Marketing and Business Intelligence vendor Data Axle unveiled Audience360, its suite of data management capabilities that consist of front-end data capture, data management, and data distribution. Enterprise data is ingested via APIs or FTP and then processed through a suite of cleansing, standardization, enrichment, identity resolution, and deduplication modules.
DMP: LiveRamp, Lotame, TradeDesk, Oracle Data Cloud, and half a dozen other programmatic platforms. Data Axle supports nearly one billion hashed emails to assist with targeting.
BI platforms: Adobe, HCL Unica, Alterian
“A lot of people struggle with the rigidity of some of the tools that are out there,” explained Data Axle SVP of Client Technology Solutions Sal Pecoraro. “People think that when they buy a marketing cloud platform, it does all the data hygiene work.”
Audience360 lets data analysts and operations teams “design data capture, data management processing, and distribution into the system that they need,” continued Pecoraro. It doesn’t matter whether the platforms are on-premise or hosted in the marketing cloud or S3 buckets on Amazon.
Pecoraro emphasized data security with encryption both in transport and at rest. “If they need to anonymize data, we can match IDs, etc. So, if there are security concerns about exporting their data to us, we can handle that through encryption and anonymization.”
He also positioned the solution as more flexible, quick to implement, and less expensive than other solutions, with a strong ROI. Platform flexibility is “the most important thing, with support that goes beyond CDPs. Furthermore, alternative platforms are expensive, ”large investments.” This “rigidity” and high cost make it difficult to define a strong ROI and use case.
Conversely, “ours is much less expensive, quicker to stand up, more flexible to have those components that you need added. You can add or remove things over time. It’s not a black box or rigid solution that you can adjust as your business changes. But I think flexibility [and] speed to market is some of our core value.”
And because the platform is service-based, companies don’t need to worry about training, upgrading the platform, or managing bug patches. “We take requirements, we do configurations, we build automations, and we plug in on data receipt and export.”
Due to the system’s flexibility, pricing is bespoke based on volume, processes, and integrations. Pricing is generated by the requirements gathering team, and implementation is passed to a design and implementation team. Later, ownership is managed by a post-implementation support team.
Audience360 offers an “iterative process” that lets clients add or remove processes, data sources, and integrations.
As Data Axle offers three datasets, a broad set of linkages are supported, including households, corporate families, business/consumer, and employment.
Audience360 is generally available.
Clients include multiple healthcare companies and a large telco. The service also supports retailers, financial services, and travel/leisure.
Vendor Neutral posted its 2023 SalesTech Landscape.
Vendor Neutral published Nicolas De Kouchkovsky’s seventh annual SalesTech Landscape. When viewed online, a magnifying glass helps the viewer focus on specific categories. The eyechart now contains over 1,000 tools across fifty categories.
New categories include “Extended Reality (XR), Email Deliverability, Product-Led Sales Platform (i.e., PLG CRM), and Ecosystem & Co-Selling Management to enable the emerging ‘nearbound’ sales motion.
Unfortunately, the SalesTech Landscape is not available for licensing or as a downloadable list.
“Sales engagement is the first category that came out of modern SalesTech stacks,” remarked De Kouchkovsky. “When it emerged, it provoked a gold rush, stimulating the birth of a myriad of email solution providers. Fast forward to today, multichannel — email, voice, including growingly LinkedIn and messaging — is the norm. It forced the landscape to settle: some vendors have graduated into true multichannel engagement platforms, some have pivoted out of the space, and the rest are offering the function as a commodity.”
Traditionally, sales engagement platforms have focused on outbound prospecting. It’s time to reset: inbound matters,” continued De Kouchkovsky. “In a world where buyers are researching on their own, engaging them when they land on your website constitutes a unique opportunity.”
De Kouchkovsky noted that inbound is more than chatbot and messaging. It also includes voice (call distribution and callback) and direct scheduling.
He also observed that prospecting (and broader sales intelligence) remains segregated from sales engagement. He cited two exceptions, Apollo and ZoomInfo Engage, but I would add Cognism to this list.
