Artesian CEO on US Market Entry

Artesian Solutions provides deep trigger functionality combined with word cloud and filtering, helping sales reps hone in on talking points.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including their 2016 entry into the US market. Artesian provides a social selling solution for the UK, US, and Canada. Their sales intelligence is delivered via a web browser, Salesforce.com, and their Ready mobile app.

Michael: You launched in the US exactly a year ago, officially. How’s your product buildup going?

Andrew: It’s going pretty well. I have to say, most of the progress has been in the last three to six months, because it took us a couple of releases to really get the US edition right. We learned quickly that there were some nuances in terms of the way sales teams work together in the US. The US sales focus is a very contact-centric mechanism. We realized pretty quickly because contact data is so sparse and difficult to get a hold of. We doubled down on our efforts to implement. We’ve got three contact data intelligence aggregation partnerships. We got those into the product pretty quickly which dramatically enhanced not only access to the contact intelligence but also the social profiling capabilities.

Then in the third release, we were able to start to bring in some refinements. In the States, news gets syndicated a lot more than it does in the UK, in Europe. The same story you can get syndicated and copied many, many times. We were getting an unacceptable level of duplication, and, even if the stories were similar, we hadn’t trained the algorithm to discard similar stories. Only stories that were the same.

We rewrote the algorithm and we created the ability to group stories which are similar together. What we do now is we publish one and then underneath it there’s a little icon that says similar stories. Again, these are things you don’t learn until you deploy the software for real [in the US], and customers start beating it up and giving you their feedback.

Michael: Can you provide any growth stats for the US?

Andrew: We’re not publishing the numbers at that kind of level, but in percentage terms it’s huge because we started from virtually nothing. It’s growing steadily. The majority of the growth is still coming in the UK. I don’t think we’re backward in coming forward in terms of explaining that we’re a UK-centric organization with relationships in the US and capabilities in the US. In the last eight weeks. we’ve had a number of pretty decent large corporate opportunities land and I don’t know if that’s as a consequence of one of our competitors unraveling.

Michael: How else do the US and UK markets differ?

Andrew: A big learning for us was how much customers didn’t want to meet face-to-face. We weren’t ready for that. We need to go visit these customers, and we would be flying all over the place. I think it was four months in and somebody sat me down and said, “You know you’ve got to stop this flying around stuff.” Nobody expects that. People just expect to do things on the phone. From a kind of scaling standpoint, we’re doing a bit of scaling locally, but we’re also doing a bit of scaling remotely because to the customer, as long as the time zones are aligned, it doesn’t matter where you are.

The kind of sales pursuits we’re getting more involved in are the ones that are better suited to our sweet spot. We’ll walk away from opportunities that we think are better suited to others. We might even recommend others.

The interview will be continuing over the next few days with discussions of artificial intelligence, what it means to be a “customer curious” business, and how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users.

Artesian Solutions: “Biggest Ever” Release

Artesian Insights Agents for Salesforce Opportunities

US and UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions claimed that their 16.1 software release was their “biggest ever.” The release included functional upgrades, expanded content, user experience improvements, and new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The new Insight Agents are their first step towards delivering “intelligent chat bots aimed at automating many of the tasks carried out by B2B professionals daily.” The new AI tool combines advanced natural language processing and behavioural analytics. The goal is to “deliver commercially valuable and immediately actionable insights, telling the user what they need to know and what action they need to take.”

The evolution of Natural Language Processing, Machine Based Learning and Artificial Intelligence technology is set to have a profound impact on the activities of those in commercial teams. This product release is a significant stepping stone towards an AI future, the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes R&D based on an incredibly rich understanding of the enterprise B2B landscape through the eyes of some of the biggest and most influential companies in the world. We have been working closely with them to understand what their future looks like and where the biggest gains can be made.

Artesian CTO Steve Borthwick

Continued Borthwick, “Artesian has been evolving and improving its relevance and analytic algorithms over the last 10 years, benefiting from the feedback and success that our trusted customers have provided, and that has always kept them one step ahead of the sales intelligence race.”

Insight Agents are initially available within the AppExchange as Salesforce Opportunities. This feature surfaces trigger events based upon the opportunity stage and preferences of each client. “It provides a step change in productivity and customer engagement, enabling you to focus on the most important aspects of your most critical deals,” said VP of Product Management Rich Clark.

