Contacts database Social123 rolled out a set of enhancements to their contact enrichment service including more accurate matching, expanded reporting, saved searches, improved security, and additional enrichment fields.
Match rates were improved due to the normalization of company and contact names on input files. Name standardization reduces the number of nicknames, typos, and corporate identifiers (e.g. LLC) prior to match processing. D-U-N-S Number matching is also being offered which allows marketers to upload a list of D-U-N-S numbers and receive a set of targeted contacts at the companies. (D-U-N-S numbers are a proprietary global company numbering system developed and maintained by Dun & Bradstreet. They are the closest schema to a de facto global numbering system for companies and corporate linkages).
Social123 automated their Data Health report with data quality metrics, net-new contact counts, and contact analytics. Amongst the new contact analytics are the top ten titles and the top ten reported skills.
Social123 added twenty-five site location fields including address, phone, SICs, NAICS, revenue, employee count, and geocodes.
To improve security, users are no longer emailed direct file links. Instead, notification emails direct users to a secure application.
Finally, Social123 now offers a firmographic only append. Other services include contact prospecting, data cleansing, and email validation
The Social123 contacts dataset now exceeds 300 million detailed global contacts sourced from the open web and social media.
Lead quality stratification chart from “I Don’t Want More Leads (and Neither Do You)”
I was recently commissioned to write a blog series on the subject of Account Based Marketing (ABM) for sales intelligence vendor Avention. ABM is one of the hottest trends in sales and marketing as firms have realized that blanketing the market with non-personalized messaging is both inefficient and becoming less effective. ABM provides a structured approach to sales and marketing whereby firms define their best customers and prospects and then focus their energy on these best candidates. Due to improvements in datasets and technology, firms can now target and personalize their messaging much more effectively.
Here are my recent articles and opening paragraphs:
Data Quality Remains Boring, but Ever More Important: Three years ago, I wrote a blog titled, “Data Quality is Boring”. To be honest, it still is. Few marketing executives will walk into the job and set data hygiene as their first priority. But is it more critical than ever due to the increased scope of SalesTech and Martech and the advancement of Account Based Marketing (ABM) and predictive analytics. None of these tools will achieve their promise without a rigorous process for embedding high quality data into your leads, contacts, and accounts. Marketers need to build data quality into the front-end of their data acquisition process and then maintain data quality over time. Likewise, data quality needs to be maintained within CRMs due to the rapid rate of contact decay.
Demand Gen is to Fishing With Nets as ABM is to _____: Account Based Marketing (ABM) is quickly moving up the hype cycle and becoming a best practice at many B2B organizations. While ABM has been around for decades, it is only in the past two years that the wisdom of B2B targeting combined with focused sales and marketing activities around ideal customers has been revisited.
Digital Transformation of Sales & Marketing: In my last blog, I discussed Forrester’s model of Digital Predators, Digital Transformers, and Digital Dinosaurs. Forrester argues that businesses must quickly become digital with products and services which are either sold or delivered digitally. According to Forrester, about five percent of business revenue is being converted from traditional to digital each year with nearly half of all revenue being digitally mediated by 2020. At that point, ninety percent of digital predator revenue will be digitally mediated, and nearly seventy percent of digital transformer revenue will be digital, but only one-third of digital dinosaur revenue will be digital. Thus, over the next four years, the transformers will quadruple their digital revenue mix while the dinosaurs will merely double it
Account Based Marketing & Cloning Best Customers: As sales and marketing teams embrace Account Based Marketing (ABM), they have come to realize that ABM requires that the two departments agree on what constitutes a best customer as well as how to identify them. Account Based Marketing is a balancing act between extending your target market and retaining strategic focus. Firms need to direct their energy and investments into a universe of best prospects and customers. Once this ABM target list is defined, sales and marketing must maintain a laser-like focus on these candidates.
Account Based Marketing & Expanding Your Footprint: When assessing vendors for Account Based Marketing (ABM), the initial focus may be on building the ABM target list, but equally important is the ability to sell more broadly across an organization. Thus, deep contacts and linkage are critical for upselling, cross-selling, and accessing new pockets of potential buyers within firms. After all, it is easier to sell deeper into your best fit accounts than it is to establish that initial beachhead. Furthermore, a broader footprint generates both greater income and greater account security.