De Kouchkovsky argued that sales reps are overwhelmed with data entry and juggle multiple apps with more complex workflows. He called out several emerging solutions beyond Sales Engagement Platforms for addressing these problems: Collaboration and email plug-ins, Sales Workplace systems (e.g., Dooly, Scratchpad) that “overlay existing systems to offer sellers a streamlined experience to update systems,” and workflow automation tools that manage “the back-end synchronization between the various apps of the stack.”
“Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) are not new but now play a more strategic role in sharing content with all the stakeholders and helping better ‘read’ deal dynamics through content consumption, remarked De Kouchkovsky. “Mutual Action Plans began as shared to-do spreadsheets. They are becoming another mini-category, used not just by customer success teams but also to drive the initial sale through to onboarding.”
The Landscape is also seeing a blossoming of AI assistants that offer recommendations and guidance. This category grew 2X over the past year.
ZoomInfo announced another data cloud partnership, this time with Databricks. ZoomInfo now delivers its B2B intelligence via the Databricks Marketplace, including over 100 million company profiles, 260 million contacts, technographics, and intent data.
“This partnership brings together a pair of billion-dollar industry leaders,” said Databricks President Andy Kofoid. “Our customers will love having secure, easy access to ZoomInfo’s industry-leading data in the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, and they’ll be able to harness the power of this data to fuel their AI and machine learning processes. With the latest insights fueling their advanced analytics, our customers can quickly accelerate their revenue growth.”
Databricks enables ZoomInfo B2B intelligence for data engineering, data science, analytics, and business intelligence teams. The open marketplace, powered by Delta Sharing, allows teams to exchange data assets and automate data updates. Customers can either license pre-built Data Cubes or work with ZoomInfo’s data services team to design custom Data Cubes.
Delta Sharing is an “open standard for secure sharing of data assets without proprietary platform dependencies, complicated ETL, or expensive replication.”
Off-the-shelf Data Cubes include:
Company Data Cube: Firmographic Data purpose-built for Sales & Marketing with over 200 data attributes. Updated Quarterly.
Company Data Cube Add-on: Advanced Attributes. Advanced Attributes delivers a comparative analysis of department size and strength, technology spend, and a blended measure of department-level sophistication.
Intent Data Cube: Over 4,000+ standard intent topics for data modeling, scoring, analysis, and other advanced data initiatives.
Contact Data Cube: Contact Data, updated monthly.
Contact Data Cube Add-on: Job History
“With unlimited access to ZoomInfo data delivered directly to your existing systems of work, you can build a reliable go-to-market data foundation to analyze, predict, and engage with the right accounts to drive revenue,” wrote ZoomInfo. “By actualizing your total addressable market, pinpointing your ideal customer profile, increasing segmentation accuracy, predicting look-alikes, sharing go-to-market insights, and more, ZoomInfo Data Cubes provide holistic account intelligence for your go-to-market motions.
ZoomInfo is now a certified data provider on the Databricks platform, allowing prospective customers to trial ZoomInfo DaaS.
Other ZoomInfo cloud partners include Snowflake, AWS, and Google Cloud.
“Seamless access to ZoomInfo data helps teams fuel accelerated growth for their GTM teams by unlocking and centralizing insights at scale,” said ZoomInfo Product Management VP Sneh Kakileti. “These insights can power advanced technology applications, such as generative AI-based processes — which are only as good as the data they have access to. This partnership will help data-centric organizations solve some of their toughest go-to-market problems and win faster.”
Vidyard formally launched its Vidyard Rooms digital sales room (DSR) to beta. Vidyard Rooms are available at no charge for both free and subscription clients. However, Vidyard plans to introduce paid DSR plans in the future.
Vidyard Rooms support personalized videos, tailored demonstrations, recorded meetings, documents, and proposals. Users can comment on and tag content. Sellers are notified when new buyers join the room and when content is consumed.