For example, Insights for Sales Opportunities will place higher emphasis upon opportunity alerts at the front of the pipeline and risk-based alerts during later stages.

“This latest release without doubt places Artesian at the leading edge of innovation for enterprise B2B,” said CEO Andrew Yates. It delivers the first milestone on our road-map to predicting customer needs, automating and directing pipeline activities, and the delivery of hyper-personalised communications and custom marketing.”

Administrators can now tailor the trigger topics available to their users including adding custom topics and constructing a topic taxonomy focused on industry-specific triggers.

User experience improvements include easier access to topic filters, color-coded triggers in email alerts, and adaptive HTML design for improved mobile navigation and display.

Other design upgrades include the social media viewer which now surfaces social media links alongside inline blogs and tweets and a social selling leaderboard at the team or corporate level which benchmarks Artesian usage versus peers.

: “Hotness” flags were added to the US service. They have long been available in the UK edition.

In the UK edition, Artesian partnered with Blue Sheep to add three million contacts and double the number of emails to 875,000. The additional executives were focused on non-directorial positions, helping expand coverage beyond filed corporate directors. The new set of contacts raised the UK contact count to 9.7 million. Furthermore, the new execs were matched against the Full Contact file, providing additional social media links and biographic relevance to contact profiles.

The expanded contacts and social media links are also available to users of the Artesian Ready mobile app which combines mobile calendars with Artesian insights. Ready helps reps prepare for meetings by supporting on demand company and executive research, sharing meeting notes with colleagues, and reviewing the latest attendee triggers and social media posts.

The firm also added Auditor Fees as a new UK select. Auditor Name was already supported.

For the US edition, Artesian now supports a “Hotness” indicator highlighting firms with recent key trigger events and improved event prospecting (see image above on right). The Hotness indicator was already available in the UK edition.

Artesian has formalized its training and certification program with an integrated leaning management system. The older training was more PowerPoint oriented but the new system is more blog-like with videos and quizzes. Along with tool certification, Artesian includes annual refresher courses.

Ignite Technologies Acquires FirstRain

FirstRain Coverage of Lattice Engines includes web volume, business influencers, market drivers, Twitter trends, recent stories, related topics, and subject filtering.

Ignite Technologies will be acquiring news analytics vendor FirstRain as part of a pre-negotiated, Chapter 11 corporate reorganization. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of July subject to court approval. The acquisition is being funded by Ignite’s parent company, ESW Capital.

FirstRain provides a set of company-specific insights and analytics derived from news, press releases, filings, Twitter, and other open web content sets. FirstRain applies a high-precision taxonomy to the “business web” which spans companies, industries, geographies, and business topics. For the past few years, FirstRain has been the source of company and industry news for Dun & Bradstreet (Hoovers Classic, First Research, D&B Direct, and D&B 360), Mergent, and other OEM partners. FirstRain also provides integrated solutions on Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft SharePoint.

FirstRain Who to Call Panel. — The FirstRain Who to Call Panel provides insights on which accounts have Deal Threats and Accelerators, Reasons to Check In, or New Information.

“FirstRain’s leading-edge, analytics technology providing actionable insights for its clients’ sales and marketing teams strengthens Ignite’s portfolio of sales and marketing solutions,” said Ignite’s CEO Davin Cushman. “Additionally, with the close of the FirstRain acquisition, Ignite will be materially expanding our foundation of sales and marketing solutions that Chief Marketing and Chief Revenue Officers can depend on to drive their business.”

Once the acquisition closes, FirstRain will be part of the Ignite Prime product offering which provides access to enterprise software by simply paying a maintenance fee on at least one Ignite standard solution.

“Ignite has a proven track record of buying, strengthening and growing the companies it acquires, and FirstRain is excited about the potential for our world-class teams to carry the FirstRain solutions and customers forward,” said YY Lee, Chief Executive Officer of FirstRain. “Through this acquisition, Ignite’s foundation of success and innovative programs, including their unique Ignite Prime program, extends the value proposition even further for FirstRain customers, now and into the future.”

LinkedIn Acquires Heighten for SalesTech Tools

Heighten Homepage Announcement (Post-Acquisition)

LinkedIn acquired Redwood City SalesTech vendor Heighten and plans to integrate its technology into Sales Navigator. LinkedIn is looking to leverage feature sets around sales process tracking, pipeline reporting, and note taking. Last summer, LinkedIn acquired sales content sharing vendor PointDrive and recently completed the PointDrive integration into Sales Navigator.