Account Based Marketing & Company Research: Account Based Marketing (ABM) has been re-embraced as a strategy by sales and marketing teams as they have realized that traditional outreach methods (e.g. banner advertising, phone, and email) need to be better targeted towards a set of Ideal Customers. Simply taking a “spray and pray” approach to marketing is becoming less effective as prospects become less willing to answer calls or read poorly targeted emails. If the voicemail is generic or the email appears to be generated from a marketing automation platform, it is unlikely that the prospect will do anything beyond hit the delete button.
Meet ABM’s Kid Brother: ABSD: In my last few blogs, I’ve discussed Account Based Marketing (ABM) as a targeted approach to strategic B2B marketing, but have yet to broach the subject of how ABM affects sales reps. Since ABM began at the very top of the funnel as programmatic marketing to anonymous targets at named accounts, it had little process impact further down the funnel; but now that ABM has become a broader marketing strategy for named accounts, the question is much more relevant.
MQL and SQL — Why Can’t We Just Agree on Lead Qualification: For too long, sales and marketing have been at loggerheads over what constitutes a qualified lead. This disagreement on what is an actionable opportunity has been one of the sources of ongoing conflict between sales and marketing. How many times has marketing crowed about all the leads they generate for the sales team only to be dismissed by sales reps and their managers?
I Don’t Want More Leads (and Neither Do You): The headline to my email read, “I don’t need more leads. Said no marketer ever.” I guess I’ll be the first to disagree with that statement – as would the marketer who wrote the headline. You only need to read her subsequent copy which states “When fully integrated into your demand generation efforts, predictive marketing enables B2B marketers to drive deeper buyer engagement and increase revenue opportunities from target accounts.”
Note: I am a former Avention employee (2001 – 20010)
While other sales and marketing intelligence vendors provide integrated prospecting within marketing automation platforms, Salesforce has not implemented Data.com prospecting for the Pardot B2B marketing automation platform. Pardot is strictly a permission-based marketing platform so sales reps need to work the prospects to obtain marketing permission before the record can be sent from Salesforce to Pardot.
“It’s a bad idea to purchase email lists and immediately send email to those purchased prospects, and no reputable email service provider will allow you to immediately send email to a purchased list. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from this treasure trove of information, as long as permission is explicitly obtained first,” said Skyler Holobach, Pardot’s Email Compliance Manager.
Instead, Holobach recommends using Data.com Clean to enrich basic contact information obtained from web forms or tradeshows. If the user is synching with Data.com Clean, then company and contact data is enriched. Otherwise, users can synch against Data.com Connect for contact enrichment. Updating takes the user through a “stare and compare” process.
When users have Data.com Prospector lists, they are required to call into accounts to obtain opt-in permission.
“The incorrect way would be to use Data.com as a cold lead generator for email purposes. Given the terms stated in the Permission-Based Marketing Policy, customers can not pull in prospects through Data.com and immediately add them to Pardot lists for emails and/or nurturing without first obtaining their permission. By not following best practices, you’re also running a significant risk for getting your IP address blacklisted, which can lead to significant email reputation damage,” said Holobach. “Instead, you should follow the best practices outlined above, to first obtain permission prior to sending email. By obtaining explicit permission prior to sending email, you can reap the benefits of the Data.com database while staying in compliance with Pardot’s Permission-Based Marketing Policy and keeping your email reputation high.”
The InsideView – Campaign Stars joint value proposition in three easy steps.
Content as a Service vendor Campaign Stars has partnered with sales and marketing intelligence firm InsideView to deliver InsideView Target within the Campaign Stars platform. According to Campaign Stars, “Marketers enjoy jumps in conversion rates of 45% or more when combining audience segmentation with content optimization.”
“Campaign Stars’ clients simply share their brand’s vision and insight via their collaboration platform, purchase credits that are redeemable for any number of services, and select what assets they need. Campaign Stars then targets their audience, creates the content, delivers it via the client’s marketing automation software, and then tracks campaign performance across dozens of key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketers can buy more credits whenever they need, and they never have to exhaust their own bandwidth to create engaging content,” said Campaign Stars CEO Henry Bruckstein.
Campaign Stars provides both the digital content platform and editorial staff for creating, targeting, and distributing content. InsideView Target provides a segmented list of potential prospects for outbound marketing. Campaign Stars features include analytics, A/B testing, and project management tools.
