Cognism Intelligence within Salesforce. Hybrid Engagement Platforms Continuously update CRMs and MAPs.
The market
is beginning to evolve a set of hybrid engagement vendors that deliver a broad
set of sales and marketing services. The boundary between sales and
marketing is quickly crumbling. Hybrid engagement services manage both
data and workflows. Features include
Data Services: Prospecting, Webforms & Batch Data Enrichment, CRM/MAP Data Maintenance, De-duping, Data Health Reports
Lead Management: Lead Scoring, Lead-to-Account Mapping and Routing, Dynamic Lead Prioritization, First and Third-Party Intent
Future functionality will include Next Best Actions, Embedded 1:1 Video, SNAP (Sales Navigator) Integrations, and Programmatic Advertising.
No vendor provides all of these services and some provide them as separate offerings, but firms such as Dun & Bradstreet, Zoominfo, Infogroup (Salesgenie), Lead411, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Cognism have all taken steps over the past two years to meet the emerging requirements of the CRO.
For the
moment, I’m calling these emerging offerings Hybrid Engage Platforms, but that
is a placeholder name as the market evolves.
SalesTech adoption rates and spend continue to increase according to a recent SalesTech study of 268 B2B sales and marketing managers conducted by Smart Selling Tools. Only 3% of respondents are planning on reducing their SalesTech spend in 2020 while 6% plan to spend significantly more in 2020 and 41% slightly more. Expanded spending will be focused on the top and middle of the funnel followed by management and reporting. Skills Development, Onboarding, and Bottom of the Funnel expenditures have a lower priority.
Over the past year, SalesTech spend per user has increased significantly. In 2017, only one-third of respondents spent in excess of $150 per user, but two years later, 65% spend more than $150 per user. As the average number of sales tools in use rose only modestly from 4.5 to 4.9 over the past two years, the spend per product has likely increased. The number of applications that are used by a majority of respondents trebled to six (CRM, Online Meetings, Lead List/Database, Social Selling, Account Targeting, and Skills Training & Reinforcement) with an additional four at 47% or higher. CRMs are used by 75% of respondents, lead/list databases by 65%, and social selling by 60%. The one category that dropped in usage was online meetings.
Adoption rates of technologies were fairly even by company size with large firm (500+) employees more likely to have adopted Sales Enablement, Skills Training & Reinforcement, and Sales Performance & Compensation. Conversely, firms with fewer than 500 employees were more likely to have adopted Prospect Engagement (Sales Engagement) solutions.
Account targeting tools for ideal customer prospecting grew from 4% to 51% over the past year, a clear indication that ABM strategies have been adopted. Lead Engagement (communicating at scale with early-stage, unqualified leads) grew from 11% to 49%, while social selling grew from 10% to 60%.
“The significant increase in usage of sales tools across the board indicates a trend (likely irreversible). If your organization is slow to take up the use of sales tools, you could get left behind. Even so, we don’t recommend adding new sales tools without considering what’s required to keep them up to date and who will be responsible, having a plan for measuring success (what does “Good” look like?), and deciding what’s required to establish and grow user adoption.”
Smart Selling Tools founder Nancy Nardin.
The top
three industries represented in the study were technology (42%), Financial
Services (9.3%), and Manufacturing (8.7%).
Business Categories expand the set of synonyms associated with UK SICs
Artesian Solutions announced the availability of Artesian Business Categories and Company Buzzwords functionality to its Artesian Engage sales intelligence service. Company Buzzwords are a set of common product and service descriptors not found in standard industry taxonomies. The buzzwords are mined from company websites. For example, firms manufacturing or selling craft beer can be targeted within Artesian’s Prospector module. Likewise, technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things, which span many industries, may also be targeted.
Artesian
Business Categories expand the categories and synonyms associated with existing
UK SIC codes. Artesian gives the example of Drink Production as a
synonym of Manufacture of Beverages with the word Drink returning
industries such as Drink Retail and Drink Wholesale.
“As
a business, we constantly aim to exceed customer expectations, so in response
to their feedback, we not only improved the way they use SIC codes (with
Artesian Business Categories), but also created a whole new way of finding
companies in niche or highly specialised industries,” said Richard Clark
Artesian’s VP of Product Management. “These two new features will help
our users get hyper-specific when searching for companies using Artesian’s
prospecting tools, thereby enabling them to uncover new opportunities that may
otherwise have been missed, and keeping them one step ahead of the
competition.”
