Mattermark Returns

The Mattermark Account I-Frame in the Salesforce AppExchange supports both company news and an account overview with over 80 fields. The service is reasonably priced at $49 / user / month.
The Mattermark Account I-Frame in the Salesforce AppExchange supports both company news and an account overview with over 80 fields. The service is reasonably priced at $49 / user / month.

Mattermark is back as an independent company after being acquired by FullContact in late 2017.  Unfortunately, the acquisition announcement was mishandled with FullContact first saying the product was going away and later saying that it was still available.

The relaunched Mattermark attracted back much of its early staff including its founders Danielle and Kevin Morrill and Product Lead Paul Denya.  The firm has a “renewed focus on private deal intelligence.”  

“This transition has been in the works for the past few months without disruption to services. You have our assurance that will continue to be the case.”


Eric Milliken

To support the relaunch, Mattermark is adding headcount to their customer service, engineering, and data teams “to redouble our commitment to customer satisfaction and data excellence.”

Mattermark data coverage spans 4 million companies, company news, and funding data.  Users can leverage public lists or build shared lists.  Mattermark also supports an API, Salesforce integration, Chrome extension, Google Sheets, and lead and account enrichment.

Mattermark: Dataset Growth and Enhancements

Mattermark rolled out a set of enhancements to their product and content over the past few months.  The PE/VC funding data firm added Revenue Range and Zip Code to company profiles delivered via Mattermark Pro, Mattermark API, and their recently released AppExchange connector.   Mattermark now supports over 80 variables.

The Old Growth Score (Blue) was based upon historical growth data. The New Growth Score (Blue) is limited to the past 12 weeks.
The Old Growth Score (Blue) was based upon historical growth data. The New Growth Score (Blue) is limited to the past 12 weeks.

Mattermark also revised its Growth Score.  Previously, the firm evaluated the Growth Score over the company’s lifetime, which resulted in the ongoing display of Uber, Accenture, Amazon, and Google.  The new model employs a rolling twelve-week score which “better captures the dynamic changes over time,” said Marketing Manager Nick Frost.  “By reducing the span by which we calculate the Growth Score, our customers have a better representation of a company’s activity.”

Mattermark has been actively growing its company database, hitting four million profiles in February.  The firm continues to add missing firmographics.  For example, they added location data for 300K companies and industry tags for 700K companies.  Most profile vendors require these fields prior to publication.

Mattermark Salesforce Connector

Mattermark rolled out its new Salesforce.com connector.  Mattermark, which released a sales edition for its PE/VC database in Q3 2015, supports lead enrichment spanning over eighty fields including Last Known Funding, Employee Count, Investors, Growth Score, Estimated Web Traffic, and Location.  Other features include custom object mapping, event triggers, and automated updates.  The Mattermark database now spans four million global companies and is growing at 100,000 companies per month.

Sales reps can also apply triggers and actions to any lead, opportunity, or other object.

“By launching Mattermark on the AppExchange, it allows sales professionals to spend more time doing what they do best, and what computers can’t do,” said Danielle Morrill, CEO of Mattermark. “Whether you’re an SDR, Sales Executive, or VP, your time is best spent on the phone or in person cultivating the relationships that earn you the right to do business.”

The Mattermark Account record displays firmographics, funding details, and recent news.
The Mattermark Account record displays firmographics, funding details, and recent news.

While they do not yet support prospecting, it is on their roadmap.  “The next thing we are building for Salesforce is simple but powerful: we’ll give users the ability to fill up the CRM with the accounts they want,” blogged Morrill. “Instead of starting out empty and filling it up, we want to give you the opposite experience. Every possible account is available to you with Mattermark, and through application of your ideal customer profile criteria you can chisel away at this massive block of possible customers to come up with the best possible targets to go after.”

The app is priced at $49 per user per month.

 

Evolution of Sales Intelligence

Darwin's_finchesThe Sales Intelligence (SI) space has been undergoing some rapid change over the past year.  This evolution in functional scope and content sets has resulted in an expansion in the number of companies I cover as well as the categories (ABSD services, PE/VC funding databases).  There is also a movement of sales intelligence vendors into marketing intelligence as the traditional SIs look for additional revenue opportunities and a broader value proposition.

A year ago, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was discussed mostly by DemandBase, a top of the funnel programmatic marketing vendor, but the predictive analytics vendors and Zoominfo began discussing the methodology.  Thus, a year ago, ABM meant anti-ballistic missile or activity based management to all but the most well-versed marketers.  Now the term is commonly found in corporate blogs and collateral and has spawned ABSD (Account Based Software Development) which follows ABM down to the middle of the funnel in the sales development function.  There are now several ABSD vendors which I have begun to include in my newsletter including SalesLoft and QuotaFactory.  ABSD shifts the sales development focus away from “smile and dial” calling towards targeted messaging into a set of top prospects.  Since the prospecting activities are targeting higher value opportunities, there is a benefit to personalizing calls and emails.  SalesLoft refers to this activity as “sincerity at scale.”

What is even more impressive about SalesLoft and QuotaFactory is that they are both less than two years old and yet they have already grown in commercial stature to the point where they are building out partner ecosystems with traditional SIs and other vendors.  SalesLoft rolled out their Sales Development Cloud at their customer conference last month with nine partners including DiscoverOrg, InsideView, Datanyze, and Owler.  At the same time, QuotaFactory announced partnerships with Bedrock Data, Ambition, HG Data, and InsideView.

