Tag: G2

Demandbase Standalone Intent

Both services provide keyword intent, with Standalone Intent delivered to third-party platforms. (Source: Demandbase)

ABX Platform Demandbase, which also offers a data cloud and sales intelligence solution, rolled out its keyword intent dataset for third-party platforms.  Demandbase Intent is available both inside the Demandbase One platform (embedded) and delivered to other platforms (standalone).  Demandbase Intent joins Demandbase’s other Data Cloud assets, including firmographics, technographics, and contacts.

Standalone Intent, which supports 375,000 keywords and ingests 18 billion daily signals, provides buying signals for predictive models, data stores, and analytics.  Data is delivered via API, cloud delivery, or CSV flat files.

New keywords are added weekly, with historical intent maintained for twelve months.

Demandbase Intent helps marketing teams target in-market accounts and refine their messaging.  Furthermore, Demandbase Intent can trigger campaigns, avoid churn, and expand accounts.

“Our intent takes multiple sources into account, providing a much stronger and more accurate signals than others in the space,” said Demandbase VP of Product and Industry Marketing Jackie Palmer.  “By using Demandbase Intent, data scientists, corporate strategists, and sales and marketing analytics professionals can build and improve their predictive models, helping them to better understand buyers’ goals and navigate the anonymous buying journey.  As they identify patterns, trends, and opportunities, they can be more precise in prioritizing accounts and gaining deeper insight into their revenue potential.”

Demandbase claims that its keyword library provides superior targeting compared to taxonomically-based intent datasets, allowing vendors to target niche industries and segments, track competitor offerings, and dovetail on partners’ intent.  Furthermore, customers can add new keywords “to fit their needs, whereas other intent providers limit customers to a finite, predefined list of topics.”  They can then feed keyword intent to their data lakes, data warehouses, or business intelligence platforms, making the intent data available to data scientists for propensity-to-buy models.

Palmer told data scientists, “What you can do is build your…propensity-to-buy models, all the different things you need for predictive analytics around your account intent activities.  You can stream that directly into your CRM systems, marketing automation systems, or any go-to-market systems that you need to.”

Demandbase Intent can be used alongside other intent datasets.  Demandbase One also supports Bombora’s third-party intent, G2 second-party technology research intent, website visitor intelligence, and other datasets licensed by its Demandbase customers.

“Our mantra is the more intent data, the better,” Palmer explained to GZ Consulting.  “So, that’s why within the platform, we always integrate with Bombora, G2, etc.  But this is now for standalone people that may not want the Demandbase platform but also want to add additional concepts of intent into their data lakes [and] data warehouses.”

Furthermore, keyword intent is “totally complementary” to taxonomic intent data sources.

The Demandbase AI assesses keyword usage and the age of the article (older articles provide higher relevance), related articles the user has read, and “rare and hyper-qualifying keywords and themes to identify personas and buying committee roles.”

“We track the relevant articles,” explained Demandbase Data Cloud Product Marketer Imran Ahmed to GZ Consulting.  “If you want to look at how the market does it, they do it through co-ops.  They do it through metatags.  We’re doing it through articles that help us identify not only the keywords but help us gather all the users looking at those keywords across the web.  That brings up signal relevance and helps us get more granular and more exposure.”

Demandbase Intent does not look at Google search terms but looks a layer deeper at which articles are being viewed.

“Demandbase intent data is based on years of AI research and delivers more breadth and relevance than any you’ll find anywhere else.  Why?  Because we own the technology to identify anonymous accounts and pair that with our direct access to the bidstream — the source for the most intent signals.  Then we beef up the relevance of those signals using a combination of AI and natural language processing.”

Standalone intent is priced per keyword.

Standalone intent has been generally available since December and already has several clients.  However, due to the calendar, the firm held off on announcing the service until late January.

Demandbase Intent by the Numbers (Source: Demandbase)

Resources

Clearbit Partners with G2

Clearbit leverages first and second-party intent data for building and activating audiences.

B2B data vendor Clearbit is the latest firm to announce a partnership with G2 to deliver G2’s second-party technology intent data.  The G2 feed will be available alongside Clearbit’s firmographics, contacts, and Reveal visitor intelligence.