With the announcement, Heighten immediately took down its website, but Doug Camplejohn, Head of Products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, provided the following feature descriptions:

The sales process tracking feature allows reps and managers to take their sales playbook binder off the shelf and put it into software, making it easier to see actions and content relevant to each pipeline stage.

The sales pipeline reporting feature lets managers and reps see their current opportunities in a more efficient way, and update key opportunity fields like amount, close date, stage and next steps on a single screen, with all changes automatically written back to CRM.

Finally, the intelligent notepad makes it easy for reps to take free-form notes and rapidly move information back into their CRM system with a single click. It also gives them instant access to key deal content such as person and account profiles, collateral, and competitive battle cards. This feature brings note taking into the context of a specific sales opportunity, reduces the heavy lifting involved in CRM data entry, and gives sales reps insights on-command

It is unclear, however, which of these capabilities will be integrated into Sales Navigator. “Over the next few months, we will be evaluating which of Heighten’s features we’ll be bringing to Sales Navigator,” said Camplejohn. “I’m also excited by the caliber of talent that Heighten brings to LinkedIn.”

Heighten has a staff of ten.

“The Heighten intelligent workspace is truly unique in its ability to bring together all of the key systems salespeople rely on — CRM, calendar, email, social and delivered — in an innovative, intuitive, and user friendly way,” blogged Heighten CEO, Luke Braud. “This approach to sales productivity is a natural extension of LinkedIn’s goal to make Sales Navigator the best version of LinkedIn for Salespeople, the System of Engagement, and ultimately influence every relationship‐based sale for our customers.”

Heighten received $7.36 million in venture funding last September. The acquisition price was not disclosed.

Boardroom Insiders CxO Bios

While most sales intelligence vendors focus on broad coverage, there are several that continue to generate value the old-fashioned way through editorial research focused on high value content sets. Firms in this category include technology vendors DiscoverOrg and RainKing and industry overview provider First Research. Another editorially-focused vendor is Boardroom Insiders, founded by Sharon Gillenwater and Lee Demby. Gillenwater, who was a marketing consultant, realized that several of her key accounts were struggling with CIO-level discussions. In 2010, she partnered with Demby, the co-founder of First Research (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet / Hoover’s in 2007), to create a C-level executive information service.

“Most companies spend too much time worrying about getting customer contact info and not enough time thinking about what they are going to say to these customers once they get in touch with them,” said Gillenwater. “While having the right contact info is important, it is useless if you don’t have a strategy for making yourself relevant to the person on the other end of the phone.”

Boardroom Insiders provides deep biographical profiles of C-level executives. They cover the CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, and COO of the Fortune 500 along with additional top executives requested by their customer base. In total, Boardroom Insiders publishes 13,000 rich biographies for 3,000 US and international companies. A team of fifteen editors (ten full-time) research and update their bios. All of the editors have at least ten years of business journalism or management consulting experience. While all of the material is editorially researched, executive changes and key events are monitored with just-in-time editorial updates performed. Furthermore, if a profile has not been touched in six months, a user can request that it be immediately refreshed. They also retain a pool of in-flux biographies for executives that may be in transition, allowing Boardroom Insiders to quickly revive and update profiles when a high-level executive resurfaces.

Included with subscriptions are credits towards the creation of additional biographies, providing users with on demand professional research. For requests of up to ten executives, the firm turns around new bios in two business days.

Content is derived from the open web with a focus on earnings calls, executive interviews, and industry articles. LinkedIn is also employed as a resource, but depth of content varies greatly and executives are often slow to update profiles after departing firms. What’s more, LinkedIn lacks insights into executive biases, interests, and passions. Finally, LinkedIn does not contain a broader view of the executive’s division and corporate environment.

“LinkedIn is an essential tool, but the profiles are unpredictable, limited in strategic insight, and biased,” said Gillenwater. “Boardroom Insiders is rich with strategic insight, unbiased, and provides the full professional story of the key decision maker you are calling on.”