A second area of rapid growth is the technology sales intelligence vendors.  DiscoverOrg and RainKing have grown revenue and capabilities, transforming what was historically a sleepy niche into a significant sub-category.  Both vendors have posted high multi-year growth rates, internationalized their datasets, expanded their technology trigger events, and developed CRM and marketing automation connectors.  While they continue to gather rich profiles of IT execs, they are broadening their functional coverage to include non-IT functions that are significantly investing in IT cloud solutions such as marketing and finance.  DiscoverOrg is continuing this functional expansion with product management (the recently released TEDD dataset), HR, and Sales.  Furthermore, their databases, which once focused on the Fortune 1000, now cover nearly 50,000 top global companies and 700,000 executives.  Both firms announced significant funding events in the past six months.

Aberdeen Group, which was spun off of Harte-Hanks last year, has begun to invest in the AccessCI database.  Once the leading source of technology profiles and leads, the AccessCI (aka CiTDB and CITDS) dataset had received little investment from Harte-Hanks over the prior decade.  Under new ownership, the product is once again receiving management attention.

The SIs have also increased their coverage of technographicsAvention acquired SalesQuest two years ago and integrated their Crush profiles into their products while other vendors have licensed vendor/product data from HG Data or mined technographic intelligence.  HG Data has become so adept at collecting vendor/product data that DiscoverOrg and Aberdeen Group have begun licensing content from them.

Several firms that began as fundings databases found that Business Development was a logical extension of their value proposition and have since repositioned themselves as sales intelligence solutions.  Firms such as DataFox and Mattermark are focusing more on sales intelligence functionality while CB Insights has launched a sales intelligence solution (with technographics) while retaining its focus on the PE/VC space.

For the most part, the SIs have avoided the predictive analytics space.  The exceptions are Avention, which supports business signals and ideal profiles, and Radius which morphed  from an SMB SI into a predictive analytics company.  Meanwhile, the predictive analytics companies are beginning to offer a subset of SI features such as net-new leads.

Instead, the SIs have focused more on marketing analytics, data enrichment, and data hygiene which allows them to leverage their databases without investing in data scientists.  Dun & Bradstreet acquired NetProspex last year for its contact database and the Workbench cloud data hygiene platform.  They have also begun to offer Hoover’s concierge services including enrichment, segmentation reporting, and email delivery.  Avention launched its DataVision customer data platform earlier this year while Zoominfo, Data.com, and InsideView have placed equal weight upon marketing services and sales intelligence services.

Social Selling continues to be a core element of positioning for InsideView and LinkedIn Sales NavigatorArtesian Solutions, a UK vendor that is launching a US product later this year, also focuses on social selling.  A significant product gap across the SIs is the lack of social tools built into their offering.  I can understand why SIs have shied away from Who Knows Who tools (the exceptions are InsideView and DueDil), but it is perplexing why most SI vendors have only limited sets of social media links and little social media content displayed in their services.  Only InsideView, Artesian, and Owler have put much emphasis upon social media content.

Europe is also becoming a home of new services.  DueDil has evolved into a UK challenger to Avention and BvD Mint while IKO System and Sparklane (formerly Zebaz) have an established presence in France.

When I started my newsletter four years ago, many of the companies and products either had not been launched or weren’t on my radar.  I mostly focused on Avention, Hoover’s, InsideView, DiscoverOrg, BvD, Sales Genie, Data.com, and RainKing.  While these companies continue to innovate, much of the energy is coming from new entrants.  The rapid growth and diversity of sales intelligence functionality has been exciting to observe.

Credit: Darwin’s Finches are in the public domain.  Charles Darwin, 1845.

Chrome Integration: Mattermark

MattermarkToday I am continuing my coverage of Google Chrome integrations with Mattermark, a funding database.  The Mattermark Chrome extension provides company and funding details on 1.3 million companies.  The connector identifies companies based upon the current URL in the active browser tab.   If the company is not found in their database, then users can request that the firm be added to Mattermark.

Content includes business descriptions, social media links, industry keywords, top executives with titles, and funding rounds.

The Chrome viewer also provides employee history, funding history, and Mattermark growth score graphs.  Users can even trace along the graphs to find the employee counts, funding amounts, or growth scores over time.

A View Connections button opens up a LinkedIn tab and displays the top connections to the company.  To improve connection accuracy, Mattermark passes the LinkedIn company code.  Other social media links include Facebook, Twitter, Angellist, and CrunchBase.

The extension provides quick access to company searches, saved searches, and lists via the Mattermark browser.  If the user clicks on the company name, the full Mattermark company profile is displayed in a new tab.  Additional content includes funding and acquisition histories, similar companies, news headlines with open web links, and user notes.

Multiple graphs are displayed including Growth and Mindshare, web traffic, social media (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and app ranks (Apple App Store and Google Play).  Unfortunately, none of the graphs provide context.  Thus, if there is a spike in social media activity, there is no direct method for discerning what events or promotions drove the spike.  Likewise, a declining growth score lacks context.

Users can also click on one of the company investors listed in the Chrome window to view a list of other investments made by the PE/VC.  Along with a list of the investments with recent funding data and growth scores, Mattermark provides investor analytics including top industries, growth momentum, business model (B2B vs. B2C investments), stage distribution, and company location.  Thus, a startup could use Mattermark for both building prospect lists targeting fast growth companies and research on potential investors.  Knowing what stage, industry, and location a firm invests in helps narrow a CFO’s funding targets.

Mattermark collects and edits its company dataset.  After cancelling the last of its data licenses last year, Mattermark now mines all of its data.  They also have a small team of analysts for verifying the extracted content.

Executive information is limited to top names and titles.  They do not provide contact information.  However, users can click on the LinkedIn icon to be taken directly to the LinkedIn company page for research.

I should warn you that the service is expensive.  Users must have a paid subscription or free trial for access to Mattermark Chrome extension content.  Pricing begins at $6,000 per annum.

Given its price and limited coverage, Mattermark is best suited for PE/VC firms and startups looking for their next funding round.