“For any company that shows up in your defined Audiences, Capture automatically creates new accounts and key contacts (from our database of marketable and verified contacts) directly in Salesforce,” blogged Clearbit CMO Kevin Tate.  “This way, your marketing and sales teams can focus on engaging the right people, based on role and title, from the companies you care about.”

Clearbit offers B2B data enrichment, audience building, visitor intelligence, and web forms to over 1,500 customers, including Segment (Twilio), Intercom, HubSpot, Asana, and Atlassian.  Clearbit’s reference database gathers insights on 44 million companies and 350 million contacts.

“Marketers know that engaging the right companies at the right time is key, but with increased pressure to build high-quality pipeline, it’s never been more critical.  With G2 and Clearbit, teams can now leverage the powerful combination of company fit and buyer intent to focus their funnel – and even use Clearbit Capture to discover key buyers and contacts at their best-fit, high-intent prospects.”

Clearbit CTO Harlow Ward

G2 Buyer Intent Signals include

  • Companies viewing G2 Product Profiles and Sponsored Content
  • Companies viewing G2 Categories, Comparison Products, and Alternative & Competitor Pages
  • G2 Buyer Intent Scores for every visiting company

“Buyer intent data is a secret weapon for leading B2B marketers,” said Christine Li, VP of Growth & Enablement at G2.  “Clearbit’s integration with G2 helps marketers take that data even further — driving more streamlined actions for sales, intent-based revenue, and realizing the full potential of account-based marketing.”

The combined first and second-party intent datasets help identify the optimal time to reach out to customers and prospects.  By integrating intent data with a firm’s ICP, marketing can determine which ideal customers are in-market.

As G2 also identifies accounts that are viewing alternatives or running product comparisons, it assists with identifying competitive threats at current customers.  Risk flags allow Account Executives and Customer Success Managers to reach out proactively to wobbly renewals and reduce churn risk. 

Clearbit Audience and Capture leverages first and second-party attendance.

Clearbit Audience and Capture combine first and second-party intelligence for building and activating campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google.  Admins can also set up automated Slack alerts when intent scores are met, helping ensure that sales reps focus on target accounts while they are in-market.

“Our focus is on helping you put our Clearbit + G2 audiences to work across your existing stack and apps (with our flexible integrations & webhooks),” remarked Tate to GZ Consulting.  “It’ll be interesting to see how these changes in the economy continue to affect how companies spend on MarTech – but we’re seeing more companies currently looking for flexible solutions to ‘upgrade the stack they already have’ vs. ‘rip-and-replace with a walled-garden suite.’”

G2 Aiming for $100M ARR by End of Year

Nathan Latka interviews Godard Abel

On Nathan Latka’s podcast, Godard Abel, CEO of G2, said that he expects to hit $100 million ARR before the end of the year.  G2, which raised $157M at a $1.1B valuation in June 2021 (Series D), grew at 40% over the past year.  At the time of its Series D, its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was $55 million.

G2 maintains a product/vendor taxonomy for its review site, with vendors identifying their product categories.  “If you’re a software vendor, you want it to be right on G2,” said Abel.  That way, its seven million monthly visitors can properly discover a vendor’s offerings.

Along with categorizing vendors, G2 editors determine the key features for each product category and let customers rate these capabilities.

The number of G2 listings grew 48% over the last year.  Its fifty-person research team collaborates with its “community of vendors” to maintain vendor and product profiles.

G2 also licenses its taxonomy to partners and investors.  For example, ServiceNow licenses the G2 taxonomy for its ITS Management tool for categorizing apps.  Abel also noted that around fifty of the “World’s leading SaaS investors” have licensed G2 data to help understand the SaaS competitive landscape and adjacent markets.

G2 has additional revenue streams.  It offers second-party opted-in intent data and a G2 Track service for tracking SaaS expenses.

Nathan Latka interviews SaaS CEOs and posts them to his podcast. This data is then loaded into his database of SaaS metrics. As he regularly reinterviews executives, there is often historical ARR and employment data. The database is a freemium service with limited free data.

