Linked Sales Navigator Repackaged SKUs

LinkedIn will be repackaging its Sales Navigator SKUs in late January.  The service has already begun notifying customers of the change.  Unlike product releases which they roll out over multiple weeks, the new packaging will be implemented across all customers simultaneously.

Sales Navigator retains its original SKUs from its early days, so repackaging was in order.  Before making any changes, LinkedIn interviewed or surveyed over 2,000 customers, discussed customer requirements with sales reps, and analyzed product usage.

LinkedIn Head of Product and Solutions Marketing Nicole Desjardins discussed a number of her team’s learnings with GZ Consulting:

  • Users want to increase their productivity with an integrated sales stack that avoids data silos and app switching.  “Our customers believe that in order to effectively meet this need, it is critical to seamlessly integrate sales workflows both within and beyond Sales Navigator (e.g., sales stack, CRM).”
  • CRM integrations are a priority for customers.  To prioritize customer value delivery, the future Sales Navigator lineup has CRM integrations as the only top differentiator.  This will “massively clarify” lineup positioning and deliver more value to customers.

    Currently, Sales Navigator only offers full integrations and data synchronization with Salesforce and MS Dynamics 365.
  • Customers are looking to increasingly leverage the data stored in their CRM and expect applications to bisynchronously share data.
  • Buyer intent is “hot in the market” as customers are looking to leverage intelligent signals in a real-time manner.  Sales reps want to “know when to act.”

The new Sales Navigator SKUs are based on a pair of packaging design principles: Customers can use all of the features in the licensed package, and it should be clear which package best meets the needs of each customer.

According to Desjardins, the new packaging enables positioning that is “clear and easy to understand” and aligns to value. In addition, the new packaging will help customers and sales reps  “easily identify the offering that best suits their needs.”

“What I’ve been preaching is that SN is not just one product – it’s an integrated approach to the daily sales process.”

LinkedIn Customer

The legacy SKUs followed a Good / Better / Best packaging structure, but the new SKUs support a Good / Best / Best with CRM packaging with the top tier similar to the mid-tier but containing all of the CRM connector and data sharing functionality. The new packages consist of a “foundational use case, the best of Sales Navigator for non-CRM integrated customers, and the best of Sales Navigator for CRM.”

“Customers will be able to use all of the features they have purchased: CRM features will be the only differentiators for the top tier.  Additionally, we have planned investments to further expand and deepen our CRM capabilities.”

The Core offering is designed for quota-carrying sales reps and supports targeting, lead and account tracking, and communications.  Features include

  • 50 InMails per month (this allotment is the same across all three SKUs).
  • Advanced Search
  • Account and Lead (contact) List Building
  • Guided in-product best practices
  • Account Map, a tool for mapping out the buying committee
  • Up to 10,000 Saved Leads and Accounts

The Core edition is designed for quota-carrying individuals with limited tech stacks.  Core helps sales reps “target the right buyers, understand who they are, and reach out in an informed way,” said Desjardins.

The Advanced tier supports sales teams with administrative and reporting functions, including usage reports.  Product differentiators include

  • CSV Account uploads for tracking key customers and prospects
  • Smart Links (customer-specific landing pages with attachments and multi-media links).  Smart Links may be shared by email, InMail, chat, etc.  Smart Links Analytics tracks who has viewed and downloaded which content. Sales Navigator also tracks Smart Link forwards, providing deeper insights into the Buying Team.  Sales reps are alerted when content has been viewed or forwarded.
  • Team collaboration tools such as shared lists, shared searches, TeamLink (leveraging co-workers’ networks), and collaboration alerts based upon shared features.
  • Buyer engagement alerts and buyer intent.  “Buyer interest is a predictive score based on LinkedIn data from employees at this company,” states the firm.  “This score is an indication of an account’s interest in buying from your company.  It considers key factors like employee interaction, InMail acceptance, ads engagement, company page engagement, and more.”
  • SNAP integrations such as embedded profiles, BI integrations, and a CRM widget.  SNAP integrations are available for CRMs (Salesforce, MSD 365, HubSpot, SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Pega), SEPs (Outreach, Salesloft, Groove, XANT/InsideSales, YesWare, MixMax), and ABX Platforms (Demandbase).

