Tag: Sales Intelligence

Lavender Series A

Lavender Insights

Lavender, which markets an AI-powered sales email coaching platform, closed an $11 million Series A, raising its total funding to $13.2 million.  Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Signia Venture Partners.  The funding follows strong growth in 2022, with revenue rising 865%.

Funds will be deployed towards expanding its team and introducing “new AI-powered features that help revenue teams not just understand why their messaging is falling flat but also provide actionable coaching to improve productivity and generate faster responses.”

“Lavender’s new investment helps it build out a generative AI solution at the intersection of email marketing, sales enablement, and news and information,” wrote Outsell Lead Analyst Randy Giusto.  “It shows where sales and marketing intelligence vendors must head next.”

Lavender integrates with a user’s email workflow, helping reps improve response rates.  It also delivers prospect company and contact intelligence.  Lavender scores emails and recommends steps to improve response rates.  It also “coaches sales reps on how to build meaningful relationships and close more deals.” 

Along with raising response rates, email composition time is significantly reduced.  Lavender claims that rep time writing an email drops from fifteen minutes to one while raising email response rates fourfold to twenty percent or more.

“Using Lavender is like giving every seller on the team a dedicated coach, making them more effective, more efficient, and more confident in their job,” stated CEO William Ballance.  “This funding quickly accelerates our ability to build the best email experience for sellers around the world.  Most importantly, we’re creating new jobs as our team of #EmailWizards rapidly expands.”

The Lavender Team Dashboard

Lavender recommendations are initially based on “millions of successful sales emails and your historical emails.”  However, it continues to adjust recommendations based on “what works best for you.”

Lavender evaluates the subject and body to improve open rates.  It will identify subjects that are too long, not in title case, or contain numbers and punctuation.  For the body, it looks at the length, layout, spelling, and grammar.  For example, long sentences and paragraphs are difficult to read on mobile devices, so they are discouraged.  According to Lavender, 80% of buyers are viewing emails on their phone, “so making emails easily scannable on a mobile device is imperative.”  A mobile preview window displays the email as it would appear on phones.

“We recommend things across multiple categories, including formatting, phrasing, tonality and emotional intelligence, mobile optimization, personalization, and more,” explained Lavender COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting.  “The data is always shifting though, and as trends shift in sales emails/what works well for that user and/or their team, Lavender’s scoring and recommendations dynamically adjust accordingly.”

Other Lavender features include a coaching dashboard, AI for Sales emails, and a personalization assistant.  The coaching dashboard provides individual and team email scores, open rates, reply rates, and writing time.  It helps managers determine which reps require additional coaching, what is working, and why it is working.

Lavender includes a “Start my Email” function that employs generative AI to “draft impactful outgoing email messages” based on seed bullet points from the rep or as email responses based on the email thread. 

The generative AI is OEM’d from OpenAI & Cohere.

The personalization assistant displays recipient context to assist with personalization.  For example, lavender surfaces social data, personality insights, news, events, job listings, funding announcements, and other intelligence within the composition workflow.  Lavender AI also recommends “personalized intros to tailor your email and make it relevant to the recipient.”

Lavender is integrated with Gmail, Outlook, Outreach, and Salesloft.  Lavender Anywhere, a Chrome extension, supports email composition for HubSpot, LinkedIn, Groove, Apollo, Engage, Outplay, and Mailchimp.  As Lavender Anywhere is not directly integrated with these platforms, users must cut and paste the resulting text into the communication window.  Lavender Anywhere is available with Pro and Teams licenses.

“Lavender is delivering exceptional value to our customers.  Their integration provides real-time email assistance to help Salesloft customers build and deepen their relationships with prospects through better emails,” said Salesloft VP of Global Alliances Devin Schiffman.  “We share in the mission of helping sellers be loved by the buyers they serve.”

Customers include Twilio, Sharebite, Sendoso, Segment, Lucidworks, and Clari.  Allred said Lavender sells into a “large range” of companies, “but our sweet spot tends to be mid-market tech or tech-enabled companies.”

