Last month, LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out a set of alert enhancements as part of its Q2 release. Alerts are intended to deliver “timely, relevant, and actionable insights” which allow reps to shift from researching to selling and building relationships. As with other recommendation engines, Navigator alerts call out the “Next Best Action” with an “instant snapshot of the things that matter most about your prospects along with recommended action step for each.”
“At
LinkedIn, our goal is to arm you with timely, relevant, and actionable insights
so you spend less time sifting through information and more time focused on
what matters: building relationships and closing deals,” stated the firm in its
release notes. “Alerts on the homepage gives you all the functionality of
Newsfeed in a compressed, easy-to-use dashboard. Don’t worry about missing
anything — all of your favorite items from the old Newsfeed live on as alerts.
We’ve also added some new types of alerts as well!”
New
alerts are highlighted in blue at the top of the feed. Each alert
contains an action step (e.g. Message, See Article, See List). Alerts may
be filtered by type and individual alerts may be deleted or turned off.
Three
new alert categories were released
An account has had a funding event
A colleague shared a custom list
Pending actions in Sales Navigator Coach
LinkedIn
recommends that Navigator Alerts be reviewed once or twice a day.
“Every sales professional faces the challenge of how to best spend their time, maximize their productivity and close more deals,” said Camplejohn. “That’s why Sales Navigator is now centered around alerts — making it easier for salespeople to identify important changes and prioritize the best next steps to take.”
People.AI announced availability of The Wire, their new artificial intelligence service for sales reps which suggests next best actions. According to the firm, “Like a brilliant personal assistant who’s always on top of his game, The Wire uses AI intelligence to remind you when to follow up on key accounts, suggest next-best-actions, warn you when a rep or account is falling behind, let you know when customer champions switch jobs, and ensure you’re always prepped for every meeting.”
The Wire
suggests emerging opportunities, opportunities requiring attention, and
champions that have departed to other companies.
The Wire flags opportunities that are in jeopardy of slipping due to inaction.
Managers are
alerted when sales reps are falling behind targets. A Rep Ramp Alert “helps you
move from data-aware to data-driven, proactively leveraging industry data to
guide and coach your teams.”
Ramp Alerts identify reps that are lagging behind best-in-class recent hires and suggest when a one-on-one meeting may be required.
The Wire also supports meeting intelligence with meeting prep reminders and post-meeting note capture and CRM sync.
San Francisco-based Revenue Intelligence vendor People.ai announced Round C funding of $60 million along with the launch of its new The Wire next-best-action (NBA) service. The round was led by ICONIQ Capital with participation by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital, and Y Combinator. Will Griffith, Partner at ICONIQ Capital, has joined the People.ai Board of Directors.
People.ai
has received $97 million in funding to date. Its valuation was not provided,
but TechCrunch placed the valuation at “mid-nine-figures.”
“Today’s
announcement of our Series C funding represents a critical milestone in
achieving our vision for the Future of Work,” said People.ai CEO Oleg
Rogynskyy. “We’ve already enabled customers to, for the first time,
capture all of an organization’s critical business data, such as contacts and
customer activity data, and deliver it directly to the CRM. This has
significantly improved sales productivity and CRM data accuracy and liberated
the enterprise from time-consuming manual data entry. Today, we’re taking
People.ai to the next level with AI-driven intelligence that provides
customer-facing teams with a simple, personalized set of actions based on
current, historical and industry data that will help accelerate revenue.
When you use The Wire, you’ll have your most productive day at work,
every day.”
People.ai
was founded in 2016 and already supports Red Hat, Lyft, Zoom, New Relic, and
Splunk. The firm describes itself as a Revenue Intelligence System:
“People.ai offers the industry’s only Revenue Intelligence System (RIS) that automates the capture of all contact and customer activity data, dynamically updates CRM and provides actionable intelligence across CRM, collaboration, business intelligence, and other management tools for sales, marketing, customer success and services teams – exponentially accelerating growth and delivering actionable insights for strategic business decision making.”
People.ai Website
People.ai fills out buying committees for active opportunities, maps contacts and interactions to accounts and opportunities, and suggests next best actions. Applying natural language processing and machine learning to buying committee discovery and NBA are the latest advancement in sales and marketing intelligence.
People.ai
also supports contact updates derived from email signatures and pulls “critical
information” such as product or competitor mentions, sentiment, and buyer
intent.
People.ai’s
recently launched Campaign360 service supports marketing attribution by
tracking opportunities influenced or generated by marketing activities.
Campaign360 is the “industry’s only AI-based solution that equips
Marketers with the real-time, full funnel campaign visibility they need at
their fingertips,” said the firm.
“We’re
thrilled to partner with People.ai as they execute their vision to unleash the
potential of AI to drive enterprise revenue,” said Griffith. “People.ai
is well positioned in a highly strategic enterprise market, leveraging
automation and AI to fundamentally change the way people work.
People.ai’s product, powered by strong network effects, is delivering
insights and productivity at the scale and quality we have not seen previously.
We see an incredible opportunity to accelerate People.ai’s game-changing
technology as they redefine the meaning of the Predictive Enterprise.
People.ai is the Future of Work.”
Partners include Salesforce, Slack, Outreach, SalesLoft, Exchange, and G Suite.
On Monday, I will be covering The Wire, People.AI’s new Next Best Action service.
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.
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.”
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 added three new alerts:
Someone at a saved account viewed your profile
A saved account has just raised funding
A saved lead has engaged with LinkedIn posts from your company
which
accompany six current alerts:
A saved lead started a position at a new company
A saved lead has a new position within the same company
A saved lead viewed your profile
A potential lead recently joined a saved account
A saved lead has accepted your connection request
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.
Four vendors
launched v2 SNAP integrations which provide broader access to Sales Navigator
actions:
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
