Tag: ABSD / Sales Engagement

InsideSales.com: Essentials for SMBs

InsideSales.com Notifications and Activity Tracking
InsideSales.com Notifications and Activity Tracking

InsideSales.com is now offering “InsideSales Essentials,” a cloud-based sales acceleration service for SMBs (I have generally classified companies like this as Account Based Sales Development [ABSD], but Sales Acceleration is also a descriptor used by vendors in this category).  The new offering supports email tracking and analytics, integrated dialer, email templates, call recording and monitoring, and automated voicemails.  The service also bundles in local call number display in the top twenty-five metro areas.  InsideSales claims that local number presentation improves contact rates by up to 38%.

“InsideSales has mastered sales across the enterprise, powering companies like Microsoft, ADP, and Groupon to increase revenue growth by up to 30 percent. With this new package, we’re taking what’s proven to work for some of the biggest brands and tailoring it for small business needs,” said Gabe Larsen, director of InsideSales.com Labs.  “Essentials gives small and medium-sized businesses the power to sell smarter and help expand their company through strategic sales plays.”

InsideSales Essentials begins at $5,000 for five seats.

“Our mission is to leverage big data and cloud capabilities to unlock human potential through predictive analytics and machine learning,” said InsideSales CEO Dave Elkington. “We are building an Amazon-style recommendation engine for business — a system capable of intelligently analyzing billions of data points in real-time and recommending the optimal next steps for almost any application or business process. This lays the groundwork for a future where predictive technology can be applied, not just to sales organizations but also to government, healthcare, retail and beyond.”

The firm was also just named to Forbes Cloud 100, placing it amongst the top private cloud companies in the world.

ABSD  / Sales Acceleration is a rapidly growing field as firms look to formalize ABM processes amongst their sales development teams.  I have seen such rapid growth amongst ABSD firms that I am including profiles of four ABSD vendors (QuotaFactory, KiteDesk, Outreach, and SalesLoft) in the next edition of my Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors.  Inclusion is based upon the existence of a partner ecosystem which includes sales intelligence vendors.  Because InsideSales.com does not offer such an ecosystem, they did not make the cut.  However, the firm has seen rapid growth and would be considered amongst the leaders in this burgeoning field.

Outreach: Forbes 100 Cloud Rising Star

Account Based Sales Development vendor Outreach has been named a Forbes 100 Cloud Rising Star.  CEO Manuel Medina said that his firm offers a “platform that transforms how sales teams communicate and engage with prospects.  We believe there is a massive opportunity to bring a higher level of sophistication to the sales process so teams can focus on what they do best – close deals.”

Karan Mehandru, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, describes Outreach as a “system of action for sales people.”  Calling sales “the lifeblood of the organization,” Mehandru continued that “salespeople are creating the same level of sophistication as their marketing counterparts” which creates an opportunity for a “massive company” to deliver on the promise of CRM.

Mehandru joined the Outreach board after Trinity led a $17.5 million Series B round this summer.

Noting that almost sixty percent of sales rep time is dedicated to non-sales activity, Medina said, “Our main goal is to provide them with both more analytics about what he’s doing and more insight into what he could be doing to do it better.”

Seattle-based Outreach has grown to 92 employees and has sixteen open positions across Product, Sales, Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Success.  Back in June, they stated plans to double their company to 160 employees over the next year with a trebling of their engineering team to forty headcount.

The firm supports over one thousand sales teams at firms of all sizes.  Customers include AdRoll, Adobe, Glassdoor, Cloudera, Zillow, and Docusign.

Outlook provides email and phone cadence tools. Email features include Exchange and Gmail support, email templates, A/B testing, open and click tracking, and out of office detection. Actions are posted to Salesforce.
Outlook provides email and phone cadence tools. Email features include Exchange and Gmail support, email templates, A/B testing, open and click tracking, and out of office detection. Actions are posted to Salesforce.

The firm provides a cadence tool for email and phone, analytics, mobile apps, and connectors with Salesforce, Gmail, Exchange, DiscoverOrg, and Datanyze.

