Tag: Company Research

Avention: Expanded Asian Presence and Coverage

Avention's Global Business Browser is now available in Chinese and Japanese editions.
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.

DemandBase: DemandGraph Company Ecosystem

Demandbase DemandGraph
Demandbase DemandGraph

ABM vendor DemandBase announced a new dataset it calls the DemandGraph which combines its WhoToo dataset of crawled business information with Spiderbook relationship data.  The expanded content set employs semantic mining and machine learning to assemble the “entire business network of a company” which helps  “identify which companies and buying committees are in-market for particular solutions.”  The DemandGraph helps users target in-market accounts, identify key buyers, uncover meaningful insights, and deliver personalized content.  While they have not announced specific predictive tools or capabilities, they are hinting at such tools.

This expanded information set of customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, and investments is built from:

  • Unstructured business knowledge such as SEC filings and annual reports
  • Demandbase’s proprietary identification technology that maps billions of network IP addresses to businesses worldwide
  • Complex corporate hierarchies extending beyond subsidiaries and remote offices to include vendor, customer and partner relationships
  • The digital footprint of web activity by businesses including ad impressions and web traffic from more than 3 billion B2B interactions every month

“DemandGraph isn’t exactly a product but rather a resource that Demandbase will use to power other products,” said analyst David Raab of Raab Associates.  “It lets Demandbase more easily build detailed profiles of people and companies, including history, interests, and relationships. It can then use the information to predict future purchases and guide marketing and sales messages. There’s also a liberal sprinkling of artificial intelligence throughout DemandGraph, used mostly in Spiderbook’s processing of unstructured Web data but also in some of the predictive functions. If I’m sounding vague here it’s because, frankly, so was Demandbase. But it’s still clear that DemandGraph represents a major improvement in the power and scope of data available to business marketers.”

The DemandGraph captures what I’ve long called the “company ecosystem” that goes beyond lists of competitors to include partners, advisors, investors, customers, etc.  An understanding of corporate relationships creates an opportunity to extend beyond traditional six degrees solutions when looking for introductions and relationships.  A few companies have attempted to gather this data, but none have figured out how to market this broader relationship intelligence outside of industry niches such as technology (e.g. DiscoverOrg, RainKing, HG Data), advertising (e.g. TheList/WinMo), and PE/VC datasets (e.g. CB Insights, Mattermark, DataFox, Crunchbase).

Likewise, when LinkedIn describes their Economic Graph, they are focused on people and their relationships to other people and organizations, not the relationships between organizations.

Demandbase claims that company relationships captured within their business graphs offer twenty times the predictive power of social network relationships.  Demandbase SVP of Technology Aman Naimat asserted that “DemandGraph has proven that it can be 7-8 times more accurate than an account executive trying to predict a potential customer, which provides better targeting and conversion.”

Chief Product Officer Alan Fletcher dubbed DemandGraph a “personal concierge” which supports personalization across all sales and marketing touchpoints. “That consistency in messaging throughout the whole sales funnel is what we’re trying to do, and you can only do that if you have the underlying data.  It’s what the best account managers already do today, but it obviously doesn’t scale. Large companies can only do it for their top 200 targets.”

Fletcher suggested that this relationship ecosystem is also predictive of investments, acquisitions, and potential partnerships but that the company is “focused on predicting the next customer.”  The DemandGraph provides insights into the culture of an organization.  “Do they do businesses with startups?  Do they only like to do business with established companies?  Do they typically sell t0 people that are only involved with McKinsey?” asked Fletcher.  “There are a bunch of signals that may not be directly related to you and your products.”

Crunchbase Pro Unveiled

Crunchbase, which has long offered a free database of PE/VC funded companies, is launching a subscription service called Crunchbase Pro.  The new service helps users “discover new companies, people, and deals based on highly customizable search.”  The new service was unveiled at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago.

Crunchbase was spun off of TechCrunch last year and now has a staff of sixty following a Series A round.  The firm has trebled its revenue over the past year led by database extract revenue.  They have also seen a ten-fold increase in customers.

Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell set a high objective for his firm.  “If we can become the LinkedIn for companies or the Facebook for companies and help companies connect with one another, I think that is a really interesting challenge that can take us into the long term.”

Crunchbase Pro supports an active homepage with Crunchbase editorial content, saved lists and searches, and trend data.
Crunchbase Pro supports an active homepage with Crunchbase editorial content, saved lists and searches, and trend data.

The service lists core five capabilities:

  1. Identify prospective partners, customers, investors or investments
  2. Quickly see what matters most with Crunchbase Rank and Trending Score
  3. Conduct faster, deeper due diligence on new business deals
  4. Receive email alerts when there is activity that users care about
  5. Drill into search results to see the interconnections between entities as well as get quick analysis of market trends

Features include “multi-join dynamic searches” (a techie way of saying “list building with immediate results”), custom lists, shareable searches and lists, and CSV export.  Alerts are provided for lists, saved searches, and user defined topics.

Multi-join dynamic searches support firmographics, biographics, and funding selects.
Multi-join dynamic searches support firmographics, biographics, and funding selects.

According to TechCrunch, the Trend Score for companies and VC firms “uses metrics like size of round, date of last financing, and profile page views to produce a ranking of these entities that changes with time.”

Crunchbase now covers a half million companies and 2,700 VC firms.  Data is maintained by a team of editors with updates provided to Crunchbase by their member community.  The database also benefits from VC firm updates and machine learning tools which search for anomalous information.

The new service is free of advertising and available at an introductory price of $29 per month (billed annually).  Next month the price rises to $49 per month.  The pricing is aggressive with respect to sales intelligence vendors which generally run in the $100 to $150 per month range prior to volume discounts and well below the pricing of their PE/VC database competitors such as CB Insights, DataFox, and Mattermark.

John Mannes lauded the Pro service’s speed and usability in TechCrunch, “Side by side with comparable platforms like PitchBook, CB Insights, and Mattermark the new CrunchBase Pro is fast and simple. Nearly every task can be done from the main page and there is little to no lag, even on complex search queries. The new colorful design, taking a page from Google’s material design, is a huge improvement on its dimly lit predecessor.”

Pro is a standalone service, but Crunchbase plans on CRM connectors and integrating external data sources such as SimilarWeb, Glassdoor, Apptopia, Enigma, and Product Hunt.  The firm gives the example of a job hunter searching for Glassdoor jobs using a combination of Crunchbase and Glassdoor data.  Crunchbase also has search intent data for marketers on their roadmap.  Intent data will provide “visibility into who has searched for their company or competitors.”

Clients include Bain & Company, Citibank, Deloitte and Microsoft.

Owler: CEO Jim Fowler on Marketing

Owler's Profile of General Electric.
Owler’s Profile of General Electric.

Jim Fowler, CEO of Owler and former CEO of Jigsaw, has an excellent interview with Brian Carroll on the B2B Lead Blog.  They discuss SEO, virality, why successful entrepreneurs itch to start additional companies, and the give and take between sales and marketing.

Here is Fowler on the subject of the future of B2B Sales and Marketing:

Sales people are going to continue to have to become better marketers.

With Jigsaw, we provided a set of contact data so that you could communicate with people directly with phone numbers and business email addresses. I said at the time, what this means is that the people on the receiving end of these communications are going to get more and more and more communications. It’s kind of a funny thing. Sales and marketing, their job is to communicate with people that don’t really want to be communicated with, but they need to be because they need to buy stuff.

I think that we’re going to continue to see the buyers or the receivers of these communications get more and more of it, and it’s become more and harder to rise above the noise. What it means is sales people are going to have to become better marketers. They’re going to have to work hand in hand with marketers to get them.

Marketers, frankly are going to have to become gods, because their job is just getting harder and harder. I mean, people have no attention. We’re in the age of a hundred and forty character limit is all people will read, and this makes the job tough. I just think that with that in mind all of our communication is crisp, simple, scannable data.

