B2B Data and Intelligence vendor LeadGenius announced its expansion into the APAC region with “substantial” coverage of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. The firm also touts “emerging” coverage of China, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, the firm announced its new LeadGenius Plays and Rapid Enrich offerings.
“By leveraging top-performing campaigns from exceptional marketers, we help businesses launch complex data requests in seconds,” said VP of Sales and Customer Success Zeb Couch. “We are continuing to work with our clients around the world to build global B2B data aimed at increasing growth through custom signals and account insights. With over 80% of B2B data undiscovered or underutilized, we want to give our clients every tool possible for targeting and differentiation.”
LeadGenius Plays simplifies custom data campaigns and look-a-like audiences based on non-standard data characteristics. Plays also enriches files and appends missing fields.
LeadGenius employs artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), human intelligence, and curation when collecting its data.
LeadGenius Campaign Plays
LeadGenius also announced its Rapid Enrich real-time DaaS product this week, with coverage of enterprise, SMB, and global data.
“In the fast-paced world of B2B data, the need for a solution that offers agility, precision, and comprehensive insights was evident,” stated LeadGenius CEO Mark Godley. “With the unveiling of Rapid Enrich, we are setting a new standard for data enrichment technology, enabling our clients to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape. We are thrilled to introduce Rapid Enrich as our latest innovation in providing agile, comprehensive, and industry-leading data solutions. Our relentless pursuit of excellence and commitment to our clients’ success remains our guiding principles as we continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible in the B2B data sector.”
LeadGenius emphasized its data security and privacy management. Rapid Enrich includes “contractual assurances of responsible data handling, coupled with transparent audit trails that enable businesses to maintain an unquestionable record of their data management activities.”
The Siemens Company Profile as it would display in German.
D&B Hoovers, a global sales intelligence solution that has long been English-only, began a multi-phase process towards becoming a truly global, multi-lingual solution. Most sales intelligence vendors support only a single language, but European vendors Vainu and Echobot support multiple languages for their regional coverage. Last year, when Dun & Bradstreet bought Bisnode, a firm that serves Central Europe and the Nordics, it declared that it would be sunsetting Bisnode solutions. Internationalizing D&B Hoover’s then became a priority.
The D&B Hoovers’ UX already supports 17 languages:
Asian: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese
Adding international languages transforms D&B Hoovers from an Anglo-centric solution for multinationals and companies based in Anglophone countries to a localized version.
“In terms of personalization, we’re trying to switch this from being a US product that is sold globally to a fully local version of a global product,” explained International Product Development & Strategy VP Adam Leslie to GZ Consulting. D&B Hoovers needs to be a “local product” that supports sales reps selling to local customers, regardless of language. “Historically, it’s been a US product sold in the local market only where the local market user sells to the US and internationally. If the local market user only sells domestically, they haven’t bought Hoovers.”
D&B Hoovers greatly expanded its industry code standards, allowing users to filter companies by global taxonomies (e.g., ISIC), regional (e.g., NAICS, NACE 2.0, ANZ SIC), or national standards:
D&B Hoover’s also supports two proprietary taxonomies: Hoover’s industry codes and eight-digit SICs.
Country-specific industry code descriptions will be displayed in either English or the local language.
D&B Hoover’s Localization Options
Along with expanded taxonomies, D&B Hoovers recently added website searching to identify companies based on their self-descriptions across one hundred languages. Website search has gathered 247 million rows of structured data across 30 million websites and 300 million web pages.
This feature helps identify companies with emerging technologies or positioning (i.e., the evolving three-letter acronyms that firms use for classifying themselves). The feature echoes its Conceptual Search, but instead of identifying companies based on topical references in news articles, it searches global corporate websites.
D&B Hoovers and its predecessor service, OneSource Global Business Browser (GBB), have supported English-speaking multinational teams for two decades. Their content and functionality have always been the deepest for the US, UK, and Canada. Yet, they also provided a robust set of international content:
Global Public (Quoted) Company Financials, Segment Reports, Executive Bios, and Long Business Descriptions.