“At Vidyard, we are always looking for ways to help sellers and go-to-market teams create more productive relationships with their buyers,” said COO Jonathan Lister. “With Vidyard Rooms, we are doing just that – empowering sales professionals to build personal relationships at scale and educate key stakeholders in a way that is timely, convenient, and collaborative.”
Vidyard described it as the first “video-first DSR,” but I’m not sure that video-first provides a significant value add as all DSRs support video (and many include chat). There are three primary values of DSRs:
Expedited deal onboarding and journey stage transition (i.e., looping in the legal department or handing off from an account manager to a customer success manager).
There is also a latent opportunity for building out the demand unit, but vendors have not focused on that. None of these requires a video-first platform but building out the demand unit and engagement metrics call for the DSR to be native to an SEP, ABX platform, or Revenue Intelligence platform that ingests multi-channel signals. Furthermore, Vidyard is integrated with most of the major vendors in these categories.
As such, Vidyard Rooms are likely to be used primarily by SMBs and in enterprise sales segments that have deployed asynchronous video but not cutting-edge RevTech platforms.
“Demand for Digital Sales Rooms is up 325% year-over-year as post-pandemic digitalization and a shift towards efficient growth put pressure on sales teams to transform the way they work with buyers,” said GTM Partners Chief Analyst Bryan Brown. “With its unique video-first approach, Vidyard Rooms is a compelling new solution in this emerging market that aims to make digital sales rooms more personal, engaging, and helpful to buyers.”
Vidyard Rooms act as a centralized hub for sharing deal artifacts with stakeholders.
RevSure, which describes itself as a Pipeline Readiness solution, closed on an additional $6 million in seed funding, bringing its total seed funding to $10 million. The round was led by Neotribe Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, with participation from Operator Collective and Correlation Ventures. Neotribe Partner Alex Salazar, the former founder and CEO of Stormpath (acquired by Okta), joined RevSure’s board.
RevSure helps go-to-market teams “share a single source of truth” concerning the health of their pipeline. It also automates reporting tasks and offers recommendations for converting leads into qualified sales opportunities. RevSure helps marketers determine revenue leakage and where to concentrate their spend.
RevSure offers insights into demand generation effectiveness and efficiency, helping prioritize leads and opportunities. AI recommendations call out which leads to prioritize and how to optimize campaigns. Users can drill down into campaigns or filter by title, industry, segment, and channel.
RevSure already supports Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.
“The question that is top of mind for every marketing leader right now is: ‘Am I meeting my pipeline generation goals, and if not, what should I do about it?’ What sets RevSure apart is the unique combination of data normalization and predictive AI that allows CMOs and their teams to answer those questions faster than ever using a simple, action-oriented user interface,” said Haley Daiber Brannan, Investing Partner at Operator Collective. “It’s working, and the growing customer love RevSure has earned in such a short time speaks for itself.”
The additional funds will help advance RevSure’s “mission of advancing the effectiveness of pipeline generation for B2B companies, with additional investments in product, engineering, and AI technology and resources. RevSure will also invest in customer acquisition and “doubling down on the company’s go-to-market strategy.”
Demand Generation Effectiveness Drilldown.
RevSure focuses on the top and middle of the funnel with recommendations and prioritization tools instead of the bottom, which looks more at forecasting. “We are in the lead-to-opportunity journey,” explained RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra to GZ Consulting. “We don’t go into the forecast.”
“Pipeline health needs to be on every go-to-market leader’s, CEO’s, and Board’s agenda – it’s the missing link in driving predictable & profitable revenue growth, which is critical in the current economic climate. Adding AI-based predictive insights into pipeline effectiveness and health will allow companies to focus on predictability for outcomes, acceleration to revenue and effectiveness or quality and efficiency.”
RevSure CEO Deepinder Singh Dhingra
RevSure officially launched at SaaStr in September 2022. “RevSure uncovers what’s happening in the marketing and sales funnel so companies know exactly what’s working, how much leakage is occurring, and where to focus resources to win more deals,” said Neotribe Ventures Partner Alex Salazar. “We’re thrilled to be leading the expansion of RevSure’s seed round as their ability to accurately predict pipeline value from all the leads marketing generates is creating an opportunity for them to become the de facto system of engagement for demand gen teams.”