“Lavender is marketed toward ‘sales emails’ – but many things are a sale,” continued Allred.  “Our users use Lavender for B2B sales, recruiting, customer success, marketing, and many more.”

While output is English only, features such as the email generator or summary tools can ingest foreign language input.  Thus, Lavender “works great for ESL (English second language) selling into English speaking markets,” said Allred.

“Lavender’s platform goes beyond basic AI-generated writing to augment—rather than automate—sales outreach and humanize every interaction.  It supercharges sales reps by reducing their time spent writing emails so that they can focus on building relationships and selling products,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners.  “We were blown away by the ‘customer love’ for Lavender’s product, which is a testament to the founding team’s deep understanding of their end user and the tight-knit community of sales leaders it has already built.  We’re excited to partner with this team on the journey ahead.”

The firm has benefited from the recent interest in generative AI and ChatGPT.  “We were using GPT-3 long before ChatGPT was a thing, but ChatGPT has definitely increased interest in Generative AI more broadly.  Users have created UGC (user-generated content) of them using Lavender to edit ChatGPT–generated emails,” explained Allred.  “But before ChatGPT was released, thousands of users were already getting the benefit of it within Lavender.”

“We view the process of emailing as four parts: research, creation, editing, and learning,” continued Allred.  Lavender assists in all four.  Generative models can assist along the way to streamline things for our users.”

Lavender employs a freemium pricing model.

Lavender is sold on a freemium basis.  Free users receive email analysis and personalization for five emails per month. 

Reps can license an Individual Pro license for $29 per month that provides unlimited emails and recommendations.  In addition, the Pro service includes Lavender Anywhere, multi-inbox support, analytics, and Gmail and Outlook 365 integrations.

For $49 per user per month, companies can license a Team edition that includes Team AI coaching, Team Insights, a Manager’s Dashboard, and SEP integrations for Salesloft or Outreach. Lavender offers a seven-day free trial and free premium licenses for job seekers, students, and bootstrapped entrepreneurs.

Vainu’s Nordic Coverage

Vainu’s Nordic Coverage

Scandinavian Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu released a new platform for its Swedish and Finnish databases.  The new platform includes expanded datasets, CRM connectors, usage-based pricing, and an updated UX.

Customers can migrate to the new platform or stay on the old one near-term.  However, future development will only be made for the new one.

The new platform offers a “simplified and unified” UX to “better represent what we offer clients: Actionable and reliable business data,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang.  Changes include a simplified prospecting module for Norway and Sweden and updated profile displays.

The platform includes a new filter architecture that will allow Vainu to “develop new filters in the UI faster as our databases expand with new data sets without compromising the platform’s speed or usability.”

Users can now define custom table layouts for reports which are reflected in the product and when downloading tables.  Users control which fields to display and their order.  In addition, Vainu added a JSON download format.

Vainu’s updated Build a List UX.

As the new platform pricing is usage-based, it includes a usage dashboard that tracks records downloaded and CRM account records matched.

While the old platform supported 400 financial variables, they were “incoherent and unmaintained fields, with duplicates, poor documentation, and poor naming.”  The new standardized financials display “100 carefully picked financial terms,” and financials are segmented for improved display and navigation.

Along with field display, the reports include definitions, making it easier to understand KPIs and how fields are calculated and rolled up.

To help with customer outreach, Vainu added 26,000 GDPR-compliant, human-verified contacts for Finland and Sweden.  Contact records include title, phone number, email, and LinkedIn handle.  Contacts were collected for firms with at least 10M€ (Finland) or 100MSEK (Sweden) in turnover.

Scandinavian Business ID connectors are available for Salesforce, MSD 365, HubSpot, and Pipedrive.  Global Domain-based connectors support Salesforce and HubSpot.

Bang noted that some customers and prospects had found Vainu to be a “significant financial commitment.”  The new usage-based pricing model “helps alleviate this worry” as it “lowers the barrier to entry for trying out data.”

