Category: Sales Triggers

TechTarget Confirmed Projects

TechTarget's new Confirmed Project details are collected by their research assistants.
TechTarget’s new Confirmed Project details are collected by their research assistants.

TechTarget added a set of Confirmed Projects to their Priority Engine service.  Projects include company information, project location, project contact name, purchase criteria, and purchase details.  Purchase criteria include top purchase drivers, product feature criteria, and vendors under consideration.  

Purchase details include capabilities being considered, key factors in choice of vendor(s), deployment method, departments where the purchase will be used, and anticipated benefits.

“The integration of Confirmed Project intelligence within the platform provides an expanded view of the Total Buying Team as well as new deal insights and angles – all in one place – to help Sales teams win more meetings, opportunities and deals.  The addition of Confirmed Project data provides a much deeper layer of intelligence on project criteria, specific vendor shortlists and key purchase drivers which enriches and expands insights available within Priority Engine to give sales teams more points of entry into live deals.”


TechTarget Press Release

Confirmed Projects are displayed alongside TechTarget intelligence including Owler company overviews, TechTarget buying teams, DiscoverOrg contacts, and HG Data installed technologies.

TechTarget Confirmed Projects are displayed within Salesforce Account i-frames.
TechTarget Confirmed Projects are displayed within Salesforce Account i-frames.

Confirmed Projects are collected by TechTarget’s “team of skilled in-house research assistants who are responsible for calling active prospects from high-ranking Priority Engine accounts.”  Prospects exchange project intelligence in exchange for TechTarget research.

TechTarget intelligence is accessible from “any browser and imported directly into Salesforce.”

“We saw rapid growth in the use of Priority Engine to fuel inside sales efforts in 2018 as more and more of our customers’ sales teams are using the insights we provide into prospect interests, research focus, vendor considerations, and tech installs. Using this data, leading sales teams have seen up to a 4x increase in opportunity conversion. The addition of Confirmed Projects within Priority Engine will fuel this growth even more.”


TechTarget SVP of Products Andrew Briney

Priority Engine raised revenues 29% in Q4 year-over-year and “bookings remain strong.”  The firm signed an additional 32 customers in Q4 and the firm raised Priority Engine prices by 10% in January 2019 after raising them 20% in January 2018.  The price increase was across all Priority Engine solutions.  As price increases are recognized over the life of contracts and renewals are overweighted to Q4, much of the 2018 price increase will show up in 2019 revenues.

“People that signed up prior to the beginning of the year were protected in their previous year’s pricing, but then we added other add-on bundles and solutions, because…we are integrating a lot of our branding lead generation offers into Priority Engine,” said CEO Mike Cotoia.  “So there is an up-sell capability and opportunity for our customers to…create a greater share of voice percentage within the markets they care about.”

“Our customers continue to increase their commitment to becoming data-driven sales and marketing organizations. This is creating opportunities to strengthen our partnerships with our customers by further embedding our purchase intent data into their systems to make their sales and marketing efforts more intelligent, competitive and efficient.”


TechTarget Shareholders Letter, February 6, 2019

TechTarget admitted that the data subscription business differs significantly from their traditional quarterly marketing campaigns.  Over the past two years, they have learned that service requirements vary greatly by size.  Larger firms “who have sophisticated systems and ample resources” can immediately leverage intent data for awareness campaigns and fueling sales outreach.  Enterprise accounts have revenue renewal rates “well over 100%.”  However, smaller firms require more handholding and renew at less than 100% of revenue.  To assist SMBs, TechTarget has assembled a unified customer success team to offer post-sales service and support.  “We believe over time that this will increase our revenue renewal rates with this customer segment. “

TechTarget described a strong IT spending environment with multiple catalysts for growth: AI, security, data analytics, and cloud migrations.  In the US, accelerated depreciation of capital expenses through 2022 gives “companies a short window to invest in technology with favorable tax treatment.”

LinkedIn Q4 Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator now supports custom Account and Lead lists.
Sales Navigator now supports custom Account and Lead lists.