    SNAP integrations do not share data, but they support profile viewing and limited Sales Navigator functionality.  For example, the HubSpot connector provides sales reps with profile viewing, InMails, Icebreakers, Introduction Requests, Related Leads for companies and contacts, and Connections.

The Advanced edition helps teams “forge deeper relationships through real-time sales intelligence and seamless collaboration,” said Desjardins.  “Advanced is the best Sales Navigator for businesses if you’re not integrating with CRM.”

The Advanced Plus edition adds full CRM functionality, including

  • Auto-saving Sales Navigator Leads and Accounts from CRM
  • CRM information in Lists such as Opportunities and past customers who have moved to new companies
  • CRM-powered Lead Recommendations
  • The ability to include or exclude matched CRM leads in Sales Navigator searches
  • CRM Activity writeback (e.g., InMail, Notes, Messages, Smart Links)
  • Create CRM Leads and Contacts directly from Sales Navigator.  These are limited information records (e.g., Company Name, Contact First and Last Names, and Title) as LinkedIn does not share member data.  Contact and Lead Creation also upload fields entered by reps such as email, phone number, and opportunity role.
  • The Data Validation flag warns users when a contact is no longer at a company listed in the CRM.  If the company differs between LinkedIn and the CRM, a “Not at Company Flag” is written to the CRM.  The flag is displayed to the rep and available as a trigger for contact clean-ups and removal from marketing campaigns.

With the Advanced Plus edition, users will be able to “surface actionable intelligence on your books of business, improve productivity by automating key processes, and leverage data to update stale information and make better decisions,” said Desjardins.

At renewal, customers will be offered one of five customer service packages that are “set by the size and scope of your program.”

“We know that onboarding is a critical stage for customer success, so we’re investing in hands-on, human-led onboarding for new customers and existing customers when they grow by a significant amount to accelerate their time-to-value,” stated a LinkedIn FAQ on the new service plans.  “Our customers have different needs and expectations for training, so we’ve invested in world-class resources: on-demand training for all customers at every stage of the customer journey in seven languages. Training is created and led by specialists who are experts in best practices and our product.”

Programs with a minimum of 50 licenses will have a Customer Success Manager that supports periodic Program Health Checks, a tailored Customer Success Plan, Strategic Value Reviews, and ongoing Success Coaching.

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires NetWise Data and Eyeota (Part III)

Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I). Today, I’m covering the Eyeota acquisition.

Eyeota supports a global methodology for onboarding offline and online data in a privacy-compliant and globally consistent way without the use of personally identifiable information (PII).

“In today’s market, brands need the ability to bridge real-world insights into the digital space in order to communicate more effectively with their customers and prospective customers,” states the firm’s About Us.  “Yet the market has never been so difficult for brands to navigate.  The challenge is finding the best ways to capture and activate audience data and to do so in a way that they can be confident is authentic, trustworthy and reliable.”

Eyeota builds audiences “based on what people are buying, watching, listening, reading, and interacting with in both the digital and offline world” that takes into account consumer demographics, behavior, and psychographics.”

Eyeota supports a broad set of global ad buying platforms, trading desks, DMPs, DSPs, and ad networks, including Adobe, Google Marketing Platform, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce DMP.  Eyeota also supports social targeting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

“Eyeota’s expansive global data onboarding and activation capabilities are underpinned by our commitment to delivering audience solutions at scale, and we are proud of the work we have accomplished to develop one of the most powerful, agile, and interoperable frameworks for delivering addressable data in a privacy-conscious era,” said Kristina Prokop, Chief Executive Officer of Eyeota. “By combining forces with Dun & Bradstreet and NetWise, we will be able to offer a more holistic B2B audience platform to our clients, leveraging a powerful combination of data, technology, and insights that help clients better target and engage audiences across global markets and digital channels.”

Eyeota’s products extend the Audience Solutions business into campaign execution and “being online and participating more fully in the B2B MarTech and AdTech supply chain.”

Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in Eyeota for an estimated purchase price of $165 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment. The deal is expected to close by November 5.

Eyeota has 84 employees and grew its headcount 12% over the past year. Founded in 2010, it maintains four offices in the U.S. and outposts in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Pune, Berlin, and London.

Yesterday’s blog about the NetWise acquisition.