Dun & Bradstreet announced the launch of D&B.AI Labs to lead the co-development of AI solutions that apply Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) against its proprietary data and analytics.
“Over the last few years, Dun & Bradstreet has gone through a dramatic transformation driving a culture of innovation and making significant investments in technology, data, and analytics, including adding 64% more analytics solutions, evolving its scores and indices to leverage AI, LLM and ML capabilities,” claimed the firm.
A team of data scientists, data engineers, and solution specialists with expertise in AI, LLM, ML, and advanced business analytics staffs D&B.AI Labs. Lab members will partner with clients to formulate solutions, build prototypes, and deploy solutions that leverage Dun & Bradstreet’s data and analytics.
“Powered by innovation and in support of the rapid changes across the business landscape, companies of all sizes need access to an environment where they can fuse our trusted datasets, responsibly apply AI, and tap into our expertise to quickly develop prototypes and solutions to advance their businesses. We believe there is no company better than Dun & Bradstreet to accomplish this,” said Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour. “D&B.AI Labs creates an environment for us to work side-by-side with our unparalleled client roster, including 93% of the Fortune 500, to understand their pain points and help them to swiftly design and deliver innovative solutions specific to their needs.”
Along with generative AI expertise, D&B.AI Labs offers expertise in Dun & Bradstreet’s ESG, linkage (e.g., family trees), Master Data Management, and sales and marketing solutions. Dun & Bradstreet’s MDM solutions help connect data within organizations, cleanse and enrich records, and apply predictive analytics against customer datasets.
“In a world where LLMs are trained on mainly uncontrolled publicly available data from the web, the value of trusted datasets such as Dun & Bradstreet’s will increase significantly,” said Gary Kotovets, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Dun & Bradstreet. “Our products and services are underpinned by validated, historical, and proprietary data, which allows us to deliver reliable and interpretable AI-created results that drive our clients’ most critical business decisions.”
Dun & Bradstreet also announced that its Sales Intelligence solution, D&B Hoover’s, is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. D&B Hoover’s via the Google Cloud Marketplace allows for a “dollar-for-dollar drawdown against Google Cloud commitments.”
“The demand for trusted B2B data intelligence is ever-increasing. D&B Hoovers continues to be a solution that organizations rely on to help boost sales productivity and strategic targeting to drive business growth,” said Karlos Palmer, SVP of Sales & Marketing Solutions Product. “Having D&B Hoovers available on Google Cloud Marketplace makes it easy to use incredibly valuable data to build sales pipelines, and since we’ve migrated D&B Hoovers to Google Cloud, customers have already reported significant performance improvements.”
B2B Data and Intelligence vendor LeadGenius announced its expansion into the APAC region with “substantial” coverage of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. The firm also touts “emerging” coverage of China, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, the firm announced its new LeadGenius Plays and Rapid Enrich offerings.
“By leveraging top-performing campaigns from exceptional marketers, we help businesses launch complex data requests in seconds,” said VP of Sales and Customer Success Zeb Couch. “We are continuing to work with our clients around the world to build global B2B data aimed at increasing growth through custom signals and account insights. With over 80% of B2B data undiscovered or underutilized, we want to give our clients every tool possible for targeting and differentiation.”
LeadGenius Plays simplifies custom data campaigns and look-a-like audiences based on non-standard data characteristics. Plays also enriches files and appends missing fields.
LeadGenius employs artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), human intelligence, and curation when collecting its data.
LeadGenius Campaign Plays
LeadGenius also announced its Rapid Enrich real-time DaaS product this week, with coverage of enterprise, SMB, and global data.