For instance, our descriptions of companies are one sentence long. We only allow a hundred and forty character description of a company, because we know people won’t read more than that. I just think understanding these trends is critical regarding future success. It’s going to continue to accelerate, is my prediction.

It is clear that reaching B2B professionals is becoming more difficult for sales and marketing which is why Marketing Automation, Account Based Sales Development, and Sales Intelligence services are so necessary.  It is about having a compelling message when you can get their attention.  It is also why Account Based Marketing is gaining traction — when it is difficult to garner attention, make sure you are focusing your sales and marketing efforts on your best prospects.

However, I disagree with Fowler’s contention that 140 character business descriptions are sufficient to describe a company.  While sales reps would rather be selling than reading long reports, 140 characters is simply too short.  It is really an editorial decision made by Owler.  They didn’t want to invest editorial resources in writing and maintaining business descriptions.  Instead, they are focusing their editors on fine tuning their triggers and collecting funding and M&A details.  Whether you are using Owler for competitive intelligence or sales intelligence, 140 characters will often be insufficient to provide an actionable description.

Here is Owler’s description of General Electric:

GE provides capital, expertise and infrastructure for a global economy.

Let’s compare that to what Reuters says about GE:

General Electric Company (GE) is a global digital industrial company. The Company’s products and services range from aircraft engines, power generation and oil and gas production equipment to medical imaging, financing and industrial products. Its segments include Power segment offers products and services related to energy production and water reuse; Renewable Energy segment offers renewable power sources; Oil & Gas offers drilling, completion, production and oil field operation; Energy Management offers technologies to electrical power; Aviation designs and produces commercial and military aircraft engines, integrated digital components and mechanical aircraft systems; Healthcare provides essential healthcare technologies; Transportation is a supplier to the railroad, mining, marine, stationary power and drilling industries; Appliances & Lighting offers appliances and a subset of lighting products, and Capital offers continuing financial services businesses and products.

And that is Reuter’s short description.  The long description from Reuters runs one to two paragraphs for each of their divisions.

To be fair, when you are looking to cover millions of companies, short descriptions are understandable for the vast majority of companies.  But top companies should have deeper profiles.  Owler, with half a million registered users, has sufficient usage data to identify the most heavily researched companies and write longer profiles.  The question is whether they wish to invest expensive editorial resources in expanding beyond Twitter-length descriptions.

Fortune: The C-Suite Remains a Male Bastion

DiscoverOrg employs 150 editors to gather its multi-level executive database across 60,000 global organizations.
DiscoverOrg employs 150 editors to gather its multi-level executive database across 60,000 global organizations.

Fortune employed DiscoverOrg C-Level executive data to analyze the presence of women in the C-Suite. Of the 9,975 C-level executives evaluated, only 18% were female. At the corporate apex, only 6.9% of the CEOs and 6.7% of Board Chairs were women. That is fewer than one in fourteen execs.

Of the twelve titles assessed, only four have female population rates above twenty five percent:

  • 31.9% Chief Legal Officer
  • 36.4% Chief Compliance Officer
  • 48.0% Chief Marketing Officer
  • 62.2% Chief Human Resources Officer

Even more concerning is that the top two positions leading to the CEO position, COO (7.2%) and CFO (8.8%), remain male bastions.

“The biggest surprise to me was how little gender diversity there still is,” opined DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck. “You might expect less than 50% of C-level executives to be women, but I was surprised at how much less it was.”

I also found it interesting that this research was employed using DiscoverOrg data and not a public company dataset from Reuters, FactSet, S&P, Mergent, etc.  Any of these public information vendors could have also provided the data as well, but DiscoverOrg had an advantage in that it researches the full C-suite (and several levels below it) and reverifies data every ninety days.  While the other vendors are also likely to have highly accurate data for the C-Suite, they are dependent upon SEC filings to recognize executive changes.  Thus, they would be as accurate as DiscoverOrg for CEO, Chairman, COO, CFO, and Chief Legal Officer, but are less likely to be accurate for positions which report into the CEO, CFO , and COO.  Here, DiscoverOrg’s curated data collection methods have a data quality advantage.