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires NetWise Data and Eyeota (Part II)

Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I)

NetWise offers Dun & Bradstreet a B2B-to-consumer ID Graph that helps Audience Solutions compete in this broader digital context.  The Graph includes 30 million U.S. businesses, 100 million business professionals, 250 million opted-in consumer profiles, and 70 million consumer-to-business linkages.  At the audience level, NetWise supports over 500 standard B2B segments and 150 consumer segments.

NetWise extends D&B Audience Solutions’ identity graph “across every major online channel, individual device, or a marketing platform,” said Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour.  “Just as our clients rely on the D-U-N-S Number for precision in their offline data, we’re looking to provide the same level of confidence and consistency online as well.”

NetWise adds a B2B-to-Consumer Graph for cross-channel, cross-device digital marketing.

NetWise excels at joining the offline and online worlds together to connect business personas to their online personas,” said NetWise CEO Dwight Gorall.  “We look forward to joining the Dun & Bradstreet family with Eyeota. Once together, we can work to create a complete solution for clients, enabling a full spectrum of capabilities – from audience creation to activation – at scale across many demand-side platforms, customer relationship management systems, connected T.V. or social media platforms. We are committed to helping global enterprises future proof their marketing strategies so they can thrive in a multichannel world.”

NetWise notes that it is the “original producer” of its B2B data products built from first-party data sources, including state and federal business filings, company websites, job descriptions, job postings, social websites, and business directories.  Moreover, the firm has unrestricted rights to use and sell its data.  Thus, it offers supplementary intelligence for enriching Dun & Bradstreet’s company and contact files.

According to its FAQ, “NetWise generates comprehensive and deterministic B2B segments using current job titles, company firmographics, and other self-declared business-related attributes like skills, education, certifications, etc.  This is accomplished by analyzing publicly available information and data created directly by persons in our dataset.  These data features are often multi-source validated across our compiled data.  Segments are deterministic, based on foundational information and never modeled unless explicitly indicated.”

NetWise is fully compliant with CCPA.  In addition, its Data Protection Officer is a California-licensed attorney.

Outside of the US, NetWise maintains 100 million global profiles that can be folded into WorldBase and 300 million non-EU global profiles.  NetWise does not build profiles on GDPR (EU) subjects.

Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in NetWise Data for an estimated purchase price of $69 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment.  The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter.

NetWise is based in Boca Raton, Florida and has 47 headcount (as per LinkedIn).

Continue to Part III which covers Eyeota.

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires NetWise Data and Eyeota

As part of its Q3 2021 earnings discussion, Dun & Bradstreet announced that it acquired two digital marketing companies: NetWise and Eyeota.  The acquisitions “extend the company’s position in the B2B online marketing value chain and will build upon its rapidly growing Audience Solutions business by adding global scale and the online data to power omnichannel marketing around the world.”

“Dun & Bradstreet’s acquisitions of Eyeota and NetWise will cap-off several years of investment in the Sales and Marketing space, including the acquisition of our Customer Data Platform, Lattice Engines, which is at the core of our D&B Rev.Up platform, and the acquisition of Orb Intelligence to link digital and physical businesses in our Data Cloud,” said CMO Stacy Greiner.  “We are executing on our vision to help revenue-generating teams get out of the business of wrangling data and technology and back to engaging with their customers and prospects to drive growth for their companies.”

Dun & Bradstreet noted that marketers have a broad set of digital channels but are unsure whether their advertising dollars reach their targeted audiences online across multiple digital touchpoints.  The three companies “will be able to provide data and technology that empowers businesses to confidently identify, reach, and engage high propensity B2B audiences for multichannel marketing campaigns.”

“Our online Audience Solutions business continues to see robust growth rates, and we see a significant untapped opportunity in the online business-to-business marketing landscape. This led us to strengthen our position through the signing of definitive agreements to acquire Eyeota and NetWise,” said Jabbour.  “These two complementary companies will extend our position further in the B2B online marketing value chain and build upon a business that has grown over 40% year to date.

The acquisitions extend Dun & Bradstreet audience channels from B2B to B2B2C, helping businesses target business decision-makers at home and improving match rates.  The deals also provide Dun & Bradstreet with an international ecosystem of digital activation platforms.  Other vendors with B2B2C datasets include AnalyticsIQ BusinessCore and Data Axle B2CLink (FKA Execureach).

“This will enable clients to build on the investments they have made into Data Management mastered on the D-U-N-S Number, and more readily activate that data in social, search and display advertising campaigns,” stated the firm.