Artesian
Business Categories are available for the UK SIC taxonomy, but not other industry
code structures (e.g. NACE 2.0, NAICS). When multiple codes are employed,
Boolean AND / OR operators are supported.
“The SIC code system of categorising a company’s primary activities was first introduced in the UK in 1948 and although it has since been revised, the most recent update was back in 2007. It is widely criticised for excluding categories to cover the latest sectors and for misrepresenting the activities of many businesses. For example, Google UK Ltd is listed on Companies House as ‘82990 – Other business support service activities not elsewhere classified’ (a generic category for companies struggling to identify a suitable alternative).”
Artesian Solutions Press Release
Other
new features include a news topic search (previously, users had to navigate
menus) and expanded prospecting selects for Export Turnover (Export Revenue),
Location Type, TPS (UK Telephony blocking), and roles. Users can also
exclude companies with estimative turnover, employee counts, or net worth
values instead of actuals.
A/B Testing analysis of Bombora Company Surge variables in LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Intent data vendor Bombora has enlarged its direct sales team and is looking to shift from data resellers to OEM partnerships. The OEM partnerships will deliver a “limited but powerful amount of data (or limited supported use case)” to customers and partners that want full, direct access. Terminus is their first OEM partnership, but Bombora is looking to roll out three or four OEM relationships in Q4.
Shifting to OEM workflow solutions for intent data makes sense. Unlike firmographics, technographics, or contacts, first and third-party intent data is more difficult to present to end users as it is both ephemeral (i.e. changing weekly) and statistically based (i.e. firms with a score above 70 are in the top 6% of signaled intent). Thus, filtering the data by topic, company, and surge score provides confidence to end users that the data is meaningful. OEM deals also place the intent data in the proper workflows for sales and marketing end users.
“Say a 200 person software business has Boeing as an account record in their Salesforce. We will append the topics surging at Boeing that that customer has licensed from Bombora onto the account object in Salesforce. Once it’s there, it becomes searchable, so they can create tasks for salespeople, or they can use Salesforce as a hub and pipe that data to sales platforms, or marketing automation platforms. Once the data’s in the system, it can be piped out to a bunch of different workflows.”
Bombora SVP Data Sales Michael Burton
Bombora
also recently began providing intent-based audience feeds to LinkedIn Marketing
Solutions for sponsored content, sponsored InMails, text ads, video ads,
and dynamic ads. Each week, Bombora provides an updated list of domains
to LinkedIn based upon ABM lists or firmographic selects. The domain list
is updated dynamically based upon surge data with the first set of matched
audiences available within 48 hours. On the LinkedIn side, LinkedIn
member targeting is available (e.g. job function, level, interests) through the
Campaign Manager.
Bombora
recommends that users perform A/B testing against the standard B2B audience
list and the company surge list.
Bombora was spun out of Madison Logic in 2014 and made the Inc 5000 list for the first time in 2019 placing #997. 2018 revenue hit $26.4 million, up 425% over three years.
LiveRamp – Bombora data flows for audience targeting.
This is Bombora week in my blog. Yesterday I covered their Bombora for Growth offering and today I’m discussing their August LiveRamp partnership. It is one of many partnerships they’ve formed over the past few years
Bombora’s latest partnership is with LiveRamp, an identity resolution firm that also supports data onboarding. Bombora identifies audiences based on intent data to develop in-market audiences for both large and small companies. Large company attribution is fairly straightforward as IP addresses can be employed. For smaller companies, attribution is performed behaviorally based on thirty attributes with an 86% confidence level.
Bombora then
layers in their topical surge data to determine which companies are showing
high levels of intent by topic.
“What
typically we’d receive from Bombora is a list of IP addresses which map a
specific business profile,” said LiveRamp B2B COO Pieter De Temmerman. “For
example, we might be asked, ‘Can you find small businesses that are currently
in-market to buy a CRM system, or accounting software, or you name it’.”
“What Bombora has done, and patented, is we’ve looked at IP addresses from a behavioral perspective, and because we see 30 to 40 billion business transactions a month, we’re looking at them through the lens of the behavioral attributes of a business (versus a home, Starbucks, or hotel) IP address.”
