Tag: LeadSpace

Leadspace – SalesIntel Partnership

CDP and DaaS Platform Leadspace deepened its partnership with company and contacts vendor SalesIntel to deliver richer profiles.  The expanded profiles will assist with territory planning, campaign building, and ABM programs, helping convert a “company’s total addressable market into new opportunities and customers.”

Leadspace is promising at least a fifty-percent cut in third-party data licensing expenses for human-verified contacts, firmographics, and technographics.  “This frees companies to reinvest their savings into advanced AI-assisted technologies to fully optimize funnel conversion,” stated Leadspace.

Leadspace aggregates third-party data from over thirty vendors, with data spanning 70 million companies, 240 million buying centers, and 280 million business professionals.

Leadspace delivers “fully-enriched, 360-degree buyer profiles of current and high-performance lookalike customers” that align the company’s territories with its TAM and ICP.  It then activates ABM-derived audiences across multiple channels, including Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and LiveRamp. 

Leadspace offers connectors for major platforms, including Salesforce, MSD, Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot.

“Leadspace is redefining the performance of B2B sales and marketing teams.  We have over a decade of experience in delivering the most extensible B2B profiles in the industry.  And unlike other offerings, the Leadspace platform is data source agnostic, open, and extensible,” stated Alex Yoder, CEO of Leadspace.  “Companies large and small need and deserve complete and active profiles, but today many companies struggle to keep their profiles up to date and complete.  We’ve worked with SalesIntel for several years, and this expansion in our partnership to include human-verified B2B contacts and technographic data in the Leadspace B2B graph is a testament to their being the leading vendor for the most affordable direct dial and accurate contact data in the industry.”

SalesIntel employs a global research network of nearly 2,000 editors who double-verify its data each quarter, ensuring a 95% accuracy level of its contacts.  It also provides firmographics and technographics.

“At SalesIntel, we are committed to providing the best sales intelligence available for revenue teams of all sizes.  Leadspace requires the highest quality data to fuel its platform, so this partnership expansion comes naturally.  We are honored to be a trusted provider,” said SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “With customers having access to accurate contact data and over 200 million technographic data points, they will be equipped with the most accurate insights so they can expand reach, grow pipeline, and increase close rates.”

Leadspace – ZoomInfo Partnership

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.

Leadspace Closes on Series D

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.

MSD 365 Customer Insights Partnerships

Microsoft rolled out a set of enhancements to its Customer Insights CDP earlier this month, including a set of technology and data partnerships. I covered the functional enhancements yesterday.

“Organizations can automatically augment profiles with survey responses to truly uncover sentiment and drive detailed segmentation of customers, empowering agile actions that build brand loyalty and driving detailed understanding of customers,” said James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Applications.  “Furthermore, organizations can enrich customer profiles with proprietary audience intelligence on brand affinity and user interests or by using third-party enrichments such as Experian and Leadspace.”

Leadspace supports B2B firmographic enrichment use cases, including industry codes, discrete and ranged sizing variables, geocodes, social media links, URLs, and standardized addresses.  Leadspace plans to include more advanced account-level insights such as company hierarchy and site-level details, as well as lead and intent scores, in future releases.  Firmographic updates may be processed daily or weekly with company matching performed by Leadspace.

The Leadspace data license is written on Leadspace paper and based upon the number of records under management.  Volume discounts apply.  When additional content sets are available, tiered pricing will be employed.

“We’ve been really honored to collaborate closely with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights team as their first B2B data enrichment partner and excited about the value it’ll bring our joint customers who want a single source of truth to fuel their sales and marketing efforts.  This offering goes a long way to helping them improve their ability to segment, prioritize, and personalize engagement across the customer lifecycle.”

Leadspace CTO Amnon Mishor

Experian supports consumer data enrichment spanning lifestyle segmentation, demographics, purchasing habits, brand preferences, life-event triggers, and mobile location data.  

Microsoft also rolled out a set of new Customer Insights integrations that “drive meaningful actions across the customer journey.”  Customer Insights is vendor-agnostic, “from ingesting data from any source to activating insights on multiple destinations.”  New partners include AutopilotHQ, Bing ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, and SendGrid (Twilio).

Phillips emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to data privacy and security “by enabling organizations to better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions from Microsoft Information Protection.”  Organization can “configure policies to classify, label, and protect data based on its sensitivity.”

Customer Insights pricing begins at $1,500 per tenant per month for up to 100,000 profiles.

LeadSpace Fall Release

LeadSpace rolled out its Customer Data Platform (CPD) fall release with improved processing of first-party data, enhancements to their Salesforce app, and refinements to their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) modeling.  Automated ingestion of first-party data and custom data sources deliver unified customer profiles “for use across systems.”  Automated data onboarding assists with AI modeling, scoring and analytics, and enterprise software activation.