What would be fascinating is if DiscoverOrg analyzed their data by function, level, and sector across the Fortune 1000.  They already have data sets for Finance, Marketing, Product Management (TEDD), and IT with several others ready to launched by the end of the year.  Assuming DiscoverOrg can provide historical cuts of their database, the IT function can be evaluated going back a half decade or more with Finance and Marketing for a few years.  At a minimum, such an analysis would make for some fascinating blogs, but it could also be an invaluable dataset for academic research.

MarketLine Advantage Research Database

MarketLine, formerly known as DataMonitor, is expanding the content and functionality of its MarketLine Advantage research database.  The service is designed for management consultants, investment bankers, trade agencies, lawyers, and academic research.  While its company and industry content has long been licensed by the sales intelligence vendors, the additional datasets found in Advantage provide only limited incremental value to sales teams.

MarketLine is expanding profile coverage of both companies and industries, but not expanding the licensed dataset it makes available to sales intelligence vendors such as Factiva, Bureau van Dijk, LexisNexis, and Avention.  Industry coverage has roughly doubled to 6,000 country/industry pairs.  For company intelligence, they are trebling the number of company profiles to at least 100,000 firms; likewise, the number of company profiles with SWOTs is quadrupling to 12,000.

Company profiles are available in multiple formats and can be selected at the table or chart level.  Thus, users can perform a one-click export of a company or industry table to PowerPoint, Word, PDF or Excel files.  Unfortunately, company and industry news is maintained separately from company and industry profiles; thus, users cannot create a unified report containing editorial research plus news.  This lack of unification adds to the search and export work of researchers.

Marketline is one of the few vendors that provides global and regional industry research across a broad set of industries.  Most vendors focus on a subset of countries (e.g. emerging markets, United States) or industries (e.g. Consumer Products).  MarketLine publishes industry research at the country, regional, and global level allowing users to compare the same industry in different countries or many industries within a country.  This ability to compare across countries and industries – with standard terminology, methodology, industry definition, and economic assumptions – assists with market entry analysis, whether it is researching new sectors or researching new countries.  It also helps sector-focused sales reps adjust their messaging and targeting across markets.  Furthermore, by including Five Forces Analyses and the top company profiles for each country, it is possible to determine whether new companies should be added to your ABM target list as well as assess potential obstacles when entering a new market.

MarketLine Industry Research provides a half dozen Spider Charts (The Five Forces Summary with sub-category detail) along with short explanations of each sub-category.
MarketLine Industry Research provides a half dozen Spider Charts (The Five Forces Summary with sub-category detail) along with short explanations of each sub-category.

Because MarketLine research covers so many regional / industry pairs, the reports should not be considered detailed industry research.  Industry specialists generally write technically oriented reports on specific industry topics.  Instead, the focus is on market size, key segments, current trends, top competitors, and market growth projections.  MarketLine focuses on actionable information that can be understood by industry generalists and researchers operating across many industries.

MarketLine also offers a set of country profiles which assist with market entry decisions and help users develop a basic understanding of local dynamics and risks.  Country profiles utilize a PESTLE framework.

Each of the major profile categories contains a standard Competitive Intelligence / Strategy tool employed by B schools and analysts:

  • SWOT – Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat analysis looks at a company versus its competitors and the overall market.  Thus, opportunities might include emerging technologies or newly opened markets while threats cover exogenous variables such as government regulation, market substitutes, and competitor actions.
  • Five Forces – This industry tool was developed by Michael Porter and covers Buyer Power, Supplier Power, New Entrants, Threat of Substitutes, and Degree of Rivalry.  Within each of these elements, a set of sub-topics is covered.  The Five Forces analysis is discussed at the sub-section level and displayed as a spider web graph.
  • PESTLE — Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental analyses for 150 countries.