Bombora CSO Mark Dye
“What
we realized is that a lot of these B2B marketers are wanting to target large
companies, which are easy to identify, but are also wanting to have a
conversation with the longer tail of customers,” said de Temmerman. “When
you’re dealing with these smaller companies, you might be dealing with a large
number of prospects, but you don’t necessarily know who they are,”
The combined
offering pulls together a set of third-party cookies and associated devices for
anonymous users, expanding the universe of targetable in-market SMBs. According
to Bombora, “This solution, being the first of its kind in the B2B market,
produces a high likelihood of the SMB audience to be susceptible to the ads
they are seeing. Thus, producing a higher return on ad spend and a lower
customer acquisition cost.”
Bombora
targets 7.5 million global SMBs with up to 100 employees based on IP addresses.
Bombora audience targeting is initially available for North America and
the UK with plans to expand to additional markets “in the coming months.”
LiveRamp charges $2 per CPM for SMB targeting and $4 per CPM for Bombora surge-based SMB targeting.
Bombora gathers company website intelligence (1st-party intelligence) through its NetFactor Visitortrack service and combines it with 3rd-party intent data from B2B Media Companies.
Bombora announced the availability of a Growth package which provides a “concentrated” set of intent data for SMBs. Both first and third-party intent data are delivered through CRM, MAP, and CDPs including Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Oracle, Lattice Engines, Leadspace, and Everstring.
First-party intent data is derived from a firm’s own website. Bombora quietly acquired NetFactor for visitor intelligence and packages it alongside its third-party intent data from dozens of B2B media websites. Combined, first and third-party intelligence help identify which companies are actively in-market for solutions. Firms can opt to run campaigns which target high-intent companies (e.g. programmatic, email), or deem the leads marketing qualified and pass them to sales.
Growth provides an unlimited feed of high-intent companies spanning up to eighteen topics. Bombora identifies companies with a surge score of at least 70, which approximately represents the top 6% of companies with interest in a topic. As multiple topics are being measured, the feed covers approximately the top 25% of companies. Because Bombora compares surge scores against topical baselines, surge scores are normalized such that companies in industries related to a topic and very large companies do not dominate. Surge scores are updated weekly and available for 2.8 million company domains across 6,100 B2B topics.
The Growth
package also includes dedicated support, visitor intelligence, browser access,
and integrations. Pricing begins at $17,500 plus integration fees.
“What’s happened over the last five or ten years is that the way companies buy products and services has changed pretty significantly” as buyers conduct a significant percentage of their research prior to raising their hand. “In the past, if you were going into a buying cycle, you’d just engage with the companies that you think you might ultimately work with; and those companies would be part of that process from the beginning. The promise of intent data is to tap into that part of the process which is no longer visible to a vendor during the prospect’s buying cycle.”
Bombora SVP of Data Sales Mike Burton
“Over the
last 12 to 18 months, the market has figured out that this data is really
important, in terms of getting into sales cycles and driving pipeline,” continued
Burton.
Bombora
tracks first and third-party intent to the location level. Thus, there
are no issues with GDPR compliance or the collection of personally identifiable
information.
Bombora identifies surging topics by location with topics often acting as proxies for personas. “If Boeing, in Texas, is in a big research surge on accounting software and budgeting software, there’s a really good chance that’s coming out of a finance department, or a finance persona, rather than H.R. or a sales department,” said Burton.
Zylotech added Bombora surge data to its Customer Data Platform (CDP). Bombora’s third-party intent file is gathered from over 4,000 B2B media sites and helps identify accounts with surging interest in B2B topics. The partnership helps “find and drive active demand into the funnel, empowering sales teams to prioritize accounts and win more business.”
Zylotech
describes itself as a “self-learning B2B customer data platform that ensures
customer profile enrichment, predicts purchases, and brings relevancy-based
recommendations towards unprecedented lift.” Features include data health
reports, next best actions, lead scoring, propensity predictions, prescriptive
micro-segments, dynamic segmentation, GDPR support, ID resolutions, anonymous
visitor data resolution, look-a-like audience prospecting, and 360 Customer
Views that incorporate hierarchies.
“Self-learning”
means that the CDP automatically and continuously detects and creates customer
matches across different data sources.
“Bombora’s intent data coupled with Zylotech’s unified view of all customer data means marketing and sales now have a single, seamless way to identify ideal B2B buyers and drive more conversions. Marketers can personalize their campaigns specifically to the buyer’s intent, allowing sales to focus on buyers with expressed interest, and proactively engage in the decision-making process armed with customer insights.”
Zylotech Chief Revenue Officer Patrick O’Brien
Zylotech
supports HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, Tableau, MailChimp, and LiveRamp.