“In the fast-paced world of B2B data, the need for a solution that offers agility, precision, and comprehensive insights was evident,” stated LeadGenius CEO Mark Godley. “With the unveiling of Rapid Enrich, we are setting a new standard for data enrichment technology, enabling our clients to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape. We are thrilled to introduce Rapid Enrich as our latest innovation in providing agile, comprehensive, and industry-leading data solutions. Our relentless pursuit of excellence and commitment to our clients’ success remains our guiding principles as we continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible in the B2B data sector.”
LeadGenius emphasized its data security and privacy management. Rapid Enrich includes “contractual assurances of responsible data handling, coupled with transparent audit trails that enable businesses to maintain an unquestionable record of their data management activities.”
Engage’s generative AI models help personalize customer engagement efforts while streamlining email composition.
Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong unveiled Gong Engage, its entry into the Sales Engagement space. SEPs have been adding Conversational Sales tools for several years, so Gong adding SEP functionality should not be surprising. After all, Gong began as a conversational sales solution before widening its scope to Revenue Intelligence. Also, one of Gong’s top rivals, Chorus, is owned by ZoomInfo, which has been building ZoomInfo Engage for several years.
“Gong Engage serves as a single solution to streamline sales engagement for revenue teams by delivering AI-based sales guidance from the first touchpoint with a prospect to deal close,” wrote the firm. “Engage helps teams create and accelerate pipeline by delivering increased productivity with AI-driven automation and guidance, high-quality outreach to engage entire accounts, and a single sales engagement solution to streamline revenue workflows. Gong’s proprietary AI delivers three times more accuracy than off-the-shelf AI models.”
Engage supports core SEP features, including a web-based dialer, workflows, and email templates. It also sports generative AI models for deal prioritization and extracting call highlights, action items, and outcomes. AI features include:
Call Spotlight, Gong’s generative AI functionality that composes call briefs, account highlights, and action items from sales conversations
Automated call outcomes and email response classification that automatically categorizes calls and emails and syncs these insights with the CRM
Assisted writing, which helps reps personalize their outreach based on persona
“Engage’s contextual, account-based approach for prospecting and selling exceeds the limitations of traditional lead-based tools that encourage mass outreach with little targeting. Instead, it delivers a complete understanding of an account, including all touchpoints, relevant CRM information, and conversational history,” stated Gong.
Gong emphasized that it didn’t jump on the generative AI bandwagon following the breakout success of ChatGPT but has been working to integrate generative tools into its platform for over a year. Furthermore, its focus on sales-focused NLP offers it a leg up on vendors marketing generic ChatGPT tools or lacking years of AI expertise and product development.
“Gong launched in 2016 to harness the power of AI to rid customer-facing people of their day-to-day drudgery. We have been working with LLMs for over a year and see it as a major breakthrough. But highly accurate, domain-specific AI that delivers a deep understanding of what’s going on within a sales organization and the next steps needed to win deals is more elusive,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov. “AI is the core of Gong’s platform, and our new models exemplify the sales-driven advancements we’re bringing to market to help our customers transform their teams and accelerate revenue growth.”
Along with conversational sales expertise, Gong offers Smart Trackers, a set of AI-based customized signals. Launched last year, Smart Trackers help revenue teams “identify deal risks and opportunities, understand the effectiveness of strategic initiatives, replicate best practices, and get ahead of emerging market needs.”
Gong Recommended Contacts
Engage’s Recommended Contacts feature analyzes historical deal data to recommend contacts for outreach. It feeds contact data from LeadIQ, Cognism, and Apollo based on target personas. Recommended contacts may be added to flows (cadences), or sales reps can reach out via email, phone, or LinkedIn.
Engage also displays buying signals from over 120 Gong Collective integrations “to help teams stay on top of their pipeline, no matter where signals are coming from.”
Along with consolidating conversational sales, sales engagement, and revenue intelligence in a common platform, Engage supports partnerships that include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Chili Piper, and Calendly.
Engage workflow and dashboard features include Pipeline Views for viewing key tasks and insights across open opportunities, an Analytics Dashboard for sales management, and team collaboration tools for sharing and assigning tasks across teams.