“We are solving for the current audience shrinkage these marketers face today with the low match rates that plague this industry.  This will enable clients to build upon the investments they’ve made into data management mastered on the D-U-N-S Number and more readily activate that data in social, search and display advertising campaigns.  Said simply, Dun & Bradstreet has the offline B2B targeting data, NetWise enables marketers to translate that data into online audiences, and Eyeota syndicates it across the digital ecosystem.”

Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour

As Work from Home and Work from Anywhere are likely to remain the dominant approaches to professional work in the coming years, marketers need to engage business professionals across multiple devices, channels, and locations with a consistent message.  The acquisitions assist with both multichannel audience targeting and activation, tying together offline and digital.

Continue to Part II, which discusses Netwise, or Part III which discusses Eyeota.

Openprise $16M Series A

RevOps Automation Platform Openprise closed on an oversubscribed Series A last month.  The $16 million round was led by SIG Asia Investment, an affiliate of the Susquehanna International Group, with new investments from Banyan Pacific and Citta Capital.  Existing investors Alumni Venture Group and AI List also participated.

Funding will accelerate development on the Openprise RevOps Automation Platform and scale up the sales and marketing teams.

Openprise supports data management, enrichment, and hygiene across sales, marketing, customer success, BI, and analytics platforms.  Features include data deduplication, data onboarding, lead-to-account matching, lead routing, attribution, and account scoring.

Openprise RevOps automation capabilities.

Openprise cited a recent Gartner forecast that 75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025.  “A move from sales enablement to revenue enablement is needed in today’s rapidly shifting buying and selling dynamic to support this RevOps imperative.”

“Openprise is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the momentum in companies moving to a RevOps model,” stated Anne Marie McCallion, its PR rep.

“When companies move to a RevOps model in order to better align marketing and sales, they soon identify huge gaps in their joint processes and data that aren’t addressed by traditional marketing and sales automation solutions like Marketo, Salesforce, and Salesloft,” said Openprise CEO Ed King.  “Openprise is fueling the RevOps revolution by providing a single, no-code platform that can automate hundreds of RevOps processes and deliver go-to-market-ready data for the entire RevTech stack.”

Openprise customers include UI Path, Vimeo, Zendesk, Okta, Nutanix, Freshworks, Splunk, and Zscaler.

Openprise will face stiffer competition from RingLead, which was acquired by ZoomInfo in September.

Mediafly Revenue360

Mediafly recently released Revenue360, a revenue intelligence service that combines “content engagement, buyer intent, and sales activity data for a 360-degree view of opportunity and account health in one visual dashboard.”  The solution helps revenue teams assess opportunity health, improve forecasting, and accelerate revenue.

The dashboard brings together Mediafly’s content analytics with sales activity captured from Salesforce, SAP, or Microsoft Dynamics and 6sense intent data.  Mediafly argues that a broader view of engagement is required for analyzing deal health.

“Many companies claim to have revenue intelligence capabilities, but their solutions provide users with only partial intelligence.  In a digital selling environment, sales organizations can no longer rely solely on what happened in the meeting to accurately gauge opportunity health. They also need to understand how buyers engage with content outside of live sales interactions. With the most robust content engagement analytics in the market, Mediafly is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap, offering revenue teams full visibility into insights derived from engagement – or lack thereof – with the content that is presented, shared, and available online.”

Mediafly CEO Carson Conant

Mediafly argues that content engagement is a missing element in deal health analysis, with the average B2B Buyers consuming thirteen pieces of content across their journey.  Mediafly captures content consumption regardless of channel (e.g., in a content hub on the website, presented in a sales meeting, sent as a follow-up). In addition, Mediafly captures the assets viewed, time and duration viewed, and whether it was shared.

“A wealth of data often goes unnoticed in sales pipelines,” said Tom Pisello, chief evangelist at Mediafly. “Unfortunately, many companies rely on partial insights from CRM or qualitative feedback from sales reps following their meetings. While these insights are helpful, revenue teams have an opportunity to secure a holistic view of the entire deal pipeline, breaking down silos and gaining perspective into the overall health of an account. The addition of Revenue360 allows us to consolidate data and provide prescriptive recommendations unlike any platform on the market.”

The service is in limited release, with full availability planned for later this quarter.

