoomInfo Chorus Integration

Go-to-Market Platform ZoomInfo announced that it completed the first stage of its Chorus Integration after acquiring the Conversational Sales firm in mid-July.

“Since announcing ZoomInfo’s acquisition of Chorus…our team has made great strides in seamlessly making key features of the Chorus platform available to our customers. These integrations will allow sales, marketing, and operations teams to instantly use both ZoomInfo and Chorus to expand their pipelines via a data-first approach that they can’t get with any other platform on the market.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

Conversational Sales functionality has also been added to ZoomInfo’s Engage SEP.  Chorus transcribes and analyzes calls, helping them build strong customer and prospect relationships and be more present during calls. For example, ZoomInfo dialer calls are recorded and stored in Salesforce while Chorus transcribes and analyzes the conversation.

Chorus’ Momentum Insights are displayed in the ZoomInfo platform under the Chorus tab.

Momentum Insights are available in ZoomInfo, Chorus, and Salesforce, delivering call insights wherever the rep is working.  “Combined Chorus and ZoomInfo users can now view conversation and relationship insights within the ZoomInfo platform for better visibility and management of their prospect and customer pipeline,” stated the firm.

The new Chorus tab in ZoomInfo lets revenue teams see with whom they’ve engaged across the account; whether the interactions were via inbound email, outbound email, or meeting; and the most recent interaction.  The Momentum Insights chart shows touchpoints over time with the ability to search by participants and activity type.  Users can drill down on any of the interactions for email or call details.  Audio can be reviewed from within ZoomInfo’s account and contact views.

Users can also drill down on Quick Signals or search by keyword from the Chorus tab, allowing reps to research deal risks, wow moments, negative sentiment, next steps/to-dos, timeline discovery, etc.  Chorus supports hundreds of topics that can be customized.  For example, companies can filter by specific competitors or product feature capabilities.

While the primary use case for Signals is rep account review, managers can use the tool for deal discussions, skill review, and coaching.  Likewise, product managers can broadly investigate customer calls to research specific topics (e.g., product complaints, competitors). 

When the user clicks on a signal, a textual synopsis of the discussion is provided, along with the ability to review that part of the discussion.  These tools are essential for reviewing negative sentiment, pricing discussions, competitors, etc.  Also, call snippets can be extracted for training (e.g., objection handling, competitive parrying, value messaging) or forwarding questions in the voice of the customer to subject matter experts or service departments.

Chorus users also benefit from the integration, with ZoomInfo serving as the reference data set for customer contact intelligence.  ZoomInfo claims that switching to ZoomInfo’s database and matching logic (from Clearbit) resulted in a 33% lift in match rates and a 10X faster load time for contact records in Chorus (150 MS).  Enriched company and contact intelligence include department, job function, seniority level, business email, phones, industry, location, and company.

According to Chorus, ten percent of calls have attendees that were not announced, leaving the rep blind to the role and importance of the additional attendees.  In other cases, a third party is mentioned, but that individual is not in attendance.  In either case, ZoomInfo will surface contact information for these individuals, helping fill out the Buying Committee.  ZoomInfo also recommends personas who are likely Buying Committee members, fostering multi-threaded discussions across the Demand Unit.

“In addition to helping you expand across your deals, you’ll gain a new understanding of which deals are more likely to close, helping improve your forecast accuracy and visibility across your pipeline,” blogged Senior Director of Customer & Product Marketing Sophie Cheng.  “ZoomInfo’s rich company insights like noteworthy scoops (news and events), intent data, and reporting relationships, infused with Chorus’ new Momentum suite will help paint a clearer picture of the entire relationship context like who’s involved in each deal, what’s being discussed, and the likelihood to close.”

Chorus speaking track analysis

RelPro – IBISWorld Partnership

Sales Intelligence vendor RelPro announced a partnership with well-regarded industry research vendor IBISWorld to deliver an integrated solution for commercial banks.  The joint offering, delivered via the RelPro platform, assists with meeting preparation, due diligence, and industry research.  Ten commercial banks have already deployed the integrated solution, including three of the top five.

RelPro serves business development and relationship management professionals in Financial Services (banking, insurance, wealth management, private equity) and Professional Services (legal, and advisory).  RelPro users are often industry generalists who serve SMBs across many industries.  IBISWorld provides broad industry research across sectors along with economic and environmental changes.