G2 Revenue (Source: GetLatka.com)

Demandbase Audience Management Destinations

ABX Platform Demandbase released one of its “largest product launches of the year”: Audience Management Destinations.  While the firm has long supported B2B Campaigns via display advertising and LinkedIn channels, Audience Management Destinations extends its reach into consumer platforms and social advertising.

“B2B buyers are people, too, and B2B marketers can and should be advertising on those channels,” said Demandbase CMO Jon Miller.

New advertising channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Bing, and Adobe Audience Manager.  Additional services will be rolled out next year.

Demandbase does not store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so its social outreach is GDPR and CCPA compliant.  Instead, Demandbase leverages LiveRamp’s identity resolution, an opted-in identifier system that matches individual identifiers across platforms.

Demandbase also expanded its integration with LinkedIn.  Previously, it only supported account-level targeting on LinkedIn, but now marketers can target at either the account or person level.

Demandbase Targeting

Marketers will build audiences using a set of selectors that include first-party data, third-party data, intent, technographics, and activities. (See the image on the right).  They can then activate campaigns to their targeted buyers across the business and social web.

“This will allow a highly consistent customer experience across social networks and other platforms,” explained Miller on LinkedIn.  In addition, the new release expands marketing’s outreach and orchestration across a broader set of channels “using the account intelligence and the Demandbase One platform.”

“We’re constantly learning about how the B2B buyer thinks and acts, and this new account-based social targeting functionality plays a role in reaching buyers more holistically,” said Miller. “By viewing the buyer not just as someone within a target account or in a buying committee, we recognize that buyers are individuals, too.  This mindset shift — and the corresponding ability to engage with them as such across business and social platforms — gives our customers yet another advantage in today’s B2B go-to-market landscape.”

Demandbase claims that it is the only system that runs both “people and account-based plays from one system.”  Marketers can target specific audiences and “then automatically apply the most effective sales and marketing tactics to advance the account in its journey, across every touchpoint, and with the most relevant messages.”

Demandbase augmented its company and contact intelligence in April with the acquisitions of InsideView and DemandMatrix.  The two firms supplemented Demandbase’s firmographics, contacts, and technographics and provided Demandbase with a set of sales intelligence, B2B DaaS, and ICP/TAM tools. 

Demandbase supports its own intent data along with partner datasets from Bombora and G2.  TrustRadius is coming soon.

“Demandbase’s solutions are stronger in certain areas and helps drive top of the funnel engagement or audience targeting, while InsideView has been more focused on bottom of the funnel data.  We realized the two companies are quite complimentary and we could combine our customers to offer a much more complete solution to all of them.  Today we have an integrated top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel marketing and sales data provision to allow customers to look at the full funnel and identify a more appropriate addressable market, including what kind of technologies those companies use.”

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti to MarTech Series this week

The three companies combined to create a four-cloud solution that supports Advertising, ABX Marketing, Sales Intelligence, and Data.

“What’s exciting about this is the ability to provide all of this to customers as one solution,” continued Milletti.  “We have done a lot of work since the merger was completed to combine all of our technologies and go to our customers with information on how much more we can do for them.”

Demandbase combined its Demandbase One platform with InsideView and DemandMatrix to support four clouds.

G2 – Bombora Partnership

Two of the leading intent data vendors, Bombora and G2 (FKA G2 Crowd), announced a partnership to provide an integrated data set to Pro, Power, Activate, and Accelerate G2 customers from within my.G2.  The combined offering mixes G2’s technology research intelligence with Bombora’s third-party intent data set gathered from dozens of B2B media companies spanning over 4,000 sites.  Thus, software vendors can determine both which companies are exploring solutions in their category and which topics are of interest.

Once activated, My.G2 customers will see Bombora’s topic scores next to G2 Buyer Intent accounts.  Admins configure the relevant Bombora topics for display.  Based on the product, the number of topics is capped at either ten or twenty-five, which should be sufficient for most technology companies.