Campaign Stars assigns two creative teams to projects, allowing them to separately develop and test content against a sample of targeted prospects. The two campaigns are then compared across a set of key performance indicators. This process, called Campaign Optimization, results in the more effective campaign being rolled out broadly.
“Our commitment is always to help our customers get the best results possible from their content campaigns,” said Bruckstein. “Our partnership with InsideView gives CampaignStars marketers integrated access to over 25 million B2B contacts across 800 industries. It’s like a turbo charge for your campaign.”
To entice InsideView customers to test out Campaign Stars, the firms are offering Campaign Stars credits to InsideView customers.
“Campaign Stars gives you something to say; InsideView gives you the right contacts to say it to,” said Heidi Tucker, VP Alliances at InsideView. “By partnering, customers now get both the fuel and the engine. Together, we are a total one-stop shop for market intelligence, content creation, and delivery automation – the entire journey, as easy as saying ‘Go.'”
Since launching its API a few years ago, InsideView has been very aggressive in identifying emerging opportunities for partnership. In March, they announced licensing deals with ABSD vendors QuotaFactory and SalesLoft.
Campaign Stars is also a partner of Quota Factory. “You can harness the power of the ultimate marketing one-two punch. Create engaging content faster than ever before to drive more qualified leads, and convert more of those leads than you ever thought possible with QuotaFactory’s dynamic PRM system,” said Bruckstein about their joint value proposition. “Identify more prospects, qualify more leads, and convert more sales. Guide your customers along the buying journey every step of the way with an uninterrupted stream of high-octane content, and get them across the finish line with a multi-faceted cascade of targeted, effective follow-up communication.”
Campaign Stars lists partnerships with the major B2B marketing automation platforms. They also list DiscoverOrg as a partner, but the partnership has yet to be formally announced.
InsideView’s new download limits take effect for all InsideView Sales customers on June 1st. Going forward, users will only receive 500 company and 500 contact credits per month. The maximum size of a download file remains 2,000 records. These limits are well below those of their top two competitors, Hoover’s and Avention; InsideView now heavily targets the marketing function, so they are becoming miserly with respect to downloads in their flagship sales offering.
Customers looking for broader limits can license InsideView Target, their prospecting service for marketers.
InsideView also announced a set of enhancements, the most important of which was InsideView Target’s one-click list Send to Eloqua feature. Target checks for duplicate contacts based on emails, ensuring that uploaded prospects are net-new. Marketo connector functionality is also available.
InsideView Target now supports Eloqua synch with duplicate checking.
Other May release announcements were fairly minor:
The mobile product displays 90 days of news instead of 30.
InsideView for CRM provides direct access to the full InsideView company or executive profile by clicking on the name.
On LinkedIn’s Q1 earnings call yesterday, the firm boasted that their Sales Solutions products grew revenue 55% year-over-year with sales products now constituting 40% of Premium Subscription divisional revenues. Thus, LinkedIn Sales Navigator revenues were around $60 million last quarter. This is an impressive number given the short period of time the product has been available. It also suggests that Sales Navigator is by far the largest Sales Intelligence product on the market.
The funny thing is, when I talk to other vendors in the Sales Intelligence space, LinkedIn remains low on their competitive threat list. They simply aren’t seeing them much as competitors. Perhaps their customers are licensing both Sales Navigator and their solutions, but I’m not sure about that. Doing so would be an expensive proposition.
This is a square I have yet to circle.
LinkedIn, which laid an egg last quarter after announcing much more conservative guidance than the analysts expected, raised its full year guidance by two percentage points and had beats on earnings and revenue. The market obviously overreacted to its lower than expected FY 2016 revenue guidance on the Q4 call, but LinkedIn generally guides low. The problem with hyper-growth stocks is the moment the growth trajectory slows, the expected revenues and future cash flows decline by a compounded factor. Thus, several years of stock price growth can be wiped out overnight. There is a reason analysts often say these stocks are “priced to perfection.”
LinkedIn announced a set of small-ball enhancements to its Sales Navigator service in Q1. The firm mentioned some improvements to their CRM connectors on the earnings call, but didn’t provide any details. There were some non-discussed features that were covered on a SlideShare presentation a few days ago.
