Vertical IQ industry intelligence is now available via the Risk Management Association’s (RMA) eMentor program, a “self-service, subscription-based knowledge hub” for credit professionals. The combined tool marries RMA’s Annual Statement studies with Vertical IQ’s plain English industry overviews, helping credit team members prepare for calls, assess credit risk, and improve their credit knowledge. Other tools include Best Practices, eCases, interactive worksheets, and trackable exams.
RMA has long collected US private company industry norms to assist with credit and lending decisioning. RMA multi-year financial ratios are available by NAICS code and stratified by assets and revenue.
Vertical IQ industry overviews help bankers prepare for meetings, understand industry trends and issues, and assess potential loan risks. Vertical IQ provides 250 reports covering over 1,000 industries. Vertical IQ research is directly viewable within eMentor and downloadable as PDFs.
“With the addition of Vertical IQ’s industry knowledge to eMentor, RMA makes a great platform even more indispensable for the bankers who rely on eMentor to better understand the risks and opportunities financial institutions and their borrowers face,” said RMA CEO Nancy Foster. “eMentor powered by Vertical IQ arms bankers with the market intelligence that is crucial throughout the life of the loan—from initial meetings with borrowers, to putting together a financing package that is right for them, to monitoring loan performance.”
Highspot became the latest Seattle-area unicorn following a Series E that valued the firm at $2.3 billion. The Sales Enablement platform, which was launched nine years ago by three former Microsoft employees, closed on a $200 million round led by Tiger Global Management. Bain & Company, CONIQ Growth, Madrona Venture Group, OpenView, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Shasta Ventures also participated.
“Sales enablement is about more than sales. It connects everyone from marketing and sales to post-sales in delivering a unified buying experience that wins, retains and expands customer relationships,” said Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot. “Scaling your go-to-market strategy is a complex process with a large gap between strategy and action. We close this gap. Our single, unified platform improves sales performance by turning strategy into successful execution.”
Customers have deployed the Sales Enablement Platform for sales onboarding, ongoing training, content management, guided selling, rep coaching, engagement intelligence, and 360-degree analytics. They include DocuSign, General Motors, John Deere, Nestle, and Verizon Media,
The firm has over 500 employees in Seattle, London, and Munich. It plans to open an office in France and enter the APAC market in 2021. In May 2020, it opened up a Munich office to support its D-A-CH operations. Highspot doubled its EMEA revenue in 2020.
Highspot supports users in 125 countries.
Highspot does not disclose its revenue but told Bloomberg that ARR increased 900% over the past three years.
Last year, Highspot connected over three million salespeople, channel partners, services reps and customers in digital sales experiences, with usage double that of 2019. Highspot’s community of sales enablement professionals, Sales Enablement PRO, reached 13,000 members.
“Salesforce changed sales 20 years ago. Marketo changed marketing 10 years ago. Now, Highspot’s vision is to fundamentally change the way companies go to market,” said John Curtius, Partner, Tiger Global Management. “Highspot’s secret is an authentic commitment to people – their employees, customers and partners – that inspires a tremendously collaborative and resilient culture. We believe they’re capable of sustaining unmatched levels of innovation to achieve their vision.”
“There’s a famous Harvard Business Review article that 70% of strategic initiatives don’t work. Sometimes it’s not because the strategy isn’t right, it’s because they can’t translate it to the actions taken every day by their frontline sales team. We allow them to do that.”
Highspot CEO Robert Wahbe
The new funding will “accelerate platform development, including deeper insights into go-to-market strategy and execution offered through Highspot’s industry-only Scorecards.”
HighSpot also plans to grow its partner ecosystem, expanding its sales methodology training partnerships, technology partners, and Sales Enablement PRO community.
To fuel its growth, Highspot is hiring across “every business function.”
“Over the past year, sales enablement has emerged as a strategic imperative,” said Mark Kovac, Head of Bain & Company’s Global B2B Commercial Excellence Practice. “Companies that have built world-class enablement teams and technology are managing change and uncertainty at scale, while others struggle with agility and inconsistent performance. We believe Highspot’s differentiated approach will become the foundation upon which modern businesses achieve consistent revenue growth and market share gains.”
In March 2011, the Harvard Business Review published “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” which discovered that companies were slow to respond to sales leads, and there were considerable benefits from rapid responses. The study is often cited, but there was little subsequent data to determine whether these issues and opportunities still held. Fortunately, XANT recently replicated the study, looking at three years of inbound lead response and contact rates.
The new study analyzed 55 million sales activities at over 400 companies. XANT looked at 5.7 million inbound leads and found that 57.1% of first call attempts took place after a week or more, and only 0.1% of inbound leads were responded to within five minutes. However, firms that responded within those first five minutes had an 8X conversion rate versus later return calls.