SMB Pricing for one of the Nordic country databases begins at 4,200€ per annum with a 750€ onboarding fee.  The Team level supports one user and includes data updates and workflow triggers for 1,000 accounts.  The Business edition is similar but supports 8,000 updated accounts with triggers for 9,900€.

The Global Business database, which is domain-based, supports up to 10,000 company exports or enrichments and provides full access to the global database.  The Global Database is priced at 12,000€, with each band of 10,000 additional enrichments priced at 1,000€.

Vainu has shifted to a usage-based pricing model that monitors the number of downloaded and enriched records.

Resources

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

Owler Integrates with HubSpot & Teams

Owler maintains lists of companies that have been synced with HubSpot.

Company Intelligence vendor Owler unveiled a pair of integrations with HubSpot and Microsoft Teams.  Both offerings are available through its Owler Max subscription product for sales reps.

Owler supports competitive and sales intelligence, with data gathered from web mining and crowdsourcing.  Along with standard firmographics, it offers M&A intelligence, funding profiles, company news alerts, and twenty-three sales triggers.

Owler Max is their sales intelligence edition with CRM syncing, email alerts, and prospecting.  Reps control which of the twenty-three alert categories are relevant, including new triggers based on revenue and employee count changes.

Company prospecting selects include industry, location, company status, revenue, employee counts, funding history, and competitors.  Owler profiles 15 million global companies, with the option to push companies and lists to the CRM.  Company data is passed bi-directionally, while news can be used to create HubSpot Tasks or display alerts via email, HubSpot, or Slack.

News and company profile links are embedded within HubSpot Tasks.

“Owler Max provides sales teams with resources they need to do their jobs the best they possibly can,” said Owler CEO Tim Harsch.  “Our new integrations and data insights offer sales teams key improvements to organization, workflow, and research efficiency.  Sales professionals can leverage data better, drive desired results quicker, and grow the capacity of collaboration in the remote work era.”

Owler syncs data every six hours and can match and upload 1,000 records per minute.

The Teams integration was launched back in August.  Owler Max users will see their MS Teams instance in the Owler Max dashboard.  They then click connect, name the connection, and syncing commences for all followed companies.  Team members can then read, collaborate, or share company intelligence via Teams or email, with alerts automatically posted to Teams channels.  Alerts may be aggregated from all lists or customized.  Users can also control which of its nearly two dozen event categories should be shared so that only relevant topics are posted.

“Owler Max’s new offerings put sales teams on a straight path to winning.  To unlock their full potential, sales teams need efficient access to personalized data and tools for seamless workflow.  By providing this scaffolding, Owler Max gives sales professionals an immediate competitive edge.” 

Owler CEO Tim Harsch

Owler Max is priced at $600 per annum with a minimum of five seats.  Owler Max also supports a Salesforce connector.

RelPro Partners with Lendovative Technologies

Sales Intelligence vendor RelPro announced a partnership with Lendovative Technologies, “a provider and developer of niche lending technologies for financial institutions.”  The partnership enhances both companies’ ability to assist financial institutions that serve businesses across the United States.

The two firms made a go-to-market announcement with no technical integration.  Ostensibly, it is a two-way referral partnership “consistent with us developing relationships in the Banking and Financial Services ecosystem,” explained RelPro CEO Martin Wise to GZ Consulting.  Lendovative reached out to RelPro due to its “established and growing position in the Banking industry.” 

“Their platform helps banks to grow their commercial business, and the next question from their customers is ‘how can I find new SMB companies and executives to call on to grow my business?’ and that’s where RelPro fits in,” continued Wise.  “Equally, RelPro’s smaller banking clients are always interested in learning about new technology platforms that will help them grow their business.”

“The two-way referral partnership is consistent with us developing relationships in the Banking and Financial Services ecosystem – this is an efficient way for us to grow our business with smaller banks, and it leverages RelPro’s strong positioning in the banking industry (RelPro is used by half of the Top 50 banks in the US),” concluded Wise.

