DataFox grew its year-over-year annual recurring revenue by 150% and trebled its presence at Fortune 500 companies. According to the firm, “Its exceptional growth has sparked a major hiring initiative as well as plans to secure a larger San Francisco headquarters office to accommodate a growing team of engineers and data scientists.”
The DataFox CRM Orchestration service provides company profiles and insights for two million companies. The firm collects 100,000 signals each week across seventy signal categories. DataFox supports both an initial batch enrichment and ongoing data refreshes.
DataFox Signals
A unique feature is their coverage of conferences which helps marketing departments identify which conferences to attend and assemble conference based prospecting lists. The service also captures major lists such as the Inc 5000 and Fast 500 along with niche lists.
“This is an incredible acceleration point. Customers are seeing the immediate benefits of investing in our solutions that automate grunt work and help guide better, faster decision-making,” said DataFox CEO Bastiaan Janmaat. “DataFox has been able to improve the way people approach their jobs in sales, marketing, and other growth functions by helping them find, orchestrate, and leverage CRM data so they can focus on what matters most – building relationships and growing their business.”
Along with Salesforce, DataFox provides integrations with Marketo, Google Chrome, and Slack.
“Building a Winning Dataset” from DiscoverOrg Collateral.
Sales and Marketing intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg announced their latest database earlier today. The new Startup and SMB dataset covers more than 60,000 small and mid-size businesses and 400,000 executives. The initial North American coverage profiles companies with between 50 and 1,000 employees.
All of the contacts are editorially verified and will be maintained via the same sixty-day review cycles as their other contacts. Executives cover “all key departments, including IT, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Operations.”
“DiscoverOrg’s data difference is its team of 250+ researchers who constantly augment and verify the data in our platform,” notes Henry Schuck, DiscoverOrg CEO. “Unlike other vendors that provide SMB lists with thousands of irrelevant contacts, companies, and incomplete and duplicate records, the DiscoverOrg Startup & SMB dataset is as rich and accurate as our enterprise data.”
CMO Katie Bullard said that DiscoverOrg has “aggressive plans” to invest in SMB dataset development due to customer benefits.
With more companies, our researchers won’t have to skip over Triggers that they find through their research. We’re able to return a greater number of companies that use a certain technology, and our predictive tools like AccountView and DealPredict have larger reach with more matched accounts.
DiscoverOrg CMO Katie Bullard
The initial dataset is limited to North America as that is where they have the greatest current demand, but DiscoverOrg plans to internationalize the Startup and SMB dataset in the future. While the goal is to cover all firms with at least 50 employees, the initial dataset consists of firms requested by their customers.
The press release noted how difficult it is to find reliable, actionable intelligence for SMB sales teams. Along with company and executive profiles, the database provides 6,000 “research verified buying triggers” per month.
In smaller businesses without media coverage or press releases, almost none of the buying intent triggers that DiscoverOrg gathers – including planned investments, key projects, personnel moves, and internal spending budgets – is made available to the public. This is where DiscoverOrg’s team of researchers provides a clear advantage: While there are millions of registered companies in the US, the difficulty is identifying and gathering intelligence on the small percentage of these companies who are 1) legitimate entities and 2) have true spend / budget. By continuously verifying contact info, conducting interviews, and engaging in research activities, DiscoverOrg overcomes the shortcomings of web-scraping for hard-to-find data on the SMB space, ensuring the intelligence customers receive is highly relevant and immediately useful.
DiscoverOrg Press Release
“Sales and marketing teams that want to reach the SMB market have had a very difficult go of it,” said Nancy Nardin, President of advisory firm Smart Selling Tools. “There’s been a real dearth of verified, accurate data on SMBs, quite simply because it’s harder for data companies to get. DiscoverOrg is solving for this very real pain point by bringing their best-in-class research verification model to the SMB space. You can expect the same high-quality data you get from DiscoverOrg’s broad datasets. ”
Across all databases, DiscoverOrg now covers 1.5 million executives and 90,000 companies. Customers may purchase access to the full database or various databases by job function, company size, or region.