“Maybe we simply didn’t realize what we were leaving on the table,” wrote XANT. “Maybe we over-rotated on targeted ABM strategies at the expense of speed-to-lead. Marketing automation shouldn’t replace meaningful and quick sales engagement.”
XANT proposes a second problem that slows lead response times, the manual assignment of leads to individuals, resulting in two sets of delays – the lead routing process and the sales reps’ ability to respond quickly when a batch of leads is handed to them.
“Leads sit, go cold, and revenue slips,” warns XANT.
To address the slow response problem, XANT added a shared record option to their Sales Engagement Platform. The goal is to work every lead with named accounts properly routed and other leads delivered to a shared pool with priority leads immediately offered to reps. XANT provides AI tools and a rules-engine to auto-assign leads from target accounts and load others into a shared pool with prioritized leads labeled urgent. The top-rated leads are then offered to the sales team on a round-robin basis, ensuring that all reps have access to top leads and that priority leads have rapid response rates.
“With records in a shared pool, reps won’t get bogged down or locked out,” said XANT. “High-performing reps can blow through their leads quickly and continuously draw from the shared pool.”
XANT describes Shared Leads as another robot that improves the efficacy of sales reps.
“Whereas many treat automation as a way to email spam, we treat it as an enhancement to improve engagement and sales,” explained XANT Head of Product Mark Littlefield. “The basics of Robots include auto-enrolling records, opportunity funnel progression, prioritizing tasks, triggering reps to customer events, performing reliable data entry, and a lot more. With Shared Records, we’re bringing teams the flexibility to compile records into shared folders or automatically assign them to the right reps so they can accelerate their speed-to-lead and their time-to-value.”
Leadspace and ZoomInfo inked a strategic partnership to distribute ZoomInfo data through the Leadspace Customer Data Platform. The platform-level integration lets customers activate ZoomInfo data and intelligence from within Leadspace. The Leadspace CDP is a data-agnostic platform that supports predictive scoring, ICP analytics, look-a-like modeling, intent signaling, and custom buyer personas and scores.
The partnership is Generally Available to joint customers.
Leadspace also offers robust data hygiene and enrichment based upon the Reachforce platform it acquired several years ago. Other tools include web forms, marketing automation and SFDC enrichment, and custom audiences for programmatic marketing.
“We talk to many B2B companies that work with ZoomInfo and see tremendous value in their intelligence solutions,” said Leadspace CTO Amnon Mishor. “We’ve partnered with ZoomInfo on some strategic clients and proven the added benefits of the Leadspace platform in being able to unify other data and intelligence with the ZoomInfo data, then activate it across channels. It’s really the best of all worlds for our customers.”
While both companies have strong matching capabilities, Leadspace is performing real-time matching between the two platforms. Initially, the partnership supports company and contact enrichment, but additional datasets such as technographics and intent are planned.
“Every B2B enterprise can benefit from the new Leadspace and ZoomInfo integration,” said ZoomInfo CRO Chris Hays. “We believe making our data available through a leading customer data platform (CDP) for unification and activation is the new frontier for B2B sales and marketing, and it’s a great way for customers to see even greater return on their investment in data.”
Both companies have performed well during the pandemic. ZoomInfo IPO’d in June and has had several strong quarters since going public, growing revenue 62% last year.
Leadspace closed on a $46 million Series D earlier this month. It doubled its customer base over the past two years and grew revenue 151% between 2016 and 2019, placing the firm at 2,681 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list.
ABM Platform Terminus rolled out a set of platform enhancements for “optimizing ABM strategies.” New features include global targeting, chat playbooks, and Live View. Global targeting expands Terminus’ coverage beyond the US, letting marketers create and manage international campaigns. The functionality is generally available as of February 24.
International Targeting is country-based, with campaign-based budgets and timelines. Users can also target ABM accounts or focus on an enterprise account in specific countries.
Terminus Chat now supports playbooks that “intelligently collect visitor data, trigger sales automation with prospects and customers, and qualify inbound traffic in real-time,” blogged Terminus Product Marketing Senior Director Audra Felten. The new functionality simplifies chat set-up with a “powerful new chatbot builder and logic builder.”
The new Live View feature lets reps proactively engage website visitors. Users can view live information about accounts visiting the company website, along with page views, before reaching out on the chat channel.