Other MarketLine Advantage datasets include:

  • Deal profiles spanning venture capital, private equity, mergers & acquisitions, partnerships, private placements, and joint ventures.  Deal profiles are generally available within one business day of the transaction announcement.  The deals database is screenable and goes back at least three years.
  • Country and city demographic datasets gathered from governmental resources (e.g. OECD, Eurostat, CDC) covering 750 macroeconomic and demographic variables.  Launched just a few months ago, the cities database covers approximately 2,000 global metropolises and can assist with initial planning intelligence for locating international offices and projecting which regions are poised for rapid growth.  Multiple visual formats are supported including bar, line, and pie charts.  The datasets are exportable at the field and location level, allowing users to build custom datasets.
  • Company News written by MarketLine’s analysts.  MarketLine reports on 11,000 companies with 60,000 articles per annum.  The current archive exceeds 300,000 articles.
  • Market Data Analytics for major consumer product categories including food, drink, and personal care products.
  • Company and investment prospecting.

The Home Page is a bit flat with no dynamic content.  Users are presented a single Google-style search bar along with database browsing options.  This format is in line with a reference service, but the layout indicates a lack of personalization for frequent researchers.  This is a missed opportunity.  Frequent users should be able to track specific companies, industries, and countries with homepage and email alerts.  These alerts could cover both company news and updates to key reports.

The MarketLine Advantage Homepage focuses on quick search but lacks dynamic content.
The MarketLine Advantage Homepage focuses on quick search but lacks dynamic content.

MarketLine Advantage customers benefit from access to MarketLine’s team of 178 researchers that conduct both primary and secondary research.  Users may pose questions to the researchers subject to a 24 hour SLA.  Other benefits of directly licensing the Advantage service is data currency (aggregators generally receive monthly report updates), broader content sets, custom screening tools, and the ability to quickly export report sections in multiple formats.

MarketLine Advantage is sold on a named user basis with annual subscriptions subject to volume pricing.  Users have unlimited access to reports, datasets, and downloading.  Pricing for MarketLine Advantage was not disclosed.  When MarketLine Industry reports are sold on the GlobalData store, they are priced at $350 for single user access to a report, $700 for a site license, and $1,050 for an enterprise license.

Advantage is available via web and mobile browsers but the service lacks CRM connectors and mobile apps.

PrivCo: PE/VC Database

PrivCo Prospecting provides advanced searching for private companies, investors, VC Fundings, M&A Deals, and PE Deals.
PrivCo Prospecting provides advanced searching for private companies, investors, VC Fundings, M&A Deals, and PE Deals.

PE / VC Funding database PrivCo continues to expand its coverage to nearly one million global private company profiles.  Roughly 15% of the firms are US.  Generally, the firms have $10 million or more in revenue.  PrivCo also collects M&A and funding transactions.  Advanced company searching includes firmographics, growth rates, ownership, and VC Funding.  Other search tools include Investors, VC Fundings, PE Deals, and M&A Deals.

Company profiles are available as PDF or Excel downloads and cover

  • Company Financials – Tables and Graphs
  • Business Description and Company Profile
  • Competitors & Comparables
  • Major Acquisitions
  • Complete Funding History
  • Other Important Details – IPO activity, bankruptcy/restructuring, etc.

Executive coverage is weak with fewer than one exec per company.

PrivCo QuotaAccess to the database begins at $2,388 for the Premium service which is “perfect for short term projects and light usage.”  Quarterly access is priced at $999.  However, access is subject to strict viewing and download caps (see chart of monthly quota on left).  Premium users also receive a restricted version of the search module which contains only standard firmographic selects.  Premium account support is limited to emails.

Enterprise access increases the number of viewable and downloadable records (the count is set in the contract), provides direct access to PrivCo analysts and a dedicated Account Manager, and unlocks full access to Advanced Search.  Enterprise access also supports real-time alerts.  Enterprise access is “Designed for professional and institutional usage.”

One-off reports are available for $199.  Instead of automatically fulfilling company reports, the firm runs them through a one day editorial review before delivering them to clients.

PrivCo plays in an arena that is quickly becoming crowded: Funding databases with one million company profiles, PE/VC funding data, and M&A transactions.  Competitors include Mattermark, CB Insights, and DataFox.  While the other three vendors have all recently expanded into the Sales Intelligence space, PrivCo remains focused on the PE/VC/Investment Banking market.