“Gong changed how revenue teams build pipeline with our customer-centric AI – now we’re changing how they engage with customers at every stage,” said Bendov. “We have leveraged our market-leading AI technology as the foundation for Gong Engage, which sets the entire revenue team up for success. Engage is the only solution that harnesses customer interactions at scale to drive high-quality engagement and ultimately, grow revenue.”
Rhetorik began as a European technographics vendor but now focuses on broader company and contact intelligence.
B2B Data vendor Rhetorik announced Neuron360, its “AI-enhanced data platform designed to extend and enrich clients’ data-driven solutions, marketing strategies, and talent initiatives.” AI capabilities include language translation, data normalization, and contact-level lead targeting.
Neuron360 “unifies and integrates” its B2B intelligence, which spans 200 million company profiles, 800 million professional people profiles, and 60 million verified and compliant contact records (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, UK DMA). Rhetorik also supports international technographics at both the enterprise and worksite levels.
The Professional profiles contain over eighty data fields, including career history, skills, job titles (translated, normalized, and standardized), experiences, and education. Verified contacts doubles the field count to 160 fields and includes validated email, job title, job function, switchboard and direct phone numbers, employer, and business location.
“The process of taking a profile and converting it to a verified and compliance contact involves a number of steps, including applying our proprietary, AI-driven ‘still in position’ and ‘still in business’ tests, validation tests for job title, company, email, and other details, and the sending of ‘fair processing’ notices,” explained CRO Kevin Savage to GZ Consulting.
While approximately one in four verified contact is a technology title, “the vast majority of the contacts, no matter which functional department they sit in, are technology decision-makers, influencers or users – all of whom have a role in the tech buying process these days,” continued Savage.
Contact information is translated, normalized, and standardized for 46 languages across 164 countries.
Savage emphasized that the “60M contacts are not really the main part of the announcement. The news is that we now have these datasets all in one place, and we have 800M profiles that can be converted into verified and compliant contacts on request.”
Company profiles include over 150 data fields. Along with standard firmographics, Neuron360 includes social handles, location-level sizing data, and location-level technographics. Neuron360 company coverage is global, with 70 million EMEA, 50 million North American, 45 million APAC, and 30 million LATAM profiles.
“With Neuron360, we have combined the power of advanced AI tools with extensive data coverage, empowering our clients to harness the full potential of their data initiatives and fuel their marketing, sales, and talent initiatives with confidence,” said Rhetorik CEO Meredith Amdur. “Neuron360 brings all the global B2B data needs together in one place with precision, quality, freshness, and breadth. Our exacting data buyers can choose from a comprehensive suite of data APIs, firehose feeds, online portals, and batch delivery.”
Neuron360 includes a query builder with counts and summarized firmographics presented in both tabular and visual formats. The query builder also displays the search query in multiple languages, including Python, Node.js, Ruby, Php http v1, and C. Developers can then copy / paste the query into Postman or other API platforms.
Additional tools include usage tracking and a status page for checking platform uptime. Documentation includes a data dictionary, schema, field population counts, internal and external values, and summary data (e.g., counts by country, revenue range, etc.)
B2B content syndication vendor NetLine launched INTENTIVE, their buyer-level intent platform at last week’s Forrester event in Austin. INTENTIVE offers “real-time insights into truly ‘who’ is actively expressing intent within a B2B account.”
INTENTIVE is similar to TechTarget’s Priority Engine but broader in focus. Whereas Priority Engine’s intent data is focused on enterprise and health tech, INTENTIVE supports a wider range of 247 industries, including pharma, aviation, manufacturing, and enterprise technology, etc.
“By design, TechTarget is highly focused on supporting the needs of B2B marketers and is targeting technology decision makers. They expanded to healthcare, but that’s about it,” noted Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting. “We view our platform as persona-agnostic and diversified” due to the broader scope and depth and breadth of NetLine’s audiences which now also includes Informa media properties and events.