In March, a new Advertising Insights report will be available in the Measurements Studio. The report tracks brand awareness, lead and opportunity creation, pipeline acceleration, and closed-won deals. Advertising Insights measures advertising effectiveness and ties its impact to account-based execution. Digital Marketers can assess site visits and leads driven through Terminus advertising. Likewise, Demand Gen Marketers can evaluate visits, conversions, and pipeline directly associated with Terminus Campaigns and adjust the marketing mix accordingly.
“With our February release, we’re going all in on building the ABM platform of the future, which means bringing ABM and sales engagement together even more seamlessly,” said Terminus Chief Product Officer Bryan Wade. “At the end of the day, it’s all about revenue. Customer-facing teams have to be focused on the best-fit accounts and engage at exactly the right time to drive results, but that can only happen when efforts are coordinated. These new capabilities make it easier than ever for sales and marketing to operate as one team.
Terminus just announced a $90 million Series C that valued the firm at $400K. I will cover the round on Monday.
ABM Platform Terminus and Sales Engagement Platform Outreach rolled out an integrated solution to enhance ABM workflows based on shared account data and personalized messaging. Terminus account data identifies “high-value accounts in real-time to easily kick off highly personalized sequences to the accounts that their marketing teams are targeting.” Outreach multi-channel sequences have been tied into Terminus chat, email signature advertising, and website personalization, providing a personalized customer experience and account-based routing.
“It’s our mission to help marketing and sales together drive full-funnel account engagement,” said Terminus CEO Tim Kopp. “Now with Terminus, Outreach customers can leverage the powerful account intelligence available in Terminus along with their existing sales engagement programs. This makes it easier than ever for marketing and sales to better engage with the right accounts and deliver a cohesive experience at every point of the customer journey.”
The integration helps promote sales and marketing alignment through shared data and messaging tools that reduce the friction across email, website, and chat.
“Meaningful revenue growth happens when sales and marketing are completely aligned and focusing on the accounts that matter most,” remarked Terminus Marketing VP Justin Keller. “Most of the time, that’s easier said than done, but we’re extremely jazzed about this integration because it makes that alignment simple and automatic.”
Terminus’ Chat from Anywhere functionality, based on their 2020 Ramble acquisition, routes chats to the most appropriate sales rep. Chat from Anywhere links may be embedded in Outreach emails as a CTA. The chatbot initially manages the conversation before routing the chat to the sales rep. If the rep isn’t available, the bot can offer to schedule a meeting, offer content, or qualify the prospect.
Chat conversation logs are stored within Outreach notes.
Along with email, Terminus Chat from Anywhere links can be embedded in LinkedIn, Twitter, Landing Pages, etc.
“Rather than an asynchronous back-and-forth on email, you can pull the people you’re emailing directly into a live conversation with your sales team where they can provide a highly-personalized experience based on the account data available from Terminus,” blogged Keller.
The partnership also supports email banner marketing based upon Terminus’ Sigstr acquisition. Terminus can embed targeted, personalized ads within the signature block of sequenced emails. “This capability opens up a massive new advertising channel ready to promote your most important initiatives,” wrote Keller. “From general promotion of things like content or events, to targeted one-to-one campaigns that garner outrageous engagement.”
Conversations that originate on a website are now automatically routed to the appropriate account owner in Outreach. Based on the conversation, those visitors can be automatically enrolled in Outreach sequences to ensure they stay engaged after the chat ends.
“While some segments of the economy are coming back strong, there are still many sectors struggling to find their footing in this new world. Sales and marketing teams are looking to make the most out of fewer accounts and are relying on account-based marketing to drive more revenue,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina. “But a solid ABM strategy is nothing without powerful data behind it. This integration brings together the actionable insights from Outreach with Terminus’ account intelligence data in one single solution. These connected workflows help sales and marketing accelerate the cycle from engagement to revenue and meet growth expectations as they navigate evolving sector dynamics.”
Chatbot vendor Insent.AI closed on a $2 million seed round “to help mid-market B2B companies improve how they identify and communicate with potential buyers.” The firm, which competes against Intercom, Terminus Chat, and Drift, calls itself a “human-first chatbot.”
Insent said that it isn’t “just building a chatbot that generates leads, but a collaborative platform that is going to help marketers create, nurture qualified opportunities, and shorten sales cycles.”
The goal is to remove “digital walls” between buyers and sellers by replacing web forms and follow-ups “with instant live conversations on websites” that schedule meetings and deliver “personalized content recommendations based on engagement history.”
Insent describes itself as an “integration first platform,” with MAPs, CRMs, and ABM Platforms “to help sales teams talk to engaged prospects while they’re on the website.”
According to Insent Digital Marketer Aatharsha Jey, “integrations should be planned and carried out in a way that does not ask people to change their behaviors in order to adopt a new tool.”