LinkedIn rolled out its Q4 Sales Navigator release in November, but I failed to blog about it.  (Q1 will be covered next week in this blog.) The release contains several nascent initiatives including custom lists and the collection of “Reports To” data to assist with organizational mapping.  Other feature sets include three new alerts, an improved accounts center, PointDrive activity logging, and additional SNAP connectors.

LinkedIn is beginning to collect data around who reports to whom.  As sales reps or others learn about reporting relationships, they can add them to executive profiles.  The data is then shared across the LinkedIn contract with co-workers but not more broadly.  Following after last quarter’s support of buying committees, it is evident that LinkedIn is looking to infuse additional project and reporting relationships within Sales Navigator.

“We’re laying the foundation for full-blown org charts by adding a new “Reports To” field on the Lead Page,” blogged Head of Products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions Doug Camplejohn.  “Once you learn who someone’s manager is, you can add that info to their page by searching for a name or browsing our recommendations.  Any additions you or your colleagues make will only appear to those in your company’s Sales Navigator contract. So, the next time you or a team member looks that lead up, you’ll see who they report to, who added that connection, and a reporting history.”

An unlimited number of custom lists of accounts or leads may be built within the LinkedIn desktop or mobile app. Users may post notes on saved leads or accounts and filter the lists by people who have changed jobs in the last 90 days, people who have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, companies who have had senior leadership changes in the past 3 months, etc.

LinkedIn does not yet support custom list uploading. Custom Sharing is part of the Q1 release.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator added three new alerts
LinkedIn Sales Navigator added three new alerts

LinkedIn added three new alerts:

  1. Someone at a saved account viewed your profile
  2. A saved account has just raised funding
  3. A saved lead has engaged with LinkedIn posts from your company

which accompany six current alerts:

  1. A saved lead started a position at a new company
  2. A saved lead has a new position within the same company
  3. A saved lead viewed your profile
  4. A potential lead recently joined a saved account
  5. A saved lead has accepted your connection request
  6. A saved lead was mentioned in the news

Alerts are now included in the main menu bar of both the desktop and mobile editions.  Camplejohn noted that LinkedIn has improved the “signal-to-noise ratio” of its alerts.

“Think of our Alerts as a trusted sales advisor tapping you on the shoulder with information about your saved leads and accounts when it’s most important and relevant to you,” said Camplejohn.

LinkedIn has simplified its admin experience and “made it much easier to do tasks from assigning users to managing groups.”  LinkedIn also unified its administration module across Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Learning, and LinkedIn Recruiter.

Advanced Searching was added to the Sales Navigator mobile app, bringing it to list building parity with the desktop application.  Earlier this year, LinkedIn enhanced its company and lead profiles, also bringing them to parity with the desktop application.

“LinkedIn’s recent updates to its Sales Navigator management tool makes it a more robust platform for sales teams.  More importantly, the moves to bring more of its desktop features to the mobile app are evidence that LinkedIn finally understands how crucial a mobile experience is when designing a sales tool focused on lead management.”


Amy Gesenhues, MarTech Today

PointDrive, Sales Navigator’s multi-media sharing application, will begin writing activity history back to Microsoft Dynamics.  Salesforce PointDrive sync will come in 2019.  PointDrive presents documents and video to end users as a landing page and tracks views and shares.

“Now when you send that pricing proposal to a prospect in PointDrive and members of the buying committee engage with it, you’ll be able to see that activity in both Sales Navigator and your CRM,” blogged Camplejohn.

LinkedIn continues to expand its SNAP partnerships, adding Zoom as their first web conferencing partner.  Users can now hover over an attendee name and view Sales Navigator intelligence including their profile photo, title, and common connections.  

The Zoom LinkedIn SNAP integration provides meeting attendee insights and connections from within Zoom.
The Zoom LinkedIn SNAP integration provides meeting attendee insights and connections from within Zoom.

Four vendors launched v2 SNAP integrations which provide broader access to Sales Navigator actions:

  1. Yesware (Email Engagement)
  2. Leadfeeder (Visitor ID Analytics)
  3. Groove (Sales Engagement)
  4. Outreach (Sales Engagement)

SalesLoft, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics previously released V2 SNAP integrations.