RelPro is a traditional sales intelligence service with company and executive content sourced from seventeen partners.  Data partners include ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, BoardEx, GuideStar, Crunchbase, and HG Insights.  RelPro users build prospecting lists, perform account planning, identify additional contacts at key accounts, and, with the IBISWorld partnership, research industries based upon each company’s industry codes.

IBISWorld industry intelligence is linked by industry codes to company profiles in RelPro.

“RelPro has always been a client-driven solution, focused on the needs of business development and relationship management professionals in financial services and professional services, so when our clients asked us to integrate with a new intelligence source we listened!” said RelPro CEO Martin Wise, “The value of industry insights has been so evident as our users have pivoted and navigated through the shifting economic landscape, preparing for meetings with prospects and clients.  We are thrilled to be partnering with IBISWorld and delivering our combined capabilities to mutual clients.”

RelPro said that the partnered solution is consistent with its mission “to deliver valuable insights and time-saving efficiencies to business development and relationship management professionals” across banking and professional services.

The partnership began a year ago when a top five commercial bank requested an integrated solution.  The firms polished the integration over the past year, with the announcement synced to the April launch of My IBISWorld for Banking.

My IBISWorld for Banking includes tailored industry tools, data, and analysis to support banking professionals throughout the entire credit process.  Expanded content includes enhanced financial ratios, localized statistics “to understand concentration and major market data,” role-based views, risk snapshots that highlight industry risks and trends, and targeted meeting prep questions.

“Recently, we’ve seen a shift towards banking professionals working more closely with other functions, creating cross-department synergies in this newly-remote world.  We’ve also seen a great need for hyper-local data so banks can better serve small businesses during these unprecedented times. My IBISWorld for Banking fosters this cross-departmental work and helps banks support their customers.”

Carmen McKinney, Chief Operations Officer and Head of Customer Success at IBISWorld

“Being a part of our clients’ workflows has been a continuous goal for us at IBISWorld,” said Jason Falkowitz, SVP, IBISWorld Industry Research Division.  “From the launch of our My IBISWorld for Banking platform and our robust API offering to our new partnership with RelPro, we are committed to offering world-class industry information in client-led formats. Combining IBISWorld’s industry intelligence with RelPro’s focus on targeting companies and decision-makers, mutual clients will be best positioned to win and retain commercial relationships.”

IBISWorld content is delivered within the RelPro solution, with single sign-on supported.  The partners initially focused on their set of joint customers with contracts written on separate paper.  There is no surcharge for the cross-product authorization and functionality.

RelPro company profile screen showing links to IBISWorld Research on primary NAICS / SIC Codes.

Last year, RelPro released a similar solution with Vertical IQ.  Both Vertical IQ and IBISWorld provide industry profiles and economic data, with Vertical IQs content written in plain English for cross-industry generalists, while IBISWorld offers a more formal format.

“RelPro now integrates with the two leading independent sources of industry research,” Wise told GZ Consulting.  “It is for clients to decide which of these two solutions best meets their needs, and RelPro can deliver an integrated and time-saving user experience to either / both sources. This new partnership announcement is consistent with RelPro’s mission to deliver valuable insights and time-saving efficiencies to business development and relationship management professionals in banking and other financial and professional services sectors.” RelPro revenues (bookings) grew 40% in 2020, and the company expects that growth in 2021 will be at least that much

TechTarget Acquires Xtelligent Healthcare Media

On its earnings call last week, TechTarget announced its latest acquisition, Xtelligent Healthcare Media, a Boston-based firm with a similar content model to TechTarget.  It has over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites.  Content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market. Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.

“The healthcare IT market is one of the most important vertical technology markets and a natural adjacency for TechTarget to expand into. This acquisition checks all of the boxes for us.  Xtelligent has an original content model with a permission-based audience of registered members and a large amount of first-party purchase intent data.”

CEO Michael Cotoia in TechTarget’s Q2 2021 Letter to Shareholders

Similar to BrightTALK, Xtelligent did not have a solution for disseminating its intent data, but TechTarget will create new purchase intent segments and feed them into Priority Engine, expanding Priority Engine’s potential user base.

Xtelligent CEO, Sean Brooks, is a former TechTarget VP who founded Xtelligent a decade ago.  Brooks will continue to run the business.  Cotoia noted that Brooks built Xtelligent with a similar opted-in, permission-based audience model.