Chili Distro

Last week I wrote about Chili Events, the new event calendaring service from Chili Piper. Today, I am profiling their new Distro service which acts as a “one-stop-shop for lead qualification, routing, distribution, and booking.”  Distro routes and assigns multiple Salesforce objects in real-time, including leads, contacts, opportunities, cases, and accounts.

Distro expedites the inbound lead process by immediately routing prospects and customers to the correct sales rep. In addition, Distro supports lead-to-account matching so that inbound prospects are assigned to the proper account owner when applicable.

“Whether a lead comes through your organization’s web form or from an offline source, routing can get quite tedious,” explained Chili Piper in the product announcement.  “With the launch of Distro, teams can create intelligent rules to decide which lead gets routed to which rep (or group of reps) on the team. With this intuitive technology, hand-raisers will have the ability to book a meeting instantly, while buyers who need more nurturing are automatically assigned to the appropriate sales rep for follow-up.”

Chili Piper Distro qualifies, routes, and schedules meetings.

If rules do not assign a lead, round-robin assignments ensure that reps receive an equal number of leads.

Chili Piper has been busy with new product releases.  A few weeks ago, Chili Piper announced Chili Events, an Event Meetings Management solution for in-person conferences and trade shows.  The product lets Chili gather engagement data from events and manage pre-conference meetings on the floor as well as post-event meetings with reps. 

The firm also announced a HubSpot integration earlier this month.

“Today, capturing existing demand for a product or service, in real-time, is vital; yet, ensuring each lead is routed and assigned correctly is way harder than it needs to be. With Distro, we can help B2B sales and marketing teams automate the first step in a meaningful engagement and prevent leads from falling out of the marketing funnel. This is a crucial step for increasing inbound conversion rates and boosting revenue generation.”

Chili Piper CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe

Inbound and event lead management address the issue of speed-to-lead with which many B2B organizations struggle.  The average time for lead follow-up is 42 hours.  Automating the process greatly increases the likelihood of scheduling a meeting and converting leads to subsequent stages.

“Chili Piper allows you to connect inbound leads with a rep at the moment they’re interested,” blogged Senior Marketing Manager Maggie Aland.  “This increases your inbound conversion rates and prevents leads from falling out of the marketing funnel.”

Chili Distro is only available for Salesforce.

IT Central Station $30M Series A

Tech review site IT Central Station closed on a $30 million Series A led by Invictus Growth Partners.  The site grew ARR 124%, surpassed 500,000 registered members, and was visited by 3.5 million enterprise software buyers over the past year.  The firm was bootstrapped in 2012 and has been self-funded until now.  It is both profitable and cash-flow positive.

The funds will be employed to rebrand the site as PeerSpot, expand its coverage of new enterprise tech categories, and accelerate sales and marketing.  Hiring will be concentrated in the R&D, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success departments.

IT Central Station has focused on core IT sectors such as Cybersecurity, DevOps, and IT management; however, it does not have the profile breadth of some of the major review sites.

“Now we are expanding to categories where IT is not the primary buyer but is still on the buying committee,” explained CEO Russell Rothstein to GZ Consulting.  “Following that we will expand our coverage for all enterprise technology categories, including mid-market.”

The new brand and site will be launched in January 2022.

“IT Central Station has succeeded in building a platform that tech buyers trust and enables vendor marketers to achieve strong ROI,” said Rothstein.  “We are in the top of the first inning in our plan to build the world’s largest B2B marketplace for enterprise technology, built upon a foundation of verified user-generated content and peer reviews.  The Invictus team adds deep operating expertise, including a uniquely valuable approach to data science, and I am thrilled to have Invictus as our partner for the next stage of our growth.”

Rothstein explained that as a bootstrapped company, the firm didn’t have the marketing resources of other sites, so he focused on the depth and value of reviews, high-quality intent data, and building its customer success team.  Along with rapid revenue growth, the firm posted a net retention rate of 142% last year.

“People trust their peers more than any industry analysts or so-called experts,” said Rothstein. As a result, younger tech buyers expect to “go online to tap into the knowledge of their peers as part of the buying process.  It’s just natural for them.”