In the Salesforce Winter Lightning release, admins will be able to configure Sales Navigator and add support for Person accounts without having to go to the AppExchange.

This year, Sales Navigator focused on improved functionality and display for accounts, leads, and list building in their mobile and desktop applications; SNAP integrations; GDPR compliance and security; CRM opportunity management and buyers circles; alerting; employment analytics; and PointDrive CRM integration.  Details on earlier releases are available in my blog: Q1, Q2, Q3.

Owler Pro

Owler promises 60 second access to the platform with one-click Salesforce permissioning.
Owler promises 60 second access to the platform with one-click Salesforce permissioning.

Sales and competitive intelligence vendor Owler is readying to launch Owler Pro, its first end-user premium service.  Pro reads the open Leads, Accounts, and Opportunities in Salesforce and begins delivering automated alerts to sales reps.  Owler Pro supports single-click sign-on so no Salesforce admin support is required.  The service is currently in beta test and includes a redesign of their Instant Insights email alert design.

“In short, it’s an ad-free, streamlined way for Saleforce.com users to automatically sync their active opportunities with Owler, and auto-follow those companies on Owler. So, a sales person’s Daily Snapshot will always be relevant to the deals they are currently working on.”


Owler CEO Tim Harsch

The service is designed for sales reps, but Owler plans to support competitive intelligence analysts, marketing professionals, and senior level executives in the future.

Owler Pro, which is expected to launch in mid to late February, is priced at $12.99 per month or $119.88 annually.  During the beta, users receive one free month, but they are undecided on whether that offer will continue following general user rollout.

The premium service also alerts on a broader set of topics.  While the free version focuses on M&A activity, funding events, and exec changes, the Pro edition adds an additional dozen triggers:

  • Product Launches
  • Joint Ventures
  • Partnerships
  • Awards
  • New Offices
  • IPO Announcements (a precursor to the closing of the actual funding)
  • Record Earnings
  • Earnings Announcements
  • Restructuring
  • Key Employee Departures
  • Key Employee Hires (in addition to primary leadership which are included in the free version)
  • Layoffs

According Harsch, the goal is to “arm sales reps with sales triggers.”

Owler also recently rolled out a Lightning Data solution which performs a monthly match and append against Salesforce Accounts.  36 fields are supported including the top three competitors and social media links.  The service is priced at $25 per user per month for all users in the instance.

The Lightning Data solution includes a free self-assessment report which analyzes Owler’s match and append rate against Salesforce Accounts and includes segmentation data.

Owler has 2 ½ million active users, up from 1.1 million a year ago.  Nearly half of users are located in the Sales or Marketing department and forty percent are directors or above.  An additional 17% describe themselves as Analysts, Consultants, or Specialists.

Owler user base demographics
Owler user base demographics

Owler is also available through its API partners including CrunchBase, SalesLoft, SugarCRM, and Salesforce Lightning Data.

Owler collects data on over 11 million companies including four million full profiles.

Artesian Tweaks Platform Performance & News Storage

The Artesian Watchlist
The Artesian Watchlist

Artesian Solutions implemented a set of technological upgrades to its sales intelligence service which provide speedier searches, more accurate sales triggers, and improved capacity. Artesian now employs Elasticsearch for its news and social media storage. According to the firm, “This has enabled it to dramatically scale up server capacity, boost the performance of its advanced architecture, and provided the ability to analyse, filter and deliver results from raw unstructured data. Search results that previously took 10 seconds now take just 10 milliseconds.”

Artesian Solutions enhanced their sales triggers with improved scoring and ranking algorithms while improved caching and load balancing allow the firm to expand concurrent users ten-fold without a degradation in performance.

The net result of these architectural enhancements is a 25X increase in historical content available for analysis and research and a five-fold increase in the speed of news query engines.