“We are very excited to join TechTarget and extend our combined audiences and offerings into new markets,” said Brooks. “TechTarget’s experience and success with first-party data, combined with their deep understanding of the B2B Media & Data space, will help us continue to grow and offer customers new opportunities to reach and engage highly targeted healthcare technology decision-makers.”

“[Healthcare] is a vertical that we’ve been keeping our eye on for a couple of years and the adjacent vertical where healthcare intersects with IT and infrastructure, security, hardware, and software, just made all the sense in the world to us. We believe it’s going to open the door to new customers [and] opportunities….We believe that we have an untapped revenue opportunity with Priority Engine and bringing our purchase intent data onto the Xtelligent community.”

TechTarget is eyeing other adjacent verticals, including FinTech and Asset Management, where BrightTALK has some penetration.

TechTarget paid $25 million in cash for Xtelligent, which includes an additional $5 million earn-out.

Bombora in D&B Hoovers

Search Results include Bombora Intent Badges.

D&B Hoover’s customers can now view and build lists of in-market accounts using the Bombora intent file.  Users can set up SmartLists (dynamic lists) with a combination of account and intent data to identify in-market ICP accounts.  The list is then displayed on the sales rep’s desktop and daily email digest.

Target lists can be assembled from over 175 selects that span company, contact, intent, and technographics.  Bombora intent data is gathered from over 4,000 B2B media website and span 7,000 pre-defined topics.  70% of the websites are exclusive to Bombora.

Dun & Bradstreet provides a sophisticated approach to selecting intent topics that tie to business strategy.  Instead of simply choosing the obvious topics, the firms recommend that customers employ topic clusters, “a group of like-minded Intent topics [that are] representative of all facets of a product or service.”  Clusters would include

  • Brand/Products (core): Brands, products, key functions
  • Competitors/Partners: Brands and products of competitors and partners
  • Industry/Vertical: Strongly associated categories, use cases, and product/service capabilities
  • Pain Points/Challenges: Pain points, issues, expected outcomes
Multiple intent topics may be monitored in a SmartList.

Dun & Bradstreet has removed intent scores, which are often confusing.  By creating clusters, topics are either surging or not, with no interpretation required.  Instead, the number of clustered topics serves as the indicator of surge strength.

The firms recommend that content be adjusted based on the number of intent topics identified for a prospect.  Sales and Marketing should “serve higher-level or awareness-based content to those showing interest in one or two topics, and lower-funnel content to those showing interest on many topics.”  Furthermore, prospects with many surging topics are probably closer to making a purchase.

D&B Hoovers also added 4 million direct dial numbers to their database, bringing the product total to 6.2 million.  Direct dials contain a set of standard and mobile numbers, so users should hover over the direct dial number to determine the phone type.

“As more business contacts work from home, direct dials are essential to engage customers in real-time, from anywhere,” wrote Product Management VP Phil McWade.  “Access these numbers in the lists you’ve already created, when viewing a Contact Profile, or within Contacts Search & Build a List results.”

D&B Hoover’s coverage has grown to 209 million global companies and 235 million contacts

EXPLORE Sales Intelligence

EXPLORE.FR, which has historically been more of a niche data provider for the French market, now offers a full sales intelligence and DaaS offering covering the entire French market.  In March, EXPLORE took a minority stake in Societeinfo and published its set of registered Sirene data for ten million active businesses.

“With Societeinfo, we can offer a wide range of data enrichment scenarios, contextualized email generation, semantic targeting without equivalent on the market,” said Laurent Nicouleau, Associate Director of EXPLORE.  “These data can, of course, be integrated into the information systems of our customers, including those deployed by GESTINNOV, our subsidiary dedicated to CRM & ERP integration.”

EXPLORE describes itself as ”a designer of high value-added B to B behavioral data solutions” that “identify all the life stages of your prospects and customers and transforms them into a lever for commercial performance.”

EXPLORE French market intelligence includes company and executive profiles, financials, and triggers.  Features include prospecting, list mapping, news alerts, and mobile apps.

EXPLORE offers connectors for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Oracle, SugarCRM, Efficy, and SAP.

A new Microsoft Teams feature lets users look up and share company profiles within the Teams discussion stream.  Company profiles may be looked up via their Siret # (registration number), name, or address.  From the mini-profile, colleagues can link to the company website or view additional details in EXPLORE.  The service works as a freemium with non-EXPLORE users viewing a limited profile and EXPLORE users viewing a complete profile.