“By guiding their buyers at the right time and proactively alerting your salespeople, Insent generates new revenue opportunities and accelerates existing ones,” said CEO Arjun Pillai.
Emergent Ventures led the round with participation from BAM Ventures, TechStars, Arka Venture Labs, Arali Ventures, and Bizable founder Aaron Bird. Funds will be deployed to expand its chatbot integrations and add engineering, sales, and marketing headcount. Another area of development is improving its visitor data intelligence to improve personalization.
“We believe the B2B sales process currently has unnecessary friction for both buyers and sellers,” said Anupam Rastogi, Partner at Emergent Ventures. “As an increasing proportion of sales is digitally intermediated and more leads are generated online, we believe Insent has a tremendous opportunity to help both buyers and sellers do their work more effectively and connect seamlessly.”
Initially, the pandemic slowed Instent’s growth as marketing teams reduced budgets and delayed decisions, but chatbots are high on the list of MarTech digital acquisition solutions. Since May, revenue has quadrupled.
Aaron Bird, former VP at Adobe and CEO of Bizable, remarked that marketing had undergone two major paradigm shifts over the past few years, the rise of ABM and a focus on the buyer experience at the heart of the sales process; however, “companies are yet to start adapting to this paradigm. Insent is a key piece of the puzzle to help them do so.”
Insent stress-tested various platforms before settling on MongoDB and AWS. Pillai contends that the platform gives them a five-year or six-year window before rearchitecting. The platform was designed with an account-based, versus lead-based, architecture that ties leads to accounts for account-based orchestration.
“So, the architecture is obviously manually decided. But as far as the scaling is concerned, it is all automated,” said Pillai. “There are enough database services that will enable us to run automated services of scaling up and scaling down … to make sure that when you are sleeping if a customer connects a 10 million [record] database, the system scales up.”
Insent is using 6Sense for visitor identification. “We go and task 6Sense through an API,” said Pillai. “We take that data, and we do further processing of that data. All of this happens in microseconds. Basically, the moment somebody lands on the website, boom, the API call comes back with the data based on that website, company visitor.”
Insent was founded in 2018 and has forty employees in the US, Canada, and India.
Customer Data Platform vendor Leadspace closed on a $46 million Series D led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP). It has now raised $107 million since being founded in 2011. The firm also announced Alex Yoder as its new CEO as the firm ended a dispute with their former CEO Doug Bewsher.
Leadspace features include company and professional profiles, data hygiene and enrichment, web forms, reports and analytics, TAM and ICP analysis, and account engagement. Leadspace also performs lead prioritization and identifies similar companies. Unlike many CDPs, Leadspace is a pure B2B platform.
The funds will be used for meeting growing demand, expanding its headcount, and resolving litigation. The firm currently has 100 employees in the US and Israel. The 40 employees in Israel are technology-focused, and the US contingent manages business leadership.
“A major part of our post-investment vision is to grow our team in Israel,” said CTO Amnon Mishor.
Leadspace also announced that Doug Bewsher was stepping down as CEO and being replaced by Alex Yoder. According to VentureBeat, there was a falling out between Bewsher, JVP, and the Leadspace board about the company’s direction. Bewsher was looking to sell the firm, while the Board and JVP wanted to continue growing it, resulting in a lawsuit between two JVP partners and Bewsher.
“I’m glad to say that the lawsuit is behind us. The former CEO agreed to leave. A situation arose in which the CEO and some of the investors, particularly Arrowroot Capital were interested in selling the company, while JVP, other board members, and I saw potential in our figures to build up a large company. We had made a technological leap and didn’t want to sell. There was a conflict among the board members and negotiations between the various investors over whether to sell or not, with the lawsuit being part of that. Eventually, everyone reached an understanding,” said Mishor.
Despite the leadership issues and a failed 2018 merger with Radius, Leadspace has grown its market presence. It doubled its customer base over the past two years and grew revenue 151% between 2016 and 2019, placing the firm at 2,681 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list.
Yoder is bullish on Leadspace, forecasting 70% growth this year, double that of the market. Growth is being driven by the need to find and engage contacts at companies as the pandemic precludes face-to-face meetings.
Yoder has led several B2B and SaaS companies over the past two decades, including WebTrends, Ebiquity, and Trueffect. According to the press release, Yoder has “built strong teams and implemented transformational strategies, running businesses that spanned $20 million to $150 million in revenue.”
JVP Executive Chairman Erel Margalit was named the Board Chairman.
“We typically invest in early-stage companies, but we only double down in category leaders and companies that can reach $100 million in ARR,” said Margalit.