“Customers can use data on engagement, product use, relationship, and other information unique to their business to power real-time orchestration of activities and processes,” stated the firm.  “Decisions about how to route leads, assign nurture programs, segment for campaigns, and personalize interactions can now be made with all the intelligence of the CDP and a complete customer view.”

The fall release also supports data hygiene with the sunsetting of Data.com Clean in mid-2020.  Both real-time and on-demand matching and enrichment are supported.  Triggers automatically identify new or updated records and automatically look to match them against the LeadSpace CDP.  At the end of the year, a sync button will be displayed within individual records.

“Getting a complete view of the customer is critical to improving the customer experience for B2B.  Buyers no longer tolerate generic and impersonal content and interactions.  Our Customer Data Platform gives B2B marketers a real path to being able to orchestrate the ideal customer experience at scale.  Improving the ability to ingest 1st party data makes that even more powerful because it is unique to each of our client’s journey with their customers.”

LeadSpace CEO Doug Bewsher

Enhanced ICP Analytics help select the right accounts and personas for ABM targeting.  Interactive, filterable reports display account, contact, and intent data matched against conversion and revenue data to “uncover which categories and segments have performed well historically.”  

LeadSpace On-Demand look-a-like segment building now supports company suppression.

LeadSpace customers include Microsoft, HPE, SAP, Iron Mountain, IBM, and Symantec.

Leadspace Closes on Reachforce Acquisition

Reachforce Smartforms support thin forms that are less likely to be abandoned, enrich leads with firmographics, and allow the user to select the proper location. Data entry and enrichment is performed in real-time allowing for immediate scoring and routing decisions.
Reachforce Smartforms support thin forms that are less likely to be abandoned, enrich leads with firmographics, and allow the user to select the proper location. Data entry and enrichment is performed in real-time allowing for immediate scoring and routing decisions.

Leadspace formally closed its ReachForce acquisition on July 1st.  Coincidentally, that was the same day that Dun & Bradstreet closed on its Lattice Engines acquisition.  Thus, Forester’s top two B2B CDPs (Q2 2019 Forrester Wave), were strengthened on the same day.

According to Forrester, “Leadspace offers comprehensive data that includes a proprietary second-party data asset with numerous sources of intent data and access to third-party data sources.  It also has strong segmentation capabilities (e.g., ideal customer profile and total addressable market modeling for ABM) and can help sellers decide who to call next and what to offer.”

ReachForce adds two core products to Leadspace: The well-regarded Smartforms web form service and the SmartSuite data hygiene platform.

SmartSuite provides “a one-stop-shop for data management, cleansing, and enriching, with an easy-to-use interface which shows quickly the ‘state of the union on data within CRM and MAP systems,” blogged Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher.

Reachforce and Leadspace share over 200 joint customers, so integrating the services and standardizing their content sets will provide direct benefits to those clients.  The firms share seven of the top ten enterprise software companies as clients.

Leadspace provides an additional set of data partners which can be combined with Reachforce data sources.  Leadspace data partners include DiscoverOrg, Dun & Bradstreet, Bombora, KickFire, and others.

“Customers will now be able to leverage all of these data sources seamlessly in real-time, through a single API and interface, offering a genuine single source of truth,” wrote Bewsher.

The Leadspace CDP supports a broad set of CRM, MAP, and digital advertising platforms including Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, and LiveRamp.  Smartforms will be an additional “activation product,” which “seamlessly and simply onboards new customers and customer intelligence into Sales and Marketing engagement platforms.”

Smartforms performs real-time data enrichment to lead records, allowing them to be properly scored and routed.  One of the long-standing benefits of Smartforms is the opportunity to shorten forms and perform real-time firmographic enrichment.  Not only is the enriched data more accurate, but form abandonment rates are significantly lower, resulting in a higher return on digital marketing campaigns.

“What’s more, combining Smartforms with existing Leadspace capabilities like reverse IP information, detailed account- and person-level data, and AI modeling, means we can offer highly-accurate site and ad personalization on both the account (ABM) and persona level.  For our customers, this means even more precise and personalized engagement and targeting, particularly those currently using our ABM solutions.  (We will be announcing more on this offering in Q3 as we integrate the Reachforce and Leadspace platforms.)”

Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher

The merger also allows Leadspace to incorporate its proprietary AI-driven intelligence, automated scoring, and models within Reachforce products.  Leadspace is beginning to move partner platforms from systems of record or systems of engagement to systems of intelligence.  “CDPs combine vast data and data management capabilities with advanced AI to create a system of intelligence that guides Marketing and Sales to their best customers, and delivers razor-sharp insights and recommendations on how and when to effectively engage them,” said Bewsher.  “The CDP is being rapidly adopted by B2B businesses now — including many enterprise companies at the forefront of marketing and sales strategy and innovation — and it’s proving equally as effective for them.”