Over the next year, the company is looking to add additional intelligence and insights into the sales workflow.  The firm lists many insight and workflow capabilities as coming soon:

  • Plays and Playbooks – “Create a master plan to engage your accounts with Plays and Playbooks designed to optimize your approach.”
  • Play-by-Play – “Engage multiple personas within an account simultaneously with Plays designed to accomplish a specific goal at every step.”
  • Insights Tiles – “Learn more about the person you’re communicating with for the most personalized conversation possible.”
  • Colleague Replies – “Determine how connecting with one prospect in an account affects the engagement of other colleagues in the playbook.”
  • Persona Optimized – “Outreach gives you analytics to determine when the best times are to call, all by persona.”
  • Voicemail Drop – “When reaching your recipient’s voicemail, let Outreach leave a pre-recorded message, so you can move on to the next activity.”
  • VM Drop A/B Testing – “Let Outreach test which voicemails produce higher call-back rates by A/B testing the drop of a selection of recordings.”
  • Calling within Playbooks – “Call each role persona in succession for an opportunity to communicate your value.”
  • Conversation Transcription – “Read transcripts of conversations, broken down by who said what, for coaching opportunities.”
  • Transcription Search – “Search conversation histories for specific mentions of objections, competitors, and more.”
  • Whisper – “Managers can speak to their reps on a call without the end recipient hearing them.”

An MS Dynamics connector is also in development.

The Corporate Data Show Podcast

"Effective sales is not just about how many people to contact at the company, but who are the right people and what should I say to them."
The Corporate Data Show Podcast

I was privileged to be recently interviewed by Rick Holmes for the Corporate Data Show podcast.  The two of us discussed the benefits of sales intelligence, how sales intelligence differs from business intelligence, data collection methods, CRM and MAP integrations, ABSD, and sales triggers.

Rick is the CEO of Every Market Media so also very knowledgeable about the content industry.  EMM is a compiler of US and global B2B Emails.

Account Based Marketing Blog Series

 

Lead Quality Stratification Chart from "I Don’t Want More Leads (and Neither Do You)"
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)

ABM: How Many Accounts?

ABM Target

The question of how many accounts to include in an Account Based Marketing (ABM) program was addressed by Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio in a recent blog.  (Engagio uses the term “Account Based Everything,” but it still applies).  Miller proposed a straightforward capacity analysis based upon the hourly requirements to properly manage various categories of accounts.

He also identified variables to include in your estimation:

  • Your expected deal sizes
  • The length of the sales cycle
  • Your available sales resources
  • Your current level of engagement 
with major prospects
  • The intensiveness of your account-based strategy

If your ABM targeting is defined as “we target the Fortune 1000 vendors in the following sectors…”, then you may be missing many opportunities.  Likewise, if it is too broadly defined then you may lack the resources to properly manage a land and expand strategy at each of the targets.  A capacity analysis lets you work backwards based upon the number of global enterprise reps, named accounts (large, medium, and small), and SDRs.  Miller proposes sample capacity numbers for each of these sales rep categories.

“The challenge is to scale your ABM program so that you can address internal requests from the sales team, but at the same time not lose the unique approach of ABM and revert back to the traditional kinds of marketing,” says Jeff Sands of ITSMA, “Salespeople are highly competitive, and when they start to see their peers succeed in implementing a strategy like ABM, they want to jump on that bandwagon really fast. You have to make sure you scale appropriately.”

Your ABM strategy should begin with an understanding of your capacity and then progress into an analysis of revenue goals (revenue maximization, profitability maximization, new market entry, market share growth, etc.).  Only then should you begin identifying your ABM targets.

OutReach Series B: $$ for ABSD

Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) vendor Outreach closed on a $17.5 million Series B VC round led by Trinity Ventures.  Also participating were Microsoft Ventures and previous investors.  The round raised the total funding for Outreach to $29 million.  Trinity General Partner Karan Mehandru was named to the Outreach Board.