Fortino described TechTarget Priority Engine as a “phenomenal product” but geared toward a more select audience of technology buyers. As such, Priority Engine is “Apple-esque,” while INTENTIVE is the “Android alternative in the marketplace.”
NetLine’s intent data is all “first-party-sourced data” and not cookie-based. Furthermore, it is transparent and includes professional bios, job types, job levels, locations, and engagement activity.
By surfacing individual activity data, NetLine is going beyond “black box metrics.”
INTENTIVE provides buyer-level activity data within accounts. Both online (e.g., webinars attended) and offline (e.g., conference sessions attended) activities are displayed with weights applied based on activity type.
Fortino also emphasized that INTENTIVE is both persona and industry-diversified, so not limited to IT Buyers.
INTENTIVE’s buyer-level intent activity spans 11,000 topics. Intent data is captured from millions of first-party content registrations, 285 distinct event activity types, and 329,000 keywords.
“With nearly 15k+ pieces of content on the platform, a given customer’s assets usually account for 0.03% of all content. For years, our clients gladly worked with us to source first-party leads that specifically engaged with their own content,” blogged NetLine Content Marketing Manager Jonathan Steiert. “The reality, however, is that 99% of their ICP were engaging with content on our platform—they just weren’t engaging with their content. They were missing nearly all of their buyer’s journey.”
NetLine was acquired by Informa in late 2021, so it benefits from Informa’s content and event registration data across 100 million event activities. Event Intent is gathered from over 500 annual B2B events hosted by Informa.
“We were acquired not because of what we were doing at the time but based on the vision of filling out a buyer-level intent platform on top of all of the various content consumption signals that we’re processing every single day of the year,” explained Fortino. “By being part of Informa, we were able to aggregate not only all of the content consumption and buyer behaviors occurring through all of the NetLine powered content experiences, but also all of the Informa properties and all of the Informa offline events.”
When Informa met with NetLine before acquiring it, “Informa was sitting on a massive amount of event-specific intent data that was looking for a mechanism and impetus to action that data into a subscription-oriented product.”
Fortino sees two high-level categories of intent vendors (he omits second-party review sites): Vendors such as Bombora that provide third-party intent based on page views and firms with a broad set of B2B content that drive buyer-level intent. Firms such as TechTarget and Foundry provide “some transparency into what individuals are doing on the sites that they own and operate.” The transparency gives users “a bit more granularity into downloading a white paper, webinar, and so on.”
Fortino argues that NetLine’s advantage is the scope of activity generated across Informa, NetLine, Industry Dive (34 B2B publications and newsletters), and events. Activities go beyond page views.
“There’s everything from…submitting a demo request to expressing an interest in learning more about a given topic, to taking a course and being certified, to the most extreme: going to an event and sitting in countless sessions and being scanned each time you’re going into one of those sessions. All of these 285 things are visualized inside the product as well. So, you can know that this person downloaded a toolkit that helps them predictably model X or they’ve registered for this event.”
Thus, NetLine is marrying online, offline, and customer-content-based intent data.
The signal intensity of some activities is much greater than that of others. “While pageviews can be brief, attending a conference is a very robust form of intent…Compare that to a group of people, let’s say it’s a CEO, a CTO, a director of DevOps, are flying to Vegas for four days to attend the Black Hat conference,” argued Fortino. “They’re sitting in six and a half hours of material each day for three days about malware [and] other enterprise security topics.” The difference in signal intensity is “night and day,” continued Fortino. “Those three people spent maybe 30 grand for three days going to that event.”
Furthermore, “We are looking at the seniority of the person taking those activities. We’re looking at the types of activities that they are actually doing,” including how those activities map to buyer journey stages.
Conversely, if the user is anonymous, “we’re actually disinterested in scoring that information and playing up the value of that information,” argued Fortino. Pageview-based intent is interesting but not actionable for sales reps. “If you’re telling me someone at SAP is trending for these three topics, I don’t even know where to begin.”
