Databook Salesforce Connector

^{Databook account insights are displayed in Salesforce Account and Opportunity records.}

Sales Intelligence vendor Databook unveiled a Salesforce connector that helps “sales teams translate financial data and business insights into sales strategy and execution.” The AppExchange solution provides access to “personalized, real-world insights and recommendations” concerning which accounts are in-market, whom to contact, and how to message their offerings.

Databook employs AI and NLP to generate account and solution-specific insights “with the same level of relevancy and value provided by professional consulting firms.” Custom content supports “account planning, executive preparation, value architecture, ABM, and customer presentations.”

Insights include

Databook Score (propensity-to-buy scoring)
Recommended use cases
Financial case for change
Strategic priorities
Management intent
Buying cycle history and trends
Investor sentiments

^{Databook Risks & Opportunities insights}

Account insights highlight customer priorities and pain points, helping reps hone messaging and identify risks and opportunities. Databook insights are displayed in account and opportunity tabs and include strategic insights, recommendations, and “downloadable executive decks and point-of-views that align to corporate priorities, market conditions, fiscal year timing, and financial case for change.” Databook also notifies reps about key account changes.

Opportunity recommendations include tips/steps such as “select an economic buyer for this opportunity,” “review management changes at <account>,” “read <account>’s latest earnings transcript.”

Sales reps can download a set of overviews and tools, including executive point-of-view decks, sales presentations, executive briefings, company profiles, and an account worksheet offering a step-by-step account strategy.

Sales reps can link from the CRM dashboard to Databook to identify deal expansion opportunities. Databook highlights use cases deployed at similar companies that may be relevant. Use cases are highlighted with “relevant proof of success and value-driven vision for the future to create the strongest possible pitch that resonates with executive buyers.”

Databook presents financial and business data sourced from over a dozen vendors.

During the beta period, early adopters increased company research by 157% when accessing Databook insights from both the web and Salesforce vs. simply conducting research via the browser. The firm claims that sales teams using Databook average 3X more pipeline, 2.5X larger deals, and 1.5X faster cycle times.

“Now, more than ever, sales reps need to hone strategic acumen to drive executive relationships and effective sales execution,” said Databook CEO Anand Shah. “Databook’s new CRM application combines essential external context about a company’s business objectives, financials, and budget cycles with the internal account and opportunity information within Sales Cloud to create a new level of intelligence and customer understanding. Now any rep can have an executive-level conversation aimed directly at the business problem they solve in order to repeatedly grow and close deals.”

Databook closed on a $50 million Series B in March led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by DFJ Growth, Threshold, Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Haystack.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Buyer Intent (Q3 2022)

LinkedIn began rolling out the latest edition of its Sales Navigator service to clients at the end of last month. The Q3 release focused on adding intent and engagement data to the sales intelligence service. Intent-based features include a new Account Dashboard with Buyer Intent, a buyer intent filter in Build a List, and intent highlights on the home and account pages.

Other enhancements include a new Lead Panel and an updated search UX that streamlines search execution.

Senior Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, Mitali Pattnaik, blogged that high-performing sellers don’t spend more time selling but:

Focus on the opportunities that matter the most
Identify buyers when they are ready to engage
Go beyond shared connections to find hidden allies

These steps are the “playbook for winning in sales today.” To support sales reps, LinkedIn will focus on “three sets of relevant, actionable intelligence within Sales Navigator: Account insights to understand what matters to your customers and which ones to focus on; Relationship intelligence to map the ideal paths into an account and stay up-to-date on [the] movement of key decision makers; and Buyer intent to see which of your prospects are currently showing interest in your solution.”

Relationship Intelligence includes

Decision makers connected with you or your team
Former coworkers from your current or prior jobs
Prior customers associated with closed/won opportunities in your CRM
Leads following your company on LinkedIn or engaging with your company’s ads

While relationship mapping and account insights have long been part of the Sales Navigator value proposition, buyer intent is a new product focus. Buyer Intent is displayed in a new Account Dashboard that includes a buyer activity timeline with “specific people who have completed intent activities in the past 30 days, as well as a graph showing the distribution across all activities.”

The Account Dashboard identifies both current and new accounts displaying buying intent. Sales professionals can then identify warm paths to high-intent leads.

^{The Account Dashboard displays buyer interest at saved accounts and prospects.}

Account Insights go beyond standard firmographics to include headcount across specific job titles and departments, connectivity across a company’s network, and account growth and engagement trends.

Buyer intent has also been added as a screening variable in Build a List and integrated into the new Lead Panel.

Initially, only four types of buyer intent are supported:

Who’s followed a company
Who’s visited your profile
Who’s a new connection to yourself
Who’s filled out a lead gen form

However, LinkedIn is promising additional buyer intent categories in coming releases.