Breaking News: Leadspace Acquires ReachForce

Customer Data Platform vendor Leadspace acquired B2B Hygiene vendor ReachForce.  The two firms offer complementary functionality with ReachForce adding webforms (SmartForms) and a continuous data quality platform (SmartSuite) to Leadspace’s CDP.

Leadspace plans to merge SmartSuite into their CDP over the next six months. SmartForms will become an “activation product” for Leadspace.

“ReachForce is a well-respected brand with an experienced team in the B2B marketing tech space,” stated Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher.  “We’ve known them, and competed against them, over the years, so we’re excited to be joining forces now to move the B2B CDP space even further.”

ReachForce will maintain its Austin office and staff while LeadSpace will continue to operate in Hod Hasharon, Israel, and San Francisco.

Reachforce SmartSuite Customer Data Management processes.

The Reachforce SmartSuite provides real-time and continuous data quality management.  Features include B2B data match and enrich; data standardization; de-duplication; email, phone, and address verification; data health reports; CRM and MAP connectors; and contact prospecting at target accounts.

ReachForce has its best-in-class SmartForms product, which is a key way that customers build an understanding of their customers, as well as SmartSuite, which provides a real-time data cleansing and management service. Combined with Leadspace’s best-in-class B2B customer data platform, there is a definite complementary and additive effect. SmartForms will become one of the activation products for Leadspace, and we will work over the next [several] months to combine the best of both data management platforms to provide a single end-to-end solution for B2B CDP. 

Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher

The Reachforce acquisition follows shortly after Dun & Bradstreet acquired Lattice Engines.  Both Dun & Bradstreet and Leadspace now offer a CDP alongside a data quality hub, digital advertising, visitor intelligence, and CRM/MAP connectors:

Dun & Bradstreet / Leadspace Product Line Comparison (© GZ Consulting 2019)

Forrester’s Q2 2019 Wave report on B2B Customer Data Platforms placed Lattice Engines and Leadspace in the leader category with both holding the highest scores in strategy and Lattice Engines being ranked slightly higher for their current offering.

Prior to the acquisition, the Dun & Bradstreet CDP (D&B DataVision) was ranked a strong performer. The dual acquisitions help the vendors extend their leadership in the CDP space and increase the likelihood of additional consolidation within the B2B Customer Data Platform segment.

Leadspace did not disclose the acquisition price. Acquisition discussions began earlier this year.

LeadSpace Partners with Bombora

LeadSpace is now including Bombora intent data in its Customer Data Platform.  Bombora’s company surge data helps identify which companies are in market for products and solutions based upon surges in topical interest above historical baselines in the topic.  “Customers can combine the resultant intent insights with Leadspace Predictive and Persona scores to accurately predict prospects’ readiness to buy in real time.”

LeadSpace customers can target outreach based upon topical interest, prioritize sales and marketing activities using intent data within predictive models, and personalize ad campaigns with messaging and content around surging topics.

LeadSpace customers employing an ABM strategy enjoy improved account list building and engagement due to the partnership.  They can also identify net-new prospects using look-a-like modelling and surge data.

“ABM succeeds when sales and marketing work closely toward the same goals.  The easiest way to find that success is for both departments to start with insights from a single data source. Intent data that shows which target accounts are actively in-market helps sales and marketing tailor their efforts to the best prospects, and avoid those that are not engaged in the buying cycle. Working with Leadspace ensures the easy orchestration of Bombora’s insights across these departments.”

Erik Matlick, CEO and co-founder of Bombora

Intent data also assists with sales-marketing alignment via harmonized messaging.  According to David Tam, Director of Marketing at OneLogin, “I’ve never worked anywhere before where we could run a fully-integrated and aligned marketing campaign and sales play, where the messaging matches. Our marketing emails are talking about the same things that our sales reps are talking about. That alone is enough to get brownie points with Sales!”

LeadSpace has offices in San Francisco, Denver, and Israel.  It called off a merger with Radius in August.

"How to Get Real Value from Intent with Leadspace," Leadspace Graphic
“How to Get Real Value from Intent with Leadspace”

Radius-Leadspace Merger Aborted

Radius and Leadspace quietly called off their merger back in August, agreeing not to point fingers at each other and continue supporting joint customers.

“At the end of the day, private to private mergers are incredibly hard to pull off. In this case, despite all of the best intentions in the world, we could not get to something that would work for all sides,” Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher told Demand Gen Report. “We are excited to see the evolution and clarity around the whole customer data platform really starting to define itself in B2B.”

Bewsher remains bullish about Leadspace and the Audience Management space:

Leadspace pioneered this space when we launched our Audience Management Platform two years ago. We continue to see great success with customers as they both simplify their data management processes and bring additional data driven insights and recommendations into their activities. Whether driving an ABM strategy, a content marketing / inbound lead driven strategy, or outbound prospecting, the right data and insights deployed into systems of engagement is typically the first step in any company’s success…

We look forward to working with you to develop, build and lead this category as we continue our mission to help B2B sales and marketing teams drive a new level of engagement, targeting and resulting revenue for their organizations.