“By delivering deeper insights on small- to medium-sized companies and their decision-makers, we are helping financial services professionals identify more potential clients who need access to capital,” noted Lauren Meyers, RelPro’s VP of Partnerships & Customer Success.  “This partnership with Lendovative enables us to accelerate the prospecting initiatives of lenders while providing them with a solution to help businesses navigate their cash flow needs in unique and innovative ways.”

RelPro has long specialized in financial services and developed a sales intelligence platform for the space.  Its business datasets include seven million US companies, 150 million contacts, UCC filings (liens), PPP (pandemic loans) intelligence, and SBA loan data.  This summer, it added Commercial Real Estate intelligence and financial services intent data to its platform.

Lendovative offers the BB-360 lending collateral tracking platform for commercial lending.  BB-360 connects businesses to financial institutions, helping maximize access to short-term capital and collateralizing accounts receivable, inventory, and other assets.

“Loan growth is a key strategic goal for our financial institution clients, and that starts with actionable business intelligence,” noted Patrick True, President at Lendovative. “I have worked with similar service providers for more than thirty years, and no one is better at helping develop quality leads for commercial lending than RelPro.  The synergies that exist between our two companies are powerful, and will help Lendovative Technologies achieve its mission of connecting financial institution clients to more businesses across the U.S.”

RelPro integrates and presents company and contact intelligence from 17 vendors.

6sense Unveils Conversational Email

The new 6Sense Conversational Email Campaign Builder

At the 6sense Breakthrough Conference, 6sense unveiled its new Conversational Email module. Conversational Email employs AI models, psychographics, technographics, intent data, and predictive analytics to deliver “hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant emails to qualify and convert leads to sales meetings.”

Conversational Email supports campaigns across functions and the buyers’ journey. Marketing can send “personalized peer-to-peer nurture emails from multiple AI personas, and Operations can systematize meeting conversion and scheduling for qualified accounts. Sales teams can operationalize best practices and “scale across segments much easier.”

Marketing can also deploy Conversational Email to revive dormant accounts, qualify and convert inbound leads, and boost webinar and event registrations, participation, and follow-up.

6sense claims that beta customers enjoyed a 50% reduction in deal cycle times for marketing-sourced opportunities and a 1.5X increase in average deal size.

“A look at the basic process Conversational AI uses to nurture leads and turn them into sales opportunities.”

AI tools include a Visual Conversation Flow Builder, Email Assistant, and Qualification and Sales Handover. The Email Assistant employs AI to “effortlessly engage the correct buying team members, schedule follow-up based on out-of-office replies, book meetings with the right owners, and send targeted content.”

Dynamic content consists of multivariate blocks tailored to specific keywords, segments, personas, or products for personalizing messages.

Additionally, Conversational Email supports automated workflow triggers based on account buying behavior and contact activity.

“This launch is one of our most significant product updates yet,” said 6sense CTO Viral Bajaria. “Every company has overlooked and underworked, yet high-quality, leads. Critical outreach happens too late or simply never at all, which leads to missed revenue opportunities. The early results from customers in our beta program using 6sense Conversational Email demonstrates the impact: reduction in deal cycles, increase in average deal size, and new pipeline generated. While others in the market focus on sending emails, we are the first to focus on writing relevant emails and responding in ways that lead to more quality pipeline, more efficiently.”

6sense Contextual Targeting improves engagement and recall.

6sense also rolled out Contextual Targeting, which places ads alongside similar digital content. A study by Spark Neuro found that contextually relevant ads generate 43% greater engagement and double the ad recall.

In addition, 6sense offers over 100 new custom contextual topics for B2B marketers. “Advertisers won’t need to settle to use contextual segments that are largely designed for consumer marketers,” stated 6sense.