The partnership is part of Bombora’s freemium strategy, where they license a subset of their content into partner workflows.  In the G2 partnership, they are “double verifying” the intent data for accounts showing activity in G2.  “The customers are not seeing new accounts that we see as showing intent if they are not also coming to the customer’s G2 page.  The goal would be to help prioritize the intent they are receiving in G2 in a light way,” said Bombora Partnerships VP Charles Crnoevich.  “In layman’s terms, they have been to your G2 crowd page or category page (similar to a company coming to your website) and Bombora sees them showing elevated levels of intent around the B2B web – our cooperative of B2B websites.  This data overlay is also only in G2 crowd, so if you wanted a big infusion of Company Surge data in SFDC, Terminus, RollWorks, Marketo, HubSpot, Outreach, etc., you would need a premium license of Company Surge data with us.”

Crnoevich said that there are only a limited number of “compliant and reliable intent data sources” on the market, including G2 and TechTarget, ”so we’re excited to form a partnership with them [G2] from a thought leadership perspective in the intent data community.”

G2’s intent data set complements Bombora’s and is sourced differently.  “G2 shows data across their network on a number of interactions and user level,” stated Crnoevich.  “Our data is across a huge network of sites and we normalize it against normal traffic to give a propensity score instead of a count of interactions.”  Users are shown both the number of relevant topics that are surging at an account and the specific topics and surge scores with surging intent.

Having both topic counts and individual topic surge scores are valuable.  One or two surging topics may be anomalous (particularly at SMBs), but a broad set of related topics that are surging indicate a significant growth in research.  Likewise, high scores above the baseline (50 is the baseline average, and 60 is used as the minimum surge score indicating increased intent), demonstrate a significant spike in interest as well as help shape a sales rep’s positioning.

Bombora’s surge data validate target buyer’s research behavior on G2, helping sales and marketing teams ”craft hyper-personalized outreach covering the products and topics they’re most interested in.”  Intent data from the two firms also assist in sales outreach timing and prioritization.

“Understanding the buyer’s journey so you can help them make informed decisions is one of the most important focus areas for every tech business.  This collaboration allows us to combine the power of G2 Buyer Intent data with Bombora’s Intent topics giving vendors a thorough and enhanced view of their buyers’ research behavior across G2 and the B2B web.  G2 customers will now not only have access to more insights but more context, too.  We’re excited to give businesses the opportunity to experience the value of Bombora’s Intent topics and scores right from within their my.G2 admin panel.”

G2 CRO Mike Weir

While intent data should not be used for defining Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and ABM lists as it is ephemeral, it is quite valuable for determining which of your ABM firms are currently in-market for technology solutions.  Thus, intent helps decide which accounts should be nurtured by marketing and which should be actively targeted by sales reps.  Surging intent does not answer who, but it addresses “who now?”

“The integration of Bombora with G2 allows revenue teams to see valuable prospects’ activity across both G2.com and the greater B2B web,” said Mike Burton, SVP of Sales at Bombora.  “Combining these powerful intent signals provides a huge validation for account-based activities, arming folks with the information they need to have successful sales and marketing interactions.”

G2 intent data also identifies competitors being researched, which assists with both new opportunity messaging and churn reduction.

G2 has over five million unique monthly visitors researching software solutions.  Half are North American viewers, 20% European, and 20% Asian.

G2 displays both product profiles and user reviews, with products categorized.  Purchasers can even build side-by-side comparisons of software product reviews.

The pandemic has increased the demand for third-party product insights and reviews.  The loss of face-to-face meetings at tradeshows and in the office has moved most product research to the Internet.  The trend of independent purchasing research, which goes back at least a decade, has accelerated.  However, digital research is now being accompanied by intent datasets that are helping level the playing field and provide vendors with early, actionable intelligence about which firms are in-market.

“Seemingly overnight, the ‘digital first’ world [that] sellers once knew has evolved into a “digital-only” world – a world where the same marketers, compete for the same buyers, against the same solutions — across the same channels,” explained G2 Director of Product Marketing Yoni Solomon.  “That’s why incorporating intent data on buyer research, behavior, and online activity has never been more important for the success of B2B sales and marketing.”