Clients include Bain Capital, Deloitte, Jefferies, Google, Cooley, American Express, and Korn Ferry.

SLA: Why Special Libraries Aren’t So Special Anymore

SLA LogoI attended the SLA (Special Libraries Association) meeting two weeks ago in Philadelphia.  I had skipped the meetings for a half decade but returned last year when it was in Boston (where I live) and again this year in Philly (cheap, one hour flight).  The show is much smaller that it was ten or fifteen years ago when it would be packed at the Jacob Javits center in New York City.  There are fewer attendees, fewer exhibitors, smaller booths, and less energy.  This is probably the case for most trade shows which are not industry events (e.g. Dreamforce).  Fifteen years ago, when I was at OneSource (now Avention), vendors timed product releases for the SLA show.  That is no longer the case.  Sales Intelligence vendors now ignore the SLA and time their release calendar around Dreamforce.

SLA Attendee Statistics from the 2016 Exhibitor Prospectus
SLA Attendee Statistics from the 2016 Exhibitor Prospectus

The show itself has always been a bit of a hodgepodge with STEM, Legal, Financial, Business, News, and other vendors providing databases and research tools for corporate, academic, and research libraries.  But two decades ago, corporate libraries were either closed or their budgets were slashed.  Centralized repositories made less sense as information delivery shifted to Internet browser and API-based workflow tools.  Nowadays, few corporate libraries are involved in buying business research tools and, when they are, it may be more as an influencer than a buyer.  According to the 2016 Exhibitor Prospectus, only 7% of the attendees were corporate.  Even if you add in financial services, insurance, and consulting, only one in six attendees was a likely buyer of business information databases.

Half the attendees were librarians or library directors, but two decades ago, budgets and decision making authority shifted away from corporate libraries due to the Internet.  This was a precursor to the current shift of purchasing authority away from IT to functional departments caused by the cloud.

I didn’t write about the SLA at the time because I was on the exhibitor floor when one of the vendors mentioned that Microsoft acquired LinkedIn.  This was one of the biggest transactions impacting the sales intelligence space (LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the largest revenue sales intelligence vendor and Microsoft Dynamics is the second fastest growing CRM) and neither vendor was at the show.

Nor were LinkedIn’s competitors in the recruiting, marketing, social media, and professional subscription services spaces.  Not many sales intelligence vendors attend the show anymore.  You used to see Dun & Bradstreet / Hoover’s / First Research, Zoominfo, OneSource (now Avention), and Sales Genie along with many of OneSource’s aggregation partners.  LexisNexis and Factiva both flew the flag at the show, but their primary offerings are not business information but legal (Lexis) and news (Nexis and Factiva).  Except for PrivCo, none of the PE/VC focused vendors were onsite.

Interestingly, many internationally-focused vendors such as BvD, EMIS, BMI, MarketLine, Euromonitor, and Financial Times still attend.  The industry research segment seems to have held up better than business information.  BMI, MarketLine, IBISWorld, and Euromonitor were there along with various industry specific vendors.  However, Plunkett Research and First Research (owned by Dun & Bradstreet) were not present.

The decline of tradeshows is tied to Buyer 2.0.  It used to be that tradeshows were one of the few ways you could semi-anonymously gather information about vendors.  But now, information services no longer require a face-to-face meeting for demos.  You will find them on YouTube and Vimeo as either training tools, feature specific release demos, or recorded webinars.  And once buyer and seller are speaking, web sharing tools have long replaced onsite demos.  We have become accustomed to signing up for services without meeting a sales rep face-to-face.  At the lower end of the market, users simply enter a credit card and may never speak to a representative of the company.

Nowadays, there is so much information available online that the attendees are on site either for professional development (and much of SLA still serves that purpose) or because the show is local.  One exhibitor commented that the shows do better in the Northeast, likely due to higher population density and Amtrak.  I agreed — I have no plans to attend SLA 2017 in Phoenix.