“We believe that Alex Yoder can take the business to the next level as Leadspace becomes the single source of truth for B2B data,” said Margalit. “Leadspace – through its revolutionary AI platform – is changing the way enterprises manage their internal and external customer data. In the coming years, enterprise CDP will be established as a new category, using AI to obtain the true identity, title, and roles of companies and individuals, creating true added value for clients.”
Competitors include D&B Lattice, 6Sense, Zylotech, and ABM Platforms. Yoder contends that Leadspace’s strength in in analyzing unstructured social and behavioral data.
“Creating a source of truth for B2B is a very complex problem. Companies are complex — sales cycles and engagement can be sporadic, involve multiple stakeholders, and can last months or even years,” said Mishor. “There are multiple data and intelligence point solutions that address small parts of the fundamental data issue. No other solution is taking the holistic approach of being the connective layer between raw data and engagement channels for B2B like Leadspace.”
Leadspace clients include Microsoft, Salesforce, American Express, Intel, HPE, and Zoom.
Synergy Research Group sized the Q4 enterprise spend on cloud services at $37 billion, up 35% year-over-year. The full-year spend was $129 billion. Microsoft Azure continued its growth, reaching a 20% market share, second only to AWS in the low 30s. Azure has doubled its market share over the past four years. AWS posted $12.7 billion in Q4 revenue. Google Cloud has a 9% market share but remains a money loser. Except for Alibaba, at 6%, the smaller cloud providers continue to lose market share.
Azure grew 50% year-over-year, while AWS grew 28%.
“We believe Azure’s cloud momentum is still in its early days of playing out within the company’s massive installed base, and the Office 365 transition for both consumer/enterprise is providing growth tailwinds over the next few years,” said Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives.
“Based on our conversations with CIOs, CISOs, and IT product managers globally over the last month, we believe cloud-driven architecture IT growth in 2021 could surpass that of 2020 as more enterprises rip the band-aid off on digital transformations.”
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives
AWS CEO Andy Jassy will succeed CEO Jeff Bezos at Amazon in Q3. AWS generates half of Amazon’s profits but generates only ten percent of revenues. Bezos will assume the role of Executive Chairman.
Zoominfo launched their new Targeted Audiences service to support programmatic advertising against their universe of B2B account and contact data. [Part I]
ZoomInfo employs signature-block mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and email verification to build and maintain their Data Cloud. They also recently acquired EverString to augment their firmographic depth and field fill rates for 95 million companies. Targeting against the Zoominfo Data Cloud offers “campaigns with unmatched precision and enhanced performance.”
“Digital agencies and marketers typically face challenges in collecting high-quality, complete B2B audience data,” contrasted ZoomInfo. “Most widely available contact information for companies and their employees is either inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, which means many digital agencies and marketers deliver their messages to the wrong people altogether.”
“What’s common knowledge to those in the industry — but not to a bright-eyed data guy like me — is that advertising audiences aren’t engineered to be precise. Quite the opposite, actually: This space is all about volume and audience expansion through inferences, and modeled data has taken over.”
ZoomInfo SVP of Innovation and Data R&D Derek Smith
Marketers can also build custom audiences from over three hundred demographic and firmographic selects, including funding data, benefits data (licensed from GlassDoor), event participation, banking variables, technographics, and Fortune 500/1000 flags. Biographic variables include function, level, and title/keyword.
Targeting is most effective for the North American market because ZoomInfo is limited in the number of legally gathered and stored identifiers for EU citizens due to GDPR.
“Our product is unlike any other for two reasons. First, we’ve amassed a treasure trove of emails, phone numbers, and titles. Second, we’ve architected our company data to let you identify companies with a level of granularity that significantly eclipses the competition,” said Derek Smith, SVP of Innovation and Data R&D. “Was this always intentional? Of course not. But unbeknownst to me, our data became tailor-made for advertising activation as a result of other projects at ZoomInfo.”
As a new offering, Targeted Audiences should be viewed as a solution for building precise B2B audiences and activating them via LiveRamp. With nearly 100 million targetable professionals, 500 million identifiers, and 300+ selects, ZoomInfo can build very focused audiences. However, there are some gaps. Targeted Audiences does not offer any campaign analytics, creative management, social marketing, retargeting functionality, or intent-based targeting.
“Targeted Audiences allows marketers to build strategic campaigns based on contact and company information and creates new levels of granularity in B2B audience data that have never before existed on the market,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck.
Targeted Audiences is a standalone offering. Marketers and agencies can test out the service on a few audiences before signing a volume contract. The fifty off-the-shelf audiences are priced at $1 CPM ($1 for 1,000 advertising exposures). Custom Audiences begin at $2.75 CPM, but the price falls with volume commitments.