“This is only the beginning of our multi-year journey to bring intent information to life in our products and services,” wrote VP of Product Management Lindsey Edwards. “We believe understanding intent can make a significant difference in the effectiveness of your go-to-market strategies, and we look forward to embarking on this path together with you.”

LinkedIn contends that its intent data differs from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence. Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account. Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”

Sales Navigator also claimed that it offers a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement,” stated LinkedIn. “Only Sales Navigator will be able to show you intent data throughout the buyers’ journey.”

Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.

“As we improve this dataset, sellers will see a complete view of every intent activity completed, giving a full timeline into the right moment and message and allowing you to reliably capitalize on every warm opportunity.”

“We know B2B selling has gone through a dramatic shift these past few years. We know now that buyers today are far harder to reach, and – quite honestly – many don’t want to be reached. At least not with irrelevant or generic outreach,” wrote Pattnaik. “To help you overcome that, we are focused on this next generation of Sales Navigator. Tapping into the unique power of our Economic Graph, Sales Navigator can help you sell in the way today’s buyers want to buy.”

Buyer intent is available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.

^{The new Lead Panel streamlines prospecting and quick qualification.}

The new Lead Panel accelerates people searching. Instead of opening a new window, a popup panel supports immediate research from lead lists, allowing for quick qualification of prospective leads. In addition, the Lead Panel offers an overview with Save and Message buttons.

The Lead Panel is a beta feature being rolled out to accounts with fifty or fewer seats this quarter. The Lead Panel will eventually be available to all Sales Navigator licensees.

Search enhancements include pinned filters that display as default filters and an expanded industry taxonomy that spans over 400 industries. The new industry codes are aligned with the NAICS North American industry taxonomy.

New search filters include buyer intent and a TeamLink filter (searching across colleague networks).

LinkedIn’s economic graph now spans 850 million business professionals and 58 million companies.

LinkedIn Sales Insights enhancements include a new personas management page, adding persona locations to persona definitions, and increasing the number of persona tags in CRM export to six.

Sales Insights is a data analytics and enrichment service for sales ops.

Continue to Part II, which discusses LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ new “Deep Selling” positioning.

HG Insights Functional Area Intelligence

Technology Marketing Intelligence vendor HG Insights released Functional Area Intelligence, a set of advanced insights that specify the department and location where specific technologies have been deployed. The new offering provides deeper intelligence for sales and marketing teams.

“Functional Area Intelligence is a first-in-the-market [capability], deriving insights about a company’s organization linked to its technology profile,” said CTO Rob Fox. “By providing actionable data at the departmental level, we’re enabling companies to better understand technology adoption across teams and locations. This increases the ability to better optimize territories, hypertarget marketing campaigns, and build better account plans across sales. We’re committed to improving insights for sellers and marketers so they can close more deals, and this is a step in that direction.”

HG Insights employs advanced NLP for analyzing structured and semi-structured documents to determine where technology has been deployed at global organizations. Functional Area Intelligence is available through the HG Universe data subscription as a monthly or quarterly feed. Functional Area Intelligence includes

The department tied to a particular technology and specific location
Summary and detailed location views
Department size predictions down to the location
Trend analysis to show department adoption changes over time
Decisionmakers associated with the documents from which the technology signals have been mined.

“Armed with this knowledge, Go-To-Market teams can develop targeted competitive campaigns connecting the organization, key location, and technology information, enhancing program effectiveness to drive revenue,” stated HG Insights.

^{HG Insights organizational and technology insights.}

Clari Account Engagement

Revenue Operations vendor Clari announced Account Engagement, a set of AI insights focused on account relationships and activity “to help leaders strategically identify risk and opportunity and deploy resources against the accounts that matter most.”

Account Engagement takes real-time CRM, email, calendar, and partner engagement data to display a full view of touchpoints across each account. “Revenue leaders can understand how reps are engaging with accounts, what accounts are at risk, and what the whitespace potential is,” helping managers allocate resources, reduce churn, and expand new account penetration.

With Account Engagement, revenue leaders can analyze how their remote sales teams are performing via Account Heatmaps, Engagement KPIs, Territory Coverage, and Account Whitespace.

Engagement KPIs let managers assess meeting, email, and other engagement metrics across accounts. Account Managers and Customer Success Management touches are also tracked, helping ensure that all accounts are receiving proper attention. Managers can quickly filter the accounts to review only non-engaged accounts or drill down on any account to reveal next steps, notes, account priority, and opportunity size.

Being able to view accounts in aggregate and then drill into the details of individual accounts supports engagement-informed account review and strategy sessions.