Leadspace had a strong Q2 with its “best ever revenue growth.”  New customers include SAP and Splunk.  Growth was driven by the increasing recognition that B2B firms require a data-agnostic Customer Data Platform “which brings together many different data sources at the company- and individual-level, drives recommendations, insights and a single source of truth through AI, and then has a single point of integration into multiple executions systems (CRM, MAP, Ads etc),” said Bewsher.

“Radius and Leadspace agreed to continue operating independently and are now partnering to support joint customers,” said Radius.  “Radius’ customer data platform is the first for B2B, and we will focus on offering enterprise companies integrated, unified and trusted data across all go-to-market systems, while Leadspace’s audience management platform will continue to equip companies with audience enrichment and analytics.”

Both firms no longer talk about predictive analytics and emphasize Customer Data Platforms.  The Predictive Analytics space has been squeezed by both DaaS vendors with light scoring tools and integrated AI solutions such as Einstein.

Predictive Analytics Is Losing Steam as AI Becomes Prevalent across SalesTech & MarTech

On Monday, Radius Intelligence and Leadspace announced their merger and plans to become the “leader in B2B data intelligence.”  The firm, which will continue under the Radius brand, is no longer emphasizing predictive analytics.

The predictive analytics market has failed to develop as a standalone segment. According to Radius Chairman Darian Shirazi, the total investment in the space was over $600 million.  However, Gartner sized the market at $100 million to $150 million in 2016 revenue, suggesting that the promise of predictive analytics was developing slowly.

In his just released 2018 MarTech Landscape, Scott Brinker removed Predictive Analytics as a segment as machine learning is being integrated broadly across marketing products.

For B2B predictive tools to work, they require high quality reference data sets for initial and ongoing enrichment, but the predictive analytics companies black-boxed their data sourcing. Radius was one of the few exception to this opacity as they were transparent about their data acquisition model (web crawling combined with a customer contributed data model), but most of the other firms have been vague about their data models.

The predictive analytics companies were also slow to offer ABM tools and similar company and contact recommendations. These features are now commonly offered by both predictive analytics companies and sales and marketing intelligence firms such as D&B Hoovers, InsideView, DiscoverOrg, and Zoominfo. What’s more, the sales and marketing intelligence firms have all developed light predictive scoring or ranking tools. While none of these firms approaches Radius or Leadspace in predictive capabilities, they all provide company and contact insights for sales reps, ABM tools for sales and marketing, and integrated data enrichment processes.

The predictive analytics firms also initially black boxed their models, preferring to hide complexity. They have since become more transparent and begun displaying the top reasons for recommendations. However, Salesforce Einstein has provided similar functionality with predictive scores and insights.

Todd Berkowitz of Gartner summed up the situation well.

I’ve been covering the market for B2B predictive marketing analytics for almost four years. A few years ago, predictive lead scoring was all the rage. Then it became about fit and intent models for demand generation and prospecting. Then these tools were used for selecting accounts for large-scale ABM programs. But in the end, the standalone market for these applications never fully reached its potential. Many of the original vendors got acquired for their technology (Fliptop, SalesPredict, Infer and others) and predictive scoring became a standard feature of marketing automation and SFA systems.

Just because the standalone market went away, doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of value here. In fact, the solutions have essentially moved into two other markets (and you’ll see this reflected in our upcoming Hype Cycle reports). On one end, you have the Data Intelligence for Sales market where predictive and AI-driven solutions are competing with traditional data vendors for demand gen, prospecting, and segmentation use cases. On the other end, you have the broader ABM solutions market where these applications not only help with account selection and planning, but are moving towards engagement and orchestration.

Berkowitz predicted that one or two of the remaining predictive analytics vendors will be acquired in the next six months.

With over 6,000 MarTech companies, the market is quite fragmented. Although the MarTech sector continues to expand, there is already momentum towards consolidation as clients look for broad, integrated functionality instead of many point solutions. For example, marketing and sales departments adopting ABM need a broad set of functionality which includes

  • AI scoring and recommendations
  • Real-time, batch, and continuous company and contact enrichment
  • Data hygiene (e.g. de-duplication, data standardization, and verification services)
  • Third-party verticalized data enrichment
  • Programmatic marketing
  • Website visitor id
  • Lead-to-account mapping
  • Look-a-like company and contact prospecting
  • Segmentation, TAM, and pipeline analysis
  • CRM, MAP, and sales engagement connectors
  • Sales triggers
  • Account social media monitoring
  • Company and contact intelligence

At this point, nobody offers a full suite of these ABM capabilities for sales and marketing departments.