Zylotech is
based in Cambridge, MA and has 40 employees. It received a $5.5 million
Series A last October and $6 million in total funding.
I am pleased to announce that my next enterprise software purchasing report is available through this website and my partners at Tenbound. “Evaluating Sales Engagement Platforms: A Guide for Purchasing SEPs” assists with the purchasing decision of this rapidly developing SalesTech category.
Evaluating Sales Engagement Platforms
Single User License (October Discounted Price)
$495.00
The report is available as both a single buyer license for smaller firms evaluating the sector and as a buyer-committee license for larger firms. The Buyer Committee license covers a team of seven and includes a Word document checklist to assist with the evaluation.
GZ Consulting / Tenbound reports are independently written and not sponsored by any of the profiled vendors. Michael R. Levy of GZ Consulting wrote this report.
Data vendor Clearbit officially launched Clearbit X, their new marketing and sales “growth engine.” The new service provides digital marketing and demand generation functionality with first and third-party intent data enrichment. The Clearbit X platform consolidates data from CRM systems, activity data such as web events, visitor intelligence enriched with IP and domain information, and Clearbit’s third-party business data on companies and employees (e.g., company size, industry, contact information, etc.).
“Never before has a company created a growth suite built from the ground up to be data-first and focused on B2B buyers. And what’s more, X is the only platform to natively combine both data the customer owns with our popular Clearbit data. I’m looking forward to a future where marketing data is democratized, data-enabled, and smart. Clearbit X is a big step towards this future.”
Clearbit CEO Alex MacCaw.
Features
include Facebook and Google targeting, Slack and email alerts highlighting
active opportunities based on intent, and Clearbit’s visitor intelligence which
matches visitor activity to account intelligence via IP addresses. Visitor
intelligence assists with dynamic chat and website personalization.
Clearbit
is positioning X as the “center of your data universe.“ According to the
firm, “The power supply of any great growth engine is real-time access to what
we call your entire dataverse – all your user data, activity data, and
enrichment data. Clearbit X brings all of that together in one place.”
“Being
able to layer Clearbit firmographic data onto our existing data in Salesforce
is really powerful,” said Yuri Daniels, director of performance marketing at
Zenefits. “X has helped ensure that we are targeting customers in our
ideal customer profile as well as being able to exclude people already inside
of our funnel to make new leads. We can target very specific lists on
Facebook with much more efficiency and LinkedIn-level specificity.”
Clearbit
is focused on onboarding their first twenty-five customers and will release
more product details towards the end of the year.
B2B DaaS and contacts vendor DealSignal announced the availability of CRM Data Health, a Salesforce module that continuously refreshes, enriches, and reverifies lead, contact, and account records. DealSignal data is GDPR-compliant and based upon AI validation and human verification.
“Rather
than comparing dirty CRM data against other static data sources that may
themselves be outdated, DealSignal CRM Data Health takes a dynamic, on-demand
enrichment and verification approach that uses both AI and human intelligence
to ensure near-perfect accuracy,” stated the firm. “DealSignal CRM Data
Health delivers a reliable alternative for companies looking to replace
Data.com.”
Like other CRM hygiene apps, CRM Data Health includes a free data health audit. The CRM data enrichment includes detailed contact profiles, Bombora buyer intent, and firmographics. Along with CRM hygiene, customers can enrich inbound leads, events lists, and third-party lists.
“Bad CRM data is a pervasive issue that has a negative ripple effect on B2B marketing and sales performance: from inaccurate ABM targeting, to bounced emails that can damage sender reputation, to outdated or irrelevant contacts that clog marketing automation systems at a great cost,” said DealSignal founder & CEO, Rob Weedn. “Industry studies find that up to 50 percent of CRM data is incomplete, out-of-date, or inaccurate. Compounding the issue, data decays at a rate of over two percent per month, so maintaining data health is a constant challenge that requires an on-going solution—much like you can’t get in shape by going to the gym once. We’ve introduced DealSignal CRM Data Health to help Salesforce customers continuously maintain rich, accurate and verified target audience data, and keep it fresh on a regular schedule.”
With the decommissioning of Data.com, vendors like Dun & Bradstreet, InsideView, Zoominfo, and DealSignal are jumping into the fray. If you are looking to make your sales reps more effective, your segmentation more accurate, or your Einstein predictions more precise, then you should be evaluating a Lightning Data or general data quality solution for your CRM.