Managers can also step back and view activity across a team with individual rep summaries over an extended time period. Managers can click on any rep’s name to view their engagement data graphed over the period. This view is particularly valuable for recently onboarded reps or reps that are on performance plans.

“The revenue process does not end with sales and marketing. Account managers and customer success teams also need to track customer and activity engagement data and insights. Without this knowledge, you can’t effectively manage your account relationships.
Visibility into account engagement ensures your team is focusing on key customer relationships to proactively mitigate churn risk. With this information, you can guarantee your account managers and customer success team are engaging with the right stakeholders and avoiding last-minute fire drills before renewals.”
Stephane Glass, Director of Product Marketing at Clari.

Territory Coverage analytics help track rep engagement across their accounts.

The Account Whitespace report identifies accounts that are lacking attention.

“Our mission is to give teams more control over their revenue from the point of initial engagement to closed business and expansion, especially at times when teams are switching to remote selling,” said Andy Byrne CEO of Clari. “With this launch we’re providing complete visibility into customer engagement to drive higher effectiveness of GTM strategies across all stages of the revenue process.”

Account Engagement gathers engagement data from Dialpad, Drift, Highspot, Marketo, Outreach, and RingCentral. “The ability to quickly track the success of GTM strategies is critical for any revenue organization and especially in the current market environment,” said Craig Rosenberg, chief analyst and co-founder of TOPO Research. “Visibility into engagement of target accounts and where teams are spending their time provides insights into how strategy changes are performing. Revenue teams need this insight not in 6 or 12 months but in real-time, so they can see what’s working and make the necessary adjustments to stay on track to achieve their goals.”

Acquisitions Are Inevitable — Don’t Let Them Kill Your Revenue Targets

If you sell into the technology space, then you need to plan for acquisitions and their impact on your revenue stream. M&A is both a threat and an opportunity. It is a Yin / Yang situation for sales reps.

There are several ways in which acquisitions can result in a customer drop or lost revenue:

If your customer is “acqhired” by a company in another industry, then their talent is often re-purposed, and they may no longer require your product or services.
The acquirer may be a customer of a competitor and not looking to change vendors. The acquirer may be tied into a long-term contract or they may be satisfied with their current solution.
Both companies are customers, but volume pricing results in revenue decline at renewal. This can be made worse if the firm is looking to obtain efficiencies through layoffs or process efficiencies.
Your key contacts are let go or assigned to other duties.
The acquiring company has lengthy and expensive procurement processes that delay renewals or cause a drop as your POC is unwilling to navigate the new purchasing system.

But it also presents opportunities to cross-sell into new divisions and creates a greater openness to new ideas and solutions. Likewise, the new parent may be a good fit for other products and services from your firm.

Thus, it is important to be present during these windows of opportunity and risk. Here are a few recommendations:

Reach out to your advocates and congratulate them on the transaction. Keep the note short and indicate you’ll reach out to them again in a few weeks once the dust has settled. Employees, particularly at acquired firms, are nervous and often initially in the dark about what it means to them and their department, so give them a little space to breathe while acknowledging their new reality. Then make sure to follow up a few weeks later as promised.
If your current advocates and influencers aren’t LinkedIn connections, then send out the connection requests. This is the easiest way to see if their titles or roles change.
Track any departures to new companies. They are likely to be your future advocates or deal influencers so keep the conversation going even if they don’t represent any near-term opportunities.
If key individuals depart, then move quickly to reestablish connections with their replacements or former departmental colleagues. Don’t leave gaps with the buying committee.
Ask for referrals into the new organization.
Be flexible in your contracts. Being intransigent and holding firms to current contracts when they wish to renegotiate ensures current revenue but increases the likelihood that you will be dropped in the future. Consider the impact on their LTV by being intransigent.
Honestly evaluate the impact on your pipeline and discuss it with your management. Opportunities may be pushed out and renewals put at risk. Update your account plan and work with your sales director to manage deal and broader account risk.

Remember that no customer is permanent. You need to both deepen and widen your relationships. The broader your set of relationships, the more stable your LTV and the greater your likelihood of withstanding acquisitions, changes in top leadership, and departures of your cheerleaders. The best way to prepare for an acquisition is to have established a broad set of relationships across your key accounts. Relying on one or two champions leaves you vulnerable.

GZ Consulting

Advice for Vendors & Purchasers of Sales Intelligence, Sales Engagement, and B2B DaaS Products

Tag: Account Planning

Databook Salesforce Connector

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Buyer Intent (Q3 2022)

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HG Insights Functional Area Intelligence

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Clari Account Engagement

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Acquisitions Are Inevitable — Don’t Let Them Kill Your Revenue Targets

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