INTENTIVE’s real-time dashboard consolidates activity at both the buyer and account-level. Additional insights include buyer trends and confirmed projects, “a buyer-first view of professionals who have confirmed they have an active pain point, identified challenges, and shared their timeline to invest.”
Daily Buyer-Level Intent email alert
Other features include customizable email notifications, a native Salesforce app, and real-time buyer and account scores.
“Prior to today, there has been significant buzz about intent,” argued NetLine CEO Robert Alvin. “But the majority of existing intent-based products relied solely upon company IP recognition and webpage visits which doesn’t tell you “Who” is intending to do what. With INTENTIVE, NetLine has changed the meaning and raised the bar when it comes to intent. Marketers now have access to deeper buyer-level insights allowing them to accelerate the sales process from their marketing endeavors.”
Furthermore, Alvin noted that buyer-level insights eliminate hours of guesswork and accelerate prospecting, messaging, and understanding a prospect’s timeline.
Most intent solutions deliver account-level intent but lack buyer-level insights. They identify accounts (or accounts and locations), but do not usually indicate the individual behind the activity. Furthermore, other intent solutions capture their intent from one primary touch point – Pageviews.
“The basis for 99.9% of all intent data on the market comes directly from pageviews. Sans INTENTIVE, these solutions curate these data sets based upon this behavior, which lasts seconds, if not milliseconds, long,” expounded Steiert. “These pageviews are then referenced against historical baselines at the IP address and company domain. Effectively, every single existing intent vendor (thanks in large part to Bombora’s mostly commodified status sets) offers the same level of insights as their competitors.”
INTENTIVE provides a wider array of business intent at the buyer-level.
However, NetLine offers a broader array of buying activity that includes analyst reports, demo requests, disclosed areas of interest, event attendance, and confirmed projects.
“The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, said Heinz Marketing President Matt Heinz. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
The baseline INTENTIVE license includes three explorers, corresponding to three targeted intent categories with up to 25 topics per explorer. Explorers can have multiple audiences for segmentation (e.g., size, industry, geography) and email notification.
Keywords are tied to topics, but free-form keyword selects won’t be available until the V2 release.
Account and buyer Intent Trendlines and activity are available as soon as an explorer is defined.
The Explorer Dashboard displays buyer and account trendlines, accounts with buyer activity, and buyer-confirmed projects. The dashboard is displayed immediately after defining an explorer and uniquely loads historical intent data for immediate review and actioning.
Fortino noted that other intent platforms typically take 45-60 days to curate data for optimal use.
Confirmed Projects were initially sold as NetLine Intent Discovery, but that product was transitioned to a core feature within INTENTIVE.
NetLine collects first-party project data as readers register for and consume content. NetLine “intercepts those users, asks them a very short survey about their pain points, their urgency to address those pain points, challenges that they have, and most importantly, the timeline to invest in correcting those things.”
Account Activity details include confirmed projects, activity type, engaged buyers, and trending topics.
The Account Activity dashboard is filterable by function, level, and firmographics. Users may drill down to any account to see who is displaying intent and the nature of their activity. Saved filters can be set as daily email alerts.
Users can drill down from Accounts to Buyers or the reverse.
While buyer-level intelligence is provided, NetLine does not display PII beyond customer content interactions. Fortino noted that sales teams already have other vendors for contact data (e.g., ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, Clearbit), but they are not providing buyer-level intent.
“This just comes back to permission data use. I know a lot of vendors love to throw in this idea of recommended contacts where they’re really just using ZoomInfo data,” explained Fortino. “We may do that, but honestly, it’s a bit disinteresting again because it’s just commoditized data sets that everyone has access to.”
Fortino’s near-term focus is building connectors with other platforms. At launch, Salesforce is natively supported, but others will soon follow.
There is currently a waitlist for INTENTIVE access. NetLine is offering a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is similar to existing account-level intent providers but obviously delivers buyer-level insights. The license includes three explorers, unlimited seats, and the Salesforce app.
Fortino argued that the unlimited seats are a “strong differentiator when you’re evaluating existing solutions,” particularly at enterprise accounts with many users.