6sense claimed three benefits to Contextual Targeting. It:

  • Respects user privacy by targeting audiences without using behavioral or data profiles
  • Provides ready-to-use contextual topics built specifically for B2B 
  • Eliminates wasted ad spend on buyers that aren’t likely to engage 

Another new feature is Campaign Forecasting which estimates a campaign’s daily audience, daily impressions, and daily spend. Campaign Forecasting helps marketers assess campaign budget and reach before launching the campaign.

6sense also announced at Breakthrough that a sales intelligence data application would be released in Q1. 6sense, which bought data company Slintel last October, will offer global contact data, intent data (3rd-party data, anonymous web visitor insights), firmographics, psychographics, and technographics. In addition, the “intuitive” UX will provide “actionable insights and [an] orchestration layer necessary to identify, prioritize and engage with accounts in-market.”

“With B2B buying committee members increasingly choosing to remain anonymous through most of their journey, sellers need insight to earlier signals for their sales outreach to be effective. With our latest advancement in 6sense Sales Intelligence, we bring industry-leading intent data, contact data, and AI insights to help sellers efficiently identify priority prospects, personalize their interactions, and take timely action with ease to drive meetings and conversion of pipeline to revenue.”

Amar Doshi, SVP of Product & UX at 6sense

The Breakthrough Conference was billed as “an inside look at best practices to leverage AI and big data to accelerate revenue generation efficiently.”

“The Proceed with Confidence focus of our 2022 Breakthrough event couldn’t be more timely. We heard from more than 50 sales and marketing speakers at this year’s event that 6sense Revenue AI is the must-have competitive edge they can’t grow without,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “B2B companies are losing revenue opportunities and leaving money on the table. To deliver a better buying experience in today’s selling environment, it’s imperative to leverage AI along with pre-intent data, intent data, and predictive analytics to know which accounts are in market to buy your product or service, when and how to target them, and what messages to deliver to best engage.”

TechTarget: Priority Engine for Healthcare

Priority Engine for Healthcare offers topical intent for 400K registered healthcare administrators, IT professionals, and clinicians.

TechTarget, a leader in second-party technology intent data sets for sales and marketing, expanded the scope of its Priority Engine service to support the US healthcare sector.  The new Priority Engine for Healthcare service provides prospect-level intent gathered from Xtelligent Healthcare Media, its August 2021 acquisition.

“Being able to provide our customers with 1st-party intent data on the largest healthcare technology and information audience on the web is a true game changer in our industry,” said Sean Brooks, Co-Founder of Xtelligent Healthcare Media.  “Sales and marketing teams will now have direct access to entire healthcare buying teams, including Clinicians, Line of Business, and IT Decision-Makers, to find more opportunities and accelerate technology deals.”

Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.

Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies.  TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered.  Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”

The service is available for ten segments:

  1. Analytics
  2. Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR)
  3. Healthcare Security & Compliance
  4. Health IT Infrastructure
  5. Life Sciences
  6. Patient Engagement
  7. Payer
  8. Pharma
  9. Revenue Cycle Management
  10. Telehealth

Intent data is gathered from 14 B2B healthcare media properties.  HealthTech sites include EHR Intelligence, Health IT Security, and Health IT Analytics.  Clinical research and medical sites include LifeSciences Intelligence, PharmaNews Intelligence, and HealthPayer Intelligence.  Over 400 healthcare topics are covered, with roughly half focused on Healthcare Tech.

Priority Engine for Healthcare also offers visitor intelligence and content view tracking.  Healthcare intent data from BrightTALK, TechTarget’s digital webinar and event platform, is also included.

Xtelligent, also based in Boston, has a similar content model to TechTarget.  When acquired last year, it had over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites, but lacked a platform for enabling its contacts and intent datasets. 

Xtelligent content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market.  Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.

The new intent topics identify HealthTech content consumption at the account and prospect levels, gathered from TechTarget’s 150 enterprise and health technology websites.