Rothstein argues that IT Central Station’s reviews are “the most in-depth,” with an average length of 620 words.  In addition, it offers a “Zero Fake Reviews” commitment, with a triple authentication process (LinkedIn profiles, community policing, and human oversight) for validating reviews.  First, reviews are checked to ensure the individual does not work for the reviewed company or one of its competitors.  The job function is also verified to ensure that a qualified individual wrote it.

“Every review has to have pros and cons. We don’t accept any five-star ‘everything’s perfect’ reviews without any room for improvement,” explained Rothstein.  “Reviews have to have both room for improvement as well as value that you get from the product.”

Conversely, IT Central Station also filters out reviews that are purely negative rants.

“If someone’s having such an extreme opinion, then they’re not really presenting a realistic picture,” continued Rothstein.  “It’s just losing credibility.  People aren’t going to believe the review and it just reflects poorly on the review site itself.  So we really aim to get that balance in every review.”

Rothstein explained that IT Central Station has a strong community that both polices the site for biased reviews and supports active Q&A discussions.

Profiles include an overview, filterable reviews, pros and cons, pricing, alternatives, “Many of our customers generate millions of dollars in pipeline and closed business from IT Central Station leads and intent data,” blogged Rothstein.  “They’ve given us high marks with an average 70 Net Promoter Score (NPS) over the past four quarters. That’s world-class NPS, putting us at the level of Apple and Starbucks.”

IT Central Station profile of MS Azure.

IT Central Station argues that review sites mostly attract “high intent buyers” in the decision phase of the buyer’s journey.  Furthermore, Demand Gen’s 2021 Buyers Survey found that most purchasers reached out to peers and existing users before contacting any vendors.

“People don’t read complex product reviews just for kicks – they are looking for help in choosing what product to buy,” added IT Central Station Content Manager Rony Sklar.  “B2B buyers who are about to spend a lot of money on an enterprise solution want to know what their peers’ experiences have been with the solutions they’re considering before making a purchase.  Because review sites have this highly targeted, homogenous audience whose main logical use case for a review site is researching a purchase, all the site visitors exhibit a degree of intent. Unlike other types of data, this intent data is low funnel and has a high degree of accuracy because there is no guesswork involved. The intent data generated by a review platform shows you exactly which companies are researching you and your competitors.”

Along with CSV files and webhooks, IT Central Station delivers integrated intent data to Salesforce, Demandbase, and LinkedIn.  In addition, the firm will be announcing support for 6sense, Marketo, HubSpot, Outreach, and Metadata in the coming months. 

“We can provide [intent data] at the contact level, but also aggregate it at the account level, as we can associate multiple people at the same company,” stated Rothstein.  “We provide a proprietary Buyer Intent Score for each account that incorporates activity done both at the contact and overall account level for each account.  For contact level, we provide email, phone, title, function, job level, and BANT information.  We also provide product interests per contact, so you can see which products the contact is researching and comparing, with the level of depth of their research.”

Intent data is updated daily. “Making the right enterprise software purchasing decisions has never been more mission critical for the success of growing businesses and the careers of enterprise software buyers,” said Invictus Managing Partner William Nettles.  “IT Central Station’s reviews have proven to be a must have for enterprises to validate the performance of their products, while providing buyers the most trusted and reliable data for their buying decisions. We are thrilled to partner with Russell and his team to help them scale the business to the benefit of enterprise software buyers globally.”

Chili Events

The name of the game in Revenue Acceleration is Digital Engagement. There are many forms of engagement that are now being captured (emails, chat, meetings, webinars, etc.), but offline events seemed to be beyond the scope of capture; however, Chili Piper, the calendaring company, has designed tools for scheduling meetings at trade shows and from trade show floors.

The new Chili Events service offers an “all-in-one Event Meetings Management solution for generating more meetings and maximizing ROI from in-person conferences and trade shows.”  In short, Chili is looking to facilitate meetings and gather engagement data from in-person events.

As in-person events return, it is vital to gather registration data as event attendees are likely to be part of the demand unit.  According to Chili Piper, “81% of conference and trade show attendees have buying authority.”

“In-person events are hugely important for B2B revenue teams,” said Chili Piper CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe.  “With Chili Events, we’re making it possible for marketing and sales to not just automate booking conference and trade show meetings with key prospects and customers, but to treat those meetings like any other digital touchpoint in the customer journey, with quantifiable results and data.”

Chili Event Reminders support a rescheduling link.