Sparklane, which describes itself as “a publisher of sales intelligence SAAS solutions,” announced that it received a €4m funding round from XAnge and Entrepreneur Venture Investment Fund. The round raised its total funding to €7m. XAnge also participated in Sparklane’s previous funding round.
“We were won over by Sparklane’s disruptive positioning and the impressive performance of its management team, prompting us to offer them our renewed support as we participate in this fundraising initiative alongside Entrepreneur Venture,” stated Guilhem de Vregille, Deputy Director of XAnge.
The round allows Sparklane to continue its European expansion. The French company established itself in the UK in 2016 and is currently eyeing the German market. The funding will also be directed towards expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities, and growth in their sales and R&D teams.
According to Chairman Frédéric Pichard, the funding round is a “real vote of confidence,” in the company. “Our goal remains the same: to help marketing and sales people identify their future customers more quickly using Artificial Intelligence.”
Sparklane offers predictive lead scoring and prospecting tools for sales and marketing teams in the UK and France. Their Predict platform processes client CRM data to define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), apply predictive lead scores, and identify look-a-like prospects.
Sparklane supports nearly 350 clients across banking, insurance, technology and business services. The firm was listed in Deloitte’s 2016 EMEA Fast 500 list of technology companies with 265% revenue growth between 2012 and 2015 (three-year CAGR of 54%).
Owler rolled out a new Insights feature which highlights data changes such as significant increases in press coverage, blogging volume, and CEO approval. CEO approval ratings are based upon community feedback. Additional insights are in development.
Owler Company Insights track social media, revenue, and CEO approval changes.
LeadGnome’s email reply service mines emails for intelligence such as left the company, out of office, change of position, change of name/email, and unsubscribe requests. “LeadGnome is unique in its ability to mine the unstructured body of reply emails for account based intelligence. It was, therefore, important to acquire EU-U.S. Privacy Shield certification to assure our customers of our commitment to the privacy of their data,” said Matt Benati, CEO of LeadGnome.
Because the firm collects emails, titles, and business phones, they did not have to go through the more stringent approval level for firms that store credit, payment, or personal data. This helped expedite the approval process with the Department of Commerce. As LeadGnome was already Safe Harbour compliant, the approval process was focused on conforming to changes between the Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield. LeadGnome worked with the Better Business Bureau as a compliance partner and completed the process in about two months. Benati believes the process will speed up as the certification backlog clears, but noted that his firm benefited from having Safe Harbour certification.
The LeadGnome platform is integrated with major CRMs and MAPs including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Oracle Cloud.
“LeadGnome is committed to data privacy and business transparency. We had already employed many of the required best practices, so the certification process was completed significantly ahead of schedule,” said Benati.
Other vendors that are Privacy Shield compliant include Dun & Bradstreet, Avention, Zoominfo, Infogroup, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SalesLoft, ReachForce, and Outreach. The US International Trade Administration publishes a list of Privacy Shield compliant firms.
Owler news is visible to SDRs while they are customizing emails or planning for their next call.
ABSD vendor Owler officially announced their SalesLoft connector which feeds Owler News and Alerts into the SalesLoft Sales Engagement platform. Owler is one of several content partners that participate in SalesLoft’s partner ecosystem. Owler intelligence is delivered via a combination of mined content (news, blogs, press releases), editorial work (funding and M&A announcements), and crowdsourced intelligence concerning competitors, company size, CEO approval, and future expectations.
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter posed the problem of engaging prospects as one of quickly understanding them.
How do you portray that feeling? How do you portray that understanding that you know what they’re up to? That you know who they are? That you think you can help and you’ve got hypotheses about their needs? And I think the answer to that is sales intelligence and so for the last few year of my career I’ve been looking for amazing products that help our customers learn more about the prospects they are reaching out to whether it’s the account or whether it’s the individual themselves.
Owler provides integrated news, press releases, funding histories, videos (YouTube and Vimeo), and corporate blogs from within SalesLoft company and contact records. The partnerships allows sales reps to plan their account messaging without toggling to another platform. Users can even filter headlines by content type and copy links directly into emails.