Financial statements for 15 European countries and global publics. The reports may be viewed in USD, EUR, GBP, and the As Reported currency, with currency conversion rates based upon the period or statement date. Thus, revenue from a 2020 income statement (a flow statement) would be based upon the average conversion rate for the year, while assets from the balance sheet would be based upon the applicable rate for the statement date.
Global family trees
Industry Codes, including US SIC, NAICS, EU NACE, UK SIC, ANZ SIC, and UN ISIC.
Regional screening, including city, postal code, and sub-regions (e.g., state, province, county)
Regional customization for distances (KM vs. miles) and numeric formats
D&B Hoovers expanded its company coverage to 180 million active firms and 216 million active contacts as part of its internationalization. Most of the new firms have between one and five employees. It also increased the number of countries with sub-divisional regions (e.g., counties, provinces), having recently added sub-divisional filtering for the Nordic countries, Denmark, Hungary, etc. Additional countries are planned.
Several enhancements came from local customer research. In many European countries, departmental emails are employed in sales and marketing outreach. These emails lack any personally identifiable information, so they are GDPR compliant. Dun & Bradstreet is adding over seven million “entity-level emails” for European countries, including over three million entity-level emails for the D-A-CH region, 1½ million for the Nordics, and 2½ million for Eastern Europe.
Text searching was enhanced to recognize accents and diacritical marks (e.g., when performing location searches). Leslie called synonymous search with or without special characters a “major ticket to the game.” While it “sounds like a simple fix,” it was “extremely complex.”
As Dun & Bradstreet began its localization research, it realized the importance of small companies and informational depth in the context of national sales vs. international sales.
“We speak to local markets and say, ‘Well, what is it that will help you sell your products and use our products?’” explained Leslie. Dun & Bradstreet’s research found that many customers and prospects sell locally to organizations with five or fewer employees. “That becomes really important now that you can reach them.”
Leslie listed other findings and subsequent upgrades: “We capped the number of contacts at eleven. That’s been changed. We were missing the middle name. That has been changed.”
When I was a product marketing manager at OneSource (2001 – 2010), I explained that we delivered the top N companies in each European country because “you aren’t selling to Polish abattoirs.” That logic made sense when selling to multinationals and exporters based in English-speaking countries. After all, they weren’t selling to Polish slaughterhouses. But this approach fails to meet the needs of sales reps based in Poland, EU industrial manufacturers, or logistics companies.
Localization requires local language support, content depth, national standards support (e.g., industry codes, geographic districts, GDPR), in-language news and triggers (coming in phase II), market knowledge, and in-market sales and support. Dun & Bradstreet also simplified the UI and improved its dynamic display for various screen sizes and devices. The new UI was implemented in September, and 96% of browser users and 98% of CRM users have switched to the updated format.
D&B Hoover’s old and new company profiles.
In-product tutorials also enhance the user experience. For example, if a user utilizes a feature inefficiently or has not used core functionality, the tutorial will provide on-demand coaching. This feedback is also provided to account representatives to provide guidance. The in-product tutorials were launched last summer, and Dun & Bradstreet continues to collect data for honing its training recommendations.
There is also a new onboarding virtual assistant for providing on-demand training. Tutorial translations should be available to users in Q2. Expanded in-product training and virtual onboarding are consistent with the emerging Work from Anywhere expectation of business professionals.
Dun & Bradstreet provided its internationalization roadmap through the end of the year. The firm intends to extend local content, expand time-dependent sales triggers, and support multi-lingual news. New content includes more digitally sourced data, detailed financials, and country-specific datasets such as country export data for Chinese companies, product codes, and expanded tech data for India.
Ostensibly, Phase I, which completed at the end of March, serves as a minimal viable product for localized products (or what Leslie called a “ticket to the game”), and Phase II continues internationalizing the content and expanding localized content.
“We are working with each local market to collect these [data requirements], source the data, transfer to D&B, and load into the product,” said Leslie. Finally, D&B Hoovers will continue to expand its email and direct dial coverage.