SalesLoft Round D

SalesLoft Round D
SalesLoft Round D

On the heels of Outreach’s $114 million Series E, SalesLoft landed a $70 million round D led by Insight Partners with participation from HarbourVest Partners, Emergence Capital, and LinkedIn.  Total funding reached $145 million.

While the market valuation was not disclosed, TechCrunch indicated that the valuation was around $600 million.  Last year’s Round C valued the firm at $250 million.

“As the creators of the Sales Engagement category, we’ll use this investment to continue leading the innovation that has come to define the category,” blogged CEO Kyle Porter.  “This means investments in our ecosystem API, the mobile application, and our AI-powered sales coaching network.”

Porter laid out a vision for The Sales Coaching Network of full-time digital assistants which “gathers data from our network of distributed sellers and identifies what works and what doesn’t.”  

The Sales Coaching Network “learns best practices, proven effective across a variety of situations.  It identifies those outlier cases where a creative seller finds a new, better solution, and adds those techniques to its coaching.  This allows others to learn from the experience of those more creative sellers.”

Coaching advice will be tailored to individual sellers and their current activities.  According to Porter’s vision:

The Sales Coaching Network brings out the best in every authentic human-to-human interaction.  Sales can never be fully automated, but machines can coach humans in ways that improve our ability to deliver the customer with the best sales experiences while making decisions that allow them to generate the most revenue.

The additional funds will also be directed towards expanding their services team, certified partner network, professional services, and global support.

Over the past few years, SalesLoft has evolved from a cadence service to a multi-channel communications platform which supports inbound and outbound leads, meeting management, analytics, and a partner ecosystem.  Its top partner, LinkedIn, is also an investor.

“We are seeing the highest usage in our LinkedIn integration among all the other integrations we provide,” said Porter.  “Our customers find that it’s the third most important behind email and phone calls.”

Porter called many of the sales tools on the market “dumb databases or repositories” which “are not focused on improving how to connect buyers to sales teams in sincere ways,” said Porter.  “And anytime a company like Salesforce has moved into tangential areas like these, they haven’t built from the ground up, but through acquisitions.  It’s just hard to move giant aircraft carriers.”

SalesLoft doubled revenues the past two years and recently opened an EMEA sales and support office in London.  Recurring revenue has grown ten-fold over the past three years.

Porter listed a set of reasons for Salesforce’s customer success including company purpose, reliability, adoption, and impact.  SalesLoft’s purpose is to elevate the sales profession and promote authentic selling:

SalesLoft exists to activate the authentic seller in all of us.  While some focus on simply sending more email, we focus on elevating the sales professional as a whole.  Today’s buyers deserve an incredible sales experience… one that is sincere, human, and relevant to their needs.  They want sellers to provide insights and solve their problems.  It’s essential for sellers to take a buyer-centric approach.  This is the heart of what we do.

Great sellers also need to be methodical and efficient.  At SalesLoft we’re dedicated to helping you codify a scalable and effective sales process so you can consistently hit and exceed your targets.

Reliability is based upon email deliverability, phone quality, and application speed.

Adoption is evidenced by their leadership position on the G2.com grid for Sales Engagement while impact was borne out by a recent Forrester “Total Economic Impact of SalesLoft” study which measured a 329% ROI, a 20% lift in Sales Qualified Leads to Opportunity Conversion Rates, and a 13% improvement in customer renewal rates.

“So many software companies build a product to meet a market need and then focus purely on selling.  SalesLoft is different.  This team is continually innovating, pushing the boundaries, and changing the face of sales,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and MD of Insight Venture Partners.  “This is one reason the company’s customers are so devoted to them.”

What Is Intent Data?

Bombora Intent Data Collection Model
Bombora Intent Data Collection Model

I am beginning a monthly series entitled What Is where I provide an overview of one of the underlying sales and marketing intelligence technologies or processes being deployed at B2B firms.  I will begin with Intent Data.