SalesLoft noted a “dramatic increase” in reply rates and meaningful conversations due to Owler insights. The integration has helped “increase the level and efficiency of personalization that the modern sales rep can add when they’re communicating with their buyers,” said SalesLoft VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester. “So they can better connect, quality, and convert their target accounts into customer accounts.”
SalesLoft trains SDRs on a 10-80-10 strategy for creating “sincerity at scale.” SalesLoft suggests that the first ten percent of the email should have a custom hook from LinkedIn, Twitter, or Owler. The goal is to “find something relevant and connect with them on that level,” said SalesLoft SDR Brad Ansley. The 80% message core should focus on how your product relates to their pains. It should not be a feature dump, but must “give them a reason to respond.” The final ten percent is a “PS line” to connect on a more personal level (e.g. Congrats on the Pats).
Other SalesLoft content partners include InsideView, Datanyze, HG Data, DiscoverOrg, RingLead, and Prospectify. SalesLoft also provides messaging assistance and coaching tools such as Crystal prospect personality analysis, Sigstr email signature management, Chili Piper calendaring, and call transcription and analytics from TalkIQ, ExecVision, and Gong.io.
LeadGnome, which extracts account based intelligence from reply emails, announced availability of a HubSpot connectors for the Marketing, Sales, and CRM platforms. “We consider this a strategic partnership with HubSpot, helping users increase productivity within their sales and marketing departments. The fact that LeadGnome integrates across all three HubSpot platforms changes the game, providing a new level of account intelligence from the moment an email campaign is executed. This integration delivers new opportunities and increases sales velocity by identifying trigger events, decision makers and influencers,” said LeadGnome CEO Matt Benati.
LeadGnome also provides sales alerts based upon important account changes uncovered by LeadGnome. For example, “new contacts can be emailed an introductory message and sales trigger events can be leveraged to ensure opportunities are captured and closed.”
LeadGnome calls its service “an untapped source of lead gold.” By mining reply emails, Lead Gnome is able to add new account-specific leads, schedule follow-up messages to target contacts based upon out of office information, mine additional company and contact details from signature blocks, derive corporate email address formats, and link out of office emails to specific marketing campaigns.
The service also helps redirect sales activity after a lead has left the organization:
A bounced email happens when somebody leaves the company and what’s really popular right now are “left the company” reply emails; hey, Matt’s no longer with the company but don’t worry, Sally is here to help out. And so what you know is that there has been a significant event within that organization. Matt who you have engaged with or maybe Matt is even your customer has left, you find that out immediately and now you have an opportunity to go find out where Matt went and start talking to him again because as salespeople we all know if you’ve got a great relationship with Matt in his current location, he’s probably going to a parallel or better job that has buying power again so you better go and knock on his door.
And we also give you Sally who has taken over for Matt. Sally is now your go to person at that existing account you have. And then we fill in the size of who did Sally… Jobs get replaced and where did the person that Matt replaced go to? So that adds up to four. And we no longer have to wait for a hard bounce right? We are giving you all the time and advantage you absolutely will beat the competition if you have that information.
Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing doesn’t see LeadGnome as a “silver bullet” but as an incremental process improvement based upon captured intelligence. “In sales and marketing part of the game is adjustments, it’s finding those incremental opportunities to get better, it’s finding marginal improvement at various phases of the sales process that when stitched together creates a fairly compelling competitive advantage. And those little increases in productivity, those little increases in response rate and conversion rate across an entire marketing effort, across an entire sales organization can lead to massive change and massive impact on result,” said Heinz. “we are looking for thunderbolts when we really need to be listening for whispers. We are looking for these big definitive answers on how precisely to sell to everybody and I am not seeing that. I continue to believe that there is no silver bullet like that and yet I feel like our customers are whispering to us all the time and they are giving us these subtle clues that are not always directed to us but they are definitely… It’s an opportunity that they were passing by on too significant a basis.”
LeadGnome pricing is based upon the number of reply emails received each month. The service begins at $19 and is subject to volume discounts. A twenty percent discount applies to firms on annual billing plans. The firm also offers a thirty-day free trial.
Account Based Intelligence vendor 