The Teams application is French only.

EXPLORE captures business signals from news, social media, the open web, and governmental sources.

EXPLORE triggers are gathered from regional and national news, social media, the open web (e.g., governmental sites, real estate developers, public purchasers), and public data resources (e.g., building permits, legal announcements).  Triggers fall into three categories:

  1. Strategic events such as M&A, Fundraising, IPO, Investment Projects, and Restructuring.  EXPLORE captures 3 million strategic events per annum.
  2. Relocation Projects and profiles spanning 15,000 annual events.
  3. Legal News such as company registration, dissolution, change in capital, divestitures, litigation, etc.  EXPLORE tracks 2.7 million legal events per annum.

EXPLORE targets commercial real estate, real estate developers, financial services, building supplies, and B2B services.  EXPLORE pricing begins in the €2,000 to 3,000 range.

EXPLORE has 160 employees, with offices in Paris and Nantes, and an annual turnover greater than €14 million.  EXPLORE has 1,500 clients and over 40,000 users.

In other news, EXPLORE acquired Belgian data vendor CODATA which collects information about retailers in France and Benelux.  The dataset covers 370,000 retail locations at 4,600 sites (e.g., city centers, shopping centers, outlets).  The new content augments EXPLORE’s coverage of commercial real estate.

“EXPLORE has been present for many years on the commercial property market; our offer is mainly “project” oriented (construction and renovation of buildings, urban development, CDAC-CNAC decisions, etc.),” said Nicouleau.  “We were very impressed by the high quality of the teams and the data produced by CODATA in the field.  Associated with EXPLORE, CODATA will have new operational resources to develop and strengthen their positions.”

Introhive Series C

Relationship Intelligence platform Introhive closed on a $100 million Series C.  The round was led by PSG, with Bank of America Securities joining.  Existing investors The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Aegis Group Partners, Evergreen Coast Capital, and Mavan Capital Partners also participated.

Introhive will be deploying the funds for strategic acquisitions, expanding its global footprint, and growing its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

“At the moment, our primary goal is to grow as fast as we can possibly grow,” said Global VP of Sales Adam Draper.  “And we don’t want pure organic growth to be the limiting factor.  So with this amount of money, it just gives us the option (to buy) companies that maybe did well in a certain vertical but couldn’t expand beyond that…or maybe had some sales hiccups, or whatever.”

Introhive, based in Fredericton (New Brunswick) and Miami, anticipates growing from 300 employees to 400 over the next year.

“For us, (the raise) is about continuing to evolve our platform, innovating on technology, staying ahead of our competitive product roadmap, and ensuring the success of our employees,” said Draper.

Introhive Funding History (Source: Owler)

The round follows a strong 2020 during which Introhive claims to have doubled its revenue to over $20 million.  It is projecting $100 million by the end of 2023, said Draper. 

During the pandemic, Introhive refined its sales processes and workflows.

“We really focused in 2020 on scaling what I call the operational, the core parts,” said Draper. “Anytime you’re scaling, especially in my world, from a sales perspective, it’s easy to put the sales bodies in place, but you have to have the infrastructure to support that.  And so we put a lot of time into process workflow, our tech stack, but also our strategy.”

“Our internal compass focuses on the 3 R’s – revenue, retention, and relationships – as the key ingredients to a successful and thriving business,” said Introhive CEO Jody Glidden. “Whether a company is trying to reduce customer or employee churn, make their revenue generating teams more effective or leverage the numerous untapped connections of ‘who knows who’ that exist in their company, Introhive is creating raving fans.”

“Businesses of all sizes are looking for better ways to leverage relationships and drive revenue, and we believe Introhive has built a unique and innovative set of capabilities that allows them to do this more effectively.  In our view, Jody and Stewart (Walchli, CRO) have built a world-class product and management team, and the business is well-positioned for its next phase of growth. We couldn’t be happier to join them on their journey.”

Rick Essex, Managing Director at PSG and New Introhive Board Member

Introhive looks to address the high failure rate of CRM projects by mapping relationship data and identifying opportunities.  Introhive claims to save its customers $68,400 per employee on lost productivity and automating manual work.