“By expanding the amount of permission-based, relevant 1st-party purchase intent data our customers have access to and delivering a full suite of marketing, sales, and go-to-market services to engage real buyers, we help companies of all sizes achieve better results at scale in this market,” said Michael Cotoia, CEO, TechTarget.  “As a leader in coverage of B2B enterprise tech for more than 20 years – combined with working very closely with our almost 3,000 customers – TechTarget has unique visibility into the buying dynamics across every major sector of the market.  Our experience positions us well to bring our model to adjacent vertical markets with similar attributes to enterprise B2B tech – long/complex-sales cycles, large purchases, multiple members of the buying team, and a strong need for 1st party data to enable marketers and sellers – just as we have done in healthcare.”

Priority Engine for Healthcare Prospect Insights

Company Links: TechTarget | Xtelligent | Priority Engine

LinkedIn “Deep Sales” Positioning

LinkedIn Deep Sales ad (Wall Street Journal)

Coinciding with its Q3 2022 release, LinkedIn is positioning Sales Navigator as a facilitator of Deep Selling.  Deep Sales positions LinkedIn as a new way to sell that addresses many of the current problems faced by sales teams (e.g., The Great Reshuffle, increased deal complexity following COVID, the digitization of communications, and an increase in SPAM).  This new positioning was announced in the Wall Street Journal.

“Too many sales professionals are stuck in what we’ve come to call “shallow selling” – an endless, frustrating loop of contacting more and more potential buyers in ways that no longer work,” posted LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ Marketing VP Gail Moody-Byrd.  “I’ve felt the pain of sales in my professional life.  I’ve consoled colleagues who were at risk of getting fired because they weren’t hitting their numbers or seen them committing “unnatural acts” to get a deal closed.  I’ve been on endless, painful pipeline review calls, looking at leads that will never materialize into a closed/won deal.  And I feel it daily in my personal life, as I try to dodge intrusive emails, texts, and phone calls that keep coming at me to purchase MarTech software.”

Moody-Byrd argued that shallow selling doesn’t work, but reps can employ deep learning software to support “deep sales.”

“Think of deep learning, where software learns from enormous amounts of reliable data to get to a meaningful answer.  Deep sales relies on that kind of data to deeply understand buyers and their context.  It helps sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed, at a time in the buying process that makes sense.  It helps develop deep relationships with buyers, based on understanding them – the opposite of shallow spray-and-pray tactics.”

LinkedIn claims that Sales Navigator customers enjoy a 38% increase in pipeline generated, a six percent increase in win rates, and a 47% increase in deal size.  The firm is positioning the combination of Sales Navigator and Sales Insights as its Deep Sales solution set.

“It’s good to see LinkedIn working on new ways to utilize machine learning to sort its various data inputs and provide a better experience,” stated SocialMediaToday Head of Content Andrew Hutchinson.  “Thus far, LinkedIn hasn’t really been able to tap into its unmatched database of professional insights, but maybe, through advanced machine learning on its huge dataset, it’s moving towards the next stage of becoming a critical companion for all HR and business professionals, by facilitating guidance on various fronts that can lead to smarter decisions.”

Sales Navigator actionable insights include relationship intelligence, buyer intent, and Account Insights.

Vainu Launches Global Database

Vainu Global Database Attributes

European Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu unveiled its new Global Database this week, a domain-based company dataset spanning over 65 million companies.  The database was built through web-crawling and includes standard firmographics, technographics, Vainu Custom Industry Codes, social links (Facebook and LinkedIn), and web-based insights (keywords and phrases that describe the company). 

Domains are mapped to headquarters locations, with additional locations captured during the site crawl and displayed as part of the profile.  A countries of operation field helps with market entry planning (e.g., which companies in our ICP have operations in specific countries?).  Vainu also captures website languages, helping determine which markets companies are targeting.

“If you’re selling a product or service where the buying decision is made on a business unit/regional level, having this type of data in your CRM is crucial,” argued co-founder Mikko Honkanen.  “It helps your sales reps to pick upsell and cross-sell opportunities and in general, makes it easier to maximize the revenue potential of your customer portfolio.”