Chili Events features include URLs to pre-book meetings, meeting space availability, unified meeting calendars, automated reminders and rescheduling via email and SMS, and an event management dashboard.  Chili Events are integrated with GSuite and Outlook365. Additionally, check-ins and no-shows are synced to Salesforce Campaigns.

Chili Events also supports meeting scheduling from trade booth floors via QR codes for mobile phones, computers at the booth, or register on the prospect’s behalf via Chili’s Instant Booker Scheduler.

Engagement intelligence supports multiple revenue acceleration features including engagement scoring, deal health signals, and deal risk alerts. It can also be used to identify and upload missing contacts in the CRM and build out the buying committee.

LeadIQ $30M Series B

Account Based Prospecting Platform LeadIQ announced a $30 million Series B led by Cathay Innovation, with Fresco Capital, Strong Ventures, and Eight Road Ventures joining the round.  The round brings total funding to $42 million.

The funds will be deployed to accelerate the product roadmap in account prioritization, buying team and contact personalization, and sales team collaboration.  Funds will also be used to fill key management positions for managing its growth and expansion as CEO Mei Siauw plans to double the firm’s headcount over the next eighteen months.

LeadIQ still has $6 million available from its Series A but is looking to expand from lead management into broader account management; thus, it is raising the necessary funds for new product development. 

According to Cathay Innovation, LeadIQ has “some of the best enterprise SaaS unit economics we’ve seen.”

Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch reported that “the company also sports net retention figures of around 125% and a strong ratio of account size versus customer acquisition costs.  Those are the sorts of metrics that SaaS investors covet.”

LeadIQ, founded in 2015, is based in San Francisco and Singapore.  It employs a remote workforce of 115 in 22 countries and serves companies in 45 countries.  Over the past year, the company quadrupled its ARR to “eight digits.”  The firm supports over 20,000 sales professionals across 1,200 enterprise and mid-market deployments.

LeadIQ automates sales rep prospecting workflows.

LeadIQ functionality helps sales teams “focus on the right activities and automate the rest.”  Its Chrome extension supports prospecting and lead capture from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, capturing both individual contacts and filtered contact lists.  Leads may be exported to Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and Salesloft, with duplicates blocked.  Contacts sent to Outreach and Salesloft kick off cadences.

“With 65% of teams missing revenue targets, outbound sales efficiency is a major challenge for enterprises globally,” said founder and CEO Mei Siauw. “Today, account-based prospecting is still highly manual and time-consuming thanks to fragmented data across multiple systems, repetitive busywork, low-quality research, and varying privacy laws. We built LeadIQ to help sales teams everywhere make authentic prospect connections with a more thoughtful approach. The numbers speak volumes, where we tripled growth in our enterprise and mid-market segments year-over-year. With this latest financing, we look forward to working with current and new investors like Cathay Innovation, who have the global reach and local market expertise across the US, Europe, and Asia to help us scale further during this next phase of growth.”

LeadIQ CEI Mei Siauw

Other features include

  • Email verification
  • Lead, Contacts, and Account enrichment and update
  • Territory management recognizes when reps are capturing leads that do not conform with their territory
  • Contact tracking that alerts reps when contacts change companies or titles.
  • An admin portal that helps customers comply with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA

“Led by a resilient and tenacious CEO with incredible vision, LeadIQ offers a next-gen platform that is the glue that unifies sales at the top of the funnel to provide the most comprehensive solution on the market,” said Cathay Innovation CEO Denis Barrier.  “Its workflow automation builds a strong moat and competitive advantage, which is critical with the pandemic-era digital transformation and subsequent talent wars forcing sales leaders to prioritize efficiency and effectiveness beyond the quota. We look forward to leveraging our resources worldwide to accelerate the company further onto the global stage.”

LeadIQ begins at $720 per rep on an annual basis for the Starter Plan.  Sales reps receive 250 verified emails per month and 25 mobile numbers.  However, the Starter Plan only supports Google Sheets and HubSpot Capture.

The Pro Plan doubles the price and monthly data plan.  Pro includes Salesforce and SEP integrations and lets users enrich CSV files of up to 100 rows.

Pricing for the Enterprise Edition runs at $135 per rep per month and includes job change notifications, prospecting, a team analytics dashboard, and priority support.  The Enterprise plan requires a minimum of twenty users, so it begins at $32,400. LeadIQ did not disclose its current valuation.