Executive biographies run two to seven pages and contain

Headshot
Last Updated Date
Current Company, Title, Location, Phone, and Email. The phone may be either a switchboard or direct dial.
Social Media Links (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
An Executive Summary
Personal Attributes and Interests – Family status, interests and hobbies, business philosophy, awards, etc.
Current Focus – Job responsibilities, corporate strategy
Key Challenges
Biographical Highlights
Other Boards and Organizations

Executives can be looked up directly, by company name, or via prospecting. Prospecting is not as robust as large database competitors, but includes F500, Keyword, Title, CxO Function, Industry (NAICS major and minor categories), Alma Mater, etc. Keyword searching should be particularly effective due to the depth of their profiles.

Search results are downloadable as PDFs.

The Boardroom Insiders service offers email alerts for individuals and companies. Users are notified when an executive profile for a tracked company or executive is updated. Company alerts are also sent when new executive profiles are available at tracked companies.

Users may access the service via browsers or a single-sign-on integration with Salesforce.com. Within SFDC, there is a find button on Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities. Boardroom Insiders displays biographies or biography lists within the Salesforce frame.

Boardroom Insiders offers an API based upon the JSON protocol. Clients can use the API to feed information into their corporate data lakes or create custom solutions.

Users span four job functions targeting the C-Suite:

Marketers (e.g. field marketers, ABM programs, engagement teams, executive sponsorship programs)
Executive recruiters
Management consultants
Strategic sales (enterprise sales reps and account teams).

The firm has many clients in the technology sector.

Pricing is subscription based with annual contracts beginning around $10,000 and enterprise contracts reaching $250,000. An SMB account would include three seats and 25 to 50 profile requests.

LinkedIn Hits 500M Members

LinkedIn hit the half billion member mark, continuing its pace of adding 50 million members every nine months. LinkedIn also supports ten million job listings and over nine million company profiles. Members continue to post 100,000 articles per week. However, the active monthly user rate remains around 25%.

In comparison, Facebook has 1.8 billion members and Twitter has 328 million. The top five countries are the United States (138 million), India (42 million), China (31 million), Brazil (29 million), and United Kingdom (23 million).

LinkedIn published connection data by country and region for the first time with the top five most connected countries (i.e. average member connections) listed as the UAE, Netherlands, Singapore, UK, and Denmark. UAE profiles average 211 connections. By metro area, London leads in average connections with 307 per member followed by Amsterdam, San Francisco, Jakarta, and Milan. Staffing and recruiting is LinkedIn’s most connected industry (unsurprisingly as the firm’s largest revenue source is their Talent Solutions products), and human relations its most connected job function.

LinkedIn connectivity rates by job function and level indicate a strong focus on staffing, consulting, and PE/VC roles.

The top five industries are all highly networked occupations including staffing and recruiting, VC/PE, human resources, management consulting, and online media. With respect to job functions, product management was the number two most connected occupation after human resources. It was surprising to see that sales reps did not even make the top five (outside of Business Development which is a senior level mix of partnership, licensing, and relationship management), but product managers had very high connectivity. Of course, the sales function would span both junior and senior sales reps along with business and consumer sales, while product management consists of more mid and upper-level management.

“The impact of half a billion professionals connecting and communicating is very real, and very accessible to anyone who wants to take part today,” said Aatif Awan, LinkedIn’s VP of growth and international products. “We’re excited to think about the potential of what a highly connected global community of professionals can do, and the value that is created for every member of the global workforce.”

LinkedIn, which is operated as an autonomous division within Microsoft, has over 10,000 employees.

Microsoft Relationship Sales Solution

Microsoft Dynamics - LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team Lead and Contact widget display. — Microsoft Dynamics – LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team Lead and Contact widget display.

Microsoft announced Relationship Sales, a bundled version of MS Dynamics for Sales Enterprise Edition and LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team. The new bundle will be available for sale on July 1st. The service is priced at $135, which is “about one-half the cost of competitive solutions in the market,” according to Microsoft EVP, cloud and enterprise group Scott Guthrie.

LinkedIn also announced a set of insight enhancements for its MS Dynamics connector. Insights help sales reps by

Leveraging signals across email, CRM and LinkedIn to get contextual recommendations for the next best action within Dynamics 365 for Sales, facilitating introductions directly through the company’s network and sending InMail, messages and customized connection requests.
Engaging buyers with tailored content throughout the account lifecycle and getting account and lead updates, including news mentions and job changes.
Building strong relationships with existing contacts through access to LinkedIn profile details including photos, current roles and work history.