Intent Data is one of the three informational elements of B2B Lead scoring (the other two are Fit and Opportunity).  Intent data consists of first, second, and third-party elements and identifies when companies are actively researching specific product categories.  First-party data is captured in your marketing automation systems and web logs.  Typical first-party intent data includes

  • Web Logs
  • Webform Submissions
  • Email Clicks
  • Downloads
  • Page Views
  • Webinar Attendance
  • Trade Show Booth Visits

In short, if somebody is viewing your website, reading your collateral, meeting with you at a tradeshow booth, or attending your webinars, then he or she is displaying purchase intent.  Of course, not everybody doing so is a potential purchaser, but a high percentage of individuals digitally interacting with your firm are somewhere in the buyer’s journey for your products and services.

“The case for intent data is clear. If only 3 percent of the potential buyers for any given product or service are in the market at any given time (while 40 percent are poised to begin and 56 percent aren’t interested), identifying and focusing on those buyers, and those close behind them, is the key to efficiency and effectiveness in revenue growth. That’s been the Holy Grail of marketing and sales for years. After all, how many times have you heard a sales rep say, ‘If I’m sitting at the table, I win more than my fair share of deals. Just get me to the table!’

That’s the promise of intent data. And practice shows it’s more than just a theory. Fifty-percent increase in close rates and an 82 percent reduction in sell-cycle have been attained.”

“Buying Guide: From the Black Box to Revenue Metrics – Translating Buzz into Results,” IntentData.io.

Unfortunately, intent data is often anonymous.  Unless the individual submits a web form, you are most likely limited to an IP address.  As B2B visitors are usually accessing your platform from a corporate IP address, it is possible to tie the IP address to the company and at least associate the activity with a company.  Companies such as DemandBase, Bombora, KickFire, Clearbit, IntentData.io, Zoominfo, and Dun & Bradstreet offer Visitor Intelligence services to map IP addresses to companies.  Along with the company name, they enrich the visitor intelligence with firmographics such as location, size, and industry. Some vendors include technographics as well.

Real-time visitor intelligence can assist with the user experience. By providing immediate firmographics, websites can be immediately customized based upon size, location, or industry.

As visitor intelligence is beginning to feed chatbots, it is possible to prioritize customer support and sales queries. As bots become more intelligent, they will digest the firmographics and customize the conversation. Likewise, ABM customers and prospects can be given priority over non-targeted prospects. If these teams are verticalized, chats can be routed to specialized teams.

External third-party intent data is provided by vendors such as Bombora, The Big Willow, and True Influence.  External intent data is gathered from B2B Media websites that evaluate topics of interest across their network and determine which topics are of interest to companies.  Interest is gauged by articles viewed, white papers downloaded, searches performed, case studies read, etc.  Generally, each company is baselined by topic with interest determined with respect to the baseline.  A surge of interest takes place when short-term interest in a topic is well above the baseline for the company.  Intent data is generally delivered as a numeric score by topic with companies licensing the topics of interest.  As intent is determined at the corporate level, it works best in lead scoring. One limitation of third-party data is you don’t know which individuals are researching specific topics, but this ensures that the data is GDPR- compliant.

TechTarget Priority Engine provides technology-specific second-party intent at the individual level along with contact information, buying stage (early or late based upon content viewed and downloaded), and key influencers (companies of interest).  TechTarget is focused on Technology topics across its 140 media sites and its BrightTALK webinars and virtual event service.  TechTarget is considered second-party intelligence because it owns the content directly, and contacts have opted in, making them GDPR-compliant.  It also offers first-party intent data through KickFire. 

G2.com (FKA G2Crowd) is another well-known source of second-party intent data. G2.com is a technology review site, so site traffic is highly associated with company and product research, making it a very strong source of early-stage demand intent. Competitors include TrustRadius and PeerSpot.

Additional Resources:

Quora: How do I obtain the necessary information for a B2B competitive analysis?

I answered the above question on Quora, but I thought it was worth posting the answer on my blog as well.