“Outreach has developed a platform that actually helps salespeople close deals, not just add another reporting layer for management. It is a platform of action, an operating system for sales, that prompts sales professionals to be the best version of themselves by automating their entire workflow across channels,” said Mehandru. “There is nothing else like it. Outreach is truly pioneering the transformation of the sales tech stack and making heroes out of sales professionals.”

CEO Manuel Medina noted that many sales reps manage over fifty customers and prospects.  “What happens is that all this conversation with different people falls into the cracks,” he said. “Outreach creates a workflow where salespeople know what to do next and automates follow-up.”

"Tile View provides a single place for a sales person to view all of the critical information for an enterprise contact including the best time to contact them, which form of communication they respond to the best, and even what the weather is where they work.”
“Tile View provides a single place for a sales person to view all of the critical information for an enterprise contact including the best time to contact them, which form of communication they respond to the best, and even what the weather is where they work.”

The funds will be dedicated towards an expansion of their engineering  and marketing teams.  Outreach is looking to build out its automation and workflow tools for sales reps and add new analytics capabilities.  The firm’s current headcount of eighty will likely double over the next year.  Engineering will grow from twelve to twenty by the end of the year and then double again next year.

“The environment is very competitive, but this positions us well with a big cash war chest and the ability to bring in more engineers and double down in the parts where we’re strong, which is product and engineering,” said Medina.

Outreach currently supports Salesforce.com and has a Microsoft Dynamics connector in development.  The platform is shifting to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for its cloud service.

Outreach, like several other ABSD vendors, recently launched a partner ecosystem to support prospecting and messaging.  Other partners include Datanyze and SendGrid.

Clients include Adobe, CenturyLink, Adroll, AppDynamics, and Zillow.

DiscoverOrg Partners with ABSD Vendor Outreach

DiscoverOrg contact lists can now be pushed to the Outreach account based sales communication platform for cadence-structured messaging.  According to DiscoverOrg, “This integration allows for more effective communication with prospects based on persona, combining both comprehensive, verified contact data and personalized, timely interactions.”

“The number one challenge facing salespeople today is not knowing who to call or how to reach them,” said DiscoverOrg VP of Sales  Patrick Purvis.  “What is the actual strategy or sort of plan of attack in reaching out to these people [prospects] to get as many of them to engage with you and respond as possible?”

DiscoverOrg, with 750,000 global contacts in IT, Marketing, Finance, and Product Management, provides emails and direct dial phones to resolve the who to call problem.  Contact records are passed with tags into the Outreach platform and auto-refreshed as DiscoverOrg editors update profiles.  DiscoverOrg supports one-click send to Outreach which begins managing the messaging sequence.  Because the contacts are passed from a technology sales intelligence platform, the messaging can focus on the platforms, industries, job functions, and responsibilities of individual contacts.  This type of one-to-one messaging has only recently become available to the SDR function through products such as Outreach, SalesLoft, and QuotaFactory.

Outreach sequenced messaging
Outreach sequenced messaging

“The foundation of a true account based sales strategy is honing in on your target accounts and carefully choosing your personas within those accounts.  That’s something that DiscoverOrg does really, really well,”  said Outreach Chief Product Officer Andrew Kinzer.  “Then to engage those accounts, you’re going to need account playbooks and well-tuned persona-based messaging for your prospects.”

Outreach Flow schedules manual and automated emails, phone calls, direct mail, and LinkedIn messaging.  Other features include analytics, reply detection, “intelligent follow ups,” out of office detection which pauses the sequence, and open and click tracking.  Outreach also offers connectors for LinkedIn, Gmail, and Salesforce.com.

Furthermore, because DiscoverOrg is passing firmographics and biographical data, Outreach users can assess which messages are fostering engagement.  Broad prospect tagging combined with analytics is important to sales management and operations because “downstream, they can look at what message is resonating” said DiscoverOrg CEO Schuck.  “They have complete information on the records that are moving through their system.”