“We constantly feed back into our engineering team the learnings, preferences and needs of our customers, and in return they always deliver robust, superior performance enhancements that not only accelerate our R&D programme, but solidify our position as the market leader in sales intelligence software,” said Artesian CTO Steve Borthwick. “We’ve boosted the performance and accuracy of the Artesian platform across the board, improving raw speed and our ability to handle a significant number of simultaneous users, as well as optimising their ability to uncover those all-important golden nuggets of sales insight.”

InsideView UI Refresh

InsideView recently rolled out a beta user interface which follows a mobile first navigation structure and includes a redesigned News Feed view for followed companies.  InsideView describes the new UI as “fresh. Modern. And easier to navigate, with more engaging graphics and a common user experience across platforms – within CRM, mobile, and web.” 

The color scheme utilizes a monochrome palate with splashes of red, blue and green for accents (e.g. hyperlinks, highlighted tabs, buttons).  Unfortunately, much of the text is gray against a white background which may cause readability issues in brightly lit locations. 

Navigation is via a left-handed navigation bar.  For companies, the primary tabs are Overview, Company Information, People, and Insights.  Sub-headings under Company Information are Firmographics, Industry Profile, Financials, Family Tree, and Competitors.  Industry Profile has a third level of horizontal tabs, and really should be presented as a top-level navigation item. 

A Search bar provides a type-ahead feature to assist with company and contact searching.  The type-ahead feature begins as a Recently Viewed list of companies and contacts. 

The Insights Tab includes social integration, news filtering by agent, and keyword searching.
The Insights Tab includes social integration, news filtering by agent, and keyword searching.

The Insights Tab is an updated version of the InsideView buzz tab.  Users can view company news, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook in a single feed.  News can be filtered to a subset of their 17 agents and be shared via email, social media, or Yammer.  All four sources are keyword searchable.  Twitter is fully integrated with a Twitter handle summary along with reply, retweet, and favorite.  Facebook supports an integrated stream of posts with commenting support. 

One of the nice features that was carried forward from the old Buzz tab is the ability to switch between company posts and posts from others for Twitter and Facebook. 

In place of a static Home Page, the user is taken to the News Page which presents the user with news stories for followed companies in a grid pattern.  Users may filter the topics by one or multiple Agents (sales triggers) and Watchlists.  Individual articles may be shared with social media, email, or Yammer. 

The News view may be filtered by Watchlist and Agent.
The News view may be filtered by Watchlist and Agent.

The Company view still lacks an export to PDF feature similar to that found in D&B Hoovers and Hoovers classic.

Users will be able to switch between the classic and beta versions through April 27th.

Sales Navigator Q1 18: Seat Transfers, Additional Alerts, and Seniority Preferences (Oh My!)

SN Seat Transfers
If your firm has an enterprise Sales Navigator team account, you can migrate your standalone account to the enterprise account and let your employer pay your subscription fees.  Just realize that all of your current data (InMails, Messages, Saved Leads and Accounts, etc.) are being uploaded into the corporate account.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator adopted a new quarterly release system for 2018 and has begun rolling out its Q1 release.  Yesterday, I touched upon their redesigned Account profiles.  Today, I’m delving into other new features that are rolling out to clients over the next few weeks.  These include self-service seat transfers to enterprise accounts, expanded alerting, and a Seniority Level preference.

The new self-service seat transfer feature allows sales reps to import their Sales Navigator information into a corporate account. Thereafter, the corporation pays for the license. Migrated content includes Saved Leads, Saved Accounts, Saved Searches, InMail, Messages, InMail Credits, Notes & Tags, and personal Sales Navigator settings. However, when a rep leaves a firm, there is no way to migrate content back to the individual account (their LinkedIn connections are untouched). While activity that took place after the rep merged their account can reasonably be considered company intellectual property, the shared information contributed by the new rep should be returned to the individual’s private account afterwards.

Alerting for the PointDrive service (an enhanced email which directs users to an HTML page containing attachments and multi-media) has been modified to provide real-time email messages when an individual views PointDrive content. Alerts are suppressed for subsequent views by the same individual. The alert’s viewer data includes name, title, company, email, and location. The feature allows reps to reach out to viewers in a timelier manner (perhaps while still viewing the content). PointDrive also provides activity reports and identifies individuals to whom content has been forwarded.