B2B is a broad category, so I will be providing a high-level process:

  • Start with the open web — the company website, corporate blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.
  • Jump to the LinkedIn and Twitter pages of key executives.
  • Continue with third-party review sites such as TrustRadius, G2, Glass Door, and Quora. Also compare web (Alexa, SimilarWeb) and social media activity (Owler) of the company vs. its top competitors.
  • If a US public company, obtain their 10-K, 10-Q, Annual Report, Proxy, and 8-Ks. Also, review all material on their investor page and look for Fair Disclosure Earnings Transcripts (Seeking Alpha, NASDAQ), investor presentations, financial models, etc.
  • If a US or global public, analyst reports are often available subject to a one week embargo. Vendors with analyst reports include D&B Hoovers, Factiva, Zacks, FactSet, Capital IQ, and Investext. Reports with fewer than five pages tend to only look at the stock, and provide little in the way of detail. Particularly good are the Initiating Coverage reports as they often entail an overview of the business.
  • If a US or global public, review the synopsis of material events going back over a decade. Significant Developments are available from Reuters, Factiva (Reuters), D&B Hoovers (Reuters), Capital IQ, and FactSet.
  • If a European private, they are likely to have filed financials, directors, and shareholdings with a local registry. You can obtain these through D&B Hoovers, Bureau van Dijk Orbis, or local registries.
  • Major companies are profiled by MarketLine and Global Data. Check to see if they or key competitors are profiled. Industry vendors also profile companies and products within their target segments.  These profiles include SWOTs, company histories, market shares, and overviews of key products and segments.
  • Determine the firm’s list of competitors. If it is a public company they will list this in a proxy. If it is a private company, refer to Hoovers, Global Data, or Marketline.
  • If you are looking for technology employed, refer to Datanyze, HG Insights, BuiltWith, DiscoverOrg, or RainKing. [DiscoverOrg, RainKing, and Datanyze have all been acquired by ZoomInfo]
  • Review all news for the company. The open web thins out quickly, so you are best off using an archival service such as Factiva or LexisNexis
  • For Intellectual Property and Legal, use LexisNexis or Westlaw. You can also search the USPTO site for trademarks and patents.
  • Check research from industry vendors. Most focus on only one or a few sectors (e.g. Gartner, Forrester, and IDC for Hardware and Software). A few provide higher level market overviews at the country or global level which include national or regional market shares, forecasts, and mini-profiles of the top 3-4 competitors in the market:
    • MarketLine (country and global)
    • Euromonitor (country or global)
    • BMI (Emerging Markets)
    • Freedonia (US)
    • IBISWorld (US, China, Australia, Global)
  • A few US industries are required to file with state or federal agencies. These include banks (FDIC), insurance (states), and nonprofits (990 forms with the IRS).
  • Larger companies file ERISA forms (5500s) annually with the Department of Labor. This filing covers benefit plans so is useful for direct research on a company and plan advisors. Judy Diamond offers a freemium service (FreeErisa) for ERISA filings.
  • If the firm has PE or VC funding, refer to Crunchbase, DataFox, Mattermark, PrivCo, or other vendors that collect this detail. Crunchbase and Owler provide this information for free.
  • Setup news alerts on the company and competitor you are evaluating. This can be done via Owler, Contify, Demandbase Sales Cloud (FKA InsideView), D&B Hoovers, Factiva, and LexisNexis.
  • Obtain a credit report (D&B, Experian, or local credit company if overseas)
  • Research the company family tree and review major subsidiaries and recent acquisitions. Global Family Trees are available from D&B Hoovers, Bureau van Dijk, and InsideView (parents and subs only). Public companies also list their subsidiaries in their 10-K (Note 21).
  • M&A research can be performed with Zephyr (Bureau van Dijk), Mattermark, FactSet, Capital IQ, and other vendors.

This is a quick overview for secondary research.  For primary research, reach out to customers, partners, and former employees.  They can be identified via Case Studies (generally fans so don’t be overly reliant on them), customer references on site, TrustRadius, G2 Crowd.  Former employees can be determined via LinkedIn.  Partners are generally listed on the company website.

One area that is particularly difficult to obtain is pricing data.  Some B2Bs are transparent while others publish virtually no details, particularly if they have complex product lines and pricing.  Don’t be surprised if you find little in this area beyond “Pricing begins in the five digits” for many vendors.  Pricing details may require primary research and this will provide data points, but not full price lists.

If you are performing regular competitive analysis work, consider joining SCIP (Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals).

Feel free to add additional tips in the comments.