Introhive boosts CRM adoption through automated contact data enrichment and uploads.  It claims to uncover 350 additional contacts per user.  “The AI engine then maps these contacts to identify relationships across prospects and customer accounts.”  By reducing research and data maintenance overhead, sales and business professionals can focus their activities on prospects and clients, driving customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

Last year, Introhive processed more than one trillion transactions, captured 60+ million contacts and relationships, saved nine million employee hours, and supported users across 90 countries.

“Great salespeople are most valuable when they’re building relationships — and business — with customers,” commented Nicole France, Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  “By intelligently capturing data insights, technologies like Introhive increase the quality and timeliness of the data and help salespeople prioritize their efforts where it matters most. Sellers can focus more of their time on the insights generated from relationship intelligence and putting it to use. As a result, sales and account teams understand the needs of their customers and prospects better than ever before, resulting in more upsells, shorter lead times, and more revenue.”

Introhive has benefited from using its application.  “I think using Introhive at Introhive has always been one of the reasons that we’ve grown so fast,” said Draper.  “I remember in the early days, when we couldn’t get leads, we used our software to tap into the networks of our highly connected investors and advisors to create introductions and get some of those first sales.”

Introhive has ten offices in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Middle East, and Asia.

Introhive did not disclose its market cap.

Introhive Relationship Mapping

ZoomInfo Business Contact Preference Registry

ZoomInfo launched its Business Contact Preference Registry (BCPR), a centralized registry for recording B2B opt-out requests which will be shared across the industry.  The BCPR is ZoomInfo’s latest step in burnishing its data privacy positioning.

“The collection of data is central to businesses in the B2B data industry, but the responsibility of ethical data stewardship falls onto the shoulders of each individual company,” wrote the firm.  “As industry leaders in data privacy, ZoomInfo has made it easier for businesses in the B2B data marketplace to address the preferences of consumers by building, maintaining, and sharing access to the BCPR.”

“It’s critical for data-focused companies to prioritize privacy. The Business Contact Preference Registry offers businesses a convenient way to prioritize privacy by supplying the entire B2B data industry with a ready-made list of consumer opt-outs. We’re proactively sharing our opt-outs as an invitation to B2B companies to join us in putting privacy first.”

Bubba Nunnery, ZoomInfo’s Senior Director of Privacy and Public Policy

I had been flagging data privacy as a weakness in ZoomInfo’s model, which could slow their entry to the European market post-COVID, but they have been actively working to shore up their data privacy practices and demonstrate that they are respectful of the data they hold. 

ZoomInfo developed a proactive data compliance program based upon “notice and choice” that notifies business professionals about ZoomInfo’s data.  The program is global in scope, so not limited to countries that require notifications.  ZoomInfo also expanded its data privacy team earlier this year, naming Hannah Zimmerman, ZoomInfo’s Privacy Counsel and Bubba Nunnery, Senior Director, Privacy and Public Policy.

ZoomInfo data privacy certifications

“Our business is founded on the trust our customers have in our data,” said General Counsel Anthony Stark back in March. “Collecting data is central to all businesses, and it’s our job to be ethical stewards of the data we hold.  ZoomInfo adheres to its core privacy tenets of transparency and control, showcasing that we are respectful of the rights of consumers while providing critical service to our customers.”

In May, ZoomInfo announced that it received GDPR and CCPA Practices Validation from TrustArc, saying that its policies “are in line with the strictest privacy regulations in the world.”

“Organizations of all sizes must become privacy-forward to earn the trust of their customers,” said Chris Babel, CEO, TrustArc. “ZoomInfo understands that building trust requires an ongoing, scalable approach to data privacy. The organization has consistently prioritized privacy as the enabler of a better experience for its customers and their subscribers, and the TrustArc GDPR and CCPA Validations reinforce that standing.”

“ZoomInfo is leading the way in data privacy.  We are working to accept opt-outs from other vendors as part of our efforts to elevate privacy standards across the B2B data industry.”

CEO Henry Schuck

The BCPR is an excellent idea, but I’m not sure whether the registry should be hosted by one of the major vendors in the space.  ZoomInfo plans on accepting opt outs from other vendors, but It is unclear whether other vendors would promote ZoomInfo in the lead data collection role. Preferably, it would be hosted by a government agency such as the FTC, which manages the US Do Not Call Registry, or a neutral body similar to the ICANN domain registry.  DataGrail, a leader in data privacy compliance, could administer an independent database across businesses and consumers.