BvD: New UI for ORBIS

Bureau van Dijk (BvD) is releasing a new user interface for their ORBIS financial analysis product.  The ORBIS product line provides global company financial analysis tools with very deep financial coverage of European privates.  This platform is also employed for regional products such as Amadeus (Europe), Oriana (AsiaPac), and country specific products within Europe such as Fame (UK), Markus (Germany, Austria, Luxembourg), and Ruslana (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan).

The modernized UI is fast to use and supports tablets.  New features include an icon-based navigation panel along the left edge and improved multi-step searches.  Users can also group their favorite search steps together and adjust list layouts.

The new ORBIS UI provides streamlined searching and list building.
The new ORBIS UI provides streamlined searching and list building.

New report types include a visual profile and “Excel-friendly financial worksheets.”  Users can also quickly share searches, results, and reports with colleagues.

A new Tools Zone provides a set of analytical tools for peer analysis, pivot-table building, ownership research, and Excel plug-ins.

The new ORBIS Toolbox
The new ORBIS Toolbox

Both the old and new UI will be available while users migrate their saved searches and reports to the new ORBIS.

The firm did not indicate whether similar enhancements were planned for the MINT sales product line.

ORBIS is the leading financial analysis tool for European and AsiaPac companies.  They have been rapidly expanding their global company coverage and now span 200 million companies (roughly 3/4 of which are active) with market leading company linkage (ownership) intelligence.  This dataset is available in ORBIS, their regional financial analysis editions, MINT sales intelligence editions, and their line of Catalyst workflow tools (e.g. credit risk analysis, transfer pricing, valuation).

FreePint: The Value Add from Company Aggregators

GBBChris Porter, who writes many of the company intelligence vendors profiles for FreePint, recently ran a research study where he conducted half his research using an unnamed subscription aggregator and half using the open web.  While he gave the edge to the aggregator, the margin was not as wide as he’d anticipated.  Porter commented that it’s “not time to cancel that subscription just yet – but worth keeping an eye on.”

Porter found that the free web was able to provide much of his project’s content, particularly for US publics.  However, the paid service made information discovery quicker and easier.

For private companies, he found that neither fully met his research needs so a combination of open web and aggregator service worked best.

Porter confessed that his subscription service lacked annual and interim reports which would have made his research easier.  These reports are available in some of the other aggregator services.

Porter was unhappy with the Reuters Significant Developments report.  “It was not picking up all the major developments I was looking for,” said Porter.  I have had a similar problem with the report as it is limited to material events.  But an event could be important for non-investors without impacting the stock price.  For example, a new VP of Marketing may own product positioning, a significant marketing budget,  and demand generation.  Likewise, the company may have announced a significant improvement to a struggling product line.  Such events may not move the stock price, but they are highly relevant to competitors, customers, partners, and vendors.

Where I have found the Significant Developments report useful is in looking at specific topics such as M&A or Litigation going back fifteen years for US publics and about ten years for international quoted companies.  Being able to quickly filter to a topic provides insights such as whether the pace of M&A activity has changed or whether the nature of the acquisitions has evolved.  It can also be quite useful for locating a historical event such as when a joint venture was launched.  Oftentimes, these are  difficult to discover as they are based upon vague information.

Aggregators bring together tools not available on the open web such as full family trees, prospecting lists, sales triggers, market research reports, executives with contact information, and SWOTs.  They also have advantages in downloading financials, researching European private company financials, locating earnings transcripts, identifying competitors, presenting analyst research, and downloading PDF profiles of companies or full-text news stories about companies.

As a competitive intelligence analyst and market researcher, I use both subscription services and the free web for company research.  I would never research a company without visiting its website.  If public, I will also visit the investor site for presentations, Corporate Social Responsibility reports, and other material they make available to their shareholders.  Likewise, I head straight to LinkedIn for researching individuals.  But if I want to understand the company structure, analyze its financials, or reach out to individuals at the firm, then aggregators can make a big difference.

Image: Global Business Browser from Avention.