Outreach Dashboard Analytics
Outreach Dashboard Analytics

“There has been increasing focus on the SDR role as a key growth-accelerator with a lot of investment in the technology to support this function,” said Schuck. “These are the guys on the front lines, pounding the phones every day and teeing up the sale for the closers. Partnering with a robust sales communication platform like Outreach, we aim to set SDRs up for success with high-quality contact data to improve response rates and set more appointments.”

The sales intelligence industry has taken two approaches to ABSD: partnering or developing a subset of ABSD features.  The partnering path has been taken by InsideView (SalesLoft and Quota Factory) and DiscoverOrg (SalesLoft and Outreach).  The build path has been executed by RainKing which added a dialer last year and Sales Genie which offers a dialer, email, marketing creative, and direct mail functionality.

Lightning Strikes SFDC Again

SalesforceIQ Inbox_Hero
The SalesforceIQ Inbox provides a set of desktop and mobile productivity apps for which bring Salesforce intelligence to the email Inbox.

Salesforce.com had another beat and raise quarter where they beat expectations and raised their revenue guidance.  When you are growing at 27% year over year (28% once currency headwinds are factored in), it is easy to have a succession of beat and raise quarters — All you have to do is figure out how to add two billion dollars in revenue this year and then continue to do so geometrically every year forward.

On Wednesday’s earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff claimed that SFDC continues to invest heavily in its sales cloud platform while competitors have invested elsewhere.  Remarking on SFDC’s continued leadership position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, he stated that

Everyone else kind of abandoned their technology in this area and they are trying to give it a lot of lip service, but the reality is there is just no comparison between what we have and what the other vendors have at this point.  It’s incredible and it comes through in our demos, it comes through in our wins, and it comes through in the core customer success.”

The Sales Cloud, their oldest and largest cloud, saw an acceleration in its growth rate due to its Salesforce1 “rebooting” combined with the new Lightning user experience which was designed as mobile first.  Other growth drivers were Pardot, their B2B marketing automation platform, and the recently acquired SteelBrick CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) service.

Lightning also supports the Force platform.  It’s mobile development capabilities help developers “rapidly build and expand and create these applications using Lightning and deploy them on all these different devices,” said Benioff.  “Lightning is so unique and so special in the industry.  It lets our customers build these applications quickly at a very low cost and deploy them across so many different platforms that we’re going to see a continued growth in core clouds.”

The Next Growth Driver: Artificial Intelligence

Benioff also discussed past and future growth drivers for Salesforce and the tech industry.  Past drivers include cloud computing and social with mobile as a key current driver.  Moving forward, growth will come from the integration of artificial intelligence across SFDC to improve customer experience and workflows.  Benioff provided the new SalesforceIQ Inbox service as an example:

[The] Salesforce Inbox is very exciting because it uses artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to work with our users, to work with our emails, to work with their calendars, and work with their CRM data to give them perspective ideas on exactly how do be more efficient in the sales, service, and marketing processes of their companies…

This is another major growth factor because it will appear in sales, it will appear in service, it will appear in marketing.

For the past few years, Benioff has been discussing the importance of being a customer company that interacts with customers across a broad set of platforms and departmental touch points with “systems of intelligence.”  It is along this front that SFDC has staked out its most recent competitive differentiation:

We’re in the midst of a massive generational shift; a new generation of customers and consumers is clearly emerging. We have been calling them here at Salesforce C generation customers. Customer generation, consumer generation that these are people who want it now, they want it fast, they want it easy, and they’re mobile, they’re social, they’re always on, and our customers are working to connect with the C generation in new ways, very exciting. I mean this is really part of a huge shift that’s happening in computing. We’ve gone from the first generation of computing which was very much about systems of record to the second generation which was systems of engagement we talked about that on these calls many times over the last 10 years. And we are clearly moving into this incredible world that the system of intelligence that’s all yielding these incredible systems of customers or C generation customers that are — that our customers are connecting to. And that’s we’re so excited about.

Focusing on the customer, delivering systems of intelligence, developing a mobile-first platform, betting on the cloud when the tech market is collapsing, and embracing social.  These decisions all seem obvious in retrospect, but in the fog of corporate battle, the trick is to identify and implement the next wave early and better than anybody else.  When you think about it, that’s easy — sort of like growing revenue by two billion dollars this year.