The best new Sales Navigator feature is a set of Spotlight filters for prospecting. These LinkedIn-specific filters appear at the top of the results page. Navigator users can now screen for executives and managers who have
Shared experiences (e.g. groups, education, companies, etc.) with the sales rep
Changed jobs (company or title) in the past ninety days
Posted on LinkedIn in the past thirty days
Sales Navigator’s new Spotlight filters leverage member intelligence to identify contacts more likely to respond to your InMail.
These Spotlight filters help identify individuals who are more likely to respond to InMails due to similar affinities, job changes, or active LinkedIn participation. Spotlight filters, like TeamLink, are a good example of the firm leveraging its unique content sets to provide value added Solution Selling features instead of taking a me-too approach.
LinkedIn added five other new filters to their side panel of selects including “Leads that Follow Your Company on LinkedIn.” This filter lends itself to strong messaging concerning displayed interest in your company (e.g. “I see that you follow us on LinkedIn. How did you hear about us?”).
The other new filters are “Exclude my Saved Leads,” “Years in Current Position,” “Years at Current Company,” and “Company Type” (e.g. Private, Public, Partnership, Educational, Nonprofit, Government Agency, Self-Owned, and Self-Employed).
Other enhancements include multi-ZIP screening, notifying the user when a lead views his or her profile, and shifting Navigator accounts to different contracts. All of these are welcome feature additions, but small-ball upgrades unlikely to grow the business.
Navigator added an update message that flags leads who have recently viewed your profile.
And contract shifting is potentially problematic. If a sales rep joins a company, the firm can invoice the employer instead of the rep (good). However, if a rep leaves the firm, he or she can assume the contract for their account (potentially very bad). Thus, a sales rep can maintain a digital rolodex of leads and customers within Sales Navigator and take it to his or her next employer. The sales rep would be delighted by this opportunity, but the former employer is potentially making it easier for a rep to walk across the street to a competitor with their book of business.
The Data Health Scan Report is one of the Optimized Customer Data Services.
Hoover’s began rolling out a set of concierge services for small businesses after being merged into the Emerging Business unit last summer. Dun & Bradstreet CEO Bob Carrigan has positioned the new services as important to turning around the Hoover’s product line which has been struggling of late. In December, Carrigan noted that the new services have had “good success.”
The Concierge services target SMBs with revenue up to $250 million. Concierge services target the standard Hoover’s B2B verticals including technology companies, business services, financial services, and manufacturing.
Dun & Bradstreet Product Leader (S&MS Solutions) Michael Umbach noted that the company has long received requests for assistance with customer marketing. Dun & Bradstreet is meeting this need by combining their expertise with their data and solutions to help customers implement targeted list building, marketing file enrichment, and marketing campaigns. Furthermore, Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp, which was acquired last May, has had success offering concierge services to SMBs for credit products.
The services enable customers to perform targeted marketing without requiring them to add marketing headcount. According to their website, “Our experts can serve as an extension of your marketing team, helping you find—and reach—your best customers.” The underlying services utilize the Hoover’s, Optimizer, and NetProspex WorkBench (aka Optimizer for Contacts) platforms for fulfilling customer needs. Dun & Bradstreet has also partnered with an undisclosed email platform to support email services.
Hoover’s is providing three related services for SMBs:
Targeted List Building – Identifies prospects similar to a client’s best customers.
Effective Email Marketing – Delivers email services including messaging, design, email coding, blasting, and testing. Dun & Bradstreet also supports email verification, analytics, and unsubscribe / bounce management. Landing site hosting is provided via an undisclosed partner.
Optimized Customer Data – Supports data cleansing, standardization, and data enrichment for customer company and contact files.
As a promotional tool, Hoover’s is offering a free data quality check which assesses email deliverability, phone connectivity, and duplicate records. This service would be provided by their NetProspex Workbench platform.
Many of the Concierge clients are signing up for a full year of service allowing them to run multiple campaigns, target different audiences, and maintain and enrich their marketing data files.
The acquisition of NetProspex has also directly benefited Hoover’s users. Following the acquisition, the NetProspex contact file was merged into the Hoover’s contact set. Furthermore, the professional contacts file was processed through NetProspex CleneProspex validation process. Umbach noted that the improved contact data quality has raised customer satisfaction around contacts.
While other sales and marketing intelligence vendors provide integrated prospecting within marketing automation platforms, Salesforce has not implemented 