EMIS, a research service for emerging markets, was sold by Euromonitor Institutional Investor to CITIC Capital and Chinese media company Caixin Global back in April. CITIC is an alternative investment management and advisory company. Also included in the sale was CEIC data, a provider of global time series data. The two businesses, jointly named ISI Emerging Markets, have been run in parallel and will continue to do so, but sales operations have been merged. Sales continues to be organized regionally, and some product specialization will be retained.
ISI
is headquartered in Hong Kong with offices in eighteen countries. The
firm has over 500 employees located in both emerging and developed
countries. The two firms reported an operating profit of £11.9 million
($15.1 million), as disclosed in the notes to Euromoney’s 2017 annual accounts.
The firms reported 2016 revenue of about $52.7 million and EBITDA of
$14.5 million. Based on 2016 turnover and the $180.5 million purchase
price, the deal had a 3.4 multiple.
EMIS
delivers news, research, analytical data, and peer comparisons for over 125
emerging markets. The content is multi-lingual and serves researchers,
industry analysts, corporate strategists, credit analysts, and business
development professionals. Customers are found in corporate and
investment banking, consultancies, private equity, government, and academia.
EMIS displays news and research from 7,000 publications and 3.6 million emerging market company profiles, two million of which include financials. Industry sources include BMI Research, Technavio, MarketLine, Mintel, and Euromonitor. Sixteen languages are supported for content and UI along with cross-translations between the languages.
The
products have regional strengths. CEIC began with a Chinese focus twenty-five
years ago and is strongest in Asia. EMIS began in Eastern Europe, but now
generates half of its revenue in the Americas. Asia now represents 25% of
its revenue with India its fastest growing market.
Chief
Product Officer Diego Obere said that “the majority of our employees are
based in emerging markets, allowing us to establish an unrivalled level of
expertise on these often opaque countries.” The firm’s “focus [is] on
providing our clients with information on countries that are classed as
emerging markets. Over 90% of our 5,000+ content sources are from emerging
markets”.
The
product roadmap includes an improved EMIS UX, upgraded industry pages, and
investments in improved mobile and API access.
Channel-wise, EMIS partnered with EBSCO and ProQuest for university distribution. The firm supports both subscription access and on-demand research purchases.
Commercial credit and business profile vendor Creditsafe expanded its coverage footprint to over 100 countries with the addition of sixteen Middle Eastern and North African countries. Creditsafe is now able to provide real-time reports for 240 million companies. Key new countries include Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon. In 2016, the firm added Southeast Asian coverage along with 40 million Chinese company profiles.
“This mark’s the single largest and most significant database expansion we have done to date. And, it completes our global offering. No one in the marketplace offers such a comprehensive solution supported by an incredible portfolio of analytics,” said Matthew Debbage, CEO of Creditsafe USA and Asia. “Not only have we added critical financial data on thousands of public and private companies to our platform, but we are providing insight on many located in Middle East and Africa which have proven to be complex economies in the past. We can now provide International Database Reports on millions of companies instantly online. No one else in the market offers the level of data that we do.”
Based on its coverage map, the most significant gaps are in Latin America (e.g. Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica) and Africa (e.g. South Africa, Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia).
Creditsafe processes over one million daily updates collected from over 200 sources. Furthermore, the firm claims that 99.9% of report requests are delivered in real-time.
Last year, Creditsafe launched US and UK sales intelligence services under the Sales Joe brand. The product provides prospecting, look-a-like customers, light SFA tools (e.g. notes, dialer support, meeting scheduling), task tracking, and deal opportunity forecasting.
Sales Joe Deal Opportunities assist with pipeline tracking.
“The big development during the year was launching our new lead management tool, Sales Joe, which enables businesses to build effective sales campaigns using company information gathered from Creditsafe’s extensive database,” said Chris Robertson, global sales director at Creditsafe Group. “Our positive results have been fueled by strong customer retention, an increase in new business, and a further expansion and strengthening in our international offering to UK customers.”