“Unfortunately, finding good data for regional offices has been challenging in the past,” continued Honkanen.  “Most companies will only list their main office on their social media accounts, and it’s been difficult for salespeople to manually add office data from company websites to their business systems due to the limitations in the availability of data properties.”

Filtering with Vainu’s proprietary industry codes and associated Confidence Scores.

Vainu offers over 900 proprietary industry codes, including emerging industries such as SaaS and Artificial Intelligence not available in other taxonomies.  When screening, the system defaults to high-level confidence, but users can more broadly search by accepting companies with lower industry tagging confidence.  In addition, users may select one or multiple categories, employ Boolean logic (e.g., SaaS AND Executive Recruitment), and modify their selects with web-based insights.

The crawler and platform UX are English only.

Discrete sizing data is not provided, with companies mapped to five employee ranges.  Vainu employs an “ordinal regression and classification approach” to its model that factors in web traffic, the number of office locations, detected web technologies, mentions of specific key phrases, etc.

Honkanen argues that its methodology may be off by one size band but is unlikely to make large errors.  “Our own internal testing indicates that our model generally outperforms other employee count models, but it truly shines when it comes to minimizing the large, important mistakes.  What that means is that it might be difficult for the model to choose between 51-200 and 201-1,000 if the company has roughly 200 employees, but it has an easy time avoiding big and important mistakes, such as enterprise companies being classified as micro companies.  In other words, our model still makes mistakes, but those mistakes are often small in magnitude, i.e., the model might predict the nearest neighbor.”

Vainu has been building and tuning the database for over a year, helping it distinguish between product sites (e.g., Tide) and company sites (e.g., Proctor & Gamble).  It is growing at 100,000 companies per day and recrawls sites every sixty days.  Users can set up saved searches that identify new companies, upload them to HubSpot, and alert the sales rep.

Company data is available through a web-based platform, API, CSV downloads, and connectors (HubSpot today, with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the Global Database roadmap). 

Users can also upload lists of domains for matching and enrichment.  When downloading data, they specify file formats, controlling which fields to download and their order.

As they offer a LinkedIn field, users can quickly create and upload LinkedIn Matched Audiences to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager with high match rates.

The database does not contain contacts, but Honkanen argues that Vainu’s company data is superior to firmographics from other services.

Honkanen provided several reasons for not offering contacts, “We don’t want to be a vendor that provides bulk contact data…We don’t want to promote salespeople to do spam.  Also, it is very challenging to do that in a GDPR-compliant way.”

Instead, the company wants to promote “smart, Account Based Marketing” that supports very specific industry and keyword screening and LinkedIn audience campaigns.  From the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, users can target by persona.  Users can also match against existing HubSpot contacts with pre-existing consent tied to Vainu-enriched firmographics.

“If you’re looking for a combination of high-quality firmographic and website-based insights, we’ve got you covered,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang.  “Our global data offering includes numerous important data points, such as location, industry, company size, technologies, website keywords, and website traffic, that, according to our customers who have tested several offerings, other vendors cannot provide at a similar quality.”

While other databases, including Vainu’s Nordics database, are built around business ids, the global database is built around domains, with the firm capturing multiple locations related to domains.  Business ids are preferred for KYC and credit scenarios as the data is tied to legal ids, but domain data matches well against CRMs and emails.

Vainu contends that domain-keyed databases are better for ICP/TAM analysis as subsidiaries and branches aren’t double counted, providing a more accurate view of market opportunity.  Vainu claims that ICPs built using Vainu Custom Industry codes and website-based insights during beta testing consistently achieved 90% accuracy.

The Global Database resides on a new platform and is available as a distinct product with separate licensing and administration from its Nordic registered-data services.

Pricing starts at €12,000 per annum, with a one-time setup fee starting at €1,000.  Instead of seat-based pricing, Vainu is pricing based on the number of records uploaded or maintained.

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