LinkedIn added a new email alert called “Saved Leads Who Viewed My Profile.” According to LinkedIn, the mobile push notification for this event has the highest click through response rate. Sales reps perceive the trigger “as a potential buying signal and want to know ASAP when this happens.” LinkedIn added the near real-time email feature because not everybody has installed the Sales Navigator mobile app. The alert includes quick account and contact details along with account employment details by function for the past six months (if available). To avoid email SPAM, users are only re-notified of visits after seven days.

LinkedIn inserted a new variable for Seniority Level in its Sales Preferences which are employed for recommendations. Sales Navigator also added the option to quickly toggle preferences on and off during Account and Contact Searches. For example, a Boston-based rep for an enterprise Martech Solution can automatically target New England executives, Director or Higher, working in Marketing, IT, Finance, or Purchasing.

Preferences are set during the Sales Navigator onboarding process.
Preferences are set during the Sales Navigator onboarding process.

DiscoverOrg Legal & Compliance Dataset

Executive Change Alerts from the Legal and Compliance database.
Executive Change Alerts from the Legal and Compliance database.

DiscoverOrg continues to rollout additional datasets to meet the needs of sales and marketing professionals that target specific corporate departments. The latest dataset focuses on legal and compliance departments, complementing datasets for technology, sales, marketing, HR, finance, and the executive suite. The new dataset meets the same standards of coverage and quality as previous datasets (e.g. 95% accuracy guarantee, 95% email fill rates, 90-day refresh rate). Along with executive bios and contact information, users will enjoy compliance department org charts, installed technology, and buying signals.

“Companies selling into legal and compliance functions have become okay with buying inaccurate, outdated contact data and sales intelligence tools—some in actual book form.  And until now, legal and compliance companies had few other options. DiscoverOrg is changing that and bringing a solution to the market that is robust, high quality, and designed to allow these organizations to build their businesses around.”

  • Chief Growth Officer Katie Bullard

“Lack of access to contact data has prevented engagement with in-house legal teams at corporate entities,” said the firm. “Many companies outsource legal services to 3rd party firms, but the largest 20% of corporates manage most legal matters in house. The Legal and Compliance dataset enables legal technology and legal services companies to systematically reach this untapped buyer group – to position a technology solution or be the vendor of choice.”

DiscoverOrg is “already seeing high demand” during their soft launch window and have signed several “high-profile legal technology companies.” The dataset is designed for Legal Services companies, Law Firms, and Staffing and Recruiting firms looking to place Legal and Compliance talent.

Coverage spans 150,000 legal professionals across 25,000 organizations constituting “the largest and most complex legal departments and the largest law firms.” Corporate titles include General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer, Legal Operations, Compliance, Government Affairs & Relations, Litigation, IP, Contracts, eDiscovery, Risk Management, Governance, and General Counsel Executive Assistant. Titles at legal services and law firms include C-Suite / Partners, IT, Finance, and Legal staff. Also included are legal representatives at federal, state, and local government entities. Data Security Officers can be found in the IT dataset.

“Ten years ago, DiscoverOrg completely revolutionized the way IT companies prospected, and we’ve now brought that sales and marketing revolution to the rest of the market,” said CEO Henry Schuck. “Companies outside of IT have become okay with buying inaccurate, outdated contact data and sales intelligence tools—some in actual book form. That is not okay, but until now, legal and compliance companies had few other options. Today we are changing that and bringing a solution to the market that is robust, high quality, and designed to allow legal and compliance companies to build their businesses around.”

In 2017, the DiscoverOrg database roughly doubled its contact coverage to three million biographies with emails, direct dials, organizational position, and responsibilities. DiscoverOrg also expanded its company coverage by 50% to 125,000 global entities. The growth was bolstered by the acquisition of RainKing at the end of August. The firm has a team of over 300 researchers responsible for building and maintaining datasets. DiscoverOrg is used by sales, marketing, and recruitment teams at over 4,000 firms.