Creditsafe revenue has grown 28% over the past twelve months. The firm maintains 18 offices and supports 200,000 users each day. Globally, Creditsafe employs 1,500 headcount.
Creditsafe USA posted $12.8 million in 2016 revenue with a three-year CAGR of 75%. Creditsafe opened US operations in 2012 and services 14,000 US customers out of its Lehigh, PA office. “Over the past several years, we have focused incredibly hard on building our business and brand in the US,” said Debbage.
Creditsafe UK also posted strong growth with 2016 revenues up 12% to £35.5 million and pre-tax profits of £8.1 million.
“More growth is expected in 2017, our 20th anniversary year,” added Robertson. “The growing sales force and the new products and technology being introduced this year will ensure our momentum continues and we further set ourselves apart from our competitors.”
Avention’s OneSource Global Business Browser is now available in Chinese and Japanese editions.
Sales Intelligence vendor Avention, which has long had a sales presence in Asia, continues to expand its presence in the region via direct sales teams and channel partners. They also have significantly expanded their AsiaPac company and contact information sets.
Over the past year, Avention extended its coverage in India, China, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong and added additional staff in their Singapore office. Avention has AsiaPac offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Delhi, Sydney, and Melbourne along with affiliates in China, Japan, and Korea.
Along with Asian companies and contacts, Avention provides global family trees, industry market research, company news and sales triggers, and public company coverage of listed firms in AsiaPac and the rest of the world.
Japan
Avention designated Nikkei Media Marketing as their sole channel distributor in the Japanese market acting as the “exclusive and general agent” for all Avention products in Japan. Avention recently launched a Japanese language version of their OneSource Global Business Browser service. Over the past year, Avention has trebled their Japanese company coverage and quadrupled their Japanese contact coverage.
“This agreement is a terrific step for Avention OneSource Solutions as we focus our growth plans in Asia-Pacific,” said SVP of International Paul Charmatz. “Combined with the launch of our Japanese product, Nikkei’s Media Marketing’s unrivalled network and reach will take our Japanese presence to the next level. OneSource now covers well over 50 million companies globally, giving our customers in Japan access to unrivalled business insights. As a result of this agreement, our customers will be able to make smarter, more informed, data-driven decisions.”
India
In India, Avention has taken a direct sales approach. Avention first opened a Gurgaon, Delhi sales office in 2006. It has since quadrupled its sales presence in India with offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai. Avention has added five staff to its India operations including Nittin Maheshwari, who joined as Director of India & MEA in April.
“India is a big focus for us at Avention OneSource Solutions, as the country is pegged to become the driver of growth across global markets for decades to come,” said Paul Charmatz, SVP of International. “We are fully committed to helping our customers here achieve their business goals as the country’s importance as an economic hub grows. Our Indian business continues to go from strength to strength as increasing numbers of companies reap the benefits of our increased data coverage and cutting edge product offering.”
Avention’s Indian coverage now spans the full universe of Indian registered companies.
China
Avention has chosen to fully enter the Chinese market with a Chinese language version of their sales intelligence and business research product. They also increased coverage of China and the Asia-Pacific region. Expanded Chinese and global coverage presented through a Chinese UI has resulted in the firm signing “a significant number of new customers each month.”
Coverage of Chinese companies, which was slightly above 300,000 firms for nearly a decade, has been increased nearly ten-fold to 2.7 million domestic companies with plans to grow coverage to over 3 ½ million profiles by the end of the year. This coverage growth is part of an expansion of the Avention global company database from 25 million to 70 million companies this year.
Chinese customers can now “access the platform in their local language, making it far easier for them to identify international prospects and be armed with the insight to build relationships,” said Regional Director Lon Shing. “Offering our platform in Chinese is just one sign of our commitment to the region and the businesses there – as well as testament to the massive growth opportunities we see, both for our customers and for Avention”
Note: I was the Product Manager for OneSource Global Business Browser: Asia in 2001-2002 when the service was first launched.