The new service displays company and contact intelligence across Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity records. Insight features include icebreakers, TeamLink introductions, Lead Recommendations, and LinkedIn intelligence. Daily synchronization ensures that active accounts and contacts are shared between the services and that Sales Navigator activities (e.g. InMails, messages, notes, tags, and call logs) are uploaded to Dynamics 365.

“Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 will dramatically increase the effectiveness of salespeople by tapping into their professional networks and relationships, giving them the ability to improve their pipeline,” said Guthrie.

“Microsoft has been focused on integrating its acquisitions and the LinkedIn to Dynamics 365 [to] Office 365 is the latest [iteration],” said Constellation Research Principal Analyst Ray Wang. “Customers already use these three products in disparate fashion spending time doing arm chair integration. What they’ve been looking for is the ability to take the data and insights in these three products and put them to work.”

Wang believes that cross-platform functionality can be quite useful. For example, “How do you find out who knows whom inside a company? Traverse your Office 365 data, your [Dynamics 365] CRM database and your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and you realize Joe and Abdul have known each other since university days. Let’s put Abdul on the sales call.”

As LinkedIn member content is view only, Relationship Sales does not provide any member content enrichment or data maintenance. Thus, Relationship Sales would need to be used in conjunction with other services such as Insights Enterprise (InsideView OEM with MS Dynamics) or D&B Hoovers for CRM to obtain a full sales intelligence and data maintenance solution.

Microsoft Dynamics - LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team Account widget display. — Microsoft Dynamics – LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team Account widget display.

LinkedIn StoryLines Launched

StoryLines are trending topics shown on the right side of the LinkedIn Desktop

LinkedIn recently introduced their new Storylines feature parallel to the LinkedIn feed. StoryLines are “curated interest-based feeds that surface developing stories to help you discover and discuss news, ideas, and diverse perspectives from the largest group of professionals, publishers and editorial voices ever assembled.”

Articles are based upon information LinkedIn has about each reader such as their industry. StoryLines are intended to combine industry expertise with individual network commentary. A unique hashtag makes “it easy for you to join the conversation and add your own take on the issue.”

LinkedIn emphasized that StoryLines promotes a diversity of opinions and sources. “Each story includes multiple perspectives, ranging from news publishers and influencers, to people in your network, so that you can easily weigh up diverse opinions”

StoryLines are curated via a combination of editorial curation and algorithmic filters. When stories break, an editor writes a summary and identifies diverse sources. An algorithm then adds additional member commentary. This approach ensures a multiplicity of views that pull members out of “filter bubbles” which would otherwise reinforce current views and biases. Topics will be business related

“I don’t want just one point of view”

LinkedIn VP of Product Tomer Cohen

Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn believes it can avoid the problems of “fake news.” Inaccurate content that is intentionally deceptive, including fake news, is not acceptable on our site,” said VP of Product Tomer Cohen. “Our combination of algorithms and editors creates an experience where trending news is validated by editorial to ensure that it is professional and comes from trusted sources.”

Cohen added, “The content members write and share on LinkedIn becomes part of their professional identity — it can be seen by their boss, colleagues, and potential business partners. Promoting fake news can damage your reputation, and there is no hiding behind anonymity on LinkedIn.”

Other features include related stories and follow options for topical experts.

The new feature is being rolled out to US members and then will expand internationally.

LinkedIn mobile also added feed personalization tools which will soon be available via desktop. Amongst the filters are options to follow companies, industry leaders, and publications. Users can also hide posts, and unfollow people and companies. Unfollowing people allows users to retain connections without seeing the connections posts.

LinkedIn has struggled to customize their feed for users, but StoryLines sounds like a smart innovation. By creating a curated trending topic category and placing it to the right of the feed, they can provide relevant content and discussions without it overwhelming the user feed. Furthermore, by curating a set of diverse viewpoints, members are provided with a broader set of perspectives.

Since the beginning of the year, I have noticed an improvement in LinkedIn’s feed. Gone are the eye candy stories from Business Insider covering bots and bikes. Also, there are fewer viral stories about enterprising individuals overcoming hardship. Instead, they have done a better job of surfacing posts from my connections and articles in my field.

The launch of Sales Navigator Enterprise (covered last week) was another indicator that they are focusing more on the Professional side of Professional Social Networking.

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