Datanzye Insider Dropping LinkedIn Feature

Technology sales intelligence vendor Datanyze has informed users of its Insider Chrome plug-in that they are phasing out their LinkedIn functionality.  Free users were turned off on April 14th and subscription users will lose access when their contract comes up for renewal.  The Chrome extension places a small Datanyze icon on LinkedIn executive profiles which allows users to import contact data to Insider.  They also offer a list feature which allowed users to select groups of individuals for import.

Datanyze Insider captures contacts from LinkedIn lists for import, with emails, into CRMs. Unfortunately, this feature is being phased out.
Datanyze Insider captures contacts from LinkedIn lists for import, with emails, into CRMs. Unfortunately, this feature is being phased out.

In lieu of LinkedIn prospect loading, Datanyze suggests two other methods for obtaining contact information:

  • Right clicking on any name in a Google search, Crunchbase profile, or executive page bio and select Datanyze Insider “to run our manual email finder.”  The finder provides email combinations tied to confidence scores.
  • Uploading lists of names for matching.  The “People to List” CSV file import contains five fields: First Name, Last Name, Title, Company, and Domain.  First Name, Last Name and either the Company or Domain are required for matching.

Interestingly, both SalesLoft and Datanyze switched from prospect discovery on LinkedIn to Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) after phasing out access to LinkedIn.  So long as LinkedIn was an easy method for acquiring names, the firms focused on LinkedIn mining.  Once they lost that valuable feature, they began to search for less parasitic, more value-oriented positioning and features.

Datanyze also offers web-mined company profiles alongside their tech platform intelligence.  Company information includes sizing data, CrunchBase and AngelList categories, Alexa rank, a business description, social media links, Google News, Google Map, and an integrated Twitter feed.

“The average sales pitch is no longer good enough. With the amount of messages buyers receive every day, sales has become less about volume and persistence, and more about context and timing,” said CEO Ilya Semin. “For technology companies, that means understanding your prospects’ tech stack and knowing who’s in the midst of evaluating providers in your space. This kind of intelligence — or what we call ‘technology data’ flows through every solution we provide and is at the core of what we do.”

Datanyze is backed by Google Ventures and Mark Cuban.  They currenly have 600 customers including Marketo and Hubspot.

Avention: DataVision and Global Content Live

DV2

I recently had the opportunity to interview Avention’s SVP of Product Lauren Bakewell concerning their new OneSource DataVision service.  The full interview can be found in trade publication Jinfo (FKA FreePint).  The new service provides a centralized data enrichment hub with visualization and segmentation tools to assist with business planning, territory planning, and account based marketing  (ABM).  DataVision also assists with TAM analysis and offers similar companies and contacts.

Like many other sales intelligence and Martech vendors, Avention is messaging around ABM programs which identify best customers and prospects for focused sales and marketing attention.  DataVision “helps companies understand their current customer base in detail and identify the most relevant target companies and segments for growth,” said Bakewell.  “OneSource DataVision benefits the marketing department by enabling customer segmentation and target identification, which in turn helps create targeted lists for campaigns, upsells and nurturing. Any marketer knows that a more targeted approach generates better leads for sales, meaning higher campaign ROI.”

According to Bakewell, Avention supports ABM and Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) processes in three ways:

  1. Identifying target accounts
  2. Delivering insights concerning accounts and contacts
  3. Building lists of contacts at target accounts

Avention continues to build out its Global Content Live reference file built from over 100 data providers.  Vendor content is fused to create a “golden record” which selects the most reliable vendor at the field level.  International coverage has recently been tripled with a goal of covering 80% of GDP in their served markets by the end of 2016.

DataVision will soon be announcing connectors with the major marketing automation platforms.  They are also “looking towards a more guided approach to help you get to the most meaningful segmentation, as well as areas to explore for growth. We want to move forward by providing more market analytics as part of the offering, helping you understand your data in an even more actionable way,” said Bakewell.

The full interview is available to Jinfo subscribers.